Stephan: The anti-democracy orientation of the Republican Party cannot be exaggerated, nor can the party's racism. Republicans really do not want one person, one vote to take place, as this very nasty and sorry story about North Dakota illustrates. Personally, I would not live in a Red state, the quality of life is increasingly second rate compared with the Blue states.
North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, quickly signed the disputed Republican gerrymandered map into law. Credit: Dan Koeck/Reuters
Days before a new legislative map for North Dakota was set to be introduced in the state house, leaders of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Spirit Lake Nation sent a letter to the governor and other state lawmakers urging them to rethink the proposal.
“All citizens deserve to have their voices heard and to be treated fairly and equally under the law,” they wrote, arguing that the proposed map was illegal, diluting the strength of their communities’ voice.
But instead, in early November, the Republican-controlled legislature approved the map, with only minor changes. And the Republican governor, Doug Burgum, quickly signed it.
“Our voice is going to be muffled once again,” the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa chairman, Jamie Azure, told the Guardian. “It’s getting a little sickening, tell you the truth.”
The nations have sued the state, alleging that the map, which was meant to account for population changes identified in the 2020 census, doesn’t comply with section 2 […]
Stephan: The corporate interests that don't want the carbon power era to end have kept the United States from preparing as it should for the transition out of the carbon era and left the country vulnerable. This is a little understood trend that gets very little media coverage, but this article will give my readers a good sense of what is in play.
ATesla Model 3 seen in the battery marriage section at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California.
Washington, DC — Bob Galyen has spent his career building electric car batteries. And he thinks the United States has a problem. Galyen, who engineered the battery for the General Motors EV1, the first mass-produced electric vehicle, and also served as chief technology officer at a Chinese company that’s the top battery producer in the world, isn’t the only one. Elected officials, automakers and customers in the US are all excited about the possibility of electric cars, and those cars will be key to the US meeting its climate goals.
Simply building and selling electric cars, or providing subsidies for the people who make and buy them, isn’t enough. Electric cars need batteries the same way combustion cars need fuel — and the metal in those batteries can be just as precious and hard to get as gas. People like Galyen are worried the US simply isn’t ready for that switchover, or doing enough to get ready. The United States […]
Stephan: If you understand that consciousness is causal and fundamental, then it follows that everything was created by consciousness through direct intention, and everything is a manifestation of consciousness. This totally freaks out materialists but the evidence that it is valid grows year by year.
Credit: NASA
Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.
“Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?” says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. “Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”
David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness. Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework […]
Andrew J. Nelson, Staff Writer - Courthouse News Service
Stephan: Donald Trump is the worst and most criminal president in our history. He is also, and always has been, an open unrepentant Black American hater, as his known history makes clear. And he has really harmed the United States by legitimizing open race hate, and has stimulated the MAGAts to express it. That is not a political statement, it is a scientific one, as this report makes clear.
Prejudice grew in Trump supporters during his presidency, studies find
White supremacy MAGAts listen to Trump
Racial and religious prejudice increased significantly among Donald Trump supporters during his presidency, according to the results of 13 studies published Monday by the journal Nature Human Behavior.
The studies included more than 10,000 participants. The researchers, Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and Melissa J. Ferguson of Yale University, both social psychologists, also found that Trump opponents showed decreases in prejudice.
“These results suggest that Trump’s presidency coincided with a substantial change in the topography of prejudice in the United States,” the article says.
A scholar not involved in the studies said the findings are what most social scientists would expect.
“Trump was able to be a vehicle to express ones’ frustration with political correctness and tolerance,” said Stephen Farnsworth, author of Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump. “He didn’t create it. These hostilities existed before him but he was a vehicle to channel that grievance.”
Stephan: Increasingly, if you look at MAGAt media, you read or hear a growing sense of White grievance, a perception that Whites are the victims of Black, Hispanic, or Asian Americans. What exactly they are supposedly suffering from is never defined, just an existential sense that Whites, particularly White men, are losing something. It is, of course, nonsense from start to finish, but nonetheless it is a major part of the MAGAt worldview. It is another of the toxic gifts Donald Trump stimulated and MAGAt media adopted; a legacy he left America like a load of his feces in your kitchen cupboard.
Donald Trump Credit: Scott Olson/Getty
One of the most popular lies being circulated by the Republican Party and the larger white right is that white men are somehow oppressed in America. To say that such a claim is absurd would be an understatement. To be white is to have access to unearned advantages in almost every arena of American society and throughout the world. And to be male is also to have access to resources and life opportunities that in general are de facto still denied to women and girls.
By almost all indicators, men as a group dominate and control America’s networks of power, influence, wealth and other resources.
Of course many individual men who happen to be white experience life hardships and other disadvantages. Moreover, the group advantages enjoyed by men overall do not trickle down equally to all men on either side of the color line. Likewise, there are individual Black and brown people, and individual women, who have tremendous power, resources and wealth. But in the aggregate, on a societal scale, white men are […]
