Co-Opted And Weaponized, ‘Cancel Culture’ Is Just Today’s ‘Politically Correct’ : Consider This from NPR – NPR

Posted on by

'Cancelling' is a term that originated in young and progressive circles, where it was used to mean 'boycott,' University of Pennsylvania linguist Nicole Holliday tells NPR. Now the term 'cancel' has been co-opted and weaponized by some conservative media and politicians.

Something similar happened in the 1990s with the term 'politically correct.' John K. Wilson wrote about that time in a book called The Myth Of Political Correctness.

And just like 'politically correct' 'cancelling' and 'cancel culture' have been co-opted and weaponized to attack the left today. Social media has made that easier, says Jon Ronson, author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., goes back to her office after speaking on the floor of the House Chamber on Capitol Hill on Feb. 4. Andrew Harnik/AP hide caption

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., goes back to her office after speaking on the floor of the House Chamber on Capitol Hill on Feb. 4.

This episode was produced by Mia Venkat and Noah Caldwell with help from Brent Baughman. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon, Alejandra Marquez Janse, and Sami Yenigun. Our executive producer is Cara Tallo.

Here is the original post:

Co-Opted And Weaponized, 'Cancel Culture' Is Just Today's 'Politically Correct' : Consider This from NPR - NPR

Ricky Gervais suggests The Office would not get made now due to cancel culture and political correctness – Sky News

Posted on by

It has been 20 years since The Office first graced our television screens - and continues to be watched, referenced and talked about after all that time.

But creator and the man behind the (let's face it, awful) boss, David Brent, has suggested that the show would not be made now, as a result of cancel culture.

Speaking to the BBC, which aired the fly-on-the-wall comedy in the early noughties, Ricky Gervais said: "I mean now it would be cancelled. I'm looking forward to when they pick out one thing and try to cancel it.

"Someone said they might try to cancel it one day, and I say, 'Good, let them cancel it. I've been paid!'.'"

Some of the jokes in the show, mostly made by Brent and his sidekick Gareth (played by Mackenzie Crook), perhaps have not aged particularly well - but Gervais says we're not meant to relate to him.

He says: "In The Office, the audience are encouraged to identify not with the ignorant Brent, but with the characters Dawn and Tim, and the victims of Brent's ill-conceived comments are never racial or gendered caricatures, rather they are ordinary, intelligent people."

More recently, shows such as Little Britain have come under fire for insensitive and often racist and transphobic depictions of people, which led to calls for the programme to be removed from streaming services.

Even 20 years on, The Office, which only ran for two seasons and two specials, is still widely regarded as one of the best British comedies of all time, and launched the careers of the likes of Martin Freeman, Lucy Davis and Patrick Baladi.

In 2015 it was awarded Broadcast's best show of the past 20 years award, and has won a host of Baftas, Royal Television Awards and Golden Globes.

Subscribe to the Backstage podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker

Gervais even wrote and starred in a film spin-off called David Brent: Life On The Road, which followed the character on his ill-fated music career.

But its lasting legacy is undoubtedly its much-adored US version, which launched in 2005 and ran for nine seasons.

Gervais wrote the first season of the American iteration with long-time writing partner Stephen Merchant, with Steve Carrell taking on the Brent-inspired role of Michael Scott, and it turned people like Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer into household names.

Both versions of The Office are available on Netflix.

More:

Ricky Gervais suggests The Office would not get made now due to cancel culture and political correctness - Sky News

The Culture War Must Go On – The Wall Street Journal

Posted on by

I happened to mention the phrase culture war in a 1996 conversation with Irving Kristol, who was a contributor to these pages and always a penetrating observer of contemporary American life. The culture war is over, Irving said, then paused and added: We lost. Alive today, Irving would have been sadly reaffirmed in his declaration, surprised perhaps only at the extent of the loss and the cost it has entailed.

His we would include those people who believe in the rewards owed to effort and merit, the value of tradition, and the crucial significance of liberty. We would distinctly not include those who believe in the importance of spreading diversity, inclusion and equity as conceived by present-day universities. Nor would it include those whose sense of virtue derives from their putative hunger for social justice and their willingness to make severe judgments of others based on lapses from political correctness. These people are they, the woke, who have, as Kristol had it, won the culture war.

The extent of the woke victory is perhaps best demonstrated by the long list of cultural institutions they have captured and now control. Two of the countrys important newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are unashamedly woke. The New Yorker and the Atlantic have ceased to be general-interest magazines and are now specific-interest publicationsthat interest being the spread of woke ideas. The major television networks early fell in line without a fight.

Universities, in their humanities and social-sciences divisions, are not merely devoted to the propagation of woke ideas but initiate most of them. In turning away from the ideals of authority and objectivity in favor of clearly partisan views, these institutions have lost their former prestige yet are apparently sustained by the confidence that preaching woke doctrine is a higher calling.

Under the deep division in the country, certain prizesPulitzers, MacArthur grants, honorary degreesgo almost exclusively to people whose views are woke. (Presidential medalsin the humanities, in the arts, for freedomare dictated by whether the president in office is woke or not.) Under political correctness, one of the main planks in the woke platform, freedom in the arts is vastly curtailed owing to strictures against what is known as appropriation, which disapproves of whites writing about blacks, men about women, heterosexuals about homosexuals. Under woke culture, art is vastly inhibited; humor, because so much of comedy is politically incorrect, largely excluded.

Here is the original post:

The Culture War Must Go On - The Wall Street Journal

Viewpoint: School districts need to actively reject assault on teaching the truth of US history – Opinions – The Island Now

Posted on by

There is a reason why New York State mandates teaching about the Holocaust and why state legislators, led by state Sen. Anna Kaplan, have pushed for school districts to teach the Holocaust in more robust, purposeful ways rather than a casual mention.

They point to the rise of antisemitism.

In fact, you only have to listen to the garbage coming out of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who compared a public-health mask-wearing mandate to genocide, and those who knock on doors to encourage people to get the COVID-19 vaccination to brown shirts who beat and murdered Jews in the street, to have a glimpse of what ignorance breeds.

So it is really disturbing that the shite christo-fascists have now taken aim (again) at public education, specifically targeting woke teachers. The word woke is used as a slur (like political correctness or liberal), to refer to anyone who has made an effort to understand and empathize with others.

Laws are actually being proposed to ban the teaching of the made-up critical race theory which is extended to teaching about slavery, Indian genocide, Jim Crow, KKK, lynching, but especially how systemic racism is responsible for disparities in todays wealth, housing, education, jobs, voting rights and criminal justice for example, how systemic racism could factor into a police officer suffocating a man to death in front of a crowd of people pleading for mercy without care or concern.

The aim behind the campaign to whitewash history and replace truth with propaganda is the same as the attack on science (evolution, climate change), public health (coronavirus, gun safety) and education: a backlash against the policies being advanced to promote more equity now that the impact of inequities have been so starkly revealed in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd murder.

What have public health, climate action, and social equity have in common? They require a sense of community, common cause, public purpose. The commons which in white christo fascist parlance is socialism communism Marxism and anathema to America (that is capitalism).

Just as the attack on mask-wearing, the basis for the attack on critical race theory is totally bogus: CRT is not actually part of the K-12 curriculum, but rather, is an issue taught in law schools to examine how systemic racism has become embedded in criminal justice.

But the term has become shorthand for anything that is critical of United States history and might burst any myth of American Exceptionalism. The fuse was lit by the self-examination after the publication of the New York Times 1619 project.

Public education has been a target of right-wing conservatives going back to Reagan, as much because of the fight to force prayer in school and public tax money for parochial schools as to weaken teacher unions, among the largest unions still in existence and typically supporting Democrats.

Their fear is that if children grow into adults who respect others and see the injustice of economic, political and social inequities, if they realize that the American Dream is rigged, they might actually embrace policies and politicians to correct it.

Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, Trump declared. It will destroy our country adding teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.

To counter such education, he formed a 1776 Commission for Patriotic Education so that our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their souls.

Already, there have been literal attacks on school board members and meetings, and right-wingers taking over seats on school boards.

States have passed bans on teaching critical race theory but what does that mean practically? You cant teach about slavery in Colonial America, the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Indian Wars, Sitting Bull?

We told our members you can do what your professional obligation requires teach honest, accurate United States history, some of it is uncomfortable, but helps kids become critical thinkers when they understand the facts and can draw their own conclusions, AFT President Randi Weingarten said on MSNBC. We will defend that, just like the Scopes Trial of old, when they tried to stop teaching Evolution. Its very important to be able to teach accurate history.

To survive in this world, you need to be able to think. You need to be able to hold different things in your heart, in your head at same time. If you dont help kids develop those muscles, to see diversity as strength, it will hurt them.

But Weingarten added, Some teachers wont have the stamina or courage to teach Civil War or January 6. People will be afraid to push kids to think.

And lest you think this controversy is far away and not a risk to our schools, the rightwing have used textbooks to spread their political and social engineering.

Texas has frequently faced scrutiny for its state curriculum standards (called Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS), Kate Slater writes in Who Chooses the History Textbooks? on the today.com site. In 2014, NPR reported on some of the curriculum controversies, one of which included listing Moses as one of the original Founding Fathers.

But because Texas has one of the highest populations of public school students (approximately 5 million) it carries an undue influence on national textbook publishers and the content that they include or do not include in their textbooks. The narratives that they feature, which are then taught to millions of middle and high school students, have at times come under fire for being racist and xenophobic.

For example, a McGraw-Hill textbook referred to enslaved people as workers and compared the Atlantic slave trade to other patterns of immigration. They have also sought to embed Intelligent Design alongside Darwins theory of Evolution, and have dismissed climate science.

The Great Neck School District, Nassau County and New York State school boards associations and superintendents associations should consider a policy to refuse to order any textbook which contain whitewashed or propagandized history, science, social studies, as edited to satisfy Texas.

Instead, when it comes to history or social science, our students would be better served with project-based curriculum that enable them to learn for themselves how to find and analyze original sources or different sources and voices. This also teaches important techniques to distinguish fact from fraud on the internet.

