Don’t Be a Sellout | The Women Century | Dr. Donald and Mr. Trump’s Crumbling Foundation

“Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.” – Mother Teresa

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” – Charles Dickens

A Modest Proposal To Clean Up The Ocean: Eight years ago a Dutch teenager named Boyan Slat was diving off the coast of Greece. Horrified at the amount of plastic he saw floating in the sea, he began collecting and analyzing it, and thinking about ways to clean it up. When Slat was 18 he gave a TedxTalk about how he envisioned cleanup would work. The message went viral; he raised more than $30 million for his Ocean Cleanup project, using the money to market his message and do research, including an aerial survey to map the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In the ensuing five years, a team of scientists and engineers have been modeling, testing and revising Slat’s plan.

Not surprisingly, there are skeptics, who note that eight million tons of new plastic still flows into the ocean every year. Denise Hardesty is a research scientist for the Australian government and a leading authority on ocean plastics. She says a smarter way to use our resources would be to focus on the items closer to the shore. Rubbish traps could be placed at rivers that feed out into the mouth of the ocean, or even further upstream, to catch the trash before it gets to the ocean. She offers this analogy: “If you’ve got a flood in the bathtub, you’re not gonna go just get a bunch of towels and try to keep cleaning it up, because it’s still flooding over. You really need to turn off the tap, right?”

Additional read: “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?: Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering.” (NYT)

Additional quote: “Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” – Jacques-Yves Cousteau

2 Brexit 2 Furious: Support is growing for a second Brexit referendumalthough some think it would only make worse the already-bitter divisions in the UK. People on both sides of the fence are unhappy. Former prime minister Tony Blair seemed to think that because so much more is known now about the whole leaving-the-EU process than when the vote occurred two years ago, revisiting the decision might be a good idea. But current prime minister Theresa May definitely thinks having another vote would be a betrayal and do “irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics…because it would say to millions who trusted in democracy, that our democracy does not deliver.” (No one has mentioned Russia’s outsized influence on the Brexit vote.) May had to cancel last week’s parliamentary vote on her withdrawal deal because it’s so unpopular. She wants to bring it up again on January 14, hoping legislators have a change of heart over the holidays. (NPR) Additional quote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Syrian Avengers: The Syrian Civil Defense group, known as the White Helmets, is a volunteer humanitarian rescue mission founded in 2014 to coordinate rescue efforts across the country as President Bashar al-Assad’s government airstrikes accelerated. With funding help from the West, the group has rescued tens of thousands of civilians from the rubble of Syrian and Russian airstrikes. More than 250 volunteers have been killed trying to save others. But as the group has become the best-known public face of the race to save lives in opposition-held areas, rescuers themselves have become the targets. Russia is using state-run bodies and media outlets to mount a “brutal and unrelenting” disinformation campaign against the organization, including bogus charges that the White Helmets are preparing chemical attacks on Syrian soil. (WaPo)

Additional read: “Some of the Popular Images and Themes the Russians Posted on Social Media: Using an array of accounts on multiple platforms and targeting a variety of demographics, the Russians have generated millions of interactions with their posts.” (NYT)

The Women Century: The World Economic Forum (WEF) is holding the annual meeting of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, and the news is not good for gender equality. Women globally are paid just 63 percent of what men get, and at the present rate of progress it will take 202 years to close the gap. The WEF found that there is not a single country where women are paid as much as men. The country closest to achieving parity is Laos, in south-east Asia. Women there are paid 91 percent of what men are paid. Women are also far behind politically. WEF estimates it will take 107 years until there are as many female politicians as male. (Guardian)

Sexual Assault In The Church: “Jesuits name priests ‘credibly accused’  of sexually abusing children, including in D.C. area” (WaPo) and “Celebrity Brazilian healer ‘John of God,’ once featured by Oprah, surrenders on sexual abuse charges” (WaPo) and “A Nun In India Accuses A Bishop Of Rape, And Divides The Country’s Christians” (NPR)

Trump’s Crumbling Foundation: Donald Trump’s charitable organization, the Trump Foundation, is being dissolved amid ongoing investigations into numerous irregularities. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced the dissolution, saying her office had detailed “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more. This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.” The investigation was spurred by a series of reports in The Washington Post about the foundation’s activities, which suggested the foundation did little, if any, actual charitable giving, and had a pattern of helping Trump’s business and political ambitions. Journalist David Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his reporting. A judge will supervise the disbursement of the foundation’s remaining assets to charities. (NPR)

Dr. Donald & Mr. Trump: A Chaotic Administration: “Trump bans ‘bump stocks’ used in Las Vegas mass shooting: giving the owners of ‘bump stocks’ 90 days to turn in or destroy the devices and blocking owners from being able to register them.” (Reuters) “How Trump Went From ‘Tough On Crime’ To ‘Second Chance’ For Felons” (NPR) And “Mulvaney Called Trump a ‘Terrible Human Being’ in 2016: A spokeswoman for Mick Mulvaney said remarks disparaging President Trump were “old news” and had been made before he had met Mr. Trump.” (NYT)

Additional read: “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell” (Wired)

The General Who Sold Out His Country: “Judge Postpones Sentencing of Michael Flynn After Harshly Rebuking Him: The judge gestured to the American flag at his side and declared: “I mean, arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out.” (NYT)

Additional songs: “Who knows? / Not me / I never lost control” (The Man Who Sold the World, by David Bowie and Nirvana’s cover) And “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish

Additional read: “Even a War Hero Is Not Above the Law.” (NYT)

– “Surgeon General Warns Youth Vaping Is Now An ‘Epidemic’” (NPR) “Falling out: A generation of African American heroin users is dying in the opioid epidemic nobody talks about. The nation’s capital is ground zero.” (WaPo)

– “More Powerful Than a Russian Troll Army: The National Enquirer” (NYT)

– “How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right: Former extremists say they were sucked in by propaganda as teenagers, thanks to an algorithm’s dark side.” (Daily Beast)

– “China’s staggering 40 years of change in pictures: Forty years ago, China introduced major economic reforms – lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and leading to it becoming the second-largest economy in the world.” (BBC)

– “How To Make Sure Your Math Anxiety Doesn’t Make Your Kids Hate Math” Don’t hate math. Hating math is like hating breathing, sleeping, or eating. It’s fundamental to one’s existence. (NPR)

– “When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds” (NYT)

– “An early retiree who interviewed 100 millionaires discovered nearly all of them got rich using the same 3-step strategy” (Business Insider)

– “Home Addresses Are Up for Sale. Time to Take Back Your Privacy.:Home addresses have always been public information. But now they’re too easy to search.” (NYT)

– “It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights: As the US Senate debates a new bill, a data-governance expert presents a plan to protect liberty and freedom in the digital age.” (MIT Technology Review)

– “‘Men For Others, My Ass’: After Kavanaugh, Inside Georgetown Prep’s Culture Of Omerta” (Vanity Fair)

– “Is a female lead now key to box office success?: US awards season is in full swing – and so is the debate around representation (and a gaping lack thereof) in Hollywood. But the landscape for women in media may be changing for the better.” (BBC)

– “Why Do Hotel Companies Have So Many Brands?” (New York Magazine)

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill

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