Sunday, October 26th, 2014
Sunil Dutta, Ph.D., Los Angeles Police Officer - The Washington Post
Stephan: I was collecting data to write an essay on what I thought was the real importance of the Ferguson situation when a reader sent me this essay by a 17 year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. It articulates pretty clearly my own thinking on the trend importance -- as distinct from the personal tragedy -- of these events. That this essay was written by a police officer I found encouraging.
Sunil Dutta, PhD
Leaks from the Michael Brown shooting inquiry seem to be intended to prepare the public that Officer Darren Wilson might not be indicted. They suggest that the initial eyewitness accounts — saying that Wilson shot the teenager while he was surrendering or fleeing — were false; maybe Wilson was responding to a legitimate threat.
In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter if the shooting was justified. Yes, the details make a life-and-death difference for Brown and Wilson, and it will surely matter to them. But problem here is much bigger. Ferguson is about what happens when unrepresentative, majority-white law enforcement agencies police majority black communities — and the distrust they feel toward one another. It’s impossible to have a productive, cooperative relationship when those two groups see each other as adversaries. Thankfully, there’s a (painful, slow) way to change that. Here, rather than on Wilson and Brown, is where our focus should be.
With about 2.9 percent of the adult population in prison, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (2.2 million people are in federal, state and […]
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Sunday, October 26th, 2014
Joe Romm, - Think Progress
Stephan: I have been an NPR supporter for years and found this report on the gutting of NPR's climate-environmental team very disheartening. I wrote
NPR to register my displeasure at this development and urge you to do the same.
NPR has gutted its staff dedicated to covering environmental and climate issues. Given the nation’s and world’s renewed focus on the threat posed by unrestricted carbon pollution, this baffling move is already receiving widespread criticism from scientists and media watchers. It is “a sad commentary on the current state of our media,” as one top climatologist told me.
Katherine Bagley broke the story for InsideClimate News. She reports that earlier in 2014, NPR “had three full-time reporters and one editor dedicated” to cover environmental and climate issues within NPR’s science desk. Now, shockingly, “One remains — and he is covering it only part-time.”
Climate communications expert Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University is the source of that graph. He also emailed me a comment on NPR’s move:
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that led to the founding of NPR had as one of its goals that public broadcasting would serve as a “source of alternative telecommunications services” that would serve to “address national concerns.” This latest announcement illustrates how NPR has lost its way. The level of coverage […]
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Sunday, October 26th, 2014
Omar G. Encarnación, PhD, Professor of Political Studies at Bard College - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: It has been my view for many years that it is in a society's interest to encourage stable loving relationships whether heterosexual or LGBT. Study after study has shown that children raised by LGBT parents do as well, and are as well-adjusted as children in heterosexual families. Sometimes when the analysis becomes more granular it is shown they do better -- there is a lower rate of child abuse in LGBT families than in Fundamentalist religious families for instance. I have been proud of America that we have led the way but, as in so many things where we were early leaders we have now fallen behind. This essay may surprise you.
Thousands carry rainbow flags at the San Francisco Gay Pride Festival in California June 29, 2014
Credit : Reuters
By most accounts, the modern gay rights movement was initiated in the United States with a riot at New York City’s Stonewall Inn in 1969. But this history notwithstanding, the United States can no longer plausibly claim to be a pioneer in gay rights. Although the country has recently made progress in expanding access to gay marriage — the Supreme Court’s refusal to review a series of lower appellate court rulings that declared state bans on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional increased the portion of the American public living in a jurisdiction that allows same-sex marriage from 45 percent to almost 60 percent — it pales in comparison with the strides made elsewhere in the world. Fifteen countries spread across Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, including some countries that are not […]
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Saturday, October 25th, 2014
Michael Sauga, - Der Speigel (Germany)
Stephan: Here is one of the best exegetic essays I have read about what has happened to the world economy, largely led by the U.S., and the effect it has had on democracy across the world.
Six years after the Lehman disaster, the industrialized world is suffering from Japan Syndrome. Growth is minimal, another crash may be brewing and the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen.
Credit: Reuters/ Metropolitan Police
Six years after the Lehman disaster, the industrialized world is suffering from Japan Syndrome. Growth is minimal, another crash may be brewing and the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen. Can the global economy reinvent itself?
A new buzzword is circulating in the world’s convention centers and auditoriums. It can be heard at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Bankers sprinkle it into the presentations; politicians use it leave an impression on discussion panels.
The buzzword is “inclusion” and it refers to a trait that Western industrialized nations seem […]
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Saturday, October 25th, 2014
Stephan: It is going to be one of the great debates for historians of the future: How was it possible the American middle class repeatedly voted for cretins and crooks who destroyed their economy on ideological grounds and mad economic theories? And Kansas will be one of the major case studies.
Governor Sam Brownback speaks to a crowd of supporters in Overland Park, Kansas on Tuesday Aug. 5th, 2014.
Credit: Chris Neal/AP
Extremist Republicans turned their government into a lab experiment of tax cuts and privatization. And now they may be losing control of one of the reddest states in the nation.
he Republican party headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, shares space in a strip mall with Best Friends Pet Clinic, a cowboy-boot repair shop and a Chinese restaurant called the Magic Wok. Inside, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, a modest gathering of party faithful mill about, I’M A BROWNBACKER stickers affixed to their blouses and lapels.
It’s a terrible slogan. Four years ago, when Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback first took office, you might’ve wondered if these people, on some subliminal level, actually wanted to be humiliated by a filthy-minded liberal activist looking to add a new “santorum” […]
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