Here is the original post:

Viewpoint: School districts need to actively reject assault on teaching the truth of US history - Opinions - The Island Now

Chinese Foreign Official Says U.S. Dominance in ‘Decline’ But Will Be Hard to Overtake – Newsweek

Posted on by

China's foreign vice minister said Friday that America's hegemony is falling, but noted that it would still be hard to surpass the U.S. as a leading world power.

Speaking to the Chinese state media outlet Guancha on Friday, Le Yucheng said the U.S. continued to represent the strongest, most powerful nation in the world, but that the country was suffering from an idealogical perspective.

"The U.S. decline is not a decline in strength but a decline of hegemony," Le said, according to the South China Morning Post. "No matter a country's strength, hegemonic power is bound to wither, hegemony is not popular."

Nonetheless, Le continued by stating that the U.S. was "still a strong and large nation in the number one spot," and that "it will be hard to overtake it over a relatively long period of time."

The Chinese foreign minister went on to criticize President Joe Biden for approaching China with an aggressive stance, and claimed that the administration is attempting to both destroy and contain China.

"The biggest challenge faced by a superpower like the United States will always come from within, and destroying China is by no means a prescription for solving American problems," Le said, according to The Post. "We hope that the United States will return to reason and the right path of dialogue and cooperation, with no need to turn resisting China into a policy, nor containing China into 'political correctness'," he continued.

Le added that U.S.-led international groups, such as the Asia-Pacific focused Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), and Group of Seven Nations (G7), are examples of the country attempting to define the "international community," while going against China. The foreign minister also rebuked the U.S. and other Western nations for accusing China of committing human rights violations in Xinjiang.

In January, the U.S. became the first country to officially declare China's actions to be genocide, following reports that the nation has placed over 1 million Uyghurs into detainment camps in the Xinjiang region and forced them to work in hazardous conditions against their will. The country has also been accused of using sophisticated techniques to hack into the phones and technologies of ethnic minorities.

Le's statements on Friday come as several U.S. officials are sounding the alarm that China's economy and military are growing at rapid rates.

Last month, Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney warned that China is on track to become "the most powerful economy in the world and the most powerful military in the world," likely representing the most significant challenges to U.S. foreign policy.

"I think the president is increasingly aware of that challenge, as is his secretary of state, [Antony] Blinken, and I think they're looking to try to pull together our alliances to wake up to that reality and take action to dissuade China from the path of confrontation and military aggressiveness," Romney said during an interview on CNN's State of the Union.

Similarly, in a recent interview published in the Financial Times, senior NATO officer Stuart Peach remarked on China's rapid military expansion.

"It is quite shocking how quickly China has built ships, how much China has modernized its air force, how much it has invested in cyber and other forms of information management, not least facial recognition," Peach told the news outlet.

Newsweek contacted the White House for additional comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.

Read more from the original source:

Chinese Foreign Official Says U.S. Dominance in 'Decline' But Will Be Hard to Overtake - Newsweek

In the Vox Conversations podcast, Sean Illing and Jamil Smith bring a new kind of interview show – Vox.com

Posted on by

On July 12, were launching a new podcast at Vox that tries to do the interview show a little differently. Hosted by Sean Illing and Jamil Smith who promise not to refer to themselves in third person after this Vox Conversations will explore big ideas and hard questions with the most fascinating people we can find.

We want Vox Conversations to be a home for honest discussions about everything from the relationship between democracy and fascism to psychedelics and mental health to the intersection of sports, politics, and culture. Whatever the topic, well bring our whole selves to the conversation each and every week, pushing our guests to a place of real engagement, without pretense or bullshit. We both have strong points of view and youll hear that, but youll also hear attempts to probe, not preach, and to look for mutual understanding where we can find it.

We believe a good conversation is open, authentic, and makes room for surprises. To learn anything, you have to be alive to whats being said, and you have to be willing to be changed by it. This is easy to do when talking to someone with whom you agree. Its much harder to do when its someone you dont agree with, or perhaps even mistrust.

If we do anything on this show, we hope it at least creates a space for this kind of dialogue. We will make mistakes; we will poke holes in liberal and conservative orthodoxies, and we hope to ultimately challenge the deepest assumptions we and our audience hold about the world. But the goal of the show will always be to dig into the ideas behind a given question, not to win a debate.

The first episode, on Monday, July 12, features Sean in conversation with The Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig, discussing forgiveness and performative cruelty in the social media era. We talk about why its not just so damn hard to forgive, but also why our society lacks a coherent story to tell us how a person whos made a public misstep can make amends.

Youll hear our second episode, featuring Jamil and author Kiese Laymon on Thursday, July 15. The two discuss writing through racial and familial trauma, and with reference to Laymons recently re-released novel Long Division, talk over what it means to have a complex entity undergo revision whether that be a literary work, or a still far-from-perfect United States.

In the coming weeks, youll hear conversations with Bill Maher on political correctness, Michael Pollan on drugs and the nature of consciousness, Larry Krasner on the work of progressive prosecuting attorneys in Philadelphia, and many, many others.

New Vox Conversations episodes will be released every Monday and Thursday. Follow us now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

See original here:

In the Vox Conversations podcast, Sean Illing and Jamil Smith bring a new kind of interview show - Vox.com

Letters to the Editor Tuesday, July 6 – The Daily Gazette

Posted on by

Media should speak for moderates, tooFox News gets a large amount of attention from left wingers.On the other hand, I dont notice NPR, CNN, or Mother Jones getting much attention from the right.By focusing so much on this one right-wing source, it would appear theyre acknowledging theres less of them.The mainstream media tends to lean Democrat.Just like with the government, those who dont consider themselves liberal or conservative (the huge number of Americans who tend to decide elections) are not represented much in the media.Would it change anything if they did have influence?I cant speak for other moderates who dont consider themselves liberal or conservative, but here are some questions I could see a mainstream media which doesnt lean Democrat that could be asked:Given that Blacks suffered greatly from policies Joe Biden helped create, why would the intelligent Barack Obama pick him as vice president? Why do anti-war candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Howard Dean never become vice president?Why does peak oil get so much more attention than other resources that are also depleting?Given the claim that organic produces higher yields in developing countries, food is wasted giving it to farm animals, and vegan food is cheap, why should we believe a mostly vegan and organic diet cant feed the world?Since Wall Street gives huge donations to both parties, maybe they should stop donating if voter suppression bothers them.Colin YunickCharlton

Black leaders should denounce vulgarityThe BET awards, which highlight Black achievement, awarded Cardi B a Grammy and a Video of The Year award for her Megan Thee Stallion-assisted No. 1 hit WAP. A celebration of deviant sexuality was also part of the evenings festivities.If youre like me, who had a hard time keeping up with the cool kids, the acronym WAP might bestir a memory from the Dark Ages, when a similar term was used by cloddish xenophobes in regard to Italian immigrants.No, that would be totally out of place in this gathering, where delicate sensibilities and political correctness charge the atmosphere.If, like me, you dont have a confidant whos not only wise to the ways of the world, but tech-savvy to boot, to provide the lyrical content of this masterpiece.Im a bit tongue-tied to even attempt to gently describe the content. Hint: Its about sex and its graphic. Most likely the easiest way to access this, what I would call trash, would be your teenagers smartphones. Caution: It could provide some mutual embarrassment.Black leaders should denounce events such as the BET Awards.They arent true allies in helping boost Black societys PR problem, if one exists. I see them as a Trojan Horse.Gordon F. SchaufelbergAmsterdam

Caroline Streets issues are not newThere have been problems on Caroline Street since Caroline Street became the late night place to party in Saratoga Springs.The commissioner of Public Safety should know this, and I am sure the assistant police chief knows this.The problems have not started with BLM or are caused by gangs from Albany.The city has been trying to solve this problem for years.One former Public Safety commissioner tried to get the bars to close earlier. The bars fought this for months and the city backed off.The city needs to address the problems on Caroline Street, but trying to blame outside influences will not solve the problem.We are in the summer season, and it is discouraging that the Public Safety commissioner and the assistant police chief seem so unprepared to handle a problem that the city faces every summer.Karen KlotzSaratoga Springs

Online lettersCommenters to online letters who fail to follow rules against name-calling, profanity, threats, libel or other inappropriate language will have their comments removed and their commenting privileges withdrawn.

To report inappropriate online comments, email Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney at[emailprotected]

Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion

Go here to read the rest:

Letters to the Editor Tuesday, July 6 - The Daily Gazette

Opinion | Trumps Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up – The New York Times

Posted on by

The three authors go on:

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum. Further, given the decisive role that Independents can play in elections, these results suggest that reservoirs of animosity are not necessarily specific to a particular party, and may therefore be tapped by any political elite.

Before Trump took center stage in 2015, Republican leaders were determined to stymie Democratic policy initiatives, resist compromise, and make it clear that Republicans desire to score political victories and win back power from Democrats, Kane wrote in his email, but establishment Republicans generally did not openly demonize, much less dehumanize, Democratic politicians at the national level.

Trump, Kane continued,

wantonly disregarded this norm, and now Trumps base may come to expect future Republican elites to be willing to do the same. If this practice eventually comes to be seen as a winning strategy for Republican politicians as a whole, it could bring us into a new era of polarization wherein Republican cooperation with the Demon Rats is seen not just as undesirable, but thoroughly unconscionable.

Most significantly, in Masons view, is that

there is a faction in American politics that has moved from party to party, can be recruited from either party, and responds especially well to hatred of marginalized groups. Theyre not just Republicans or Democrats, theyre a third faction that targets parties.

Bipartisanship, Mason continued in a lengthy Twitter thread, is not the answer to the problem. We need to confront this particular faction of Americans who have been uniquely visible and anti-democratic since before the Civil War (when they were Democrats).

In their paper, Mason, Wronski and Kane conclude:

This research reveals a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain. Trumps unique ability to do so is not the only cause for normative concern. Instead, we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters political judgments. Should America wish to become a fully multiracial democracy, it will need to reconcile with these hostile attitudes themselves.

