Almost half of the world’s population resides in countries that held or will hold executive or legislative elections in 2024.

This prompts a closer look at how people feel about the way democracy is working in their respective nations.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, shows the percentage of the population that is satisfied or dissatisfied with democracy in 26 countries.

The data comes from the Pew Research Center.

Methodology

In 2024, the Pew Research Center conducted over 900 interviews in each country via telephone or face-to-face.

Respondents were asked, “How satisfied are you with the way democracy is working in [survey country] – very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not too satisfied, or not at all satisfied?” Those who did not answer are excluded. Percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.

Decline in Satisfaction with Democracy

Satisfaction with democracy has declined in recent years, particularly in high-income nations. In nine out of the 12 countries where this question has been asked consistently, satisfaction levels are lower today than in 2021.

Notably, six countries have seen a double-digit drop in satisfaction: Canada, Germany, Greece, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Regional Differences

• Europe: 75% of Swedes are satisfied with their democracy, compared to just 22% in Greece.

• Asia-Pacific: More than three-quarters of Indians and Singaporeans are satisfied, whereas only 31% of Japanese are satisfied with their democracy.

• Latin America: About two-thirds or more of Chileans, Colombians, and Peruvians express negative views about their democracies.

According to the Pew Research Center, satisfaction with democracy is strongly related to their perceptions of how the economy is performing. Additionally, views on the governing party also influence assessments of democracy.

Authored by Denes Albert via ReMix News,

Following Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s trips to Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing, the EU has launched a partial boycott of meetings organized by the rotating presidency, while 63 MEPs are now calling for Hungary’s EU voting rights to be entirely suspended.

Under the boycott, the EU will only send civil servants, not commissioners, to meetings chaired by Hungary.

Not every European leader is on board with these decisions. For example, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer says boycotting Hungary is not a good solution.

🇸🇰ROBERT FICO:

“I want to express my admiration for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for not hesitating to go to both Kyiv and Moscow.

If my health allowed, I would have loved to join him. There are never enough peace talks and peace initiatives. I repeat, never enough.” pic.twitter.com/38LYTb6WgB

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 8, 2024

Orbán’s peace mission included talks in Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing in the space of a few days. This followed the announcement that the EU commissioners would boycott the Hungarian presidency and even organize their own meeting in Brussels in August. Most EU leaders condemned Viktor Orbán’s peace mission, saying that as EU president-in-office he had no mandate to partake in such a mission.

Commenting on the debate, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said that Viktor Orbán had broken a taboo, which should be discussed, but that in response to this, another taboo should not be broken, so there was no need to boycott the Hungarian EU presidency.

The Austrian chancellor said that the worst solution is for the parties within the European Union not to talk to each other, which is why ministers from the Austrian People’s Party will continue to attend the EU Council presidency meetings.

🇭🇺🇺🇦 Zelensky: Ukraine’s relationship with Hungary is now “different” after PM Orbán’s visit to Kyiv. pic.twitter.com/NU6xzWvpjM

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 4, 2024

“The European Commission and the Council Presidency should resolve conflicts through discussions, not by calling for a boycott. Dialogue is the most important precondition for progress and common solutions at all political levels,” the chancellor stated.

The Netherlands will decide on a case-by-case basis whether to participate in the events of the Hungarian EU presidency, but rejects a formal boycott, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told the Telegraaf newspaper on Tuesday.

The Dutch prime minister, whose right-wing cabinet took office on July 2, said that he believed Orbán had made it clear that these meetings were bilateral and that he did not represent the EU.

“On a bilateral basis, each country can do what it wants,” he said. Whether the Netherlands will miss meetings organized by the Hungarian EU presidency will be considered together with the other EU member states on a case-by-case basis.

NEW: 🇭🇺🇺🇸 Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán will meet at the former U.S. president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday.

The Hungarian PM recently conducted his “peace mission” with visits to Ukraine, Russia, and China ahead of this week’s NATO meeting in Washington D.C. pic.twitter.com/f8Vflx1kdY

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 11, 2024

Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden recently met his Dutch counterpart and in a press statement strongly opposed the boycott of meetings of the Hungarian EU Presidency.

“In a democracy, people talk to each other,” said the Grand Duchy’s Christian Democrat head of government. He said that “Luxembourg’s positions on various issues can be better conveyed if it is represented at the meetings and communicates clearly with the Hungarians about its values.”

