Friday, January 2, 2026
Report Shows How Recycling Is Largely a ‘Toxic Lie’ Pushed by Plastics Industry
The hard truth: we simply have to stop producing so much plastic
“After decades of meager investments accompanied by
misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign
aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable,
plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and
technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable,” the report begins.
“The latest US government data indicates that just 5% of US
plastic waste is recycled annually, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014,” the
publication continues. “Meanwhile, the amount of single-use plastics produced
every year continues to grow, driving the generation of ever greater amounts of
plastic waste and pollution.”
Among the report’s findings:
- Only a
fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of
plastics—found in items like bottles, jugs, food containers, and caps—are
actually recyclable;
- Major
brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Nestlé have been quietly
retracting sustainability commitments
while continuing to rely on single-use plastic packaging; and
- The US
plastic industry is undermining meaningful plastic regulation by making
false claims about the recyclability of their products to avoid bans and
reduce public backlash.
“Recycling is a toxic lie pushed by the plastics industry
that is now being propped up by a pro-plastic narrative emanating from the White House,”
Greenpeace USA oceans campaign
director John Hocevar said in a statement. “These corporations and their partners continue
to sell the public a comforting lie to hide the hard truth: that we
simply have to stop producing so much plastic.”
“Instead of investing in real solutions, they’ve poured
billions into public relations campaigns that keep us hooked on single-use
plastic while our communities, oceans, and bodies pay the price,” he added.
He ate a hamburger and died hours later. Doctors found a shocking cause
Murder by tick
University of Virginia Health System
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have confirmed the first known death caused by the condition commonly referred to as the meat allergy, which is transmitted by ticks.
The case involved a 47 year old man from New Jersey who was
previously healthy and died suddenly about four hours after eating beef. For
months, the cause of his death remained unclear. That changed when Thomas
Platts Mills, MD, PhD, a UVA Health physician and internationally recognized
allergy specialist, took a closer look. Platts Mills originally identified the
condition years ago and continues to lead research into how it affects
patients.
ICE Plots $100 Million ‘Wartime Recruitment’ Drive Aimed at Hiring Gun Enthusiasts
It's a big job to recruit brown shirts
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that it had obtained internal
documents revealing that US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to spend $100 million over
the next year on what the agency describes as a “wartime recruitment” drive.
The propaganda blitz will be targeted at highly specific
demographics, including “people who have attended UFC fights, listened to
patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” according
to the Post.
The ICE drive would also use an ad-targeting technique
called “geofencing” to send recruitment ads to users’ phone browsers if they
are in the vicinity of certain locations, such as military bases, NASCAR races,
college campuses, and gun shows.
Calarco noted that the job post “reads like a video game ad,”
which she said “is almost certainly by design.”
Sarah Saldaña, a director of ICE under the Obama administration, told the Post that it is worrying to see the Trump administration casting such a wide net for people who lack any experience in law enforcement and who may be eager for what the Post described as “all-out combat.”
The New Republic‘s Greg Sargent on
Wednesday wrote that immigration arrests this year have fallen
far short of the goal of 3,000 people per day set by top Trump aide Stephen Miller, and
it seems highly unlikely that Miller will realize his dream of deporting 1
million people per year.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American
Immigration Council, told Sargent that “it’s clear that they have not achieved
the shock-and-awe campaign of mass deportations that
they wanted, and they are still running into quite a lot of obstacles.”
Reichlin-Melnick also predicted that “there will still be
millions of people here who are undocumented” after Trump leaves office in
2028, as the administration “will not be able to deport even the majority of
undocumented immigrants in four years.”
The Trump administration earlier in the year announced plans
to entice new ICE recruits by offering them $50,000 sign-up bonuses and
assistance with repaying student loans in a bid to double the agency’s head
count.
Thursday, January 1, 2026
New horrors planned by Trump
Shades of Nazi concentration camps
The plan is for newly arrested detainees to be funneled —
let me remind you, with no due process, or independent magistrate or judge
checking on whether they are in fact in the United States illegally — into one
of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they
would be “staged” for deportation.
The large warehouses would be located close to major
logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri.
Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.
America’s immigrant detention system is already the largest
in the world.
With the $45 billion Congress appropriated for locking up
immigrants, the regime has revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of
military bases, and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent
encampments in remote regions.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,”
ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in
April, according
to the Arizona Mirror. The administration’s goal, he said, was to
deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but
with human beings.”
The logistical problems of converting warehouses into
detention camps are significant. Warehouses are designed for storage and
shipping of things, not people. They are often poorly ventilated and without
precise temperature controls, and they lack access to the plumbing and
sanitation systems needed to support thousands of full-time residents.
Beyond logistics is the dehumanization.
Ninety-three years ago, in March 1933, the Nazis established
their first concentration camp in what is now Dachau, Poland. Other camps were
soon established in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.
Initially, the Nazi’s put into these camps Communists,
Social Democrats, trade unionists, and others deemed a threat to the Nazi
regime.
After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938,
approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to these camps in a
mass, large-scale action that targeted them for being Jewish. The systematic
mass murder of Jews in camps designed as extermination camps did not begin
until late 1941 and early 1942, as part of the “Final Solution.”
How is Trump's campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize going?
Threatened with military action:
Canada, to turn it into the 51st state
Mexico, to strike drug cartels with or without Mexico's permission
Panama, to seize the Panama Canal
Greenland, to take over the country for "national security" reasons
Colombia, because drugs, of course
Afghanistan, to take back Bagram Airport which was actually built by the Soviets
Plus, imposition of punitive tariffs on nearly every country in the world - but not Russia
Plus, imposed travel bans on dozens of countries
Plus, abandoned Ukraine to Russia aggression.
