Brett Wilkins , Staff Writer - truthout / Common Dreams
Stephan: The United States spends more on its military-industrial complex than the next seven nations of the world combined. Few people in the United States seem to comprehend that. I understand why the military wants to stay ahead of the international curve of weapons development, but I also understand what a super-profit scam those developments constitute. I also understand that poverty is a huge problem in both cities and rural areas, and feel that these new weapons systems could be developed for far less money than they currently cost and that some of those multi-billions should be going to create greater wellbeing in the United States.
The B-21 Raider is unveiled at Northrop Grumman’s Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California on December 2, 2022. Credit: Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty
Peace and economic justice advocates responded to the imminent unveiling Friday of the United States Air Force’s new $750 million-per-plane nuclear bomber by reiterating accusations of misplaced priorities in a nation where tens of millions of people live in poverty and lack adequate healthcare coverage.
Military-industrial complex giant Northrop Grumman is set to introduce its B-21 Raider on Friday. The B-21, whose development was 30 years in the making and whose total project cost is expected to exceed $200 billion, is tapped to replace the aging B-2 Spirit.
“One thing the world definitely does not need is another stealth bomber,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, told Common Dreams.
“This ominous death machine, with its price tag of $750 million a pop, brings huge profits to Northrop Grumman but takes our society one more step down the road of spiritual death,” Benjamin added, referring to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 anti-war speech, […]
Stephan: I consider this story good news because it shows consciousness on the part of governments in Europe that ocean wind turbine installations can and do impact the ecosystem where they are installed, and work must be done to minimize the negative impact. In my view every technology should be evaluated and regulated to make sure that wellbeing is a more important priority than corporate profit. We are facing the existential crisis of climate change because this has not been done.
A North Sea wind farm. Credit: Mischa Keijser / Getty
Offshore wind farms can have an impact on the marine ecosystems they are built in and upon, a new study has found, but much more research is needed to understand those impacts and how to best plan for them.
Researchers from the Hereon Institute of Coastal Systems — Analysis and Modeling – in Germany looked at the potential impacts of the planned expansion of offshore wind in the North Sea that will be required to meet the European Green Deal goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
“Our results show that the extensive expansion of offshore wind farms will have a significant impact on the structuring of marine coastal ecosystems,” study co-author Ute Daewel said in a press release. “We need to better understand these impacts quickly and also take them into account in the management of coastal ecosystems.”
The North Sea has become a “global hotspot for offshore wind energy production” because of its shallow sandbanks and steady wind supply, the study authors wrote in Communications Earth & Environment last […]
Alexander Nazaryan, Senior White House Correspondent - yahoo! News
Stephan: I have always found antisemitism a weird kind of hatred. Its origins trace back to the Roman Catholic Church, and the belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, deicide it is called. But that is both historically untrue, and irrelevant 2,000 years later. Then there is the belief that Jews control the world's wealth, also untrue. Jews make up such a small percentage of the American population it seems a very odd hatred. There are teenagers who have larger TikTok followings than there are Jews in the U.S.
If it is just wealth that is considered, according to a study from 2015, Christians hold the largest amount of wealth (55% of the total world wealth), followed by Muslims (5.8%), Hindus (3.3%), and Jews (1.1%). In the U.S. even amongst minority religions -- Christianity in its various forms constitutes the largest population in the country -- 6.5 percent of millionaires identified themselves as Muslim, 3.9 percent identified themselves as Hindu, and 1.7 percent identified themselves as Jewish. The Dark Money funders who own the Republican Party have only a very few Jews amongst their number.
But however weird antisemitism is it has become a very big issue in the United States thanks largely to criminal Trump, which itself is odd since his daughter married a Jew and converted (whatever that means in this case) to Judaism. For all its oddness though one thing is clear to me: Honorable people who support the fostering of wellbeing must stand up against this ancient hatred, and purge it from our culture.
A sign at a protest in New York City in 2020. Credit: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Jews have always been fleeing, but America was the country from which Jews would never have to flee. They fled from Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union (as my family did in the 1980s). They settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in West Philadelphia. They opened delis in Denver and Indianapolis. They went to Ivy League colleges and played in the NFL.
And now, suddenly, after all this time, after so many waves of assimilation and acceptance, after “Seinfeld” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many American Jews have come to feel like strangers in their own home.
“America was our promised land but we might not be safe here anymore,” the artist Deborah Kass recently wrote, expressing a sentiment that is increasingly voiced at synagogues, where armed guards are now commonplace, and at Shabbat tables, where younger American Jews are suddenly facing anxieties […]
Stephan: When I read this Saturday morning at first I thought it was a report on some comedian's satire. But no, it really happened, Trump really said this, and it tells us how truly mentally deranged and hate-filled Donald Trump, the Republican Party's leading candidate for president in 2024 has become. When you add in Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, as well as the other 36 Republican senators who voted against the just passed act guaranteeing marriage equality, what you see is a party that has no real forward-looking policies. Nothing that is designed to promote wellbeing. It is a cult of White supremacists, homophobes, and christofascists, owned and operated to service the interests of a small band of uber-rich individuals, and the corporations, foundations, and institutes they control. What amazes me is how many Americans who vote for these people don't seem to understand that Republicans routinely vote for the owners who have rented them, and against the wellbeing of the people they represent.
Former US President and ongoing criminal Donald Trump speaks at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on November 15, 2022. Credit: Alon Skuy / AFP / Getty
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday flat-out called for the “termination” of the United States Constitution so that he could be returned to the presidency.
Reacting to the news that Twitter in the runup to the 2020 election removed tweets that featured pornographic photos of Hunter Biden, Trump declared that the entire election had been stolen from him and demanded to be returned to the presidency.
“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION?” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the […]
Ethan Herenstein and Thomas Wolf, counsel with the Democracy Program’s Voting Rights and Elections team | Deputy Director with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. - Brennan Center for Justice
Stephan: This is a good presentation of the Independent State Legislature Theory, which I consider to be both nonsense and, depending on an upcoming Supreme Court decision, potentially the biggest threat to the continuation of the democratic republic we have had since 1787, over 300 years ago.
The Constitutional Convention
There’s a thread that links the partisan gerrymandering of congressional maps in North Carolina, attempts to dissolve the Wisconsin Election Commission, and efforts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In each case, the participants have invoked a dubious interpretation of the Constitution called the “independent state legislature theory.”
Long relegated to the fringe of election law, the theory will soon be front and center before the Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear a case concerning the North Carolina congressional maps in the fall. If the Supreme Court were to adopt the theory, it would radically change our elections.
What is the independent state legislature theory?
The independent state legislature theory is a reading of the Constitution, pushed in recent years by a small group of advocates, that would give state legislatures wide authority to gerrymander electoral maps and pass voter suppression laws. It has even been used as political cover to try to overturn elections.
The Constitution delegates power to administer federal elections to the states, subject to Congressional […]
