As you listen to the commentary of the media it is clear they haven’t a clue what the sexual obsessions of the MAGAt world are really about. This is the best short explanation of what is going on with the White supremacy anti-LGBTQ movement, and how and why it links to the anti-abortion movement. This is all part of the attempt underway by the MAGAts to turn America into a version of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. They think they are going to rig the 2024 election to take over the Senate, and win the White House, and then it is full-speed ahead. We are losing our country unless the majority of us join together to protect our democracy.
Protesters and counterprotesters square off outside a drag makeup class for teens taught by a local drag queen at the Peabody Institute Library of Danvers on May 10, 2023, in Danvers, Massachusetts. Credit: Matthew J. Lee / The Boston Globe / Getty
In March 2022, the Idaho House of Representatives, like legislatures in 13 other states, voted to criminalize providing gender-affirming medical care to transgender youth. When asked about the bill’s threat to the lives of trans youth, Republican State Rep. Julianne Young replied, “I see this conversation as an extension of the pro-life argument.… We’re not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.”
On the one hand, we want to emphasize that Young’s assertion, suggesting that trans people never have or raise children, is false. Not only do trans people have and raise children, they often do so biologically, using their own gametes. On the other hand, it is important not to reproduce the implicit logic of Young’s statement, that adoption, fostering, extended family […]
The MAGAts don’t care if we default. They think that Biden will be blamed, and that will make it possible for them to win the White House. I think they are relying on Jack Smith indicting Trump, clearing the way for another Republican to win the white House. This is all coordinated, and funded by oligarchs who want their taxes and regulations on their corporations reduced. They have figured out that somewhere between a third and a half of American voters can be played by manipulating their fears, hates, and resentments, and that they can play our democracy to their advantage.
Republican MAGAt Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Credit Alex Wong / Getty
In the quiet, marbled halls of the U.S. Capitol, speaking too frankly is frowned upon by most lawmakers.
And then there’s Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the firebrand whom critics accused Tuesday of saying the silent part out loud by talking about the stalled-but-continuing federal debt limit talks as akin to a hostage negotiation.
Referring to the bill on the debt limit and spending cuts that passed the House with only Republican votes, Gaetz said: “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow & they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” according to a reporter for Semafor.
Gaetz’s seeming brazenness immediately drew fire from some Democratic allies on Twitter. CAP Action, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, said, “Rep. Gaetz said the quiet part out loud ― this was never about fiscal health, and always about holding our economy hostage to enact an extremist economic agenda that experts predict would push the economy into […]
The worldwide sordid story of Catholic priest and staff sexual molestation of children never seems to end. It is one of the constants of that church. I actually don’t see how the church survives as an institution, it is so deeply flawed. Here is the latest chapter.
The Holy Name Cathedral is the seat of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The attorney general’s investigation identified 275 allegedly abusive clerics and religious brothers in the archdiocese. Credit: Kamil Krzaczyski / AFP / Getty
More than 450 adult Catholic clergymen abused nearly 2,000 children in the state of Illinois over a period of almost 90 years, according to a report released Tuesday from Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.
“This report reveals names and detailed information of 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers who abused at least 1,997 children across all of the dioceses in Illinois,” Raoul wrote in a message accompanying the report.
The investigation identified 275 allegedly abusive clerics and religious brothers in the Archdiocese of Chicago, 43 in the Diocese of Belleville, 69 in Joliet, 51 in Peoria, 24 in Rockford and 32 in Springfield. Some accused abusers worked in multiple dioceses, equaling a “discrete” total of 451 accused, according to the report.
The report claims to have identified 149 individual perpetrators who were previously undisclosed by the dioceses, and that the […]
Nina Lakhani, Climate Justice Reporter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
It is time to pay the piper, as a true sense of the damage and the need for reparations by fossil fuel companies is finally calculated.
Citation: To read the complete research paper upon which this report is based see: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00198-7
The world’s top fossil fuel companies owe at least $209bn in annual climate reparations to compensate communities most damaged by their polluting business and decades of lies, a new study calculates.
BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company and Chevron are among the largest 21 polluters responsible for $5.4tn (£4.3tn) in drought, wildfires, sea level rise, and melting glaciers among other climate catastrophes expected between 2025 and 2050, according to groundbreaking analysis published in the journal One Earth.
It is the first time researchers have quantified the economic burden caused by individual companies that have extracted – and continue to extract – wealth from planetheating fossil fuels.
Amid growing debate about who should bear the economic cost of the climate crisis, the paper, titled Time to Pay the Piper, presents a moral case for the carbon corporations most responsible for the climate breakdown to use some of their “tainted wealth” to compensate victims.
The study considers this to be a substantial yet conservative price tag, as the methodology excludes the economic value of lost lives and livelihoods, species […]
I am getting very concerned that most Americans don’t seem to understand what is going on. About a third of the white population, making up the Republican Party, led by power-hungry politicians who are funded by oligarchs and control the House and the Supreme Court is trying to turn the United States into a christofascist White supremacy, males in control of females, anti-LGBTQ anocracy controlled by this minority. The media is afraid to say this apparently, but it has reached the stage where a librarian can be put in prison for having a book on their shelves the MAGAts don’t like or are afraid of. Putting a librarian in prison for being a good librarian, think about that. Our last chance to stop this will be the 2024 elections.
A U.S. librarian and a student Credit: Creative Commons
In the Netherlands and other European democracies, comprehensive sex education starts at an early age. Dutch officials reason that the more youths know about sex, the more likely they are to avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
But in the United States, the Religious Right has a radically different viewpoint. Far-right white evangelical Christians who oppose abortion often oppose any time of sex education.
According to the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson, MAGA Republicans in state legislatures have been pushing bills threatening librarians with either heavy fines or prison time if they give minors a book they consider “obscene.” And material doesn’t have to be explicit to fit the Religious Right’s definition of obscenity.
In an article published on May 18, Natanson reports that “at least seven states” in the U.S. have, in the “last two years,” passed laws that “permit criminal prosecution of school and library personnel” for “providing sexually explicit, obscene or ‘harmful’ books to children.”