Trump's latest fantasy at $15 billion-plus a copy
The Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail
Commentary by Mark F. Cancian, Center for Strategic and International Studies
 |
| US Navy website, the Golden Fleet |
On December 22, Donald Trump announced a new class of “battleships” that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion. However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.
Design: The ship’s design will take many years.
At the “30,000
to 40,000” tons cited by the president, the ship is much larger than
anything the United States has built in the last 80 years, other than aircraft
carriers. The truncated DDG-1000 class (only three built) displaced 15,000 tons
but still took
11 years from program initiation (2005) to commissioning of the first
ship (2016). The battleship will be more than twice as large and more
complicated—nuclear-capable with directed-energy weapons. The first ship,
USS Defiant (BBG-1), is likely to commission in the early- to
mid-2030s, assuming it is built at all.
Cost: The cost will be extremely high. The
DDG-51 class flight III (the current version of this destroyer class) displaces
9,000 tons and costs $2.8 billion each. A ship four times as large would not
cost four times as much, but would still be much more expensive. The
Congressional Budget Office estimated that a future destroyer of 14,500 tons
would cost $4.4
billion or $300,000 per ton. That would imply a battleship cost of about
$9.1 billion, allowing for some economies of scale. Lead ships are typically 50
percent more expensive than the average, so BBG 1 would likely cost $13.5
billion, about as much as an aircraft carrier.
The cost might be even higher because of inflation in the
shipbuilding sector. For example, building the battleship will require
thousands of experienced shipyard workers, even as there is a labor
shortage, and shipyards are bidding against each other for personnel....
Read the entire analysis at The
Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail
Mark F. Cancian (Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve,
ret.) is a senior adviser with the Defense and Security Department at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
The US Navy has created its own surreal website for this “Golden
Fleet” at Golden Fleet
Republican Chas Calenda sworn in as interim U.S. attorney for Rhode Island
"MAGA stooge" will be Rhode Island's top federal cop for the next 3 months
By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current
 |
| Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is not a Calenda fan |
Charles “Chas” Calenda was sworn in as interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island on Tuesday morning. Chief U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. presided over the ceremony at the federal courthouse in Providence.
Calenda, a Republican, will act as Rhode Island’s top federal law enforcement officer, representing the U.S. Department of Justice, and work across the street from the courthouse at the DOJ’s local office.
 |
| Calenda (left) bears quite a resemblance to "Newman," played by Wayne Knight on the Jerry Seinfeld Show. Might be why Trump picked him. |
Calenda did not respond to requests for additional comment. But he told The Boston Globe, which first reported his appointment on Saturday, that the interim term will last 120 days, or until someone is found to permanently fill the role. He also said that he will step down from his role as a West Greenwich town councilor.
When asked Tuesday about the expected duration of Calenda’s term, Lindsay Lague, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island DOJ office, acknowledged the request but could not immediately confirm a definite timeline.
Without big changes, this is what the environment will look like in 2050
Self-destructive policies must be turned around
United Nations Environment Programme
This is the future that awaits the world unless humanity
takes dramatic steps to end a series of mushrooming environmental crises, finds
a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The seventh edition of the Global
Environment Outlook (GEO-7) offers a stark vision of
the decades to come. But its authors say the worst forecasts can still be
avoided if countries quickly take meaningful steps to address climate change,
nature, land and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.
“With a whole-of-government, whole-of-society effort
humanity can still turn the ship around,” says Maarten Kappelle, Chief of
Service in UNEP’s Office of Science. “But if countries continue to drag their
collective feet, billions of people will face an uncertain future, especially
those in the developing world.”
GEO-7, the work of nearly 300 scientists, created a model of what the planet would look like in 2050 if nations continued to do three environmentally destructive things: pollute, pump out greenhouse gasses and destroy natural spaces. In the first of three stories about the report, here are some of the key findings of that modelling.
Planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise to 75 billion tonnes a year by 2050 – a nearly 50 per cent jump from today. This will destabilize the climate and lead to a surge in heatwaves, which are expected to affect nearly everyone on Earth – some 9.2 billion people – by 2050. Almost no corner of the planet will remain untouched by extreme heat.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Trump’s Cruel Immigration Policy Is Devastating Children
Trump brutality against children rivals his first term
Rachel Rutter for Common Dreams
 |
| (Photo by Charly Triballeau/ AFP via Getty Images) |
“Ms. Rachel, can ICE take me?”
“What about my dad? Can they take my dad away?”
“I feel so angry about how ICE is grabbing people out of my
neighborhood.”
“I feel traumatized ever since ICE stole my sister.”
“I’m afraid to walk to school. I’m afraid to leave my
house.”
“I want my mom back.”
These are real questions and comments I’ve heard from the kids I work with at Project Libertad in recent days, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorizes their communities daily. While newcomers have always faced higher rates of anxiety, depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and other mental health challenges than their US-born peers, the divide is becoming more apparent each day.
These conversations with
my kids represent a stark increase in fear and anxiety among immigrant
children—and it’s not just an anecdotal shift. The data are clear: The Trump
administration’s increasingly hostile immigration policies are irreversibly
harming children.
Pediatricians Susan Kressly and Michelle Barnes warn of the lifelong impact these policies have on
children’s development and health into adulthood:
Witnessing harm to others and living in constant fear is traumatic to all children in the community. These stressors disrupt brain development and have long-term negative effects on the health and well-being of impacted children. Ultimately, the cumulative effects make these communities less healthy.
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