Our attention and minds are constantly deluged with breaking news events personally and globally. As a result it’s easy to oftentimes forget what are the core issues underlying and explaining much of what is happening across our lives and the world. The wave of life can easily unmoor even the most anchored and centered observer of human affairs. Worse yet, it’s difficult and perhaps even a luxury now to occasionally dock on shore away from the maddening crowd in order to step back and evaluate not just the tremors, earthquakes, and tsunamis of everyday life that demand an immediate reaction and resolution but also the root tectonic changes happening globally and in our lives.

Below is a short summary of some of the most significant megatrends we believe facing the United States and the world today:

• Massive pollution: air, ocean, ground water, soil, everywhere. Our environmental debt and waste will unfortunately be one of the most significant obstacles current and future generations must address.
• Our collective inability to understand, regulate, and adapt to the internet being everywhere: privacy, constant surveillance, the changing nature of work, the jobs lost to technology & productivity advances.
• Tribalization: we have become a fractured society splintered off into different cultural, racial, political, and economic interest groups. The only thing we have in common are our differences. Technology has accelerated our balkanization.
• A seemingly lost in faith in traditional democratic capitalism resulting in the end of the post World War II era, the rise of far right movements, and the rise of China across all areas (manufacturing, finance, technology, military, and political) and the uncertainty and the dangers of a Thucydides trap.
• Our inability collectively and individually to save and invest for the future: debt, eroding infrastructure, inability to piece together ambitious goals that will better the next generation.
• An opioid crisis, specifically-especially in America.

If you think there are other strategic issues that we and Daily Pnut readers should be tracking, then please share your thoughts at editor@dailypnut.com.

In The Pacific: Mega-Rafts of Floating Plastic Bring New Species of Marine Life To North America: The global crisis with plastic pollution in our oceans doesn’t get a whole lot of press, and yet it’s a monumental environmental disaster. A massive amount of microscopic plastic, perhaps more than a million square miles in size, was just discovered floating in the South Pacific this past summer. Humans discard billions of tons of non-biodegradable plastic every year.

Another way plastic winds up in the ocean is by natural disaster, like the enormous earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. According to a study published Thursday in Science, that event generated huge amounts of plastic debris that then floated across the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, accompanied by hundreds of marine species from Japanese coastal waters, landing on the distant coastline of North America.

One of the study’s co-authors found it remarkable that such a wide range of species could survive the long passages across the northern Pacific that often took years longer than the life spans of the individual organisms. Not only did these creatures adapt to an open ocean where food was scarcer than in rich coastal waters, they were also able to reproduce, in some cases for at least three generations, before reaching the North American coast. “We found that hundreds of species could survive for multiple generations at sea.” An Australian biology professor commented on the study, saying “We have created a new ecological process, the process of mega-rafting … The development of materials that can float for ages, and the rising levels of seas due to climate change, make the possibility of these events larger and larger.”

European Union Gives Social Media Companies Final Warning On Hate Speech: European regulators have been asking social media firms to remove racist and violent posts from their platforms in a timely manner for years. In May 2016, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google promised to review a majority of hate speech flagged by users within 24 hours and to remove any illegal content. But the European Commission said Thursday that these companies are still not moving fast enough to remove hate speech and that it would pass laws allowing the EU to punish companies that fail to act. “The situation is not sustainable: in more than 28 percent of cases, it takes more than one week for online platforms to take down illegal content,” the EU’s top official in charge of the digital economy and society said.

The EU wants social media companies to invest more in detecting hate speech, to work with reviewers trained to know what constitutes hate speech, and to do a better job of preventing illegal content from reappearing. The EU has a low tolerance for companies that don’t play by its rules; earlier this year, it ordered Google to pay $2.8 billion in an antitrust fine. Additional read: an inside look on the people who keep pornography and violence out of Your Facebook Feed.

