Kaya Laterman, - The New York Times
Stephan: A child could tell you that a country's children are its future. They would also tell you that a better-educated child will be better prepared to help a country prepare for the future. But America doesn't like its children, as this article describes. So what is that telling us about the state of American society?
The food pantry at Nassau Community College, which is now a stop on freshman orientation tours.
Credit: Desiree Rios/The New York Times
In the coming weeks, thousands of college students will walk across a stage and proudly accept their diplomas. Many of them will be hungry.
A senior at Lehman College in the Bronx dreams of starting her day with breakfast. An undergraduate at New York University said he has been so delirious from hunger, he’s caught himself walking down the street not realizing where he’s going. A health sciences student at Stony Brook University on Long Island describes “poverty naps,” where she decides to go to sleep rather than deal with her hunger pangs.
These are all examples of food insecurity, the state of having limited or uncertain access to food. Stories about college hunger have been largely anecdotal, cemented by ramen and macaroni and cheese jokes. But recent data indicate the problem is […]
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Stephan: The Republican Party does not like democracy, nor fairness, nor making every vote count. It is a party of cheats and liars. Is this a partisan statement ungrounded in facts? No it is not. It is a statement of fact. Consider...
David Niven, a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati holds a map demonstrating a gerrymandered Ohio district.
Credit: John Minchillo/AP
A federal court has ruled that Ohio’s congressional map is an “unconstitutional partisan gerrymander” and must be redrawn by the 2020 election.
In their ruling Friday, a three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio argue that the map was intentionally drawn “to disadvantage Democratic voters and entrench Republican representatives in power.” The court argues the map violates voters’ constitutional right to choose their representatives and exceeds the state’s powers under Article I of the Constitution.
“Accordingly, we declare Ohio’s 2012 map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, enjoin its use in the 2020 election, and order the enactment of a constitutionally viable replacement,” the judges wrote in their decision.
The decision is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is currently deliberating challenges to congressional maps from Maryland and North Carolina.
The League of Women Voters, ACLU and other voting rights groups sued Ohio last year, saying Republicans redrew […]
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Tim Requarth, - The Nation
Stephan: Here is the latest on the New American Slavery, and the moral cancer of the Gulag.
A man imprisoned in Texas talks to his son via video screen during a family visit in 2015.
Credit: AP / David J. Phillip
When the Bellamy Creek correctional facility’s longtime kitchen officer decided to leave in 2014, David Angel requested the position. Angel, who was nearing retirement, had worked at prisons all over Michigan, including stints at three maximum-security facilities. “I wanted a permanent position for my last few years in the department. I had a lot of respect among the prisoner and officer staff, and I thought I could do the job and keep people safe,” he said. “Um… I was wrong.”
The Bellamy Creek kitchen is typical for a Michigan prison. Sixty incarcerated men staff it, doing everything from slicing potatoes with tethered knives to working the dish tank. Angel’s job was to provide security while six or seven outside employees oversaw the operations. The employees were new hires by Aramark, […]
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Barry Meier , - Vice News
Stephan: Here is yet another aspect of the growing Mormon sex abuse crisis. It proves yet again, if such were needed, that one of the characteristics of all fundamentalist patriarchal religious organizations is sexual dysfunction and the abuse of children and the powerless. You can also see it in the abnormally high use of pornography by fundamentalists, of whatever denomination.
Mormon Temple
Credit: Salt Lake City Tours
Helen W. wasn’t born a Mormon, but she embraced the religion when she was 17 and it embraced her back.
When her son Alex was born with a heart defect and developmental disabilities, it was the Mormon Church that paid for his operations and treatments. When her second son, Zachary, was born eighteen months later, it was the members of her Martinsburg, West Virginia, congregation who helped find babysitters. And when Helen and her husband needed life guidance or wisdom, they turned to their bishop.
Bishops of the Mormon Church — or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it’s formally called — are laymen, not professional clerics. Helen’s bishop, Donald Fishel, had worked full-time as a utility company lineman before his retirement. But as a Mormon bishop, he played an all-encompassing role in his congregants’ lives.
A bishop oversees the spiritual well-being of his followers, instructing them how to act in accordance with the teachings of Mormonisms; and he oversees tithing, the practice of giving […]
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Stephan: Here is an essay that raises what I believe are the salient issues about climate change.
A polar bear walks on a melting ice floe in Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canada. Recent research shows that Canada’s Arctic is now the warmest it has been in 10,000 years, and the temperatures are continuing to climb.
Credit: Andre Anita / Getty
It is palpable now. Even the most ardent deniers of human-caused climate disruption can feel the convulsions wracking the planet.
I truly believe this, given that, essentially, we are all of and from the Earth. Deep down inside all of us is the “fight or flight” instinct. Like any other animal, our very core knows when we are in danger, as the converging crises descend ever closer to home, wherever we may find ourselves on the globe.
This anxiety that increases by the day, this curious dread of what our climate-disrupted future will bring, is difficult to bear. Even those who have not already lost homes or loved ones to climate disruption-fueled extreme weather events have to live with the burden of this daily tension.
The signs of our overheated planet […]
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