Read more here…

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”

 – Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)

There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.

Magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality, our politically polarizing culture of callousness, cruelty, meanness, ignorance, incivility, hatred, intolerance, indecency and injustice have only served to ratchet up the tension.

Consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism, a culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nation’s governmental and social policies. “Meanness today is a state of mind,” writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, “the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.”

This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides us—race, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc.—rather than what unites us: we are all Americans, and in a larger, more global sense, we are all human.

This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as “the politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as the cult of otherness… It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.”

This is more than meanness, however.

We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.

This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.

This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.

As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.

This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.

Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.

Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.

By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.

Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized.

The darkness is winning.

It’s not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning.

The darkness is winning in our communities. It’s winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. It’s winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. It’s winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.

John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin’s bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been “passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts.

This fire is not liberating; it is destroying.

We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.

We are on the wrong side of the revolution.

“If we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,” advised King, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.“

Freedom demands responsibility.

Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.

JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.

King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.

Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination:

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.

Fifty-plus years later, we’re still being terrorized by assassins’ bullets, but what these madmen are really trying to kill is that dream of a world in which all Americans “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.

But imagine…

Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom.

Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice.

Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against government corruption and despotism.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.

Authored by Monica O’Shea via The Epoch Times,

High-intensity interval exercise for just six months could be enough to improve cognitive function in older adults for up to five years, Australian scientists have found.

Researchers at the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute recruited a large group of healthy adults aged 65 to 85 for a six-month exercise program.

The volunteers undertook cognition testing as part of the study, along with high-resolution brain scans.

Five years later, researchers followed up with these older volunteers and found they had better cognition, even if they ceased exercising at the conclusion of the study.

Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett said six months of high-intensity interval training is enough to “flick the switch.”

“If we can change the trajectory of ageing and keep people cognitively healthier for longer with a simple intervention like exercise, we can potentially save our community from the enormous personal, economic, and social costs associated with dementia,” he said.

The research, published in Aging and Disease, involved examining the results of three different types of exercise—low, medium, and high intensity.

The low-intensity exercise involved balance and stretching, while medium-intensity exercise involved brisk walking on a treadmill.

The high-intensity exercise, however, involved four cycles of running on a treadmill at near-maximum exertion.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of these three exercise interventions and attended 72 sessions during a six-month time frame.

Qualified exercise physiologists supervised all sessions to ensure personalised target heart rates were reached and maintained during the sessions.

In earlier pre-clinical work, the researchers discovered exercise can activate stem cells and boost the production of neurons in the hippocampus, where long-term memories are stored, thus improving cognition.

However, this study was the first of its kind to their knowledge that found “exercise can boost cognition in healthy older adults not just delay cognitive decline.”

High-Intensity Exercise Led to Cognitive Improvement

Queensland Brain Institute research fellow Daniel Blackmore explained that only high-intensity interval exercise resulted in a cognitive improvement that lasted five years.

“On high-resolution MRI scans of that group, we saw structural and connectivity changes in the hippocampus, the area responsible for learning and memory,” he said.

“We also found blood biomarkers that changed in correlation to improvements in cognition.”

Biomarkers can indicate how the body is responding to a disease or treatment.

Mr. Blackmore was optimistic about the findings, as they could inform exercise guidelines for older adults.

The researcher noted one in three people aged over 85 were likely to develop dementia, meaning the impact of the research is “far-reaching.”

Further research could look at varying types of exercise and how they can be incorporated into aged care, he explained.

“We are now looking at the genetic factors that may regulate a person’s response to exercise to see if we can establish who will and will not respond to this intervention,” he said.

“The use of biomarkers as a diagnostic tool for exercise also needs further research.”

The paper highlighted ageing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, could impact more than 130 million people around the world by 2050.

“Delaying the onset of dementia by five years would result in a decreased prevalence of 41 percent by 2050,” the paper stated.

“Therefore, it is critical to identify approaches that delay, slow, or even reverse age-associated cognitive decline. Modifiable lifestyle factors such as physical activity have been proposed to be effective at altering the trajectory of aging dementia.”

The study received support from the Stafford Fox Medical Research Foundation.

Exercise and Cognition Link ‘Weak’

Meanwhile, a separate review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in February 2024 found physical activity was linked to better life cognition. But this association was “weak.”

