Stephan: This report is a continuation of my essay (see SR archive) Consciousness and The Weaponization of Lies. This is a trend, created by the universality of the internet, which I think has reshaped American culture in a negative way and as a society we need to address this. MAGAt world was birthed by Trump working with corporations that were anti-climate change, and what were then fringe anti-LGBTQ, White supremacist, male dominant, christofascist cohorts that have now taken over the Republican Party. It was all engineered using disinformation.
Illustration by Eliot Wyatt
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988 after scientists had spent decades raising the alarm about global warming. Thirty-five years later, there is effectively zero binding international policy to address climate change. In the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses and second-largest polluter today, there have been repeated legislative failures, including the recent Supreme Court ruling limiting the government’s authority to regulate power plant emissions.
We now know that a large part of the reason for the political failure to act on climate change is because the fossil fuel industry built a network to challenge the science and policy of climate change. The industry’s efforts, which are ongoing, have included at least 4,556 individuals with ties to 164 different organizations. The investment in climate change denial—at least $9.77 billion from 2003 to 2018—bought the companies a half-century to continue the extraction of fossil fuels and delay the transition to clean energy.
For instance, the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA)—bankrolled by BP, Shell, Chevron, and other fossil fuel corporations—has challenged […]
Stephan: Here is another take on the weaponization of lies and the struggle it represents in today's American culture. I run it not because I agree with all that Justin Peters says, I don't, but because I think my readers need to be aware that this is a major emerging trend. I think it was quite notable that Elon Musk said he would run a survey amongst Twitter users to see if he should continue as its head, and they voted against him. It will be interesting to see if he honors his promise to abide by the vote. I also think we may see some effort in the Senate to address this complicated issue.
On Thursday night, the journalist Bari Weiss posted an article on the online magazine she edits, the Free Press, that purported to tell the story behind the Twitter Files—the investigatory series, based on a strategic leak, that Weiss has helped to author. “At dinner time on December 2, I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of the Boring Company, founder of Neuralink, on most days the richest man in the world (possibly history), and, as of October, the owner of Twitter,” Weiss wrote. “Was I interested in looking at Twitter’s archives, he asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ?”
These archives were a trove of internal company documents left behind from the previous corporate administration. They purported to show that, before Musk bought the company for $44 billion this fall, Twitter had engaged in surreptitious strategies of content moderation that suppressed certain right-leaning statements, opinions, stories, and individuals on its platform. Throughout the month of December, Weiss and a few other journalists—including former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi […]
Stephan: Here is yet another take on disinformation, this one dealing with the psychological issues that make people vulnerable to being manipulated by disinformation and "magical thinking". What it doesn't include is the megaphone power of the internet and social media. But these two things work together, and that is why we are in the state we are in today.
Charms on a dashboard.Lucky charms help us feel safer in an uncertain world. Credit: Image Source / Getty
Growing up in Greece, I spent my summers at my grandparents’ home in a small coastal village in the region of Chalkidiki. It was warm and sunny, and I passed most of my time playing in the streets with my cousins. But occasionally, the summer storms brought torrential rain. You could see them coming from far away, with black clouds looming over the horizon, lit up by lightning.
As I rushed home, I was intrigued to see my grandparents prepare for the thunderstorm. Grandma would cover a large mirror on the living room wall with a dark cloth and throw a blanket over the TV. Meanwhile, Grandpa would climb a ladder to remove the light bulb over the patio door. Then they switched off all the lights in the house and waited the storm out.
I never understood why they did all this. When I asked, they said that light attracts lightning. At least that was what people said, […]
Dar Vanderbeck , Vice President of the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Global Leadership Network - Stanford Social Innovation Review
Stephan: And finally, this, article. It makes the point that separateness, and creating separateness does not foster wellbeing. We are all in this together, and the sooner that as both individuals and as a culture we recognize this truth, the better it will be for all of us.
“Love and justice are not two. without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters.”—Reverend angel Kyodo williams
As a professor at Princeton in 1949, Albert Einstein reflected on the place of human beings in the universe. In correspondence with a rabbi, he wrote that due to our limitations in our ability to experience the universe, our species is prone to a fundamental misunderstanding about our place in it. He wrote that the human “experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.”
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Here, Einstein wrote of one of the most persistent and vexing problems of our species: the […]
Suzette Lohmeyer and Anna Deen, Senior Editor | Data Visualization Reporter - Grid
Stephan: One of the byproducts of the rise of White supremacy christofascism, which has turned Christianity in the U.S. into a rather hate-filled fear and resentment-driven political cult is the sharp rise in people, particularly young people, just walking away from Christianity altogether. Here are the facts proving what I am saying. This abandonment is made even more notable because at the same time as Christian churches are emptying, a worldview based on consciousness and what many call spirituality is significantly increasing.
While the number of Americans who celebrate Christmas as a cultural holiday is going strong, there has been a shocking rise in the number of people ditching Christianity — what sociologists call “nonverts.”
And it likely will, with the largest percentage of those losing their religion being young adults who are about as old as that REM reference: people around 30 and under.
It’s a kind of “cultural whiplash” from religion to secularism that’s hit the United States much faster than it has other parts of the world, said theology and sociology professor Stephen Bullivant.
Bullivant, a practicing Catholic who teaches at St. Mary’s University in London and the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, spoke to Grid about why Americans are leaving Christianity in droves and the demographics that are seeing the (ahem) ungodliest declines. His new book, “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America,” came out in the U.S. on Dec. 1.
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