Adam Enders, a political scientist at the University of Louisville, and Uscinski, in their June 2021 paper On Modeling the Social-Psychological Foundations of Support for Donald Trump describe a Trump voter profile: an amalgamation of attitudes about, for example, racial groups, immigrants and political correctness that rivals partisanship and ideology as predictors of Trump support and is negatively related to support for mainstream Republican candidates.

In an email, Enders described this profile as fitting those attracted to Trumps

relatively explicit appeal to xenophobia, racial prejudice, authoritarianism, sexism, conspiracy thinking, in combination with his outsider status that gives him credibility as the anti-establishment candidate. The Trump voter profile is a constellation of social-psychological attitudes about various racial groups, women, immigrants, and conspiracy theories that uniquely predict support for Donald Trump.

Uscinski and Enders are the lead authors of a forthcoming paper, American Politics in Two Dimensions: Partisan and Ideological Identities versus Anti-Establishment Orientations, in which they argue that

Our current conceptualization of mass opinion is missing something. Specifically, we theorize that an underappreciated, albeit ever-present, dimension of opinion explains many of the problematic attitudes and behaviors gripping contemporary politics. This dimension, which we label anti-establishment, rather than explaining ones attitudes about and behaviors toward the opposing political coalition, captures ones orientation toward the established political order irrespective of partisanship and ideology.

In the case of Trump and other anti-democratic leaders around the world, Uscinski and Enders contend that

anti-establishment sentiments are an important ingredient of support for populist leaders, conspiratorial beliefs, and political violence. And, while we contend that this dimension is orthogonal to the left-right dimension of opinion along which partisan and ideological concerns are oriented, we also theorize that it can be activated by strategic partisan politicians. As such, phenomena which are oftentimes interpreted as expressions of far-right or far-left orientations may not be borne of left-right views at all, but rather of the assimilation of anti-establishment sentiments into mainstream politics by elites.

Anti-establishment voters, Uscinski and Enders write, are more likely to believe that the one percent controls the economy for their own good, believe that a deep state is embedded within the government and believe that the mainstream media is deliberately misleading us. Such voters are more prevalent among younger people, those with lower incomes, those with less formal education, and among racial and ethnic minority groups. In other words, it is groups who have historically occupied a tenuous position in the American socio-economic structure.

The most intensely partisan voters very strong Democrats and very strong Republicans are the least anti-establishment, according to Uscinski and Enders:

Those on the extremes of partisan and ideological identity exhibit lower levels of most of these psychological predispositions. In other words, extreme partisans and ideologues are more likely to express civil attitudes and agreeable personality characteristics than less extreme partisans and ideologues; this contradicts growing concerns over the relationship between left-right extremism and antisocial attitudes and behaviors. We suspect this finding is due to strong partisans and ideologues being wedded to, and entrenched within, the established political order. Their organized, relatively constrained orientation toward the political landscape is built on the objects of establishment politics: the parties, party elites and familiar ideological objects.

That, in turn, leads Uscinski and Enders to another contrarian conclusion:

We find that an additional anti-establishment dimension of opinion can, at least partially, account for the acceptance of political violence, distrust in government, belief in conspiracy theories, and support for outsider candidates. Although it is intuitive to attribute contemporary political dysfunction to left-right extremism and partisan tribalism, we argue that many elements of this dysfunction stem from the activation of anti-establishment orientations.

One politician whose appeal was similar to Trumps, as many have noted, was George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, who ran for president four times in the 1960s and 1970s, openly using anti-Black rhetoric.

Link:

Opinion | Trumps Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up - The New York Times

Why Africas post-colonial democracies are threatening to become dynastic dictatorships – Face2Face Africa

Posted on by

After the fall of colonialism in Africa, most of the countries adopted parliamentary and electoral system of democracy. This was some five decades ago. But as for now, this is slowly changing. The new hobgoblin is haunting Africa- the specter of dynastic dictatorship lurks all over in full gear to take over the people based democracy. This specter is evident in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, Togo and many other countries of Africa.

For example, Tanzania has maintained a very beautiful environment for intellectual and ideological culture but still it has been ruled by a dynastic dictatorship of the CCM that only gives the cronies of Julius Nyerere opportunity to contest for the top political office. This has been so despite the fact that the CCM dictatorship in Tanzania has held hostage the people of Tanzania in poverty for the past six decades.

Cameroon is a more contemporary example, where President Paul Biyas son is now making a name for himself on Cameroons political scene to take over the job of his 88-year-old father who has held the top office since 1982. Franck Biya, the son of Paul Biya, has always kept the low profile working as a businessman and entrepreneur. But now, there is political evidence in Cameron that he is preparing to take over. The social media in Cameroon is flooded with images of Franck Biya for his candidacy.

It is not a surprisethat some economically powerfulgroup of businessmen, politicians and government alliesin Cameron have formed The Frankistes Citizen Movement for the Peace and Unity of Cameroon, a political movement in Cameron led by a powerful businessman by the nameMohamed Rahim Noumeau, calling on Franck Biya to run for the presidency in the next general election.

However, it is notable that Franck Biyas presidential ambitions dont come as a total surprise in the context of the region. There are sporadic cases of dynastic politics in Africa, for example; Togos current president Faure Gnassingbe took over as the nations leader in 2005 following the death of his father, President Gnassingbe Eyadema. Eyadema had ruled Togo for 38 years. Comparatively in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), incumbent president Felix Tshisekedi was elected to lead the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) after his father, former president Etienne Tshisekedi, died in 2017. In Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has excessively empowered his wife Janet and his son General Muhozi to a clear extent that they are better placed to take over from the now aged Museveni.

Those supporting dynastic politics in Africa have always borrowed a leaf from the political past to justify their choices by pointing out similar situations around the world in the Bush family, John Adams Family in the United States, Kenyattas family in Kenya and Gabons President Ali Bongo Ondimba, who were elected following their fathers exits from politics.

The situation in Kenya is currently the practical justification for Historys accusation of parliamentary attitude towards human problems with intellectual vulgarity. This charge has not been false accusation; there is enough evidence in Kenya showing ever present mediocrity in parliamentary decisions whenever it comes to upholding dignity of the poor through good governance. Currently, this tradition of parliamentary cretinism is evident in the bill under debate before the parliament of Kenya seeking to criminalize Kenyas poor peoples thinking about their poverty. In the bill, it is suggested that any person in Kenya speaking in public about the few rich and politically connected families as the chief supporters of bad social-cum-political policies responsible for putting bad governance in place and hence serial failure by successive governments to improve welfare of a common Kenyan will be criminalized. Thus, it is like the political class in Kenya is technically criminalizing class consciousness.

This bill is provoked by the specter of class conflict in the current public political discourse where the majority of Kenyans now want to vote by basing on their class. Kenyas majority of voters belong to the economically disadvantaged class composed of rural peasants and the lumpen jobless in the urban areas. These two economically powerless communitiesare now threatening to evolve into a spontaneous voting monster that will thin-out of power the traditionally powerful political class that have always enjoyed political power to perfect unfair accumulation of dirty riches. Kenyas politically powerful class is threatened because it is only made up of just a dozen of families with dynastic tendencies which have unfairly piled heaps on other heaps of riches throughout five decades of formation of the Kenyan state. However, it is now becoming realistic that the handfuls of rich and politically connected families are nothing before the masses that have been held in poverty by bad governments for ages.The poor voters in Kenya have now realized their strength and thus they are publicly discoursing voting as a political block to thrash out the small class of blood-sucking patrimonial bourgeois from political power.

Some paradox is that Kenya has been famed for being a superlative economic power of East Africa, but it is so unfortunate to learn that the greater portion of Kenyas economic prosperity is infamously in the hands of the state which operates like private property of those few that are politically advantaged and well profiled financially. The rest of this national economic prosperity again is held as private property of the politically correct, both in a historical and in a contemporary sense. Thus, Kenyas economic exuberance is not a fact. The available technicalreality contradicts the conventional information, the reality is that ninety percent of sixty million Kenyans wallow in urban poverty, rural squalor, rural landlessness, urban destitution and wretchedness in the wynds of slums, credit-unworthiness, ignobling jobs, rural malnutrition, urban pollution, insignificant education, teenage mother-hood, economic despair, induced drug addiction, miss-education, perennial joblessness, sex-working and commercial homosexuality, and all other sorts of social-economic powerlessness.

The above conditions are socially challenging, and it is psychologically obvious that any person living in such challenging and hope-fettering conditions will be overtly conscious about these conditions. This social-psychological phenomenon is known as class consciousness. It is this social-political phenomenon of class consciousness that is now dictating Kenyas political discourse, a discourse which is predominantly reflecting volatile nature of mass emotions of those that have been politically alienated for decades.

But if one can think correctly and help to think and question What was to be expected by those that have been alienating over forty million workers in Kenya? Nothing else other than the alienatorcoming face to face with sad reality that when you alienate forty million workers you convert them into forty milliongravediggers. They will dig the grave for no one else but for you the alienator. And no kind of parliamentary law has ever been successful in muffling the grave diggers from realizing their natural right; still it can be projected or be extrapolated that no amount of selfish parliamentary legislation in Kenya will stop the forty million plus grave diggers from realizing their natural right of digging the grave for a dozen families that make the deep state, the system, the cartel or the patrimonial bourgeoisie in Kenya.

In spite of all the rudimentary and feasible evidence from active history in support of the above observations, Kenyan law-makers and parliamentarians are giving a euphorically unanimous support to this anti-class consciousness bill. They are doing so without reading the signs on the wall or even consulting with the people of Kenya to establish the human law that is currently lighting the political path of the people of Kenya. The Parliamentarians have ignored the people as if they are not aware that human law is natural, but parliamentary law is artificial-and always nature abhors the vacuum. So, let not those two hundred self-righteous parliamentarians in Kenya think that they are able to pin down the revolutionary energy of forty million workers that have become tired of being victims of economic alienation and political exploitation. The only law that can forestall this looming hobgoblin from the netherworld taking its course in Kenya is the law that upholds genuine inclusivity, genuine economic mainstreaming, genuine empowerment and un-pretentious transfer of political power and economic enjoyment to the people through a constitutional mechanism.