However, even a weak association is important from a population health perspective, the authors noted.

“This systematic review and meta-analysis found that the association between physical activity and cognitive decline was very small, with no evident dose-response association,” the paper states.

“With that said, even weak associations can be clinically significant from a population health perspective when physical activity continues over decades.”

The authors said not very many “high quality” studies had been included in the review and suggested longer follow-up times.

“Further high-quality cohort studies with follow-ups longer than 10 to 20 years, fine-grain measures of physical activity and cognition at baseline, and high participation and follow-up rates are needed to solidify the evidence base in this area,” they stated.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Winston Churchill once famously said that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

For Donald Trump, the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania could prove politically exhilarating. After rising with a fist pump and a call to fight on, Trump seems to have gone from being a movement to a mythological figure with his supporters.  All he needs now is a big blue ox named Babe to return to the campaign trail.

This assassination attempt should also concentrate the minds of everyone on the escalating rhetoric in this campaign, particularly the media in maintaining inflammatory narratives. Yet, the hateful and unhinged language has continued unabated from academics declaring that the assassination attempt was staged to those who complain that the only problem was that Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.

For years, Democrats have repeated analogies of Trump to Hitler and his followers to brownshirted neo-Nazis.  Indeed, defeating Trump has been compared to stopping Hitler in 1933.

The narrative began as soon as Trump was elected when the press and pundits uniformly and falsely claimed that Trump had praised neo-Nazis and Klansmen in 2017 as “fine people” in Charlottesville.

Watching Trump’s statement at the time, it was clear to most of us that Trump condemned the neo-Nazis and that the statement about “fine people on both sides” was in reference to the debate over the removal of historic statues.

It took six years for Snopes to finally have the courage to do a fact check and declare the common attack to be false.

It did not matter. The press and politicians have hammered away at the notion that Trump is seeking to end democracy and that everyone from gay people to reporters will be “disappeared.”

After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity, Rachel Maddow went on the air with a hysterical claim that “death squads” had just been green lighted by conservatives. Democratic strategist Jame Carville insists that Trump’s reelection will bring “the end of the Constitution.”

It is all what I call “rage rhetoric” in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” The book explores centuries of rage politics and political violence. This is not our first age of rage but it could well be the most dangerous.

Two years before the assassination attempt, I appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the expansion of domestic terrorism investigations. Democrats were seeking to pressure the FBI to focus on far-right groups as potential terrorist groups. The use of political views rather than conduct has been used historically to crackdown on groups from socialists to anarchists to feminists.

The narrative that the threat of violence is coming primarily from the Right is demonstrably false but consistently echoed in the media.

We have seen a growing level of leftist violence in the last decade. That includes riots in cities like Portland and Seattle where billions of dollars of damage occurred, hundreds of officers injured, and many citizens killed. In 2020 alone, 25 people were killed in the protests.

The Democrats often raise the Jan. 6th riot and it is important to acknowledge that the damage extended to an attack on our constitutional process. However, the preceding protest around the White House caused more injuries and more property damage. Then President Trump had to be removed to a safe location as Secret Service feared a breach of the White House.

There were a reported 150 officers injured (including at least 49 Park Police officers around the White House) in the Lafayette Park riot. Protesters caused extensive property damage including the torching of a historic structure and the attempted arson of St. John’s Church.

Mass shootings by leftist gunmen have repeatedly occurred but those are treated as one offs while any conservative shooter is part of a pattern of right-wing violence.

Keith Ellison, the Democratic attorney general of Minnesota, mocked the notion of liberal violence. In one tweet, he declared  “I have never seen @BernieSanders supporters being unusually mean or rude. Can someone send me an example of a ‘Bernie Bro’ being bad. Also, are we holding all candidates responsible for the behavior of some of their supporters? Waiting to hear.”

Republican Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana replied dryly: “I can think of an example.” Scalise was severely wounded at the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice by a Sanders supporter.

Ellison was a particularly ironic Democratic politician to repeat this mantra. When he was the Democratic National Committee deputy chair, Ellison praised Antifa, a violent anti-free speech group that regularly attacks conservatives, pro-lifers, and others.

Ellison said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany.

Ellison’s son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer. When confronted about Antifa’s violence, then House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler denied that the group existed. Likewise, Joe Biden has dismissed objections to Antifa as just “an idea.”

