Stephan: The White evangelical christofascist community by refusing vaccination is threatening the wellbeing of the rest of us as this article explains. it is one thing to be stupid and endanger your own life, but this threatens their neighbors, and people they walk or stand next to in grocery stores, dry cleaners or anywhere people gather. They talk Jesus but live and act out Donald Trump.
Trump and White supremacist christofascist evangeliical supporters Credit: Raw Story
White evangelicals in America are rejecting the coronavirus vaccine and threatening the country’s goal of emerging from the pandemic by achieving herd immunity.
“The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity,” the newspaper reported.
And they might not just be a threat to America.
“The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally,” the newspaper noted.
“There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February […]
Ryan Felton, Lisa Gill and Lewis Kendall, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: I have been writing about this issue for over a decade. When I was younger and traveled a great deal internationally for me the sign of whether a country was developed or developing was whether you could drink water from the tap safely. The United States back in the 1960s defined itself in part by the fact that in America you could turn on any tap and be safe. Well, today that is no longer true, or even close to true. Our infrastructure is falling apart and I think you should be very aware that not a single Republican voted or will vote for the Biden bills to bring our water systems, bridges, electricity grid, and on and on into the 21st century.
In Connecticut, a condo had lead in its drinking water at levels more than double what the federal government deems acceptable. At a church in North Carolina, the water was contaminated with extremely high levels of potentially toxic PFAS chemicals ( a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products). The water flowing into a Texas home had both – and concerning amounts of arsenic too.
All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water.
Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal. Yet millions of people continue to face serious water quality problems because of contamination, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate treatment at water plants.
CR and the Guardian selected 120 people from around the US, out of a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers, to test for arsenic, lead, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and other contaminants. The samples came from water systems that together service more […]
Stephan: Rex Weyler in this essay is asking what I think is a very important question. Why is it so hard to change something in our society even when it is obvious that it is destructive of our individual and social wellbeing?
Rex Weyler
I saw the danger / yet I walked / along the enchanted way. —Peter Kavanagh, Raglan Road, 1946
Over the past few decades a recurring question arises in public ecological discourse: In the face of overwhelming evidence, scientific warnings, existential urgency, and countless examples of ecological disintegration, why are societies worldwide so slow to respond appropriately?
Why, fifty years after the Limits to Growth study, are we still not able to slow human expansion and consumption? Why, fifty years after the UN first raised the issue of human population stress, are we still quibbling about whether or not we should even discuss the delicate issue? Why — 80 years after Alice Hamilton’s Exploring The Dangerous Trades, and 60 years after Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring — are we still flooding our environments and our bodies with toxins? Why — after 33 international climate meetings over 41 years, two centuries since science understood the greenhouse effect — are human carbon emissions still rising?
As a species, and as diverse societies, we’re acting like an immature student, who keeps avoiding a simple homework assignment. Except this […]
Stephan: Today's Republican Scum Award goes, for the umpteenth time, to the Grifter-in-Chief, Donald Trump. I don't think Donald Trump is capable of honest behavior; at every turn in his life, he has lied, cheated, and bullied. But I don't think that is what we should focus on. To me, the real issue is that a third of the country doesn't seem capable of seeing what Trump really is, or they see him and don't care that he is a crook. That willful ignorance has major implications for America.
Donald Trump, grifter, crook, liar, and bully. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty
Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.
Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.
Shane Goldmacher reports at the New York Times that Trump’s campaign bilked donors out of tens of millions of dollars. The scam was not complicated. When people gave them money online, the donations came with pre-checked boxes authorizing the campaign to take donations every single week. They needed to uncheck the box to stop the automatic transfer.
Stephan: I rarely agreed with Republican John Boehner when he was Speaker of the House, but I never thought of him as a grifting crook. Rather I see him as the last of the real Republicans, honorable men and women with whom I might disagree, but who I never thought of as orcs, as I do most Republicans in public office today. Here is John Boehner's view of what his party has become. It is devastating, but it is important to read this and think about what he is saying, and its implications.
In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called “a shellacking.” And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.
Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way. Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn’t their thing. A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That’s why they thought they were elected.
