Heather Digby Parton, - Raw Story / Salon / Commentary
Stephan: This is very important trend and not getting anything like the attention it should be receiving. These Republican men and women, members of Congress from both houses, knew what Trump was doing. And yet they are still in office. What this is teaching us as a culture is that you can commit treason and sedition and still hold high office.
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
Two and a half years ago, Special Counsel Robert Muller submitted his report in which he declared that Donald Trump did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with agents of the Russian government who had interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Numerous members of Trump’s campaign were indicted on various related and unrelated charges, but the special prosecutors were never able to gather enough evidence of a conspiracy. While Trump had behaved in extremely suspicious ways, investigators simply couldn’t prove that he knew what the Russian government was doing.
Trump went on to spend his entire term committing overt acts of corruption, combining his business with his duties and openly defying all ethical restrictions against conflicts of interest. He blatantly obstructed justice many times and was even impeached for abusing his power by attempting to sabotage his political rival’s presidential campaign. He broke the law repeatedly and got away with it every time.
Stephan: I think it is very important that those of us who live in a fact based world understand why about a third of us can't seem to see the Big Lie cancer for what it is. What stands out for me is that this Big Lie strategy is the same playbook that Hitler and the Nazis used to come to power in the 1930s. I have never forgotten that Trump's previous wife said that he kept a book of Hitler's writings, and speeches in a book by his bedside and studied it regularly. Our democracy is under assault and I don't think many of us really understand and appreciate how fragile our democracy presently has become.
Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Big Lie.” According to the supposed quote, Goebbels said that if you tell “a lie big enough” and regularly repeat it, “people will eventually come to believe it.” That said, Adolf Hitler actually did use the phrase “big lie” — but not to describe his own propaganda strategy. In a darkly ironic case of psychological projection, he came up with the expression to defame the Jewish community.
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf,” his 1925 autobiographical manifesto. He observed that most people are only comfortable telling small lies, and imagined others would be as uncomfortable as themselves perpetuating big ones. “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously,” […]
Stephan: Here is some good news, The Biden administration is taking some serious steps to deal with carbon energy's effect in climate change. There have been other positive steps, and I think we can see this as a trend.
Curtis Shuck, founder of Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Bozeman, Mont., that caps abandoned oil and gas wells, observes measurements of leaking methane gas from a capped oil well in June near Shelby, Mont. Credit: Adrián Sánchez-Gonzalez/The Washington Post
The White House on Monday announced new steps to help curb emissions of methane, saying it will send $1.15 billion to states to clean up thousands of orphaned oil and gas wells that leak the powerful planet-warming gas.Complete coverage from the COP26 U.N. climate summit
The Biden administration also outlined plans to enforce requirements for pipeline operators to minimize methane leaks, undertake research to reduce methane emissions from beef and dairy systems, and form an interagency working group to measure and report greenhouse gases around the nation.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement that the new funding “is enabling us to confront the legacy pollution and long-standing environmental injustices” that have long plagued vulnerable communities. “This is good for our climate, for the health of our communities, and for American […]
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center., Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: The economic news is mostly quite positive, but this is not recognized by most people as polls report almost weekly. Paul Krugman presents, as he usually does, the best discussion for what is going on economically that I have read.
Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
By the numbers, 2021 was a boom year for the U.S. economy. Back in 2020 many forecasters expected a sluggish recovery, with unemployment staying high for years. Instead, unemployment has already come down almost to prepandemic levels, and a record percentage of Americans say that this is a good time to find a quality job.
It’s true that inflation has eroded the purchasing power of wages, but new estimates indicate that despite this, real income has gone up for most adults.
Oh, and while the spread of Omicron may cause a bad month or two for jobs, rapidly falling cases in New York and elsewhere suggest that the good economic news will resume soon.
Yet consumer sentiment has plunged: Americans’ assessments of the economy are worse now, on average, than they were in the early months of the pandemic recession. Why?
Regular readers know that I’ve been speculating […]
Stephan: There is so much bad news, I thought readers might enjoy this report.
Citation: This story is based on a research paper, "Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09524622.2021.1905065
Credit: Natures Momentsuk / Shutterstock.com
While laughter may seem like a trait exclusive to human behavior, nothing could be further from the truth. That’s at least according to a recent study which has found that the phenomenon of laughter is actually quite common in the animal kingdom too.
Can animals laugh?
Conducted by scientists at UCLA, the research explored the occurrence of laughter across different animal species. Investigating existing scientific literature on animal play behavior, the scientists looked for mentions of vocal play signals as an indication of the presence of laughter in animals.
At the end of their study, published in Bioacoustics, the researchers claimed to have found laughter across at least 65 species of animals. These included primates, cows, dogs, foxes, and seals, as well as a few bird species such as parakeets and Australian magpies.
“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior […]