In the meantime, Biden has called Trump and his supporters “enemies of the people.” He recently said that the threat to democracy was so great that debates are no solution: “we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Even after the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the media has failed to see a pattern while stoking the claim of a right-wing violent movement.

In the meantime, Democrats previously filed to strip Secret Service protection from Trump. The former Chair of the J6 Committee and the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee introduced the legislation, called Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable (DISGRACED).

The press and pundits continue to tell Americans that Trump and his supporters are going to kill democracy and probably those they love. While most people dismiss the rage rhetoric, there are some who take it as a license to take the most extreme action.

We are still learning about Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who was killed after trying to assassinate Trump.

A registered Republican, Crooks gave money to ActBlue to support Democratic candidates.

Yet, we know him all too well. He is likely to be found to be a lonely, unhinged individual who found meaning in an attempted political murder.

Thomas Crooks like Nicholas Roske (who tried to kill Justice Kavanaugh) are the faces that watch from the political shadows. They hear leaders telling them to stop the Nazis before democracy dies . . . and they believe them.

As for Democrats, the anger evident every night on cable networks may reflect a degree of insecurity about becoming the very thing that they are campaigning against. It is time for the party to look around to take stock of its anti-democratic policies.

Democratic secretaries of state have sought to block not just Trump but third-party candidates from ballots to prevent voters from supporting them.

They have called for cleansing ballots of over 120 other Republicans. They have supported censorship, blacklisting, and other attacks on free speech.

As a lifelong Democrat, I have repeatedly asked what we have become in this age of rage. If we embrace groups like Antifa, oppose free speech, and cleanse ballots, we will have little beyond our rage to sustain us.

Authored by Summer Lane via The Epoch Times,

Nearly 400 public water systems in California have failed to meet recommended safety standards for drinking water, according to a report last month from the State Water Resources Control Board, but a new climate bond measure recently joined the state’s November ballot may help.

Some 913,000 Californians, approximately 2 percent of the state’s population, are potentially affected by 385 failing public water systems according to the report.

Fifty-six of those systems “serve disadvantaged communities and 67 percent serve majority communities of color.”

The annual report identifies California drinking water challenges, part of an effort to improve access to safe drinking water started by former Gov. Jerry Brown. He signed Assembly Bill 685 into law in 2012, establishing that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for cooking consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

The water board defines a failing water system as one that does not provide “an adequate and reliable supply of drinking water which is at all times pure, wholesome, and potable.”

The report provided an example of two water systems where they found both exceeded the maximum contaminant level for 1,2,3-trichloropropane, a man-made carcinogenic chemical sometimes found in hazardous wastes.

Failing water system areas tend to have a “higher percentage of households in poverty” and are mostly larger households, according to the report.

The number of failing systems has increased over the past two years. A 2022 report from the water board found that 347 such systems in California were failing, affecting over 846,000 people.

The highest concentration of failing water systems is in Kern County, for example, where small water systems and domestic wells are already located in areas with a “high risk” of contamination and water shortages.

Rural and disadvantaged areas are hardest hit by water quality problems, and it’s an issue that ultimately comes down to poor planning, according to Don Wright, the founder of the agricultural water policy news site WaterWrights.

Disadvantaged communities like Cantua Creek in Fresno County “were packed in too tight together,” with septic systems planted nearby. The region was formerly a migrant labor camp and was never set up to support the water needs of over 500 residents.

Mr. Wright called it a “failure of zoning management” and said places like that were “not designed to be municipalities.”

Many of the failures of these small water systems are simply the result of outdated equipment. Wells may often exceed their usable life and need to be replaced with new ones, he said.

Water pumped up from an underground well flows into a cistern on a farm in Fresno, Calif., on July 24, 2021. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

Mr. Wright also pointed out that some of the chemicals found during water testing were the result of nature. “Arsenic is naturally occurring in the soil [in the valley],” he said.

“Farmers don’t fertilize with arsenic, these things happen naturally,” he stated.

Echoing the concerns of Mr. Wright, state water board’s spokesman Dmitri Stanich told The Epoch Times there is a “multitude of reasons small systems can fail” as many of them are out of date without outside water sources or adequate resources for proper maintenance.

“Smaller and rural systems are at most risk of failing as they typically do not have the resources to mitigate contamination incursion, cannot maintain their systems to needed technological standards, nor do they have alternative sources of water,” he said.