Currently, the Parliamentarians in Kenya are not alive to this flip-side of the anti-class conscious bill because of their effortless service to club norm of conditioned mental tetheredness to bourgeoisie pressure. It is incidental bourgeoisie trapping that a cash-focused career parliamentarian treating politics as a family business cannot escape. In fact, history of parliamentary politics teaches that, it requires different political mindset and moral mettle to serve in a parliament that is a protg of shrewdly calculating bourgeoisie machinations without succumbing to snobbery required to serve bourgeoisie trappings.

Unfortunately, they are thesame shrewd and wily Bourgeoisie interestsare the ones dictating party nominations in Kenya, a process which has always given the people of Kenya morally punctured politicians that are out to be goons of tribal paramount chiefs, politicians that fight at the funeral gathering only to be kicked down in order to prove their policy or ideology; politicians who taste the texture of any social policy before them by using theirtongues then stomachs but not by using their supposed glowing fire of the intellectual consciousness supposed to be the light for their political ideology. I mean bourgeoisie slyness has given Kenya five decades of parliamentary politicians that make Kenyas parliament to be a perfect specimen of Marxs social diagnosis that a parliament is an instrument of the politically powerful to oppress the powerless workers by relying on the mutton-headed persiflage and anent blabbering by its leather-tongued members living in constant fear that maybe their mandibles have of-late lost germ needed to be appreciated by the bourgeoisie capitalists as mouths for hire.

Worthless again is the misplaced fear of those Kenyan politicians sought to be criminalized by the criminal law that will come from the anti-class consciousness bill. Those politicians of the hustler narrative are innocent, they have been innocent, and they are pre-emptively innocent when it comes to establishing political culpability to pre-emptive crime of being class-conscious crusaders of the rights of the workers. Their political history has no record of them being class-consciousness political leaders; they have been purely class-insouciant money making ethnic based politicians. The only criminal charges they qualify to face are; thievery of state resources, land-grabbing, crime against humanity, murder of Newspaper editor, murder of business competitor, murder of election officer, money laundering, election fraud and or being accomplice to murder of human rights activists. However, it has been hard for them be charged with these crimes because they often mutate like HIV virus-from political correctness to political enmity and then back to political correctness.

And though there was a befitting law with which to criminally charge the accused Kenyan politicians for committing crime of perpetrating class-conscious politics, still this law would be prosecuting wrong people given that ever since Kenya has never had a class conscious politician. The present political speeches about hustlers competing with dynasties for presidency dont amount to any class-conscious or revolutionary conscious politics. These are only little Machiavellian tricks to achieve parochial intentions of dissembling and perfecting dissolubility to exploit or take advantage of the already prevailing volatile relation between the few that superbly own and the non-owning masses at pain with their history of being economically abused.This prevailing volatility is a naturally occurring phenomenon known as class-conflict. It is not a philosophy of any politician, or malicious afore-thought or mens rea-inner evil intentions of some politicians. It is a natural phenomenon which dictates that; with or without a politician, the end to bourgeoisie exploitation of the poor workers is always a class based conflagration that has the poor masses ejecting violently the few oppressive bourgeoisies from political power-the dynastic bourgeoisie from power.

I want to end up this paper by pointing out that the dynastic bourgeoisie were not created by God to be eternal leaders as most of rural people in Africa have been manipulated to believe. Dynastic bourgeoisie are selfish political opportunists. They have been properly described by different Post-colonial scholars ranging from Achille Mbembe to Isa Shivji, Mahmod Mamdan to Ernest Wamba dia Wamba as those elected leaders that want to replicate colonial style of leadership for selfish reasons. These scholars have also on several occasions pointed out how the dynastic bourgeoisie have evolved, devolved or grown in Africa by stating that the dynastic bourgeoisiehave all based their growth on abuse of political power through corruption, militarization of politics, manipulation of the media to work as propaganda machinery for the dynastic bourgeoisie, impoverishment of the masses, financing of regular political violence, financing the structure of the police state, making university education to be too expensive beyond the reach of the poor and establishing a very dedicated snobbish civil service and public service systems.

More:

Why Africas post-colonial democracies are threatening to become dynastic dictatorships - Face2Face Africa

Patriotism and polarisation America’s history wars – The Economist

Posted on by

Jul 10th 2021

WASHINGTON, DC

PARENTS ARE outraged by a new curriculum. Politicians worry that educators are indoctrinating pupils with un-American revisionist history. Progressives argue that this updated version of the curriculum reflects an American reality that should not be hidden from children. Both sides clash at school meetings, teachers are under fire. At issue could be the current controversy over critical race theory in classrooms. Or it could be one of the many skirmishes during the past century over history education, from whether it was pro-British to whether it was pro-Marxist.

Your browser does not support the

Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

Critical race theory (CRT), which has become the battleground this time, originated in the 1970s as a legal perspective that emphasised the role of systemic racism (as opposed to the individual sort) in replicating inequality. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think-tank seeking to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in schools, describes the set of ideas thus: a perspectivethat believes all the events and ideas around usmust be explained in terms of racial identities. Complicating the argument is the fact that some conservatives use the phrase to encompass everything from discussions about institutional racism to diversity training.

Twenty-six states have introduced measures that would limit critical race theory in public schools, according to EdWeek. Federal legislators are also piling into the debate. Seven Republican senators, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, reintroduced the Saving American History Act in June to limit federal funding to schools that use a curriculum derived from the 1619 Project, a set of Pulitzer-prize-winning essays published by the New York Times magazine that puts slavery at the centre of the nations founding and development (and received mixed reviews from professional historians). The federal bill, originally introduced in July 2020, is mostly symbolic: Congress has little control over state and local curriculums, and the bill is unlikely to pass when there are Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. But the politics is clear. Republicans are convinced that a war on critical race theory is good politics, even if attempts to ban it might prove unconstitutional.

Tennessees bill, signed by the governor in May, prohibits public schools from teaching concepts that promote discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress. Texass law specifically bans the 1619 Project, prevents teachers from giving course credit for social or public policy advocacy, prohibits required training that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex, and restricts teaching that slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States. Idahos legislation prevents any public institution, including colleges, from compel[ling] students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to the concepts that individuals are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past. In May, Idahos Lieutenant Governor assembled a taskforce to protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism.

It is unclear how widely the theory, as described by either liberals or conservatives, is being taught in classrooms. According to the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think-tank, 43% of teachers are familiar with CRT, and only 30% of that group view it favourably (about one in ten overall). Even so, the National Education Association (NEA), Americas largest labour union, recently issued a statement embracing CRT.

This contest over how to tell the national story may seem new, but it is part of a century-old fight. The battle began once schooling became compulsory in all states in 1918. In the 1920s David Muzzey, a historian, was branded a traitor for his textbook An American History, which, according to critics, undermined the American spirit with pro-British distortions of the revolution and the war of 1812. According to Gary Nash, a historian, an opponent of Muzzeys text claimed that American children would now sing God Save the King instead of Yankee Doodle Dandy after reading it. Attempts to ban the book were unsuccessful: it sold millions of copies.

Other controversies followed. In the 1930s, Harold Rugg, an education professor, was accused of Sovietising our children by conservatives, who claimed that his textbook focused on American social ills and propagated Marxism. The McCarthy era spurred investigations into teachers labelled as Communist sympathisers. In the 1970s textbook wars led to violence in West Virginia, where protesters bombed schools and injured journalists over books with controversial multicultural content. Liberals have also attempted to censor materials. In the 1980s E.D. Hirsch, a literary critic and professor, published a list of common knowledge for American children that became a New York Times bestseller. Liberal critics accused Mr Hirsch of prioritising the achievements of white men and Western European perspectives.

Perhaps the most analogous fight, though, was in the 1990s over voluntary national history standards. The optional curriculum, originally conceived under the George H.W. Bush administration and continued under Bill Clinton, was lampooned by conservatives. Lynne Cheney, the wife of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was running for president, declared her opposition in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled The End of History. Mrs Cheney accused the standards of political correctness and lamented the lack of white male representation in the curriculum: Ulysses S. Grant had only one mention and Robert E. Lee had none, against Harriet Tubmans six. The Senate passed a resolution to condemn the voluntary standards, killing the curriculum.

These attacks are always connected to whats going on in politics at that time, says Mr Nash, who helped create the voluntary national standards. The Understanding America Study, a nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California, found that Americans are united on the importance of civics education for children. With little partisan disagreement, a majority of parents agree that it is important for children to learn how the government works (85%) and about voting requirements (79%).

But political differences emerge over who should appear prominently in history lessons. Parental opinion diverges on the importance of learning about women (87% of Democratic parents favour this versus 66% of Republican parents) and non-whites (83% versus 60%). The divide is greater on discussions of inequality. A majority of Democratic parents said it was important for pupils to learn about racism (88%) and income inequality (84%) compared with less than half of Republican parents (45% and 37% respectively).

Conservatives tend to argue that pupils should learn one unified, optimistic version of American history, and that learning about specific groups is divisive. Critical race theory is destructive because it advocates for racial discrimination through affinity groupings, racial guilt based on your ethnicity not your behaviour, and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our freedom is based, explains Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute. Meanwhile, liberals are open to a more fragmented, less flattering version of the countrys past.

It is this view which seems to be gaining ground. Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States (told from the perspective of women and racial minorities) is also grouped under the critical-race-theory debate by the Goldwater Institute: it has sold 2m copies since 1980. The 1619 Project is taught in many school districts including Chicago. According to the NEA, nine states and the District of Columbia have laws or policies establishing multicultural-history or ethnic-studies curriculums.

Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit organisation, urges liberal Americans to take conservative concerns seriously, or potentially face a terrifying boost of far-right nationalism. It is going to get more intense as polarisation gets worse and as trust goes down, he says. If each successive history war grows more intense, he adds, Where do we end up in ten to 20 years?

