Tuesday, October 30th, 2018
, - Anti-Defamation League
Stephan: We have the worst wealth inequality in the developed world. We've got a totally morally bankrupt Republican Party. We've got Trumpkriegers with their self-defining hats. We have immigrants being used to gin up fear using completely bogus information. And we've got rising anti-semitism. Welcome to fascist America.
INTRODUCTION
2017, ADL found that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. rose 57 percent compared to 2016 — the largest single-year increase on record and the second highest number reported since ADL started tracking such data in 1979. The sharp rise was in part due to a significant increase in incidents in schools and on college campuses, which nearly doubled for the second year in a row. (emphasis added)
MAJOR FINDINGS
ADL identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated throughout the United States in 2017. This is an increase of 57 percent over the 1,267 incidents reported in 2016. For the first time since at least 2010, an incident occurred in every U.S. state. The states with the highest numbers of incidents were New York (380 incidents), California (268 incidents), New Jersey (208 incidents), Massachusetts (177), Florida (98), and Pennsylvania (96). These states combined made up more than half (62 percent) of the total number of incidents. The number of incidents tends to correlate with large Jewish populations. More information on 1,200 incidents selected from the 2017 Audit is available at: www.adl.org/selected-incidents-2017.
Total number of […]
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Tuesday, October 30th, 2018
Tom Jacobs, Senior Staff Writer - Pacific Standard
Stephan: For a social thereom to be true it must work at every scale and, as the report describes, the Theorem of Wellbeing does.
Credit: Rawpixel/Unsplash
Altruistic people tend to score higher on many measures of life satisfaction. Yes, that seems counterintuitive, and such scales can admittedly be subjective. So a research team decided to explore the relationship between selflessness and two outcomes we are evolutionarily programmed to desire: wealth and procreation.
It reports generous people have more children than selfish ones. What’s more, as a rule, they also earn more money.
It further finds “people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes,” an unsupported belief that can inspire bad behavior. In fact, writes a research team let by Kimmo Eriksson of Stockholm University, being socially conscious literally pays dividends.
In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the researchers describe five studies that explore this connection. They analyzed four large-scale data sets, including two that tracked individuals and families over a period of years.
One was the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study, a representative sample of British households. The researchers compared the responses people gave regarding altruistic behavior in 2010 with their income and number of children in 2016. […]
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Tuesday, October 30th, 2018
ELIANA JOHNSON and DANIEL LIPPMAN, - Politico
Stephan: When you add in the time spent on golf Trump works for the country about four hours a day. I couldn't write this as a novel; it would be grotesque like a satire of the God Father. And yet it is true.
freewheeling president in one of the world’s most regimented jobs, Donald Trump appears to be redefining the nature of the role.
Credit: Andrew Harnik/AP
President Donald Trump had about three times as much free time planned for last Tuesday as work time, according to his private schedule. The president was slated for more than nine hours of “Executive Time,” a euphemism for the unstructured time Trump spends tweeting, phoning friends and watching television. Official meetings, policy briefings and public appearances — typically the daily work of being president — consumed barely more than three hours of his day.
The president was slated to spend 30 minutes on the phone with CEOs and make brief remarks at a state leadership conference. He was briefed by senior military leaders in the evening and joined them for dinner. Aside from an 11:30 a.m. meeting with White House chief of staff John Kelly — his first commitment of the day — the rest of his day was unstructured, some in blocks as long as 2 […]
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Monday, October 29th, 2018
LUKE BARNES, - Think Progress
Stephan: Get ready readers, we are gearing up for a massacre, as the Trumpkriegers goaded on by the abomination we have in the White House are stirred up by his racist hate, his avoidance of doing anything about guns, and the complicit support of the Republican zombies in Congress. This is what fascism looks like, and how it operates.
ARRIAGA, MEXICO – OCTOBER 26: Dozens of migrants rest in a train pass in the city of Arriaga, this as part of the migrant carvan of thousands of people who cross Mexico to reach the northern border. The caravan of the Central Americans plans to eventually reach the United States. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has threatened to cancel the recent trade agreement with Mexico and to withhold aid to the Central American countries if the caravan does not stop before reaching the United States.
Credit: Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty
Militia groups and far-right activists are gearing up to head to the Mexican border to try to stop a migrant caravan from entering the United States, as conservatives and the far-right escalate their warnings about the supposed dangers it poses.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Border Patrol warned landowners in Texas that they could expect “possible armed civilians” on their property because of the news about the caravan. The exact details of when and where the militia would deploy […]
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Monday, October 29th, 2018
William J. Astore, - truthdig
Stephan: Over the last three decades the United States has been engaged in a series of losing wars whose main function seems to be to make obscene profits for the country's war industry while dismantling the social stability of Islamic countries and causing the wounding, maiming, and death of millions of men, women, and children in those countries. It has been going on for so long and involves such a small percentage of the American population that few even pay any attention to these wars any more, the media rarely covers them, and no one is talking about the fact that we are losing them, and have engendered a deep hatred of America.
American troops in Afghanistan
As America enters the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan and its 16th in Iraq, the war on terror continues in Yemen, Syria, and parts of Africa, including Libya, Niger, and Somalia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration threatens yet more war, this time with Iran. (And given these last years, just how do you imagine that’s likely to turn out?) Honestly, isn’t it time Americans gave a little more thought to why their leaders persist in waging losing wars across significant parts of the planet? So consider the rest of this piece my attempt to do just that.
Let’s face it: profits and power should be classified as perennial reasons why U.S. leaders persist in waging such conflicts. War may be a racket, as General Smedley Butler claimed long ago, but who cares these days since business is booming? And let’s add to such profits a few other all-American motivations. Start with the fact that, in some […]
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