Earlier this month, California lawmakers passed a proposal to place on the November ballot a $10 billion environmental bond addressing water, wildfire, and air quality concerns. According to experts, it could be a step toward a solution to water problems plaguing the state.

If approved by voters, the bond would fund safe drinking water infrastructure, climate solutions, flood and water resilience initiatives, and clean air programs, its co-author Democrat Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia told The Epoch Times.

Crops are flooded after a storm outside of Fresno, Calif., on March 12, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Mr. Garcia called the bond “historic” because it allocates 40 percent to disadvantaged communities.

The largest concentration of failing water systems in California is in Kern County in the Bakersfield region, with 58.

The Kern County Health Department declined to comment on the report.

Madera County, near Fresno, has the highest proportion of systems on the verge of failing whereas Bay Area counties like San Francisco and Alameda have the least.

The Community Water Center, a water quality advocacy group based in San Joaquin Valley, said in June in response to the water assessment report that $15 billion was needed to improve California’s water infrastructure.

They told The Epoch Times July 9 the funding was “not on par with the needs outlined by [the board]” but was nevertheless“crucial” for communities.

If approved by voters, the climate bond will allot $3 billion to developing safe drinking water systems, as well as drought, flood, and water resilience programs—significantly less than what advocacy groups have recommended.

Representatives for advocacy groups declined to comment after the climate bond was approved for the ballot.

Last month, the state water board also proposed plans to distribute $855 million in financial assistance over the next year to safe drinking water projects in the state, according to a June 25 statement.

Authored by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky via GlobalResearch.ca,

Introduction

Normalization of diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation had first been proposed by Donald Trump in 2017.

Under RussiaGate (2016), President-elect Donald Trump had been accused of treason “after President Obama announced new sanctions [in late December 2016] against Russia and Trump praised Vladimir Putin’s response to the sanctions.” (Daily Caller, December 30, 2016, emphasis added)

Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leo Panetta had already intimated prior to the elections that Trump was a threat to national security. 

Even prior to the inauguration of president Trump, the US media in liaison with US intelligence had launched successive waves of smears directed against President-elect Donald Trump.

The objective from the very outset was to discredit president Trump, presenting him as a Manchurian candidate serving the interests of the Kremlin.

Vanity Fair November 1 2016

Donald Trump, The Manchurian Candidate: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Campaign to Destabilize the Trump Presidency. Regime Change in America

The Atlantic October 8 2016

RussiaGate 2.0

The RussiaGate objective as formulated in 2016 was: 

“to get rid of a President who intended to normalize relations with Russia, thus curtailing the budget and power of the military/security complex.”

(Paul Craig Roberts, emphasis added)

In January 2019, the FBI Russia investigation was quoted by the media as “evidence” that Trump was “wittingly or unwittingly” an agent of the Kremlin.

What is the stance of the FBI today in regard to the candidacy of Donald Trump? The FBI played a key role in sustaining RussiaGate. (P. C Roberts). I should mention that the FBI is also responsible (coincidentally) for the investigation of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Let us wake up to REALITY.  

The levels of political manipulation, fraud and criminality have reached their pinnacle.

The ultimate intent of the campaign against Trump in 2016-19, led by the Neocons and the Dems Clinton faction was to destabilize the Trump presidency.

From RussiaGate 1.0 to RussiaGate 2.0

There is continuity: Under RussiaGate 2.0 (2024) which we are currently experiencing, various accusations of treason against Trump will once more go into high gear, ultimately with a view to sabotage the peace process as well as destabilize Trump’s candidacy to the presidency of the U.S. 

Trump has confirmed: …

“that if reelected, he would swiftly bring an end to the war in Ukraine by speaking with Putin.

“I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on January 20.

I’ll have that war settled,” Trump said on June 27 during a debate with Biden, adding,

“I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.”

(Quoted by Newsweek)

Speaking with Putin is regarded as an act of treason. This courageous statement, reminiscent of Donald Trump –the alleged Manchurian Candidate— is unlikely to be accepted by the “Deep State”, the Military Industrial Complex and the powerful financial groups which support the Democratic Party leadership.

What will be the ultimate outcome? 

Real peace negotiations are an integral part of Trump’s election campaign.

