Stephan: I don't think most Blue state Americans realize just how active and committed the christofascist cult is to breech the wall between church and state and turn America into a christofascist culture. I consider this one of the most toxic trends in the country today, made all the more dangerous because it receives so little attention.
The FFRF this week announced that it had sent out letters to 350 different school districts warning it about letting the Todd Becker Foundation organize student assemblies on their campuses.“The Todd Becker Foundation targets high school students, seeking to convert them into fundamentalist Christianity,” FFRF writes. “The foundation is a Christian ministry that travels throughout the Midwest putting on assemblies in public schools.”
The Todd Becker Foundation’s website says that its assemblies are “based off the scripture Matthew 7:13,” which states that “the highway to destruction is wide and the road that leads to it is easy for the many who choose this way… the gateway to life is small and the narrow road that leads to it is hard, but only a few ever choose this way.”
The foundation is named after a teenage boy named Todd […]
2 Comments
Tuesday, December 5th, 2017
Joe Romm, - Think Progress
Stephan: Some weeks ago I ran several stories about the gutting of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan by the Trump administration. Now we are beginning to see the implications of that egregiously bad decision, and the source? The scientists remaining in the Trump administration's EPA.
The coal-fired plant Scherer, a major polluter.
Credit: AP/Branden Camp
A Trump administration analysis has concluded that its effort to undo Obama’s climate plan could kill some 100,000 Americans over the next few decades. (emphasis added)
Compared to 2015 calculations by the Environmental Protection Agency — done under the Obama administration — this new, updated analysis by Trump’s EPA actually raises the projected death toll from undoing the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era rule aimed at cutting carbon pollution from power plants and preserving a livable climate, while creating jobs.
Last month, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced he would begin the process of undoing the plan. We wrote at the time it could mean up to 3,600 more premature deaths (and up to 90,000 more asthma attacks in kids) annually by 2030.
Those numbers came from the 2015 EPA analysis, which found that “reducing exposure to particle pollution and ozone in 2030 will avoid a projected 1,500 to 3,600 premature deaths.” The EPA’s online fact sheet — which is now archived and no longer appears on the agency’s website — further noted that […]
1 Comment
Tuesday, December 5th, 2017
Christopher Petrella, lecturer in American cultural studies at Bates College - NBC News
Stephan: One of the reasons I became involved in the civil rights movement as a teenager, was my experience with a Black boy, who was the son of a man who worked for my father. Henry and I became friends because we both liked hiking. He would come over with his dad, and while our fathers worked we would go hiking. He was very smart and wanted to go to the local high school, but could not because of segregation. It seemed then, and seems still, grossly unfair to me, and it was one of the reasons I became an activist.
Up until the last year or two I thought we were finally getting past segregation, but no. Virulent racism is alive and well in America, and we are the worse for its re-emergence.
Students shout insults at Elizabeth Eckford, 16, as she calmly marches down to a line of National Guardsmen who blocked her from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. on Sept. 4, 1957.
Credit: Will Counts / Arkansas Democrat Gazette /AP
On Sept. 23, 1957, thousands of segregationists blocked nine young black students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School, an all-white institution in the Arkansas capital. Gov. Orval Faubus ignited a nationwide crisis when he defied the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision on desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education, and deployed the Arkansas National Guard to bar the students. Two days later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered U.S. Army units to escort the Little Rock Nine into the school.
This fall marked the 60th anniversary of this pivotal moment in the history of America’s racial struggle. With the political landscape seemingly as divided as it has ever been, this moment provides an opportunity to examine the depth and contours of segregation in the nation today. Though clear advances have […]
No Comments
Tuesday, December 5th, 2017
Emily Mullin, - MIT Technology Review
Stephan: If you talk to people in the research community as I do almost daily you are beginning to hear stories of how research in many areas is being hamstrung because funding is drying up. You also hear that the United States is beginning to fall behind in many critical areas of science.
All of this is the result of the disdain Republicanism has for a fact-based reality, and nowhere is this clearer than in the White House. Here's the story.
President Donald Trump Credit: AP/Alex Brandon
Ten months into his presidency, Donald Trump has yet to name a science advisor. It’s the longest amount of time a modern president has taken to nominate someone to the position since at least 1976, when Congress established the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Other key positions in the White House’s OSTP also remain vacant. That worries members of Congress and science experts, adding to concerns that the president is less than friendly to science.
To address this gap in the administration, a group of Democratic senators sent a letter last week to President Trump urging him to appoint “well-qualified” science and technology experts to fill these positions (see “The Gaping, Dangerous Hole in the Trump Administration”).
The authors note that OSTP currently has fewer than 50 people on its staff, down from more than 130 in the past. Meanwhile, they say numerous issues in the news during the first nine months of Trump’s presidency could have benefited from expert advice, like climate […]
No Comments
What do you think of hallucinations? Do you wonder how they work? Recently I talked about this with a woman I know well, who was experiencing some as we spoke. Her hallucinations included ‘bugs’ – microphones that she saw scattered around the room that she assumed had been put there because she was coming in, by people who wanted to keep track of everything she said, and might hurt her at any point. She could see the bugs, but I could not.