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The history wars"

View post:

Patriotism and polarisation America's history wars - The Economist

Where’s the US headed in next year’s crucial midterm election? – The National

Posted on by

Divided America may be a cliche but its political impact is deepening. As Democrats and Republicans prepare for next year's crucial midterm congressional elections, the two parties are not just offering different answers to similar questions, they are talking about completely different aspects of reality.

Parties often want to focus on different matters. But the extent to which Democrats are preparing to run on governance, the economy and recovering from the pandemic, while Republicans are laser-focused on culture and grievance, is remarkable.

Republicans will if need be talk about the economy and attribute the post-pandemic boom that is already underway to tax cuts under former president Donald Trump. But unless there is a sudden downturn or inflation scare they are likely to avoid the topic.

Democrats will tend to claim credit for all economic progress. But they will also highlight the supposed benefits of their big plans for the US economy, especially if they can pass another major spending bill before November 2022.

Even if they can't, President Joe Biden is seeking to engage the US government with the economy to an extent unknown in recent decades, primarily through executive orders that do not require congressional approval.

The White House Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force is the centrepiece of a plan to revive US manufacturing. Claiming to have learnt from crises during the pandemic regarding medicines, personal protective equipment, ventilators and other core medical requirements, Mr Biden wants to ensure that the US becomes independent of international suppliers in manufacturing such key products without relying on a complex global supply chain.

It's part of the Biden version of "America First" economic nationalism. Rather than rely on tariffs, as Mr Trump did, and ignore the reality of complex global supply chains, Mr Biden hopes to revitalise manufacturing by insisting that the US needs to be self-sufficient on broad categories of items.

That is all probably too detailed for much of the electorate, but most of the public, including many Trump-supporting Republicans, want the government to play a major role in overseeing economic growth and securing large numbers of well-paying jobs.

Fortunately for Republicans, liberal activists sometimes overplay their hands

Democrats are going to run on that issue and they will easily link it to the striking success the Biden administration has had in making Covid-19 vaccines available to all adult Americans in very short order.

Many Trump supporters and others are refusing vaccinations, which is the only reason the project has stalled just short of the stated goal of 70 per cent national inoculation by now.

Some Republican House members may try to run on an anti-vaccination and anti-mask platform. But most will avoid the issue altogether, save to again credit Mr Trump with having overseen the development of the vaccines in his last year in the White House.

Instead, Republicans are now focused on three cultural issues in which the federal government is sometimes barely, if at all, involved, but that certainly have a long track record of efficacy.

They will stress their categorical opposition to illegal and even legal immigration, with appeals to both anxieties about low-skilled wages and more cultural and racial xenophobic sentiments. Of the three, that's the only genuinely federal issue.

Republicans will also point to rising crime rates, attempting to link that to Democratic control of most large cities and falsely painting Mr Biden as leading an agenda to "defund the police".

There is almost always a strong racial component to such language, with violent crime invariably, if sometimes implicitly, attributed to African-Americans and Latinos.

Vice President Kamala Harris then US Senator with her aide Julie Chavez Rodriguez (R) during the Asian and Latino Coalition event on August 10, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa, US. Getty Images/AFP

But perhaps their biggest bet is on a "culture war" motif with "Critical Race Theory" serving as the main target. CRT has come to mean many different things. But it now frequently serves as a synecdoche for woke progressivism that is perceived to be, and sometimes can indeed be, an overly aggressive and even irrationally doctrinaire, hard-liberal approach to racial and, more controversially, transgender issues.

Despite the prevalence of QAnon and other bizarre conspiracy theories, and the near ubiquitous personality cult around Mr Trump, within their own ranks, Republicans will try to paint Democrats as the ones who have "gone crazy," and been taken over by a radical, illiberal and oppressive "cancel culture" ideology.

All that has little to do with Mr Biden's policy agenda, but Republicans are probably right that it is their biggest opportunity to make gains with a public that is otherwise likely to welcome more competent, expansive and ambitious governance on issues like the economy, infrastructure and climate change.

What is often being attacked as America-hating CRT is simply the public and academic unpacking of the reality that no society can impose centuries of slavery and mandate almost 100 years of segregation and racial discrimination without it leaving deep structural and institutional imprints and lacerations.

Fortunately for Republicans, liberal activists sometimes overplay their hands, and come across as power-hungry ideologues demanding conformity to their, often highly debatable, identity-based assertions. That inevitably alienates many people, and even alienates several African Americans and Latinos, not to mention many committed liberals and traditional leftists.

The irony is that Republican state legislatures across the country are by law mandating a countervailing political correctness which, for example, in Florida, effectively prohibits an honest discussion in schools about the role of racism in American history and present day society.

Such controversies are perennial and cyclical in the US. The cultural battle over race and identity peaked in the late 1960s, the mid-1990s and are again a focal point today. The explosion of anti-racist sentiment following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year virtually insured that the right would launch an organised "anti-anti-racism" pushback, which is the core of this controversy.

It's ironic that the Republicans' best allies in this debate are precisely some of the most zealous, hyper-progressive identity liberals, much to the dismay of many traditional class-oriented leftists.

The midterms will be about how much traction "culture war" issues can gain against an impressive commercial comeback under Mr Bidens ambitious economically oriented agenda. The midterms appear set to pit emotional impulses against pocketbook concerns and symbolic and cultural anxieties against pragmatic interests.

So, November 2022 will indicate whether the US national economy, manufacturing and jobs are more important than ethnic and cultural morale among the still-dominant white American constituency.

Excerpt from:

Where's the US headed in next year's crucial midterm election? - The National

Pastor column: Bring the glory back to America – Marion Star

Posted on by

Rev. J. Patrick Street| Guest Columnist

Todays culture prides itself in redefining right and wrong and what is truth. The everything-is-relative excuse justifies this mind set. The Book of Judges reveals the essence of this cultural mind-set … everyone did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).

The moral decline of America, including many in the church, does not alter Gods word and its view of right and wrong. To truly please and honor God, obedience to the Scriptures is still our only option. It has been said, As the home goes, so goes the church, and as the church goes, so goes the nation.

There are three things it will take to bring the glory back to America before it is too late. America needs families with strong foundations. Today in America we have compromised the absolute biblical authority and morality. Parents are losing their kids because we are not the examples we need to be. We want them to obey but they see us going our own way, doing our own thing. Our inconsistencies will be magnified in our kids and what we allow in moderation our kids abuse in excess. I share this because bringing back glory to America has to start with my house and your house.

America needs preachers with strong principles. The guidelines for living that are found in the Bible enable us to live lives that bring honor and glory to God. The apostle John wrote that obeying the Word of God is proof of our salvation (1 John 2:3-6; 1 John 4:6). He also says the commandments of the Lord will not be harsh to the believer, but they will delight the soul (1 John 5:3). Those who live out the teachings of the Bible will grow and be blessed.

America needs a government under Gods control. Hold on. Hang with me. If you study history and not try to revise it, there is no question that our republic was founded on biblical, Christian principles. And when we take God and biblical morality out of our nation, it begins to unravel and decline.

We have lost our foundation. Politicians talk about values but whose values?Judges keep striking down laws of common sense in favor of political correctness which protects criminals of all ranks. We have lost our moral compass. Why do you think all the immorality in America is so common place? The answer is simple because every man does what is right in his own eyes.

July 4, 1776, was born one nation under God … 245 years later it needs to be born again. I believe that God is bringing a revival to His church. Don't believe the liberal left that says because we believe in God and the Bible we should just shut up. It's because we believe in God and His word that we are compelled to stand up and speak up. The Lord is igniting the revival flames in our homes and churches that will affect America.

Rev. J. Patrick Street is the lead pastor of Redeemer Church in Marion. He can be reached at coachpatstreet@gmail.com.

Read the original:

Pastor column: Bring the glory back to America - Marion Star

Its Tough to Prove Youre a True Conservative in the Trump Era – New York Magazine

Posted on by

Savage right-wingers who are also no-exceptions Trump loyalists, like Mo Brooks, are about the only candidates safe from a primary purge on ideological grounds. Photo: Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Heading toward the 2022 midterm elections, Republican-watchers are fascinated by the aggressive role Donald Trump intends to play in GOP primaries. Aside from his plans of vengeance toward those who egregiously crossed him at some point over the past half-century, he is selectively backing candidates whom he can claim as his very own. Indeed, the former president has already endorsed ten Senate candidates, two House candidates, and five candidates for state offices (one for a 2021 election). More important, his potential endorsements have Republican candidates and proto-candidates scrambling to prove their MAGA credentials so as to head off, or at least partially neutralize, the possibility that the Boss will give the magic nod to an opponent. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is in the Ohio U.S. Senate race, during which candidates had an Apprentice-style audition with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in March, with one aspirant, J.D. Vance, subsequently launching his candidacy by apologizing for criticisms of the 45th president back in 2016.

But loyalty to Trump isnt the only essential trait for Republican candidates in a party that (in this century, at least) seems haunted by fears of heresy more than it is tempted by dreams of diversity and outreach. Trumpism has simply been added to previous conservative litmus tests. Revealingly, Herschel Walker one high-profile potential candidate for the U.S. Senate whom Trump has strongly encouraged to enter the race is alarming some conservatives in Georgia because he hasnt been ideologically vetted, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Herschel Walker will need to come back to Georgia and campaign. He will need to show that he is a conservative, Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman and 2020 Senate candidate, said on his radio show.

I have never heard Herschel Walkers position on pro-life. I havent, Collins said. Ive never heard his position on gun control. Ive never heard his position on a lot of these issues that are conservative issues.

This demand was significant because Collins himself is a MAGA stalwart, having served as Trumps chief defender on the House Judiciary Committee during the former presidents first impeachment. But he wont take Trumps word for it that Walker is ideologically kosher: The current Republican front-runner for the 2022 Senate nomination needs to publicly pledge his allegiance to culture-war causes like banning abortion and outlawing any outlawing of a single gun.

