Bill McKibben, Contributing Writer - The New Yorker
Stephan: History is going to condemn and vilify both Congressional Republicans and even some Democrats, for their failure to make climate change remediation one of the highest priorities of the day. People like Joe Manchin will be seen as historically significant villains. The only thing that is going to change this is the 2022 election outcome. Voters must give Democrats an overwhelming majority in both houses because for all their flaws a significant percentage of Democrats in Congress support climate change remediation. Will this happen? It's up to you, your family, and friends.
Corrupt Senator Manchin coaxed the President to strip the sticks from the Build Back Better bill which would have forced utilities toward clean energy, Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
NASA just declared that this June has tied with that of 2020 for the hottest we have ever measured. At the moment, forecasters are predicting that, on Monday, the United Kingdom, which maintains the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world, may see the hottest day that nation has ever recorded.
This was the backdrop to the news on Thursday that Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, won’t support climate legislation, bringing to an apparent end his long and excruciating flirtation with Joe Biden over the climate portions of the Build Back Better bill, the President’s ambitious economic package, which contained the most sweeping climate measures ever to reach the Senate floor. To provide the even more excruciating context: this is the third time in the past thirty years that Congress has balked at serious climate legislation.
In July, 1997, the Senate voted 95–0 (led by another West […]
Stephan: This report makes it very clear that the ultra-corrupt coal millionaire and the largest recipient of carbon industry corruption money, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin may not care about the rest of the world, but he and his wife are very careful to preserve the beauty of the area where their home is located. What amazes me is that the people of West Virginia either are willfully ignorant, or don't care about Manchin's corruption and have voted for him several times to keep him in office.
Sen. Joe Manchin walks to a morning session during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 7, 2022 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Credit: Kevin Dietsch / Getty
A new investigation has revealed that coal baron and chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and his wife have been hard at work funneling millions of dollars into preserving a small valley in West Virginia where the couple owns property – even as the senator has blocked climate initiatives over the years.
The Intercept finds in an article published Monday that, together, Joe and Gayle Manchin have directed over $15 million into the Canaan Valley in northeastern West Virginia, where they have owned a condo in the town of Davis since 2011.
The condo, around which Joe Manchin goes fishing, is surrounded by nature preserves like Blackwater Falls State Park and the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. It is one of several properties owned by the couple which, together, are worth between $4.5 million and $12.8 million as of 2020.
The investigation reveals that both Joe and Gayle […]
Anton Troianovski, Moscow Bureau Chief - The New York Times
Stephan: The thing about christofascists is how predictable they are. No matter in which country they always pursue the same goals: If the country is a democracy transform it into an anocracy; take over the country's education system so that children are indoctrinated rather educated; cultivate fear of the other and replacement fear. Those are some of the main tactics. Putin and the Republican Party, as Betsy DeVos made clear yesterday, and I reported in SR, are on the same track as this article makes clear.
School-aged children last year at an award ceremony in Vladimir, Russia.Credit: Sergey Ponomarev / The New York Times
Starting in first grade, students across Russia will soon sit through weekly classes featuring war movies and virtual tours through Crimea. They will be given a steady dose of lectures on topics like “the geopolitical situation” and “traditional values.” In addition to a regular flag-raising ceremony, they will be introduced to lessons celebrating Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir V. Putin.
And, according to legislation signed into law by Mr. Putin on Thursday, all Russian children will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement in the likeness of the Soviet Union’s red-cravatted “Pioneers” — presided over by the president himself.
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government’s attempts at imparting a state ideology to schoolchildren have proven unsuccessful, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently told thousands of Russian schoolteachers in an online workshop. But now, amid the war in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has made it clear that this needed to change, […]
Jaimie Arona Krems and Martie Haselton, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Oklahoma State University | Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles - The Conversation
Stephan: It is not hard to understand why men want women to be submissive and subordinate. What is harder to understand is how Republican women can also support a legal position that by law makes women second class. Here is a fact-based take on this question.
There’s an interesting evolutionary benefit for some women if the consequences of casual sex are high. Credit: Albin Lohr-Jones / Pacific Press / Lightrocket / Getty
Many people have strong opinions about abortion – especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking a constitutional right previously held by more than 165 million Americans.
But what really drives people’s abortion attitudes?
It’s common to hear religious, political and other ideologically driven explanations – for example, about the sanctity of life. If such beliefs were really driving anti-abortion attitudes, though, then people who oppose abortion might not support the death penalty (many do), and they would support social safety net measures that could save newborns’ lives (many don’t).
Here, we suggest a different explanation for anti-abortion attitudes – one you probably haven’t considered before – from our field of evolutionarysocial science.
Why do people care what strangers do?
The evolutionary coin of the realm is fitness – getting more copies of your genes into the next generation. What faraway strangers do presumably […]
Stephan: I agree with this report but would add something important that this piece misses, something not generally recognized nor understood. At about the time of the Reagan administration, some amongst the uber-rich, men like the Koch brothers, who funded research and understood science, began funding researchers and think tanks to test paths to power. That wasn't what it was called, of course. The correlation between education and voting, being one example. (the more education, the more likely a person was to vote Democratic. Out of that came the useful fiction that the Republican Party was working class. That research taught the oligarchs that the United States was becoming a majority-minority nation, and that this would produce a vortex of resistance, just as it has. Using the science data, they understood that the way to take control of the government was to stimulate that cohort
with misinformation and conspiracies within the population. What has become generally recognized as MAGA world.
They also learned -- you can go to Google scholar and find the papers that led them to their decision -- that coalescing the fearful, the ignorant, and the less educated into one politically powerful cohort would, over time, let you turn the U.S. into an anocracy, with the oligarchs in control.
Criminal Trump lying in public
The conventional wisdom is the same as it ever was, but with a fresh twist: the Republican Party under the former president is now a working-class party. The twist is that this working-class coalition is multiracial. The evidence for that claim is the small percentage of Hispanic voters, in places like Texas and Florida, that sided with Donald Trump first in 2016 than in greater numbers in 2020.
Being known as the party of the working class has been desirable since at least 2011 when Rick Santorum ran for president. That he drove around rural Pennsylvania campaigning in a “beat-up pickup truck” was taken by columnists like the Times’ David Brooks as a sign of the former senator’s “working-class vibe.” That “vibe” was highly coveted, as it signaled authenticity and “real America,” rather than the effeminate wonkiness of the liberal technocratic establishment.
Fact is, “Real America” is what you say when you think Americans living on the coasts or in big urban centers like Atlanta or Chicago or Philadelphia are for some reason not […]
