Stephan: I think Reagan was a very mediocre, and more than a little corrupt President at many levels. Some well-known -- Iran-Contra -- some less so -- the lost opportunity to help Russia become a real democracy; a failure that has given the world Putin. Part of the reason for this mediocrity and failure was the quality of thinking amongst his leadership and aides. This story is a measure of that. I am also publishing it because I think it articulates very clearly the worldview of the Theocratic Right. And I don't think Douglas MacKinnon is a hypocrite; I think he actually believes what he is saying and he is correct millions more, overwhelmingly White, Americans feel the same. It's all part of the Great Schism Trend.
My prediction is: It is going to take another 10 to 15 years, but there will be an adjustment in the structure of the United States. There are a whole series of trends -- fear of the coming white minority, response to climate change, radically different social state policies, to name a few -- that are lending momentum to the Great Schism Trend, making it a meta-trend that is going to touch every aspect of American life.
As you watch it happening, I suggest the thing to watch is the play made by the emerging virtual corporate states. These are the emerging world powers, controlled by 400-500 people. It is in their interest to have a sharp split inside their vassal states, particularly the U.S.. By buying one side outright and corrupting the other, they keep a majority from coming together and passing legislation that, from their point of view, would produce negative consequences.
Credit: world-o-crap.blogspot.com
A former aide to President Ronald Reagan is calling for southern states to secede from the union and form a new conservative nation called “Reagan” where citizens wouldn’t be forced to compromise on “traditional values” like marriage.
Right Wing Watch on Wednesday flagged conservative author Douglas MacKinnon’s interview with evangelical radio host Janet Mefferd, in which he hocked his new book, “The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country … Now.” Cautioning that all his secession talk was purely “academic,” MacKinnon suggested that South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida break away from the United States and form a new republic named “Reagan.”
“You have to remember that all 11 states from the South, including ultimately Texas, seceded legally,” MacKinnon told Mefferd. “They left the union peacefully, they left the union legally, and then President Lincoln … part of the problem there was that the North realized very quickly that it could not survive economically without the power of the South.”
After making the legal case for secession — and branding the Civil War “illegal” to boot — MacKinnon argued […]
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and Op-ed Columnist - Truth Out
Stephan: This is the sort of public discussion we ought to be having. It is a lie, and remains a lie no matter how oft repeated, that growth and the environment are at odds. This is the argument advanced by those whose wealth is tied up in the carbon era technologies that are rapidly becoming the past.
A cow grazes in a pasture near a coal-fired power plant earlier this year in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Credit: Luke Sharrett for the New York Times
We seem to be having a moment in which three groups with very different agendas – anti-environmentalist conservatives, anti-capitalist people on the left and hard scientists who think they are smarter than economists – have formed an unholy alliance on behalf of the proposition that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is incompatible with growing real gross domestic product.
The right likes this argument because it wants to block any action on climate. Some on the left like it because they think it can be the basis for an attack on our profit-oriented, materialistic society. The scientists like it because it lets them engage in some intellectual imperialism and invade another field (just to be clear, economists do this all the time, often with equally bad results).
A few […]
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Michael Tomasky , - The Daily Beast
Stephan: The purchase of American democracy by a handful of billionaires, a capture facilitated by a corrupted Supreme Court's Citizens United decision ought to be a subject of intense public debate. Instead we have gone through the hysteria of Ebola, which became the fuel driving the Republican election machine. During the two week peak of this madness one person died of Ebola. In that same period 364 men, women, and children died by gunfire. The result, and I wonder if in some quarters this was not by design, was that Ebola wiped everything else into the dim background weeks before the most critical election so far in the 21st century. If the Senate falls to the Republicans, nothing will happen for the remainder of Obama's presidency. That means we will not address any of the truly important trends, and there will be a dreadful cost.
Credit: www.marcandangel.com
Hundreds of millions of untraceable donations are flowing to candidates, and at some point soon untraceable ‘dark money’ will likely overtake the system.
There is something obscene in looking at the raw numbers, is there not? More than $500 million being spent on House races, and north of $300 million on Senate contests. A half-billion dollars! In the House! Where, as of yesterday, the Cook Political Report was counting a mere 17 contests as toss-ups, with 19 others as vaguely competitive. [This paragraph originally said $300 billion, which was incorrect.]
But the gross (double entendre intended) amounts aren’t the money story of this campaign. The money story of this campaign is that undisclosed money is starting to overtake the system and overtake our politics, and that at the heart of this corruption sits a lie peddled to us by the Supreme Court when it handed down the Citizens United decision. Whether it did so naively or cynically, I honestly do not know. But let’s just say that if it was naïve, it was almost too naïve to believe, Steve.
Here’s the situation. Outside […]
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Stephan: Denmark I think is an example of a culture that has made wellness a priority. It is creating a more compassionate life-affirming future that we should study closely. Here is an example of what I mean.
The outsourcing of banknote and coin production will result in 100 million kroner in savings, the bank said. Credit: Colourbox
With more and more people paying with credit cards and their smartphones, Denmark’s central bank Nationalbanken says it no longer pays to print banknotes or mint coins.
By the end of 2016, Nationalbanken plans to outsource all of its printing and minting services to an external supplier.
“Although the amount of
cash
circulating in Denmark continues to be high, society’s demand for new banknotes and coins has been falling for years, and Nationalbanken has no expectations that the trend will be reversed,” the bank wrote in a press release.
In addition to the rise in alternative paying options, the central bank also said that today’s banknotes and coins are better recirculated into the
economy![]()
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post - THe Washington Post
Stephan: It is fascinating to watch the prohibitionist disinformation campaign. I am sure the brighter ones -- the others are just tools who repeat the talking points they are given -- know they will be refuted based on the data. The game though is that not everyone will see the refutation, and if one lies over and over a certain number of people will not learn about the lie each time. It is so cynical and ethically compromised that it should be a national scandal. Instead it is just business as usual, and thousands of people -- mostly people of color -- continue to have their lives destroyed through marijuana arrests.
A woman uses a electronic vaporizers with cannabidiol (CBD)-rich hemp oil while attending the International Cannabis Association Convention in New York, October 12, 2014. Credit: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
A 2012 Duke University study made international headlines when it purported to find a link between heavy marijuana use and IQ decline among teenagers. Other researchers questioned the findings almost immediately: Columbia University’s Carl Hart noted the very small sample of heavy users (38) in the study, leading him to question how generalizable the results were.
Then, a follow-up study published 6 months later in the same journal found that the Duke paper failed to account for a number of confounding factors: “Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature,” it concluded.
Now, a new study out from the University […]
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