Certainly, abortion and guns represent two major issues on which any sort of heterodoxy is disqualifying for nearly all Republican candidates. The once-robust pro-choice Republican caucus in Congress is now down to two veteran senators: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. A good indication of how obligatory anti-abortion views have become was provided by recent party-switcher Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey. He had a strongly pro-choice voting record as a Democrat, but one of his first House votes as a Republican was on behalf of a failed effort to force a bill banning all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy onto the floor. Similarly, one of the vanishingly few congressional Republicans open to any kind of gun regulation, Senator Pat Toomey, is retiring next year. On both of these cultural issues, Republican opinion seems to be hardening. The ascendant conservative view on reproductive rights is now fetal personhood as a matter of federal constitutional law, rather than simply a reversal of Roe v. Wade, and a return of abortion regulation to the states. And on guns, the big conservative trend is constitutional carry, a rejection of any firearms licensing provisions, which is closely associated with the even more dangerous idea that the Second Amendment was designed to give teeth to a right to revolution against a tyrannical government.

But these are hardly the only litmus tests of true conservatism that survived or even flourished in the Trump era. Tax increases remain verboten, as evidenced by their absence from the recent bipartisan infrastructure package in the Senate. Anti-government rhetoric, an inheritance from the Goldwater-to-Reagan conservative movement that was intensified by the tea-party phenomenon of the Obama era, now has even greater power thanks to the Trumpian doctrines of a traitorous deep state and a corrupt Swamp dominating Washington. Hostility to organized labor is now universal in a party that used to more than occasionally secure union endorsements for its candidates (unless you take seriously the eccentric endorsement by Marco Rubio of an effort to organize Amazon workers or the more general revolt against woke corporations).

There are obviously some tenets of traditional conservatism that Trump has called into doubt as orthodoxy. Several are really restorations of Old Right thinking: the abandonment of free-trade principles for a return to the protectionist creed that animated Republicans from the Civil War to World War II, an America First repudiation of neoconservative commitments to alliances and interventionism, and a return to the nativism that has always been just under the surface in Republican politics. While Trumps sometimes incoherent views on these topics havent become totally obligatory for Republicans just yet, gestures in his direction probably are required. Its hard to imagine, for example, more than a smattering of Republicans vocally opposing a border wall, or calling for closer trade relations with China, or saying something nice about NATO, much less the United Nations. In international relations, Trumps determination to throw money at the Pentagon and his unremitting bellicosity have made his isolationist tendencies more acceptable to the Cold War set.

Theres one very loud new habit of Republicans that Trump has elevated from a fringe extremist preoccupation into a near-universal habit in the GOP: the attacks on political correctness, wokeness, cancel culture, and now critical race theory that present a violent antipathy to cultural changes deemed threatening to white patriarchal hegemony (or, stated more neutrally, to the Great America Trump has promised to bring back). All these phantom menaces are nicely designed to make old-school racism and sexism respectable.

All in all, its a complicated landscape that ambitious Republicans must navigate to safely rise within the Trumpified GOP. The safest are hard-core conservatives of the old school who downplay Reaganite views that are now out of fashion and who add in conspicuous personal loyalty to Trump and whatever he wants at any given moment. Examples of this formula are Ted Cruz, the members of the House Freedom Caucus, and, above all, Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Mo Brooks, who is still doing penance for endorsing Cruz in 2016, in part by personally participating in Trumps January 6 insurrectionary rally. Trump is close to the once-unlikely accomplishment of making true conservatism and Trumpism identical. The big question is whether his personal presence as a presidential candidate or a hurricane-force disrupter is necessary to seal the deal.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Here is the original post:

Its Tough to Prove Youre a True Conservative in the Trump Era - New York Magazine

The Office at 20: Why were all David Brent now – The Independent

Posted on by

What have been the all-time game-changing TV comedies? I Love Lucy in the 1950s definitely; the social realism of Till Death Us Do Part in the 1960s perhaps; and then onwards through the decades by way of the absurdist humour of Monty Python and the long character story arcs of Cheers. And then on a Monday evening early in the new millennium the 9 July 2001 to be precise a sitcom by first-time writer-directors and set in the Slough offices of fictional paper merchants arrived completely unheralded on BBC Two. The Office would go on to change TV comedy for the next 20 years.

With no laughter track and borrowing the style of the then ubiquitous docu-soap, a genre kick-started by the 1997 fly-on-the-wall series Driving School and often coming with similar blandly descriptive titles like Airport and Vets in Practice, an urban myth has grown up that there were those who initially didnt even recognise The Office as comedy.

Most of us certainly wouldnt have recognised the cast the now very well-known likes of Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook, Lucy Davies and of course Ricky Gervais, who wrote and directed The Office alongside Stephen Merchant. The title sequence featuring the drab, brutalist exteriors of Slough the roundabout, bus station and office blocks set to the wistful Mike DAbo song Handbags and Gladrags (as sung by Scottish rocker Fin Muir) also didnt offer many clues that a sitcom revolution was afoot.

The interior setting (actually an unused office at the BBCs Teddington Studios) was instantly recognisable as somewhere we might all have worked at one time or another a beige universe of trilling phones, paper being shuffled and (this being 2001) the occasional churning of a fax machine. Watching today, over a year into mass working-from-home, The Office might either induce wistful longing for a lost communal way of being or wonderment at how we ever spent our lives in such crummy environments.

The manager David Brent (Gervais) sees himself as an entertainer and all-round brilliant boss even when making grossly unsuitable remarks to receptionist Dawn (Davies); equally self-deceiving is bored sales-rep Tim (Freeman), who tells himself that this isnt his destiny as he bickers over the stapler with desk-sharing creep Gareth (Crook).

It captured that particularly modern form of the office that late-capitalist, neo-liberal mixture of ennui and anxiety, says Ben Walters, who wrote about the show in a book for the British Film Institutes TV Classics series. The double bind of being stuck in this god-awful situation that might be taken away from you at any time.

The naturalistic depiction of mundane everyday life at Wernham Hogg was helped by the absence of a laughter track but was chiefly enhanced by the then-innovative mockumentary format, the characters acknowledging the cameras with a sly glance or (in Brents case) a full-on cheesy grin. Although the mockumentary form had been around for a while, most notably in the films of Christopher This Is Spinal Tap Guest The Office was the first time many television viewers had experienced it.

The characters acknowledgement of the camera really upped the cringe factor, says Walters. When you had them looking into the lens, looking right at you, that really pulls you into the situation in a really uncomfortable way.

The Office launched the career of Mackenzie Crook, pictured here with Gervais

(BBC)

Indeed, along with Steve Coogans Alan Partridge and Garry Shandlings Larry Sanders, The Office marked the genesis of a whole new genre that came to be known as cringe comedy, and nowhere was this more cringey of course than when Brent was tying himself into knots of political correctness when faced with non-white or disabled characters. We thought it was interesting to write about the hypocrisy of people who think theyre politically correct, and the resultant awkwardness when they try too hard, as Gervais put it at the time.

Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Brent may have been what Walters calls a pathetic ogre in the tradition of Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty, but over the course of two series and a brace of Christmas specials, he went on a redemptive journey the tragic clown getting a reprieve. Importantly, there was compassion here as well as cringe. But if you were looking for the real heart of The Office, it was to be found in the romance between Tim and Dawn.

The traditional sitcom storytelling mode is circular, says Walters. By the end of the episode everyone is back where they started. But in terms of David Brents career and Tim and Dawns romance, it does develop. Indeed, Richard Curtis, whose sitcoms include Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley, has said of The Office: It got better in ways I hadnt expected that it would have proper tragic and romantic dimensions was a shock.

Office romance: Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis)

(BBC)

We intended the show to have a happy ending, but we wanted it to be moving and uplifting without being mawkish, Gervais has said, and Walters reckons the Tim-and-Dawn romance was innovative in British sitcoms. There had been these big US sitcoms Friends especially where the romantic plotting had become as important as the comedy, he says. And having the presence of the cameras being acknowledged added another layer to the office flirtation, with cameras picking up every little glance and touch on the shoulder. It upped the ante and made it more suspenseful and affecting.

With a total of just 14 episodes two more than the similarly self-truncated Fawlty Towers The Office has been far more influential than John Cleeses comedy classic. This is partly down to the huge success of the American remake, which ran for nine seasons and made a star of Steve Carrell, while four failed attempts were made at transporting Fawlty Towers to an American setting.

Arguments have raged ever since about which of the two versions of The Office is the better, a pointless dispute that Gervais deflated in a recent podcast when asked about how he felt about claims that the US version were bigger and better. F***ing rich, he responded (Gervais and Merchant were executive producers of the American remake and therefore earned a considerable payday from it).

Steve Carell leads the cast of The Office US

(NBC)

But its The Offices mockumentary approach that has proved most influential a style now so ubiquitous in both British (This Country, Pls Like, People Just Do Nothing, Twenty Twelve, Come Fly with Me and so on) and American sitcoms (Modern Family, What We Do in the Shadows, Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, etc) that David Baddiel was once driven to complain about this idiot idea that this is the only sort of sitcom we should have.

But if the likes of Miranda and Mrs Browns Boys have since clawed back some of the demand for traditional studio-audience sitcoms, the mockumentary goes from strength to meta-strength one episode of Disney+s WandaVision even being a pastiche of Modern Family and The Office.

And all this has its roots in a goatee-bearded middle manager with a talent for self-deception. If there is another reason that The Office has stood the test of time, reckons Walters, its because its chief protagonist, with half an eye on the camera and in constant need of affirmation, anticipated social-media culture. David Brent was very much an early adopter who took very seriously creating a narrative and self-image though being filmed, he says.

Here was this pathetic micro-celebrity but David Brent loved it and was all over it, and while he was not very good at it, actually that was the future and we all live in it now. To a greater or lesser degree, we all keep an eye open for where the camera is. Pathetic as he was, unfortunately these days most of us are David Brent.

