Friday, August 25th, 2017
Kali Holloway , - Alter Net
Stephan: Here is another data based assessment of this race hatred trend, and I guess I should say religion hatred as well given the chants in Charlottesville, "Jews will not replace us."
I see this basically as a fear response in which people blame the "other." It isn't rational, it's factually inaccurate, but very compelling emotionally to frightened people.
Credit: Shutterstock
When was America great, according to Donald Trump’s supporters? The short answer, per Trump voters surveyed by the Public Policy Polling firm, is any era when there was no chance a black guy might become president. Forty-five percent of those who voted for Trump in the last election told PPP researchers that they would rather have Jefferson Davis—the president of the Confederacy—lead the country than Barack Obama. Gives you a pretty good sense of what Trump’s base values and admires in its leaders.
Trump voters also told pollsters they believe the most oppressed group in this country today is white Christians. Queried about what “racial group they think faces the most discrimination in America, 45 percent of Trump voters say it’s white people followed by 17 percent for Native Americans with 16 percent picking African Americans, and 5 percent picking Latinos.” (For the record, that’s partly a white American outlook overall; long before Trump launched his campaign, surveys found most white people think they experience more racism than black people.) There were […]
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Friday, August 25th, 2017
William Rivers Pitt, Senior Editor - truthout
Stephan: I had a conversation today with a man in his late-30s. We got to talking about trends and he asked me about my views concerning the Afghan War. As I spoke with him and looked at him, it suddenly dawned on me that as old as he was, nearly middle-aged, there was not a single day in his life when America was not at war in Afghanistan. When I did my first survey of stories for today's SR, I came across this one, which spoke directly to this reality and thought, we have been at war so long that it has become normal, life as usual. Realizing that I thought what have we become as country when war is the normal condition? What do you think?
A paratrooper walks past an Afghan graveyard during a US-Afghan patrol April 30, 2012, Ghazni province, Afghanistan.
Credit: Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod / The US Army
When I dropped my daughter off at pre-school on Monday morning, I made a point of asking the teacher about eye safety issues regarding the looming solar eclipse. We’re not even going to bother with it, she said. There’s too many kids to keep track of, they’re not old enough to be trusted on something like this, and we weren’t going to go out and get a bunch of stuff we’d only use once. The eclipse is happening at naptime, she said, so we’re just going to skip it.
Fan-dab-tastic, I said, one less thing to worry about … and then I turned on the television, and there was the president of the United States staring belligerently into the sky, straight at the sun with no protective glasses or anything while his aides shrieked helplessly at him to stop. The next morning, the far-right proto-fascist host of my local sports […]
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Friday, August 25th, 2017
Patrick Barkham, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a major deal that has received, as far as I can discern zero attention in major American media. Why is it important? Because this story tells us the current status of the arctic ice that now allows such a ship passage.
The Christophe de Margerie carried a cargo of liquefied natural gas from Hammerfest in Norway to Boryeong in South Korea in 22 days.
A Russian tanker has travelled through the northern sea route in record speed and without an icebreaker escort for the first time, highlighting how climate change is opening up the high Arctic.
The $300m Christophe de Margerie carried a cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Hammerfest in Norway to Boryeong in South Korea in 19 days, about 30% quicker than the conventional southern shipping route through the Suez Canal.
The tanker was built to take advantage of the diminishing Arctic sea ice and deliver gas from a new $27m facility on the Yamal Peninsula, the biggest Arctic LNG project so far which has been championed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
On […]
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017
Patrick Radden Keefe, - The New Yorker
Stephan: This is the level of corruption present in the Trump administration. That's all I'm going to say. Patrick Radden Keefe has done an extraordinary job of investigative journalism. This is why a democracy needs a vibrant Fourth Estate.
Carl Icahn
Credit: Ben Jones
One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency. Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas-based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe.
Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building, in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders, pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human […]
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017
LISA FRIEDMAN and BRAD PLUMER, - The New York Times
Stephan: Could it be clearer that for Trump and the Republican congress profit is far more important than human wellbeing, and the wellbeing of the earth? Could it be more transparently corrupt?
A mountaintop removal project in Blair, W. Va., a site that was approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, but was reevaluated by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Interior Department has ordered a halt to a scientific study begun under President Obama of the public health risks of mountaintop-removal coal mining.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which was conducting the study, said in a statement Monday that they were ordered to stop work because the Interior Department is conducting an agencywide budgetary review.
Last year, West Virginia officials asked the Obama administration to look into the health effects of mountaintop mining, a technique used to extract underlying coal.
As part of the practice, which dates to the 1960s, mining companies dump the rubble into the surrounding valleys and streams, in many cases leading to extensive pollution.
The National Academies assembled a 12-member expert committee to assess […]
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