Trump’s national security advisory team has prepared a balanced plan: if the Kiev regime does not enter into peace talks with Moscow, the U.S. would (under a Trump presidency) immediately suspend the flow of US weapons to Ukraine:

“Under the plan drawn up by [General Keith] Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s National Security Council during his 2017-2021 presidency, there would be a ceasefire based on prevailing battle lines during peace talks, Fleitz said.

They have presented their strategy to Trump, and the Republican presidential candidate responded favorably”. (Reuters, June 23, 2024)

It is worth noting that this peace proposal – which is part of his election campaign – was formulated barely a few weeks prior to the failed attempt to assassinate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The Iwo Jima 2.0 pic, immortalizing the Trump fist surviving an assassination attempt, has taken the world by storm – generating everything from a meme tsunami on China’s Weibo to fresh anime in Japan. Not to mention the deluge of hats and T-shirts.

This carefully composed pic changes everything – in more ways than one. So let’s engage in a first attempt to deconstruct it.

We start with the major losers.

The combo running Crash Test Dummy’s teleprompter/earpiece set up is essentially composed by Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, Bruce Reed and Ted Kaufman.

Government functionaries like Jake Sullivan and Little Blinkie, for their part, are placed at the heart of what is known in Washington as the “inter-agency” racket, better described as The Blob.

The inestimable Alastair Crooke has explained how Sullivan and Little Blinkie’s deliberations are “spread through a matrix of interlocking ‘clusters’ that includes the Military Industrial Complex, Congressional leaders, Big Donors, Wall Street, the Treasury, the CIA, the FBI, a few cosmopolitan oligarchs and the princelings of the security-intelligence world.”

Yet the key – invisible – point is who (italics mine) tells Sullivan and Blinkie what to do.

These are the people who really (italics mine) run the show: the Big Families, and the Big Donors – old money and especially new money (as in invisible Vanguard shareholders).

They are all stunned.

They never thought it would come to this debacle – even if Joe Biden was expressly chosen for what he is: a crude, corrupt, easily-manipulated lackey, and head of a crime family. Everyone in a position of real power in the Blob knew he was becoming a zombie ages ago.

There’s fierce debate across the Beltway over how many factions are at war with each other inside the Dem blob.

There are at least three:

1.The Biden crime family – on which tens of thousands of people with cushy jobs and fat salaries depend.

2.The down-ballot Dem machine – an “extended family” of other tens of thousands who will lose badly, in elections or re-elections, in the event of a Trump 2.0. These are the ones who want to throw Crash Test Dummy under the – retirement home – bus and replace him with a Dem they hope and pray might win (the number one candidate is the uber-incompetent Kamala Harris).

Needless to add, these two factions not only are at vicious Hot War against each other but also at war with…

3.The ones who really matter: the actual Deep State – from the “intelligence community” to webs woven inside the CIA and the FBI. This is the infernal machine that actually gave the White House on a platter to Biden in 2020.

Dem Chuck Schumer once famously proclaimed: if you cross this faction, they have “Six Ways from Sunday” to get to you, destroy you, or whack you. With total impunity.

Enter Six Ways from Sunday

So this is what might happen next – way beyond Iwo Jima 2.0 and the irresistible pull of the Trump-Vance ticket. If the Deep State cannot influence the outcome of the November elections, they can find Six Ways from Sunday to cancel it, by invoking a “national emergency”. Anything goes – from false flag terrorism to war.

Extrapolating from a quite cool analysis by a crack fintech expert in Berlin, it’s possible to characterize the bipartisan War Party arrangement in the Blob as two real Mafioso enterprises fighting over an Exceptionalistan on the brink of abysmal bankruptcy – and forced to choose its final Forever Wars.

The Six Ways from Sunday faction is determined to go all the way – employing every imperial means – to conquer what could be dubbed the El Dorado in the black soil of Novorossiya, whose resources could buy it, maybe, another 50 years of power.

On the other side, the MAGA group doesn’t care about those Slavlands, and is convinced that the real existential threat is the Middle Kingdom. And as it is beholden to the Book of Joshua racket, the MAGA group also believes that “something must be done“ about Iran.

Either group, by the way, is de facto fully devoted to the Book of Joshua racket.

The Empire – of Chaos – happens to be run under a quite peculiar governance, in which a very complicated voting system decides which group gets access to the means for pursuing their obsession.

As long as there was enough gold in the vaults of the Empire – illegally appropriated or otherwise – the two groups alternated Power Possession without too much fuss.

