Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at Queens/CUNY, - Yahoo Finance
Stephan: In the United States, there are 21,951,000 millionaires and 735 billionaires. This in a country where the median American income in 2022 was $54,132. We have the worst wealth inequality in the developed world and it has distorted every aspect of American society because the United States is a culture that only has one social priority: greed and the profit it produces for individuals and whose tax structure is so biased for the rich, that millionaires and billionaires often pay less taxes than waitresses. As Elon Musk has so blatantly made clear this past year, the uber-rich are not necessarily any smarter than say an average college professor, and with a few notable exceptions they certainly aren't any nicer than say a factory worker. But they do live in a world the average American cannot even comprehend. It's not about expensive cars, or having a big house. That's the upper middle class. And nothing makes the wealth inequality difference clearer than what the uber-rich are doing to prepare for climate change.
A billionaire’s underground hideaway refuge for the coming climate change.
I got invited to a super-deluxe resort to deliver a speech to what I assumed would be 100 or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about a third of my annual salary as a professor at a public college – all to deliver some insight on “the future of technology.”
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. And I’ve never really liked talking about the future, especially for wealthy people. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols on a stock exchange: AI [artificial intelligence], VR [virtual reality], CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about how these technologies work or their impact on society beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But […]
Caroline Preston, Senior Editor - The Hechinger Report. - truthout / The Hechinger Report
Stephan: As I have been writing since Betsy DeVos was made Secretary of Education by criminal Trump, then president, the Republican Party has been working tirelessly to restructure education at every level from kindergarten to college so that it is less about education and much more about indoctrination. Why are they doing this? Because study after study has shown that well-educated people tend to vote for Democrats, and poorly educated, or uneducated people tend to vote for Republicans.
A student browses biology textbooks at a university bookstore Credit: Jeff Greenberg / Universal Images / Getty
Evidence is mounting fast of the devastating consequences of climate change on the planet, but college textbooks aren’t keeping up. A recent study found that most college biology textbooks published in the 2010s contained less content on climate change than textbooks from the previous decade, and gave shrinking attention to possible solutions to the global crisis.
The study, conducted by researchers with North Carolina State University, was based on an analysis of 57 college introductory biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. The researchers found that coverage of climate change increased over the decades, to a median of 52 sentences in the 2000s.
But that figure dropped in the 2010s, to a median of 45 sentences. That’s less than three pages, according to Jennifer Landin, an associate professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University and a co-author of the study.
“It’s really a very small amount of content,” she said. “I certainly think we can go into more detail explaining […]
Robert Reich, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley - AlterNet
Stephan: I have been thinking about the Lewis Powell Memo -- a critical point in American history that few know about -- for several weeks now, trying to see if I could squeeze the time in to write an essay about it because I thought it was so important to the present-day situation. But then, in doing some research on it, I came across Robert Reich's essay. The only amendment I would make to Reich's work is I would have placed even greater emphasis on what really empowered the Powell Memo, the 21 January 2010 Citizen's United decision which legalized the bribery of elected officials. Powell is correct when he says that the only thing that is going to change the current corruption of our democracy is if you and I, and everyone we know voted in politicians who will change the laws. Do you think we can do it?
The late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Lewis Powell author of the infamous Powell Memo Credit: Washington Post
The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you’ve probably never heard of.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.
Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.
In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.
But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.
The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them […]
Xavier Marquez, - Victory University of Wellington
Stephan: As I watched the news today, and listened to the commentary what struck me was what I would call loyalty flattery, something you associate with dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. People blatantly lie and flatter to prove to their leader that they are loyal. It has become a big part of the Republican Party, and it is generally not recognized for what it is. There is some solid research about this, and I urge you to click through and download the freely available pdf.
This chapter argues that leader personality cults are typically produced by a specific set of mechanisms of flattery inflation. It describes how loyalty signaling, emotional amplification, and direct production mechanisms can combine, under specific circumstances, to transform ordinary flattery into full-blown practices of ruler worship. And it argues for attending to the specific conditions that make possible the operation of these mechanisms, showing how patronage relationships in particular provide fertile ground for the emergence of personality cults. Moreover, the chapter argues that both ancient and modern leader cults depend on similar mechanisms, despite clear differences in context and function. I illustrate the operation of these mechanisms with many modern examples and an extended disussion of one ancient example, the abortive cult of Caligula during the Roman Principate.
Clip Through to get a pdf of the paper. This is the abstract.
Stephan: I take this report as good news, because it tells us that there is a large segment of the Christian world who are not aligned with the christofascists, and that tells us that this part of the Christian community is still psychologically healthy.
Former President Donald Trump’s supporters clash with police and security forces as they storm the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Credit: : Olivier Douliery / AFP / Getty
In an effort to fill in what they say are critical gaps in the U.S. House select committee’s report on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, faith leaders are pushing the corporate media and the American public to confront the role Christian nationalism played in the insurrection, warning that ignoring the link could make similar violence more likely in the future.
The committee’s report, released last week, laid out extensive evidence showing that former President Donald Trump was the driving force behind the attack aimed at stopping lawmakers from certifying the 2020 presidential election results, but mentioned Christian nationalism just once, despite the fact that many of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol openly expressed Christian nationalist beliefs before, during, and after the attack.
As Religion News Servicereported last week, some Trump supporters who attempted to […]
