John Stoehr, Contributing Writer for the Washington Monthly, Columnist for Public Seminar, Contributing Editor for Religion Dispatches, and Senior Editor at Alternet. - AlterNet
Stephan: This is another view of the Great Schism Trend. I agree with the trends John Stoehr describes, but I don't think his causal reasoning goes deep enough; he doesn't deal with the psychophysical causation. The South is a cultural manifestation. (See Can American Democracy Survive? Six Trends Hold the Answer in SR archive.) But he has the trends and their importance, and I think it is long past time that we began talking about this. It is not too much to say our future depends on it.
The US isn’t one country. The more we believe it is, the less sense our politics makes. By insisting on “the truth” when the truth is diametric from “the truth,” we end up doing a helluva lot more work. We end up doing all kinds of mental acrobatics to make sure “the truth” is true.
Once we drop the idea of America being one country, things make more sense. We do less work, too, because on seeing the US isn’t one country, the source of our problems – our national problems – becomes clearer. That source is the politics of the American south.
Quarantine self-isolation. Pandemic anxiety. Social distancing. Textured art portrait of bored unhappy annoyed trapped woman in black touching plastic bubble wrap wall in darkness.
There we find the reason the US isn’t one country. The states making up that region don’t want it to be. They have instead committed themselves to a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, a fictional subnation inside a factual nation in which “real Americans” fight to restore God’s country to its rightful […]
Stephan: More guns, more murders. A child can figure that out. But apparently, it is beyond the intellectual capacity of American politicians.
One of the several dozen shooting murders in the L.A. area last week
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — Thirty-four people were shot in Los Angeles in the last week, and 23 of the shootings were concentrated within a “remarkably small area” of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street and Southeast divisions, Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday.
Moore told the Los Angeles Police Commission that last week was a “troubling week,” noting that many of the shootings were concentrated in “a remarkably small area of town when you look at that frequency or that concentration.”
The shootings were primarily related to typical street violence, including disputes within gangs and between rival gangs, Moore said.
The 77th Division includes Athens Park, Chesterfield Square, Gramercy Park, Hyde Park, South Park-51st and Menlo, Vermont Knolls, Vermont Park, View Heights, Morningside Park and West Park Terrace.
The Southeast Division includes Athens Park, Avalon Gardens, Hacienda Village, Harbor Gateway, Imperial Courts, Gardena Boulevard, Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens, Parkside Manor and Watts.
Additional LAPD patrols and engagement teams with the Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development Program […]
Stephan: If you vote Republican you are voting against the well-being of your future and your children's future and grandchildren's future. I know that sounds terribly partisan, but it is not. SR doesn't do partisanship, SR does facts. And here are the facts.
Trump supporters protest the Paris climate agreement. Credit: Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images
From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald Trump in the U.S., the past five years have offered prominent examples of right-wing leaders who set back collective action against the climate crisis.
Now, a study published in Global Environmental Politics this month shows that the issue is much larger than a few high-profile leaders. The researchers, from the Universities of Sussex and Warwick in the UK, found that the influence of a right-wing populist party can reduce a country’s climate policy score by nearly 25 percent.
“Conventional centre-right political parties have always been more reluctant to adopt strong climate policies, but the rise of right-wing populist parties and movements represents a threat of a different order,” study co-author Dr. Matthew Lockwood, senior lecturer in Energy Policy in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School and co-director of the Sussex Energy Group, said in a press release.
The study authors focused on the climate and renewable energy policies of more than 25 countries, The […]
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist, Columnist, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. - The New York Times
Stephan: Paul Krugman has one of the most accurate public voices, based on facts. This is his take describing one of the strongest trends going on in the U.S. today. The transformation of the Republican Party into a cult employing the authoritarian playbook that dates back centuries. Law #1 activate fear, resentment, and hate. It is the psychodynamics that recurs, not the specific details, be they duchies or democracies, although fear of the other is a universal.
J.D. Vance Credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times
So Donald Trump has endorsed J.D. Vance in the race for Ohio’s Republican Senate nomination. Will Trump’s nod tip the balance? I have no idea, and frankly I don’t care.
Ohio’s G.O.P. primary has, after all, been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly competing to see who can be crasser, who can do the most to dumb down the debate. Vance insists that “what’s happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security” and that we should focus instead on the threat from immigrants crossing our southern border. Josh Mandel, who has been leading in the polls, says that Ohio should be a “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state.” And so on. Any of these candidates would be a terrible senator, and it’s anyone’s guess who’d be worst.
But the thing about Vance is that while these days he gives cynical opportunism a bad name, he didn’t always seem that way. In fact, not that long ago he seemed to offer […]
Stephan: It isn't just that sealevels are rising, it is also tectonic plates shifting, or human activity causing subsidence. We found Cleopatra's palace, the Lighthouse of Pharos, and the ancient seawall. They were all deep underwater because the African littoral sank submerging the most expensive real estate in the ancient city of Alexandria. It is happening all over the world...again. Plus sea rise.
Jakarta, shown here, has been called the fastest-sinking city in the world. Credit: Reuters Datanh Tri
Coastal cities like Miami and Guangzhou face the prospect of massive flooding as sea-levels rise. Yet some cities are confronting an even more urgent threat of flooding than one brought on by climate change. A new study of 99 cities around the world published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reveals some of the world’s major cities are sinking even faster than the sea levels around them are rising.
In a process called subsidence, land settles and compacts based on changes to materials below the earth’s surface. This subsidence has caused land in the vast majority of these cities to sink by several millimeters per year. Much of this is brought about by human activity such as groundwater pumping. As water flows out, the land compacts, and the structures built on top fall closer to sea level.
At least 33 cities are falling by more than one centimeter per year, five times the rate of sea-level rise, based on recent estimates of global sea-level rise. The […]
