Friday, February 22nd, 2019
Stephan: Another chapter of humanity's past opens revealing insights no one had even guessed about.
Stonehenge in the mist
Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty
Scientists have a new theory regarding one of the most famous structures in the world, Stonehenge. Based on previous structures, the new study says, Stonehenge has foundational roots in a hunter-gatherer culture that began 7,000 years prior to its construction, based out of the Brittany region of northwestern France.
There are many theories concerning who built Stonehenge. A study last year claimed that the bluestones of the structure, as well as the people who moved the stones, came from Wales. Those studies pointed toward Welsh structures dating back 5,000 years, like Carreg Coetan Arthur, as coming from the same culture that brought forth Stonehenge.
But Bettina Schulz Paulsson was looking back further, and beyond the English island. Her findings argue that European societies 7,000 years ago were more ship worthy than previously believed, and were able to travel by boat to England where they were able to replicate their stone-building culture.
Paulsson started looking at the “35,000 […]
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Thursday, February 21st, 2019
Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Neoliberalism has a corollary, socialism for the rich. This essay by Robert Reich spells out the form of that socialism. Always remember that when you hear a politician say, we can't afford socialism that what they are really saying is, I am a creature of the rich who fund my campaigns, and I support only one social priority, profit for my sponsors. What is the proof?
The Theorem of Wellbeing shows without exception that social programs that foster wellbeing are more efficient, more productive, easier to implement, more pleasant to live under, and much, much cheaper. Just consider healthcare. We spend orders of magnitude more per capita than any other developed nation and yet we get dreadful social outcomes, while obscenely enriching everyone in the illness profit system, except the doctors and nurses.
“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21bn saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.
Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4bn. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.
Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards
Trump and his appointees at the […]
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Thursday, February 21st, 2019
STEPHANIE MENCIMER, - Mother Jones
Stephan: The multi-year effort of Republicans to restructure and repeople America's judicial system to a christofascist, neoliberal, white supremacy orientation I consider to be one of the most pernicious negative trends in the country. You won't hear much on any cable network about it, nor read much about it, but we will have to live with what is happening for a generation. Here is an assessment of where we currently stand.
Neomi Rao, President Donald Trump’s nominee for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019. Liberal activists are targeting Rao for what they call her extreme views on race, sexual assault and LGBT rights.
Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite
There’s no Supreme Court decision more widely celebrated than Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that abolished school segregation. But this month, when Neomi Rao appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, she refused to say whether she thought the case had been correctly decided.
Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) whether the court had made the right decision in Brown, Rao replied, “As a judicial nominee, I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on the correctness of particular precedents.” Blumenthal asked her for a yes or no, but Rao would say only that Brown is “an incredibly important decision of […]
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Thursday, February 21st, 2019
Henry A. Giroux , - Alternet
Stephan: Another of the big negative trends being pushed by the Republican Party, and flourishing under Trump is the debasement of education. As a result American public education compared to other developed nations is not even in the top 25, and Americans are astonishingly ignorant about how the government event works. How bad is it? Only 25% of Americans can name the branches of government, and nearly four in ten can't name any of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The Republican view is: if you don't teach the peasants anything about their government you can manipulate them by getting them to vote their fears.
Betsy Devos, Secretary of Education
Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life, and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship.
Galvanizing his base of true believers in post-election demonstrations, Trump has transformed politics of bigotry and hate is into a spectacle of fear, divisions, and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned not only in the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, hate, and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.
Trump’s brand of authoritarianism has emerged at a time when there is an overabundance of information, coupled with the rise of new digital and visual media whose cognitive models reinforce the assumption that reality be echoed rather than interrogated and […]
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Thursday, February 21st, 2019
Derek Kravitz , - ProPublica
Stephan: I am sure you remember Trump's claim he would drain the swamp. In fact, he appointed people just like himself, grifters, cheats, and liars, men and women with gutter ethics. And this is what has happened. It is a trend that makes you and your family more vulnerable to illness and death.
Credit: John Minchillo/AP
It’s been more than two years since President Donald Trump, who rallied campaign supporters with calls to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and their ilk, took office. But despite that campaign promise, Washington influence peddlers continue to move into and out of jobs in the federal government.
In his first 10 days in office, Trump signed an executive order that required all his political hires to sign a pledge. On its face, it’s straightforward and ironclad: When Trump officials leave government employment, they agree not to lobby the agencies they worked in for five years. They also can’t lobby anyone in the White House or political appointees across federal agencies for the duration of the Trump administration. And they can’t perform “lobbying activities,” or things that would help other lobbyists, including setting up meetings or providing background research. Violating the pledge exposes former officials to fines and extended or even permanent bans on lobbying.
But loopholes, […]
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