Frank Newport, - Gallup Organization
Stephan: I have been following belief in Creationism and that the earth is roughly 6-10,000 years old and was created in six days, for several decades. The percentage of Americans who believe this nonsense has been remarkably constant across that time. The last time The Gallup Organization ran a large scale survey, in 2012, this is what they found.
These people are overwhelmingly Republican -- there is a very strong correlation between conservative politics and Creationism -- and I think this manifestation of willful ignorance explains in a way the corporate media simply doesn't understand how Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for President.
PRINCETON, NJ — Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. (emphasis added) The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.
Gallup has asked Americans to choose among these three explanations […]
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Valerie Tarico, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I agree with this essay and, in light of the previous story, consider it good news.
Televangelist Joel Osteen, a well-known megachurch pastor who has been associated with the ‘prosperity gospel’
Credit: JoelOsteen.com
Back before 9/11 indelibly linked Islam with terrorism, back before the top association to “Catholic priest” was “pedophile,” most Americans—even nonreligious Americans—thought of religion as benign. I’m not religious myself, people would say, but what’s the harm if it gives someone else a little comfort or pleasure.
Back then, people associated Christianity with kindness and said things like, “That’s not very Christian of him,” when a person acted stingy or mean; and nobody except Evangelical Christians knew the difference between Evangelicalism and more open, inquiring forms of Christianity.
Those days are over. Islam will be forever tainted by Islamist brutalities, by images of bombings, beheadings and burkas. The collar and cassock will forever evoke the image of bishops turning their backs while priests rub themselves on altar boys. And thanks to the fact that American Evangelical leaders sold their congregations to […]
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Jonathan Freedland, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is an excellent and very thoughtful essay by an Englishman on what Donald Trump looks like from across the Atlantic, and what the rise of a bone ignorant fascist means for democracies throughout the world.
I have been getting emails almost everyday for months now from non U.S. SR readers basically saying two things: How is it possible a man like this is the leader of one of the two major American political parties? And, Donald Trump and the millions of Americans who seem to think as he does scare, as one Italian reader wrote, "me and everyone I know and make us wonder if the America we grew up knowing and admiring still exists."
How would you answer him?
Donald Trump, Republican Presidential Candidate
Credit: Reuters
It was the night the American media were too demure to call Pussygate. At the time, Donald Trump had won nothing. Twenty-four hours later, he would be celebrating his first victory in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, setting him on the path to face Hillary Clinton in November. But on this frigid Monday night in February, while a blizzard whipped outside, Trump stood before a packed Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire and prepared to unleash his tongue.
After a rambling monologue that moved from his TV career to the happy, sunny world that would follow his elevation to the White House, Trump came to another of his pet themes: the inadequacies of his rivals. He was attacking the Texas senator Ted Cruz for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the torture technique of waterboarding when a woman in the standing area directly in front of the stage, a kind of Trumpian moshpit, called out, “He’s […]
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Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution - The Washington Post
Stephan: If you feel you are living in the Weimar Republic in 1938, or in the 5th century CE under the reign of the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, this essay will only confirm your concerns.
The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.
But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.
And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, […]
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Alex Kotch, - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: The media deigns to cover only a little bit about the oligarchy's naked attempt to buy the U.S. election. But we hear almost nothing about the oligarchy's long-term strategy of corrupting economic education to serve their ends. Here is the despicable truth, and of course the Koch's are in up to their eyebrows.
Charles Koch
Credit: Forbes
Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.
Anti-tax industrialist billionaires like Charles and David Koch stand to gain a lot by financing higher education programs tailored to their ideologies. Richard Fink, the Kochs’ right-hand man for decades, laid out their “Structure of Social Change,” the plan they devised in the late 1970s to shape society with their libertarian ideals. The plan begins with funding academic programs that favor laissez-faire economics, resulting in academic papers promoting the free market and chastising regulation and taxation. Next, think tanks they fund repackage the academic work into more easily digestible policy proposals that “citizen activists” (actually Koch-funded “social welfare” groups like Americans […]
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