“The company that maintains ownership of a product is in the best position to maintain and reuse it.”
You can see this process of dematerialization in lots of areas of life. We store files in the cloud rather than on a computer. We take Ubers and Zipcars instead of buying cars (millennials are […]
Stephan: This is an excellent exegetic essay on cults, which are a growing and concerning trend, particularly in the United States.
Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. It would be hard to avoid the label on encountering (as I did, carrying out field work last year) 20 people toiling unpaid on a Christian farming compound in rural Wisconsin – people who venerated their leader as the closest thing to God’s representative on Earth. Of course, they argued vehemently that they were not a cult. Ditto for the 2,000-member church I visited outside Nashville, whose parishioners had been convinced by an ostensibly Christian diet programme to sell their houses and move to the ‘one square mile’ of the New Jerusalem promised by their charismatic church leader. Here they could eat – and live – in accordance with God and their leader’s commands. It’s easy enough, as an outsider, to say, instinctively: yes, this is a cult.
Less easy, though, is identifying why. Knee-jerk reactions make for poor sociology, and delineating what, exactly, makes a cult (as opposed to a ‘proper’ religious movement) often comes down to judgment calls based on perceived legitimacy. Prod that perception of legitimacy, however, and you find value judgments based on age, tradition or ‘respectability’ (that nice middle-class couple down […]
3 Comments
Saturday, June 17th, 2017
Jessica Huseman and Annie Waldman, Reporting Fellow and Reporter - ProPublica
Stephan: Attorney General Jeff Sessions who has a long record of racism, and Betsy DeVos head of the Department of Education, whose record is iffy in this area, both in service to Donald Trump, are carefully gutting civil rights protections. Here's the story.
The United States is increasingly seen to be, and actually is, a regressive backward looking nation in terms of human rights issues. As someone who was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, I find this deeply offensive, and if I were a person of color I would be outraged.
Elizabeth Hill, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, told ProPublica that the new “enforcement instructions seek to clear out the backlog while giving every complaint the individualized and thorough consideration it deserves.” Lifting the requirement of collecting three years of data will allow complaints to be addressed “much more efficiently and quickly,” she said in an emailed statement. Read the full statement here.
For decades, the Department of Justice has used court-enforced agreements to protect civil rights, successfully desegregating school systems, reforming police departments, ensuring access for the disabled and defending the religious.
Now, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ appears to be turning away from this storied tool, called consent decrees. Top officials in the DOJ civil rights division have issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight.
The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. […]
1 Comment
Saturday, June 17th, 2017
Charlie May, News Writer - Salon
Stephan: For some time the NRA, a truly evil organization, in my view, has been seeking laws that would make it easier for individuals to have silencers for their weapons. You won't believe the argument they make: People need silencers to protect their hearing from gun noise. Really. They actually argue that. And of course the man sponsoring the legislation, Representative Jeff Duncan, is a Republican.
Now think about this little thought experiment for a minute: In the shooting on the baseball field in Alexandria imagine the shooter had a silencer on his rifle, so that he could shoot from a distance, and make very little noise. How many could he have killed before they even figured out where he was shooting from? I used to be a competitive shooter and thinking about it I figured that using a bolt action single shot 30-06 rifle and a good scope from a block away I could have killed about seven before anyone even figured out what was happening or where I was shooting from.
The shooter in this incident was a rare social progressive, and pretty inept as shooters go. Suppose he had been, as most such people are a White conservative, maybe a militia member who trained regularly. What do you think the outcome would have been with a silencer on the rifle?
South Carolina's 3rd District I have a question: Is this Republican zombie really the best you can elect?
Republican Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina
The House Committee on Natural Resources canceled a hearing after the shooting at a Congressional baseball practice on Wednesday for a bill that would make it easier for gun owners to purchase silencers. According to CNBC, however, the GOP still plans to follow through on its plans to ease gun restrictions.
The “Hearing Protection Act” introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan R-S.C., in January was rolled into a larger bill called the “SHARE Act” that’s been described as “broad and contains a variety of hunting, conservation and ‘recreational shooting’ measures,” according to CNBC. The subcommittee was scheduled to hold a hearing on the provision in the bill that would roll back restrictions on silencers by “eliminating a $200 transfer tax and pre-empting state or local laws that regulate the accessory,” according to Newsweek.
The measure has the support of President Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., and is backed with the help of the National Rifle Association.
Newsweek reported:
Silencers are legal but regulated by an 83-year-old federal law, […]
4 Comments
For roughly 120 years, music lovers liked to own what they listened to. We bought vinyl records, four-track cartridges, tapes, CDs, and so on, and stacked them pedantically in our living rooms. We wanted our tunes close and available, and the physicality of the sleeves and minutiae of the liner notes was part of the experience. Until one day it wasn’t. Though vinyl continues to have a niche, in 2017 many of us make do with Spotify, or a similar subscription service. It’s the same with movies and TV. Nobody in their right mind would buy hundreds of DVDs or Blu-ray discs now, especially at $20 a pop. Netflix does much the same job, and if it doesn’t, we can call on any number of other on-demand services.
