Saturday, February 8th, 2020
McKay Coppins, Staff Writer - The Atlantic
Stephan:
The truth that few will acknowledge is that there is a very large percentage of Americans who are White supremacists, male dominance obsessives, not very bright, sexually screwed up, and easily manipulated through disinformation that plays on these tropes. Look at these numbers for cable news viewership and you can see it clearly. These people watch Fox read, infowar, Breitbart, and Daily Caller. They listen to Limbaugh and Alex Jones. Which is to say they live in a world of fakery that panders to their biases and fears.
Tom Steyer is correct. This election is not about changing the minds of Trumplicans; that isn't going to happen. This election is about getting the non-Trumpers to get up off their asses to vote for whomever isn't Trump, and not to vote for third-party candidates. If you don't vote, or you vote for a third-party candidate, you are voting for Trump, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Credit: Mishko
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed […]
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Saturday, February 8th, 2020
, - National Center for Homeless Educations - University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Stephan: America doesn't like its children and treats them abysmally. I have done a number of papers on this, because when you look at any social outcome research in the United States this is one of the things that particularly stands out. Here is the latest outcome data showing more than 1.5 million young students were homeless for all or part of 2017-2018. There is no other developed nation in the world that has anything like this crisis.
Each year, states submit data on the demographics and academic performance of students experiencing homelessness to the U.S. Department of Education (ED) through the EDFacts Submission System. This report summarizes that data and examines current trends in the education of these students. The number of homeless students enrolled in public school districts and reported by state educational agencies (SEAs) during school year (SY) 2017-18 was 1,508,265.
This number does not reflect the totality of children and youth experiencing homelessness, as it only includes those students who are enrolled in public school districts or local educational agencies (LEAs.) It does not capture school-aged children and youth who experience homelessness during the summer only, those who dropped out of school, or young children who are not enrolled in preschool programs administered by LEAs. Key findings of this report include the following:
• The number of identified, enrolled students reported as experiencing homelessness at some point during the last three school years increased 15 percent, from 1,307,656 students in SY 2015-16 to 1,508,265 students in SY 2017-18.
• Sixteen states experienced growth in their homeless student populations of […]
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Friday, February 7th, 2020
Andrew L. Seidel, - Raw Story/Commentary
Stephan: Yes, criminal Trump's SOTU address was crazed, and more partisan political rally than report to Congress, as most commentators said, and Speaker Pelosi accurately described today. But I think as I listened to it that it was much more, and this article mirrors my own assessment. I am surprised there is not more commentary or even awareness of this aspect.
American democracy is in crisis and, depending on how the 2020 election turns out, may or may not survive.
Criminal Trump delivering his christofascist SOTU
Amid the ripping paper and misbegotten medals, Trump’s State of the Union address promised nationalism with a distinctly Christian bent.
Trump wants to steal $5 billion from public schools (which he decried as “failing government schools”) to give to private, i.e., Christian, schools. Trump wants to roll back reproductive rights and ban abortion. But more than anything, Trump wants to weaponize religious freedom. If he is successful there, it will be a win for his war against abortion and public schools too. He said:
My administration is also defending religious liberty, and that includes the constitutional right to pray in public schools. In America, we don’t punish prayer. We don’t tear down crosses. We don’t ban symbols of faith. We don’t muzzle preachers and pastors. In America, we celebrate faith, we cherish religion, we lift our voices in prayer, and we raise our sights to the Glory of God.
The Constitution already […]
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Friday, February 7th, 2020
Stephan: Industrial chemical monoculture agriculture is very profitable but it is also literally destroying the functioning of the planet's ecosystem. Criminal Trump's administration not only isn't acknowledging this, they are doing everything in their power to support the agricultural industrial chemical corporations.
The only thing that is going to change this is if individuals start buying only organically grown produce. Think of it as voting in support of wellbeing. Yes, I know it costs a little more. Consider it the tax you pay to assure your children and grandchildren have enough to eat, and can live in an environment that won't make them sick.
In September 2009, over 3,000 bee enthusiasts from around the world descended on the city of Montpellier in southern France for Apimondia — a festive beekeeper conference filled with scientific lectures, hobbyist demonstrations, and commercial beekeepers hawking honey. But that year, a cloud loomed over the event: bee colonies across the globe were collapsing, and billions of bees were dying.
Bee declines have been observed throughout recorded history, but the sudden, persistent and abnormally high annual hive losses had gotten so bad that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had commissioned two of the world’s most well-known entomologists — Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a chief apiary inspector in Pennsylvania, then studying at Penn State University, and Jeffrey Pettis, then working as a government scientist — to study the mysterious decline. They posited that there must be an underlying factor weakening bees’ immune systems.
At Le Corum, a conference center and opera house, the pair discussed their findings. They had fed bees with extremely small amounts of neonicotinoids, or neonics, the most commonly used class of insecticides in the world. […]
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Friday, February 7th, 2020
DAVID FREEDLANDER, - Politico
Stephan: I have been following this professor's writing for some time, and I think she is on to something valid. This supports my lead article in yesterday's edition. It gets down to turnout, and not voting for third party candidates.
Rachel Bitecofer
Credit: Julia Rendleman/Politico
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats’ big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
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