Investors Holding Puerto Rico’s Power Company’s Defaulted Bonds Will Pay To Rebuild The Island’s Grid: The bondholders, which includes mutual-fund giants and hedge funds, have offered to lend Puerto Rico $1 billion to pay for emergency repairs and to cancel $150 million of the power company’s outstanding debt as well. Because of how the debt is structured, the proposal by the bondholders could help them as well as Puerto Rico. The loan will not be enough to fully replace the island’s outdated electrical system, which was destroyed by Hurricane Maria, leaving more than three million people without power. The bondholders say that, in addition to covering immediate repairs, their offer would allow Puerto Rico to apply for federal grants for long-term reconstruction that would not have to be repaid. US federal agencies offer such grants after natural disasters, but require recipients to fund a portion of a project’s cost, usually 25 percent.

Trump To Cut Refugee Resettlement in the US to 45,000: The Trump administration announced Wednesday that no more than 45,000 refugees will be allowed to resettle in the country over the coming year. In 2016, the US (among advanced industrialized nations) took in the largest number of resettled refugees–a total of 96,823 people, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Every year since 2006, under both the Obama and Bush administrations, the US has taken well over 45,000 refugees as part of resettlement programs. Resettlement is the selection and relocation by governments, such as the US, of vulnerable refugees who have already been granted asylum by another country. However, less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees are resettled this way; the vast majority stay in the countries in which they first apply for asylum, mostly developing nations in Africa and the Middle East.

The European Parliament Won’t Be Rounding Up Anyone From Monsanto: Members of the European Parliament (MEP) have banned Monsanto lobbyists from entering the parliament, using new rules allowing the withdrawal of access for firms that ignore a summons to attend parliamentary inquiries or hearings. Monsanto officials will now be unable to meet MEPs, attend committee meetings or use digital resources on parliament premises in Brussels or Strasbourg.

A hearing had been scheduled for October 11 by the EU environment and agriculture committees, with academics, regulators and campaigners, at which allegations were expected to be made that Monsanto unduly influenced regulatory studies into the safety of glyphosate, a key ingredient in its best-selling RoundUp weedkiller. Monsanto was summoned to attend. Instead, the multinational company’s vice president wrote the committees that EU procedures had been hijacked and politicised, and no one from Monsanto would be attending the hearing. The response so incensed MEPs that leaders of all major parliamentary blocks voted to back the ban, which will be a bitter blow to Monsanto’s advocacy campaign ahead of a decision later this year about the relicensing of glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer by one expert World Health Organization panel.

As mentioned above, we think China is becoming a world power and it’s rise has already greatly changed-shaped the world and its impact on the world will only increase in the future. We’ve partnered with several other brands to provide readers a chance to experience China personally. Enter here for a chance to win a FREE roundtrip airline ticket to anywhere in China!

More Reads

• Most of the time our perception of conscious control is an illusion. Many neuroscientific and psychological studies confirm that the brain’s ‘automatic pilot’ is usually in the driving seat, with little or no need for ‘us’ to be aware of what’s going on. (Aeon)
• A software engineer wants to propose a new way of thinking and looking at maps: What if our maps were arranged by time, instead of space? (Fast Company)
• Sunday has traditionally been a day where church and state were separated. The same went for the NFL. Well, in some places, the NFL is a religion. But the NFL has finally acknowledged the real world. (The Ringer)
• Privilege has become a loaded word within the span of an entire year. The NYT explores whether marriage has become a mark of privilege?
• In Hollywood everyone is an aspiring movie star, in New York everyone is an aspiring bestselling author, in San Francisco everyone is an aspiring tech mogul. In case you aren’t in any of those cities, the Guardian explains how you might be able to write a bestselling novel with an algorithm.
• As a species, we are constantly battling the themes of sociability, loneliness, and independence. Nautilus on “when it’s good to be antisocial.”
• Everyone seems to dread old age after they hit 30. But kids can’t wait to be older. We as a species are supremely gifted at thinking the grass is always greener on the other side. Unfortunately the grass will still always need to be watered, weeded, and mowed. Nautilus on one benefit of aging: we get wiser. As they say, you either win or you learn. Or as our mothers warned us: you can learn the hard way if you want…

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