Thursday, August 17th, 2017
Stephan: Here is some good news about how a wellbeing oriented social policy transitions out of the carbon energy era. This is what we should be doing. So ask yourself, why aren't we doing this?
German coal workers
Credit: Jochen Tack/ Stiftung ZollvereinJ
Seventy-seven-year-old Heinz Spahn — whose blue eyes are both twinkling and stern — vividly recalls his younger days. The Zollverein coal mine, where he worked in the area of Essen, Germany, was so clogged with coal dust, he remembers, that people would stir up a black cloud whenever they moved. “It was no pony farm,” he says — using the sardonic German phrase to describe the harsh conditions: The roar of machines was at a constant 110 decibels, and the men were nicknamed waschbar, or “raccoons,” for the black smudges that permanently adorned their faces.
Today, the scene at Zollverein is very different. Inside the coal washery where Spahn once worked — the largest building in the Zollverein mining complex — the air is clean, and its up to 8,000 miners have been replaced by one-and-a-half million tourists annually. The whole complex is now a UNESCO world heritage site: Spahn, who worked here as a fusion welder until the mine shut down on December 23, 1986, is […]
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Wednesday, August 16th, 2017
MEDIA MATTERS STAFF, - Media Matters
Stephan: Newt Gingrich, in my view is a particularly loathsome example of auctorem publici consilii Republicus.
Reprimanded and forced to resign the House Speakership for his slimy ethics -- 84 ethics charges -- a serial adulterer, who told one wife he was leaving her as she lay in her hospital bed after surgery to save her life from cancer, and grifter, Gingrich is almost a caricature of the corrupt American politician. But he has outdone himself with this one.
Perhaps I should note that something like 90% of Confederate military statues were erected in the post reconstruction era when the KKK and anti-semitic, anti-catholic, racist movements blossomed, roughly 1877 to 1920. They were put up for explicitly racist reasons. Gingrich is presenting his truth.It is not my truth.
Newt Gingrich
From the August 14 edition of Fox News’ The Story with Martha MacCallum:
MARTHA MACCALLUM (HOST): Let me ask you about these Confederate statues because as we just reported the mayor in Lexington is about to take one down of a Confederate general. And where does that stop? At what point do you — are you erasing history and not sort of understanding? The role that these people played and the times that they lived in?
[…]
NEWT GINGRICH: I think the point is we ought to be a country focusing on the future, not a country frothing at the mouth about the past. And It tells you something about the intellectual collapse of the left. That all they have is this kind of rabid behavior. And of course, mayors in towns that are largely black are going to pander to their audience. They are going to go out and prove they are popular by doing something that meets the current demagogic needs. But that’s every thing that the founding fathers worried about. Having demagoguery define your country is truly dangerous. Listen to the mob you got on the screen back there. That’s not democracy. That’s not a free society. That’s a group of people behaving like a mob.
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Wednesday, August 16th, 2017
Stephan: In Charlottesville I think we reached a tipping point. We have come to a place in the Great Schism Trend where events are going to develop on one of two courses. Either we continue down the path of increased racial and religious hate engendered by the Christofascist White Supremacist movement, or enough of us choose in the hundreds of decisions we make each day to support compassion and to foster wellbeing. It's up to us. How do you choose?
Charlottesville Christofascist White Supremacy rally
The white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend were not ashamed when they shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” They were not ashamed to wear Nazi symbols, to carry torches, to harass and beat counterprotesters. They wanted their beliefs on display.
It’s easy to treat people like them as straw men: one-dimensional, backward beings fueled by hatred and ignorance. But if we want to prevent the spread of extremist, supremacist views, we need to understand how these views form and why they stick in the minds of some people.
Recently, psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily recruited members of the alt-right (a.k.a. the “alternative right,” the catchall political identity of white nationalists) to participate in a study to build the first psychological profile of their movement. The results, which were released on August 9, are just in working paper form, and have yet to be peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal.
That said, the study uses well-established psychological measures and is clear about its limitations. […]
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Wednesday, August 16th, 2017
MORGAN CHALFANT, - The Hill
Stephan: This is how an authoritarian government gains and exerts control. As Nazis, Communists and North Korean despots all know intimidation is cheaper than action and can be very effective. We have a racist Christofascist for Attorney General, and while the media is focused on Trump's craziness, at the operational level American democracy is slowly being disassembled.
Republican Attorney General Jeff Sessions
The Department of Justice has requested information on visitors to a website used to organize protests against President Trump, the Los Angeles-based Dreamhost said in a blog post published on Monday.
Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, said that it has been working with the Department of Justice for several months on the request, which believes goes too far under the Constitution.
DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day.
“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
When contacted, the Justice Department directed The Hill to the U.S. attorney’s office […]
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Wednesday, August 16th, 2017
Patricia Miller, Religion Reporter - The Raw Story
Stephan: There is a very interesting trend going on within the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis is increasingly socially progressive, and the establishment of the church is increasingly Christofascist. Here's an example of that tension. It is unclear, at least to me, how this is going to work out.
Pope Francis
Credit: (Andreas Solaro/AFP
It’s not surprising that the apparently Vatican-approved denouncement of the conservative Catholic-Christian alliance that has come to dominate U.S. politics ruffled some feathers. What is surprising is the sheer amount of denial and obfuscation that the article in La Civiltà Cattolic by Antonio Spadaro and the Marcelo Figueroa has engendered.
After all, as Vatican expert Massimo Faggioli told the New York Times, the article is a landmark in the history of relations between the Vatican and the U.S. church. According to Faggioli, it signals the Vatican’s recognition that the U.S. Catholic Church “has become different than mainstream European Catholicism and mainstream Latin American Catholicism” and is now in “the hands of the religious right.”
But that, according to Catholic conservatives, is a ridiculous conclusion. They argue that Pope Francis and his allies just don’t understand the traditional role of religion in politics in the United States.
Thomas Williams, the former priest who has been called Breitbart’s man in Rome, called the article “rambling” and “bigoted.” He charged that it “caricatured white southern […]
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