Stephan: The Neo-medievalism Trend of the Theocratic Right, its fear of facts, its sabotage on many fronts of institutions that educate the young from a fact based perspective has been gaining momentum.
Pew Research has now quantified this trend and it reveals that Republicans are essentially working to create a docile Christofascist peasantry. College education works against this trend of willful ignorance, so Republicans are increasingly against higher education. Here are the facts.
Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.
While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.
A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.
The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over […]
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Veronica Neffinger, Editor - Christian Headlines
Stephan: In wellbeing oriented societies where religious prejudice does not make social policy, as it does in the U.S. and Iran, a trend towards gender equality, and marriage equality is rapidly become the dominant view. Here's an example from Sweden of what I mean.
The Swedish government has told the Church of Sweden that ministers cannot refuse to marry same-sex couples.
The Christian Institute reports that Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announced that ministers of the Church of Sweden should be required to marry same-sex couples, regardless of their opinions on homosexuality and gay marriage.
“[N]o priest in the Swedish Church can refuse to marry same-sex couples,” stated Löfven. “If you work as a midwife you must be able to perform abortions, otherwise you have to do something else. It is the same for priests who do not want to perform same-sex marriages,” he added.
Currently, ministers in the Swedish state church are allowed to opt out of performing weddings, baptisms, and funerals for any reason, so this would be a major change in policy.
Although requiring ministers to marry same-sex couples is not yet mandatory, Sweden’s national broadcaster SVT reported that the prime minister is in support of making it so.
Sweden legalized gay marriage in 2009, but the church has been much more cautious of fully embracing it.
Acceptance of gay marriage in churches […]
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Nick Miroff, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The legalization and integration of cannabis into the mainstream of society is a global trend and nowhere is it more interesting than in Uruguay. SR has been covering this from its inception and now it is nearly fully implemented. Here is the latest.
Marijuana club operator Marco Algorta is seen growing a strain known as “Colombian Red” in a rooftop greenhouse on June 22 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the world’s first nation to fully legalize cannabis.
Credit: Nick Miroff/The Washington Post
MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY — In coming weeks, cannabis-seeking citizens in this small South American nation will be able to walk into a pharmacy and buy government-approved marijuana for the state-mandated price of $1.30 a gram. No questions asked. No doctor’s note required.
If that sounds like an attempt to create a stoner republic on the South Atlantic, would-be tourists should know a few things.
Uruguay is the world’s first country to fully legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. But under its strict rules, there will be no Amsterdam-style smoking cafes, and foreigners won’t have access to the national stash.
Nor will there be shops selling ganja candies, psychedelic pastries or any of the other edible derivatives offered in pot-permissive U.S. states such as Colorado and Washington, where entrepreneurial capitalism fertilizes the United States’ incipient marijuana industry.
Instead, Uruguay’s […]
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Bridgette Dunlap, - Rollingstone
Stephan: The leaders of the Republican Party, which is increasingly a White Supremacist Christofascist cult, recognize that the demographics of America are trending against them -- the U.S. will be a majority minority nation in just a bit more than two decades -- so what to do? Why gerrymander voter districts and suppress voter access. And, of course, that is exactly what they are doing. Here's the latest.
Credit: www.politicspa.com
Almost no one in the United States commits voter fraud. This is backed up by numerous studies, and also makes logical sense: Defrauding the voting system entails a lot of risk and no reward, so there’s little incentive to risk a felony conviction to cast an extra vote that is virtually certain not to change the outcome of an election. This is especially true for undocumented immigrants who would risk deportation to vote. And, in general, Americans are hardly so committed to voting that they’re breaking the law to cast extra ballots – the turnout rate among the voting-age population is, in fact, pretty dismal.
But Donald Trump expects the American people to believe he lost the popular vote because three to five million people so fervently desired to vote for Hillary Clinton that they were driven […]
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OLIVER MILMAN, - Mother Jones
Stephan: There is so much going on in the Trump administration that is sabotaging America's future wellbeing that it is hard to keep track of it all. So here is an assemblage of the major events that have occurred since Trump's inauguration. Our children and their children, and we ourselves will pay for generations for voting this man into office.
Great Plains corn, soon to be severely impacted by climate change.
Credit: oldsloat.blogspot.com
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate deal may have followed months of anguished division among his closest advisers, but his administration has proceeded with quiet efficiency in its dismantling of other major environmental policies.
The White House, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency have dovetailed to engineer a dizzying reversal of clean air and water regulations implemented by Barack Obama’s administration.
Unlike the travel ban or healthcare, Trump has faced few obstacles in sweeping away what he has called “job-killing” environmental rules that address problems such as climate change, water pollution and smoggy air.
“I’ve been very concerned by what I’ve seen—this is about people’s health,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who was the EPA administrator under George W Bush, and also served as governor of New Jersey. “They are undermining science and people’s respect for science. They don’t seem to care.”
Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically spearheaded by Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the EPA, who […]
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