See the original post:

The Office at 20: Why were all David Brent now - The Independent

Hazel Tech hosts Apple Quality Summit focused on variety and variability – The Packer

Posted on by

Chicago-based Hazel Technologies, Inc., a USDA-funded technology company delivering new solutions for fresh produce to extend shelf-life, increase sales, and fight food waste, announces its July virtual Apple Quality Summit.

A one-hour event will be held on Friday July 16th, the summit will feature keynote speakers from across the industry ahead of the 2021 North American apple season. The event will include a category trends presentation lead by Ann-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics, a Grower Perspectives Panel including Tom Facer, President of Farm Fresh First of Oakfield, NY and Roger Umlor, Owner of Umlor Orchards, exclusive apple grower for BelleHarvest Sales, of Conklin, MI and postharvest solutions discussions by Hazel Techs Enrique Garcia Perez and Mario Cervantes.

The apple category size, in addition to the dynamic pre- and post-harvest technologies Hazel Tech brings to the apple industry, are a few of the exciting reasons to highlight this innovative category at the upcoming Summit, commented Ann-Marie Roerink, Principal of 210 Analytics and Speaker at the Apple Quality Summit. Roerink will present on the latest category trends and dig into the data on variety performance across retail segments.

The learning curve never ends and there is always something new in the farming industry. At Umlor we keep up on new technologies, varieties, and farming techniques in general, but every year is different, commented Roger Umlor, Owner of Umlor Orchards. This forum is a great opportunity to share our experiences and to support the category through the exchange of new information. Umlor Orchards farms on 600 total acres, with over 340 acres dedicated to apples that are packed and stored for BelleHarvest Sales, one of the largest apple marketers in the Eastern US and the 2nd largest apple packer in Michigan.

Farm Fresh First, LLC. includes growers and managers across the United States. Specific to apples, the company has invested heavily in advancing NY state growers and markets fruit for over 100 individual growers. Our industry faces an ever-changing set of challenges. At Farm Fresh First we believe in expanding agricultural research so growers can stay ahead of these challenges, stay in operation and continue to deliver top-quality produce to consumers, commented Tom Facer, President of Farm Fresh First, LLC.

Hazel Techs ability to integrate fruit quality protection technology across the supply chain sets the company apart from other shelf-life extension products. Postharvest Scientist, Enrique Garcia Perez will present on conditioning recommendations and postharvest quality protection for popular varieties. In addition, Mario Cervantes, Senior Business Development Manager at Hazel Tech will discuss the suite of technologies developed by Hazel to meet growers diverse needs. Hazel solutions tailored for the apple category include Hazel 100 bin and box sachets ideal for early season partial application, Hazel CA quick-release 1-MCP and Hazel Datica cold storage monitoring.

Hazel Tech Quality Summits bring together experts and leaders in postharvest research, qualitative and quantitative market analytics, farming, and shelf-life extension technology to present at their crop focused virtual events. The Apple Quality Summit is a free event.

Registration is open to the general industry until July 16th or until capacity is reached.To learn more about the event and register, visit http://www.bit.ly/julyapplequalitysummit2021

Visit link:

Hazel Tech hosts Apple Quality Summit focused on variety and variability - The Packer

Everyday Habits That Add Years to Your Life, Say Experts | Eat This Not That – Eat This, Not That

Posted on by

Wouldn't you like to add years to your life? If we've learned anything from the past year and a half, it's that life is not to be taken for granted, because it can be taken from usquickly, and without remorse. Armed with that appreciation, we reached out to the world's foremost experts in life extension to ask them how to add years to your life. Read on for the top 5 ways, each of which you can add to your routine every dayand to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You Have "Long" COVID and May Not Even Know It.

There are a few ways maintaining a healthy body weight sets you up for a longer life. One is that weight gain, particularly obesity, shortens your life, and it's been proven to do so. You likely know that the excess weight, and visceral fat, can lead to a heart attack and diabetes but a new American Cancer Society report, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, measured cancer cases and deaths through 2018, and found that obesity could soon overtake smoking as the #1 cause of cancer. So what's a "healthy body weight"? Says the CDC: "If your BMI"that's body mass index"is 18.5 to 24.9, it falls within the normal or Healthy Weight range."

Even non-caffeinated beverages were found to increase the lifespan of those studied in one fairly recent report, published in JAMA Network. "Coffee drinking was inversely associated with mortality, including among those drinking 8 or more cups per day," said the researchers. Drinking coffee cuts your risk of liver problems, according to a study from this year. It's also been linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson's disease, prostate cancer and melanoma.

RELATED: Sure Signs You May Have Dementia, According to the CDC

Using sunscreen doesn't just protect you from skin cancer, but wouldn't that be enough? It also helps your face and body age less. Your skin is porous and thinthink of how easy it is to get a papercut. The sun's dangerous rays can bring on disease that may not strike till later, a hidden danger in plain sight. "Apply sunscreen 15 minutes before going outside," says Tonya Harris, award-winning environmental toxin expert and author The Slightly Greener Method: Detoxifying Your Home Is Easier, Faster, and Less Expensive Than You Think. "That's how long it can take to absorb into the skin and do its work. Also, sunscreens aren't meant to last all day and most water-resistant sunscreens only work for 40 minutes in water. Always be sure to reapply it after swimming or sweating, even with water-resistant sunscreen." Good rule of thumb: one teaspoon of sunscreen per area of the body.

RELATED: The #1 Cause of Diabetes, According to Science

Why 30 minutes per day? The Mayo Clinic and others set that benchmark and it's been proven to keep your heart happy as you elevate your blood flow, leading to decreased risk of metabolic syndrome, stroke, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes. Research published in the American Physiological Society has also shown that it leads to additional weight loss.

RELATED: The Easiest Way to Look Younger, Says Science

None of us are the platonic ideal of "happy" all the time, but if you aren't prioritizing your happiness, you are putting your life on the line. An oft-quoted study found that a "positive affect" leads to better health, while a review of 35 different studies found that "positive psychological well-being has a favorable effect on survival in both healthy and diseased populations." If you feel you just cannot achieve that happy feeling, consider discussing your situation with a therapist. And to get through this pandemic at your healthiest, don't miss these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID

Continue reading here:

Everyday Habits That Add Years to Your Life, Say Experts | Eat This Not That - Eat This, Not That

Ero Copper hits 67 metres of 9.21% copper in extension of the Pilar mine – The Northern Miner

Posted on by

Vancouver-based Ero Copper (TSX: ERO, NYSE: ERO) has provided an exploration update on its ongoing drill programs for the MCSA mining complex and the NX Gold mine, both in Brazil, with a highlight hole of 67 metres of 9.21% copper at MCSA.

The companys primary asset is a 99.6% interest in the Brazilian copper mining company, MCSA, which owns the MCSA Mining Complex in Bahia state. Copper ore is mined at MCSA from the Pilar and Vermelhos underground mines.

Deepening extension drilling within the Pilar mine has delineated a new open zone of Superpod mineralization extending over 350 metres in strike length at the deepest limits of the previously defined 2020 inferred mineral resource shell.

Recent results represent some of the best holes drilled by the company in the Cura Valley to date. Hole FC5522 intersected 67 metres grading 9.21% copper including 21 metres at 14.14% copper (the best hole on a grade-metre basis drilled by the company) located 470 metres beneath the current development of the mine. Located on the same level, approximately 100 metres south of that intercept, hole FC5523 intersected 35.2 metres grading 5.51% copper including 9 metres at 8.6% copper. Mineralization remains open to depth and along strike.

At the Vermelhos mine, new drilling continues to extend mineralization adjacent to mine infrastructure as well as to intersect new mineralized lenses up to 125 metres beneath the main orebodies.

MCSA also owns 100% of the Boa Esperana development project, an IOCG-type copper project located in Par, Brazil.

In addition, Ero Copper owns 97.6% of the NX Gold mine, an operating gold and silver mine in Mato Grosso state. The company decided late last year to extend the life of the mine.

New extensions to depth of the Santo Antonio Vein at NX Gold are highlighted by the best intercept in the history of the mine. Hole SA94A, located approximately 10 metres beyond the limit of the 2020 inferred mineral resource shell, intersected 9 metres grading 22.66 grams gold per tonne. ln addition, hole MAT20A, which intersected 2.8 metres grading 19.73 grams gold per tonne, represents the discovery of a new high-grade extension of the Matinha Vein; the new vein extension is located approximately 600 metres down-plunge from the previously defined limit of the Matinha Vein.

The current results include the regional discovery of two new mineralized gold systems, known as the Sovaco de Cobra and the Mata Verde systems, located approximately 1.2 km northeast and 25 km east-northeast of the NX Gold mine, respectively.

There are currently 24 drill rigs working throughout the Cura Valley, including six drill rigs allocated to regional exploration. Nine drill rigs are operating at NX Gold and the company now has three drill rigs operating at the Boa Esperana project.

All in all, the results from this spring drilling campaign have continued to point to the potential for mine life extension at both of the companys producing assets, Jackie Przybylowski, a mining analyst at BMO Capital Markets commented in a research note. She has an outperform rating on the company and a one-year price target of $31 per share.

At press time Ero Copper was trading at $25.05 per share within a 52-week range of $15.98 and $29.76 per share.

View post:

Ero Copper hits 67 metres of 9.21% copper in extension of the Pilar mine - The Northern Miner

The Pentagon is Preparing for China’s ICBM Double Down – The National Interest

Posted on by

The Pentagon wants to make sure it can track and take out enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles flying through space to the United States. This concern has been raised due to increasing global tension, the arrival of more low-yield tactical nuclear weapons, and the pace at which Russia and China are modernizing and expanding their respective nuclear arsenals.

The Pentagon is fast-tracking its new Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI) weapon intended to introduce a new paradigm for ICBM defense with advanced sensors able to better discern decoys and countermeasures from missiles and the possibility of firing multiple kill vehicles from a single interceptor. However, the new NGI is not slated to arrive until 2028 and the Missile Defense Agency needs to ensure that it can sustain a viable and highly effective Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) for several more decades until sufficient numbers of the NGI are available.

