Stephan: I am publishing this article not because I particularly care about George Santos, a scummy little liar with no ethics seeking power. I am publishing this because it is a particularly glaring example of what has happened to the Republican Party, that's the trend. You will notice that the Republicans in Congress are perfectly content to admit to their number a man who is a fraud and utterly without integrity, another cartoon character to join Gaetz, Greene, Boebert and the others. No Republican is speaking out objecting to him being sworn into office. Kevin McCarthy wants him. The party of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower has become a party with no real policies beyond sustaining their own personal power.
The biography of newly elected Congress member George Santos seemed quite impressive. The 34-year-old son of immigrants had graduated from Baruch College, a public college in New York, before going on to work at firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Santos eventually became a successful financier who started an animal rescue charity. The problem is that biography was apparently a lie. As revealed in the New York Times on Monday, it wasn’t just that Santos exaggerated his résumé, he had allegedly invented it out of whole cloth.
The Times found that he apparently did not graduate from Baruch College, he did not work for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, there were no records of him being a successful financier, nor were there of him registering his animal rescue charity. The Times also found that he had been charged with check fraud in Brazil.
Further, a number of outlets have found no evidence of Santos’s repeated claims to be Jewish, to have Jewish heritage, or to be descended from refugees fleeing the Holocaust.
CHARLES M. BLOW, Columnist - The New York Times - Undark
Stephan: Racism is inherently irrational, genetically we are one species. This is a scientific fact. Yet racism or, I think, more accurately fear of the other, is genetically inbred, and I think it dates back hundreds of thousands of years to when there were multiple hominid species -- Neanderthal, Denisovan, most prominently -- existed, in tribal and family groups. When you came over a hill and looked across at some hominid group the first question you would ask is, "Are those people one of ours, or something else. There was clearly contact. Research shows, that 1-4% of the genomes of non-African modern humans, that is Whites, depending on what part of what is now Europe your forebearers came from originated with Neanderthals. Archaeologists have discovered that contemporaneous homo sapiens who lived about 40,000 years ago had up to 6-9% Neanderthal DNA. On enough occasions, however, the contact must have had a high enough probability of violence that the people who avoided contact lived, their genes were passed on, whereas a certain number of people faced violence and were killed, and their gene lines did not pass on. After thousands of years, longer than recorded history, fear of the other was genetically programmed in, and it takes an act of will to overcome that. Some of us have done that, some of us have not.
Neanderthal man Credit: Smithsonian
In his 1940 essay, “Dusk of Dawn”, the renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois reflected back to his early-career appointment, some 44 years prior, as a temporary instructor at the University of Pennsylvania — a time he described as coinciding with a clarifying vision he had on America’s “race problem.” At that time, near the dawn of the 20th century, Du Bois says he believed the primary impediment to enlightenment on racial issues was “stupidity” — and the cure was simple: “knowledge based on scientific investigation.”
But where the youthful Du Bois had faith in the power of science to overcome ignorance, the older Du Bois admitted that this faith was waning: “I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort,” he wrote. “This was, of course, but a young man’s idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true.”
Stephan: Greg Abbott is a vulgar nasty man. I think it tells you a lot about the people of Texas that they have chosen him to be their governor.
Three busloads of migrants were dropped off outside VP Kamala Harris’ home on Christmas Eve. This bus took migrants from the original bus coming from Texas to a local church. Credit: 7News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A group of migrants was dropped off outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ D.C. home on Christmas Eve, as temperatures dropped into the teens and some people were seen without adequate winter clothes.
A total of three busloads stopped outside the Naval Observatory from Texas.
The Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network was there to take all three busloads of people to a church to help provide them with necessary resources and welcome them to our area.
“This is a welcome effort that we’ve been doing since the first bus arrived,” said Amy Fischer, a core organizer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network. “D.C. just continues to show up as a welcoming city that is always ready and willing to open their arms to welcome people, whether it’s Christmas Eve, whether it’s 9 degrees outside or 90 degrees outside.”
Stephan: I have closely followed with great interest China's population policies since the country began its one-child policy in 1980 because there is no other country in the world that has literally tried to shape its population through political policies. The one child policy ran until 2016 and had a massive and disruptive effect on the country. Because of the cultural bias for boy babies, and an open abortion policy, families that could only have one child overwhelmingly chose boys, to the point where today there are millions of Chinese men who will never marry. As a result it has also given women power to choose their husbands, which has had a significant effect on pressuring men to be successful, financially secure, and pleasant in their marriage. Another unintended consequence of the one-child policy is that women in China today are not interested in having large families, and that has strongly affected population growth, as this report from the Pew Research Center spells out.
A woman pushes a child in a stroller past a mural of a giraffe in Chengdu, China, on June 5, 2022. Credit: He Haiyang/Sichuan Daily/VCG / Getty
Next year, China will no longer be the most populous country in the world, ceding the title to India, according to projections by the United Nations
✎ EditSign. China has had the largest population in the world since at least 1950, when the UN started keeping records. But it is now projected to experience an absolute decline in its population beginning as early as 2023.
How we did this
Here are key facts about China’s population and its projected changes in the coming decades, based on data from the UN and other sources:
Although China will lose its title as the world’s most populous country, the UN still estimates its population at 1.426 billion people in 2022. This is larger than the entire population of Europe (744 million) and the Americas (1.04 billion). It’s also roughly equivalent to the population of all the nations in Africa (1.427 billion).
YULIA LATYNINA, journalist, worked for Echo of Moscow radio station and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper until they were shut down by Putin's administration - The Hill
Stephan: Here, from a Russian journalist is, I think, an important take on what is going on in Russia, and a profile of Putin during this period. I publish it for that reason but, also, because it is yet another example of the sexual dysfunction of the authoritarian Right. If you look across the span of history, regardless of culture, or geography, and I include the United States today, you see that one of the hallmarks of conservative politics is distorted sexuality.
RussianDictator Vladimir Putin Credit: NBC
On Nov. 24, the Russian parliament passed a law on so-called LGBT propaganda. New amendments banned anything that could be construed as a suggestion that homosexual relationships are normal.
This was happening right at the time Russian troops were fleeing from Kherson and the futile Russian attacks on Bakhmut were leaving several hundred dead on the battlefield each day.
Whу in God’s name are Russian lawmakers so agitated about gay marriages during a bloody war? Do they have nothing else to discuss? How is “gay propaganda” related to war with Ukraine?
Turns out, directly.
To understand the relationship, we must turn to a speech given on Dec. 1 at a forum in Sochi by one of the most mysterious and influential figures of the Russian court: Mikhail Kovalchuk, currently head of the famous Kurchatov’s institute and brother to Vladimir Putin’s closest friend, Yuri Kovalchuk, who reportedly spent the long months of total COVID-19 isolation with Putin.
So, what did this influential Russian “scientist” say?