But then all those Forever Wars lost over the years against militarily insignificant adversaries started to take their toll. And the financial times now are really, really tough.

The imperial voting system holds an extremely bizarre characteristic: under roughly equal voter affiliation to either group, the votes cast in just five cities in five states in the midwest Heartland actually determine the fate of those dwindling imperial resources fiercely fought over by the two main groups.

The Six Ways from Sunday group happens to control the voting in those five cities.

Already in the past elections, the Six Ways from Sunday group pre-empted a certain victory of the MAGA group in the Heartland to the tune of 10 million votes, most of them cast in truckloads of forged ballots in those five cities, plus related electronic tampering.

What the MAGA group now clearly sees is the possibility to finally grab those five cities in five states.

And yet 10 million excess votes and trying to conquer those five states may not be enough in the face of the massive fraud machine.

So in 2024 MAGA calculates that they must win another five states typically leaning towards the Six Ways from Sunday universe, and win by an excess of at least 20 million votes to pre-empt the all but certain massive fraud.

That’s where Iwo Jima 2.0 come in – graphically formatting the ticket for a landslide victory.

Six Ways from Sunday may be beyond dazed and confused at the current incandescent juncture. The trillion dollar question is: how will they change the narrative and regain the initiative?

They have made the lethal mistake of picking as their candidate a walking dead. In contrast, MAGA parades the quintessential narcissistic pop superstar, now supercharged and re-energized, and carrying global appeal.

It seems that the landslide is inevitable. Six Ways from Sunday is mired in total panic – knowing they are about to lose control.

Yet the fat lady has not yet sung.

Three and a half months is a galactic eternity in politics. And a cornered Six Ways from Sunday is all set to roar with more ferocity than ever.

China’s ruling Communist Party has been implementing bold new guidelines across ChatGPT-style large language models at major domestic tech firms. These measures aim to prevent the models from generating content that could subvert state power or criticize the communist political system. Chinese authorities’ efforts to control AI and use it as a mass censorship tool are essentially an extension of their two-decade-long “Great Firewall” policy.

A new Financial Times report states that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top internet regulator, is reviewing LLMs from tech companies and AI start-ups, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot, and 01.AI. The goal is to ensure these LLMs “embody core socialist values.”

According to those with direct knowledge of CAC’s overview process, officials are batch-testing LLM’s responses to a series of questions, including China politics and President Xi Jinping. 

The team overseeing this process is highly trained in the AI field. An employee of a Hangzhou-based start-up, who asked not to be named, said, “A special team doing this, they came to our office and sat in our conference room to do the audit.” 

“We didn’t pass the first time; the reason wasn’t very clear so we had to go and talk to our peers,” the person said, adding, “It takes a bit of guessing and adjusting. We passed the second time but the whole process took months.”

FT pointed out that censorship begins “with weeding out problematic information from training data and building a database of sensitive keywords. China’s operational guidance to AI companies published in February says AI groups need to collect thousands of sensitive keywords and questions that violate “core socialist values,” such as “inciting the subversion of state power” or “undermining national unity.” The sensitive keywords are supposed to be updated weekly.” 

Censorship is visible to users of China’s AI chatbots. For instance, queries about the Tiananmen Square massacre and whether Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh have been scrubbed. 

Baidu’s Ernie chatbot informs users to “try a different question” when asking about politically sensitive topics, while Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen responds: “I have not yet learned how to answer this question. I will keep studying to better serve you.”

In the CCP’s view, open, unfiltered AI bots constitute a significant threat to the communist party’s governance. Beijing is building itself an expanded “great firewall” to create socialist AI and continue blocking incoming foreign technology. 

Remember, David Sacks warned in early 2023 that “trust & safety” teams at big tech firms, especially the ones in the US, have immense censorship power. He warned this censorship will go into hyperdrive with AI

If you didn’t like censorship when it was practiced by the “trust & safety” team, just wait until the AI does it. From the latest @theallinpod. pic.twitter.com/agAzSuCfK9

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) February 19, 2023

If President Trump wins the presidential elections in November, a dramatic shift in AI policy could be on the horizon for the US next year. He aims to “Make America First in AI,” which could involve scrapping some of the “unnecessary and burdensome regulations” on AI development. A more open approach to AI would foster innovation, contrasting with China’s closed approach of embedding socialist values into their models.