Therefore, as nuclear threats grow more pressing, the Pentagon is continuing a multiyear upgrade and sustainment campaign for its arsenal of GBIs now based in Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

Now were going to have real hardware because were going to remove interceptors from the ground, were going to upgrade propulsion, were going to update one-shot devices, were going to update the processors, update the threat categories, and if that makes those older missiles perform like the newer missiles, and so reliability goes up, capacity goes up when you do that, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, Director, Missile Defense Agency, told reporters according to a Pentagon transcript.

Many of the upgrades have been in the realm of computing and command and control to avoid obsolescence and ensure continued connectivity in terms of targeting, flight path and sensing. Increasing software upgrades are a way that existing hardware can be adapted to meet emerging threats and enhance performance without having to be fully reconfigured.

The big concern back when layered homeland defense was first discussed was the concern that the existing fleet would start to lose its reliability over time while we also had this timeline for next-generation interceptor off to the right, Hill said. Now we have a Service Life Extension Program and were moving out there and that will increase and give us a hardware-based data capacity to really understand reliability.

Russia continues to massively modernize its nuclear arsenal to include the addition of hypersonics as well as low-yield weapons spanning a wide range of threats and China is believed to be doubling its number of ICBMs in upcoming years.

Kris Osborn is the defense editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the ArmyAcquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters

The rest is here:

The Pentagon is Preparing for China's ICBM Double Down - The National Interest

Spending $2 trillion on new nuclear weapons is a risk to more than just your wallet – Business Insider

Posted on by

The world is witnessing a new, dangerous nuclear arms race. Tensions are rising between the Great Powers. As the US, Russia, and China rush to modernize their nuclear arsenals, the trip wire is becoming more taut by the day.

Observation and communication satellites and systems are increasingly vulnerable to attacks. All three countries are fielding stealth and hypersonic nuclear delivery systems designed to evade detection. The risks of a false alarm or a political miscalculation has always haunted the nuclear landscape, and they do even more today.

Last week, legislation was introduced in the US House of Representatives to address the misguided nuclear modernization strategy the US is currently employing and chart a safer, more cost-effective course for our modernization efforts one that is predicated on deterrence rather than dominance.

As long as nuclear weapons exist, we must have a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent. However, simultaneous modernization efforts across all three legs of the nuclear triad exceed that scope and are an unnecessarily costly and risky way to achieve our deterrence requirements.

The current US nuclear modernization strategy includes the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), the B-21 bomber, the Columbia-class submarine, the Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) air-launched cruise missile, the sea launched nuclear cruise missile, and new nuclear warheads.

The costs of these projects are extraordinary: a 2017 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report estimated that the 30-year cost of nuclear weapons spending would be $1.2 trillion ($1.7 trillion adjusted for inflation).

As the Government Accountability Office recently noted, the current plan to modernize every part of the US nuclear arsenal simultaneously is a recipe for schedule delays and cost overruns.

The ICBM leg of the triad deserves special attention. The total price tag to procure the GBSD is projected to be at least $95 billion, and up to $264 billion when accounting for total life-cycle costs. A pause in the GBSD will help defray short-term costs for the Air Force and will also defer a long-term expenditure.

Additionally, the W87-1, the warhead that is being designed for the GBSD, will cost at least $12 billion to build and is not part of the estimated GBSD procurement cost of $95 billion. To build new warhead cores for the W87-1, the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) is expanding plutonium pit production, which will cost at least another $9 billion through the late 2020s according to the Congressional Budget Office.

We do not need a new ICBM to provide a robust deterrent. The existing Minuteman III (MMIII) ICBM which the GBSD is scheduled to replace can serve until 2040 with one more life extension.

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, then-Air Force deputy chief of staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, noted in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee that we have ''one more opportunity'' to conduct life extension on the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, indicating the technical feasibility of extending the Minuteman III missile.

Other independent experts have confirmed the feasibility of a MMIII life extension. In fact, the Air Force intends to do just that. It will upgrade and extend the life of existing MMIII missiles while it is replacing others with the GBSD. The swap out plan is an admission that the life extension is possible and has already been factored into the existing plan.

Maintaining and upgrading the current Minuteman III missile is not only technically possible it is also cost-effective. According to a 2017 CBO report, it would cost $37 billion less to maintain the MMIII than developing and deploying the GBSD through 2036.

It's clear that replacing the Minuteman III for the GBSD is a wasteful and costly undertaking that is not in our national security interest. That's why we are supporting the "Investing in Commonsense Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) Act of 2021," which was introduced in the US House of Representatives last week by Congressman Garamendi.

This bill will simply pause the development of the GBSD, and the associated W87-1 nuclear warhead, and life extend the Minuteman III until 2040 something that is both technically feasible and more cost-efficient. This extension provides time for arms control negotiations and additional debate on the utility of a ground-based system, which may make this program unnecessary.

This legislation will help deescalate the modern nuclear arms race and prevent the unnecessary spending of billions of taxpayer dollars. That's why nine members of Congress joined Garamendi's "ICBM Act" as original cosponsors, and it's why 12 policy experts and arms control associations have joined us in endorsing the legislation.

The "ICBM Act" will strengthen our national security and save billions of tax-payer dollars by:

As a former US secretary of defense, governor of California, and current chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, we have an intimate understanding of this issue and the urgency with which we must address it.

We have visited the launch sites. We have met the young Air Force captains who sit in the buried bunker ready to turn the launch keys for atomic bombs capable of destroying a city three times the size of Hiroshima. It sobers the mind and underscores the need to chart a new course for our modernization strategy before we cross a line from which we cannot return.

Bill Perry is the former US secretary of defense who served under President Bill Clinton. Jerry Brown is the former governor of California and is currently the executive chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. John Garamendi is the US Representative for California's 3rd Congressional District and chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness.

Read the original post:

Spending $2 trillion on new nuclear weapons is a risk to more than just your wallet - Business Insider

Postpone Student Loan Payments Until At Least January 31, 2022, According To This List Of People – Forbes

Posted on by

President Joe Biden (Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Heres a list of who wants President Joe Biden to postpone student loan payments beyond September 30, 2021.

Heres what you need to know and what it means for your student loans.

Absent an extension, your federal student loan payments will be due again starting October 1. Your regular interest rate will also resume, and collection of any student loans in default will restart. Tens of millions student loan borrowers have received temporary student loan forbearance including a pause on federal student loan payments and no interest since March 2020. However, a chorus of student loan advocates say restarting student loan payments will hurt student loan borrowers and result in financial disaster, including student loan default. If student loans arent paused again, its possible that these 4 things could happen. Heres a partial list of who wants Biden to postpone student loans:

In June, 64 progressive members of Congress including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote a letter to Biden urging him to pause student loans and freeze student loan interest until March 31, 2021 or until the economy reaches pre-pandemic employment levels, whichever is longer. The members of Congress wrote that restarting student loan payments will hurt the economy, cause financial distress for student loan borrowers, and result in student loan default. President Biden should cancel student debt, but in the meantime he should extend the payment pause so that borrowers arent hurt, Warren said.

Sen. Pattty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), who chair the Senate and House committees on education, respectively, wrote Biden to urge him to continue student loan relief for a limited period until early 2022. Murray and Scott wrote that the Education Department needs time to conduct a necessary outreach campaign to student loan borrowers so they are aware of their upcoming obligation and provide them with sufficient time before their student loan payments are due. While the economy has begun to show promising signs of recovery, the legislators wrote, more than nine million Americans remain out of work, and the economic and health disparities created by the pandemic are severe.

According to Politico, some officials at the U.S. Department of Education have urged Biden postpone student loan payments beyond September 30. They have asked the president to pause student loan payments through January 31, 2022. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona hasnt publicly stated whether he supports extending the student loan payment pause. Were looking at it, Cardona said in May. Obviously we are going to take lead from what the data is telling us and where we are as a country with regards to the recovery of the pandemic. Its not out of the question, but at this point, [the payment pause will end] September 30. Last month, Cardona told senators on Capitol Hill that conversations were ongoing regarding the possibility of extending the payment pause, although no decision has been made.

A group of leading advocacy organizations sent a letter to Biden urging him not start student loan payments until the Biden administration fixes student loan repayment and cancels student loan debt. The 128 organization include American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), among others. Before the pandemic struck, tens of millions of borrowers struggled to navigate a badly broken student loan system, the organizations wrote. Americas student debt crisis wreaked havoc on the financial lives of families across the country, despite payment relief and debt forgiveness programs that promised that these debts would never be a life-long burden. Your administration now has a once-in-a-generation chance to repair the damage caused by policy failures at the federal and state level and decades of government mismanagement and industry abuses an opportunity and an obligation that must be fulfilled before any action is taken to resume monthly student loan payments.

Biden hasnt announced a decision whether to extend student loan relief beyond September 30. If Biden extends student loan relief, there are several options. Reasons to extend include: help student loan borrowers who are struggling financially, prevent potential student loan delinquency or student loan default, and give student loan borrowers more time to prepare for the transition to student loan repayment. According to a new survey, 90% of student loan borrowers are not ready to pay student loans again starting October 1. Reasons not to extend are primarily related to cost and the economic recovery. Opponents to extending student loan relief say that student loan borrowers will have had 18 months of no student loan payments and received more than $90 billion of student loan cancellation. Biden could extend student loan relief beyond September 30, but theres one major dilemma. One one hand, the Biden administration says the economy is strong and recovering. However, on the other, if 40 million student loan borrowers suddenly need more time to pay student loans due to financial struggle, it sends a mixed message. Moreover, the federal government is ending enhanced unemployment benefits and the eviction moratorium, two other essential financial relief efforts. Opponents also ask if these two programs are ending, why the Biden administration would extend student loan relief.

Remember that even if student loan forbearance is extended, its only temporary. There will come a time when you have to pay your student loans and your regular interest rate will resume. Dont wait for student loan payments to resume to take control of your student loan debt. Consider these student loan repayment options to start saving money:

See the original post here:

Postpone Student Loan Payments Until At Least January 31, 2022, According To This List Of People - Forbes