Friday, February 8th, 2019
Peter Montgomery, - Ring Wing Watch
Stephan: How is it possible, given what the news brings us every night, that a large number of Americans -- 40.1 percent of the country -- still passionately support Trump. To a rational person, the continued support for him seems... well, frankly, insane.
Here, I think, is a major part of the answer. Christofascists believe he is God's anointed agent. I mean, really, God's agent. Just think about that for a minute, and the kind of worldview you would have to have to actually believe first that God chooses agents and, then, that his choice is Donald Trump.
Credit: fivethirtyeight
Media outlets and social media were buzzing this week about White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ Wednesday interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network, during which she said that God wanted Donald Trump to be president.
Here’s a new flash: Since the earliest days of his presidential campaign, Trump has been hearing from Religious Right leaders, including his personal “spiritual adviser” Paula White, that he was chosen and anointed by God to be president; they routinely portray his 2016 victory as miraculous—the direct result of divine intervention.
The Christian Broadcasting Network is every bit as much a pro-Trump propaganda outlet as Fox News, with the added bonus of promoting Trump as God’s anointed. The same can be said for the Pentecostal media platform, Charisma, and other conservative Christian media networks.
And if Trump is God’s chosen instrument, Religious Right leaders repeatedly tell their followers, it follows that Trump’s opponents—including his “deep state” enemies—are opposing God and are in league with Satan’s demonic forces of darkness.
During the 2016 campaign, Religious Right leaders worried that their supporters might have qualms about voting for a guy with such glaring […]
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Friday, February 8th, 2019
Justin Baragona, - Daily Beast
Stephan: I went to prep school, and as at most prep schools, at mine there was a small subset of boys born to privilege, who combined their sense of entitlement with an aggrieved sense their privilege was not properly being recognized, particularly by people of color. What do I mean by that, who's an example of that kind of feckless little twit? Why Tucker Carlson, of course. He is almost a caricature of the type. A sort of living Onion satire. Carlson is popular on the Fox Disinformation Network precisely because with no self-awareness of his personal vileness he articulates White male preppy racism.
One of the major social trends Trump and the Republican Congress have brought into focus, and Carlson bloviates about is the depth of White Supremacy still baked into American society. I actually think this is a good thing because you can't heal an infection until you squeeze out the pus, and people like Tucker Carlson by appearing night after night espousing such hate puts this social infection in the spotlight. Here's a good snapshot of what I mean.
Tucker Carlson
Fox News host Tucker Carlson went after rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams on Wednesday evening, painting her as a demagogue looking to marginalize white men.
Abrams, the former Georgia House Minority Leader who lost last year’s hotly contested gubernatorial race, delivered the Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday evening.
Carlson dismissed her night speech as “not much,” and then took aim at Abrams for recently arguing in an essay that identity politics helps strengthen democracy—by embracing their identities, she argued, “Americans will become likely to grow as one.”
The Fox News primetime star, who has asserted before to widespread criticism that diversity is bad, claimed Abrams is selling “bitter division” and seeking to rally the “marginalized to unite against the dominant groups,” namely white people.
Carlson noted that “marginalized people,” according to Abrams, includes “women, Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.”
And so, he added, “The dominant are everyone who is left. So do the subtraction. That’s only one group. […]
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Thursday, February 7th, 2019
Chris Hedges, Columnist - truthdig
Stephan: Should the U.S. dollar stop being the world's principal reserve currency the effects on American society and our economy would be catastrophic, and everybody knows this, or should. Yet the trend is moving in that direction thanks to Trump and the Republican Party. This essay by Chris Hedges gives a taste of why I say this.
Credit: Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire—the abandonment of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. Nations around the globe, especially in Europe, have lost confidence in the United States to act rationally, much less lead, in issues of international finance, trade, diplomacy and war. These nations are quietly dismantling the seven-decade-old alliance with the United States and building alternative systems of bilateral trade. This reconfiguring of the world’s financial system will be fatal to the American empire, as the historian Alfred McCoy and the economist Michael Hudsonhave long pointed out. It will trigger an economic death spiral, including high inflation, which will necessitate a massive military contraction overseas and plunge the United States into a prolonged depression. Trump, rather than make America great again, has turned out, unwittingly, to be the empire’s most aggressive gravedigger.
The Trump administration has capriciously sabotaged the global institutions, including NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank […]
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Thursday, February 7th, 2019
Caroline Haskins , - Motherboard
Stephan: Racial profiling, how old school that is today. Here is what's coming, and it should freak you out.
The use of PredPol—a predictive policing software that once advocated for a controversial, unproven “broken windows” approach to law enforcement—is far more widespread than previously reported, according to documents obtained by Motherboard using public records requests.
PredPol claims to use an algorithm to predict crime in specific 500-foot by 500-foot sections of a city, so that police can patrol or surveil specific areas more heavily.
The documents obtained by Motherboard—which include PredPol contract documents, instructional manuals and slide presentations for using the software, and PredPol contract negotiation emails with government officials—were obtained from the police departments of South Jordan, UT; Mountain View, CA; Atlanta, GA; Haverhill, GA; Palo Alto, CA; Modesto, CA; Merced, CA; Livermore, CA; Tacoma, WA; and the University of California, Berkeley using public records requests. These cities and municipalities are home to over 1 million people, according to the most recent census data available. In October, BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow published a story speculating that these cities had contracts with PredPol, based on an anonymous researcher’s study of the company’s URL structures and login […]
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Thursday, February 7th, 2019
Frances Perraudin, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is an appalling story about women in British prisons, but I am sure, that a similar survey of women in American prisons would look much the same. American prisons even more than their British counterparts are punitive in nature, as compared to the prisons in Holland or any of the Nordic countries. The warehousing of human beings is a very evil and often profitable business. This story is also telling us how much abuse of women is present in British society and, by extension, I suspect, American society.
Domestic violence was blamed by 62% of prisoners at Drake Hall with a history of brain injury.
Credit: Mark Goddard/Getty
Nearly 65% of prisoners at a women’s jail may have suffered traumatic brain injuries at some point in their lives, a study has found.
Research by the Disabilities Trust and Royal Holloway, University of London, found that of the 173 women screened at Drake Hall prison in Staffordshire answering questions about blows to the head, 64% gave answers consistent with having symptoms of a brain injury. The symptoms of 96% of the women suggested that these arose from physical trauma.
The work adds to a growing body of research on the over-representation of people with brain injuries in the prison population. In 2012, a university of Exeter report described traumatic brain injury as a “silent epidemic”. In 2010 a study of 200 adult male prisoners found 60% had suffered a head injury.
Research has suggested that traumatic brain injury (TBI) could increase the likelihood of violent behaviour, criminal convictions, mental […]
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