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Macron, Trudeau Say They Weren't Going to Tell Trump Where G-7 After Party Was |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 10 June 2018 13:39 |
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Borowitz writes: "Saying that they were 'tremendously relieved' that Donald J. Trump is leaving the G-7 summit early, the leaders of France and Canada said on Friday that they had been planning not to tell Trump the location of the G-7 after party."
Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau. (photo: Eliot Blondet/Sipa/AP)
Macron, Trudeau Say They Weren't Going to Tell Trump Where G-7 After Party Was
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
10 June 18
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 aying that they were “tremendously relieved” that Donald J. Trump is leaving the G-7 summit early, the leaders of France and Canada said on Friday that they had been planning not to tell Trump the location of the G-7 after party.
Speaking to reporters, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau said that there had been “total consensus” among non-U.S. participants to withhold information about the time, place, and existence of an after party from Trump.
“The plan was, if Trump asked about an after party, we were going to be, like, ‘Ask Angela Merkel,’ ” Macron said. “Angela was going to totally stonewall him.”
Merkel confirmed that she had planned to tell Trump that she “didn’t think anyone was planning to do anything” after the summit and steadfastly to deny “hearing anything” about an after party.
“I would have had no problem lying to him, despite our two countries going way back, to D-Day or whenever,” Merkel said, rolling her eyes.
Trudeau said that the after party will proceed as scheduled when the G-7 concludes, on Saturday, adding, “Now that Trump is out of here, we’ll really have something to celebrate.”
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God's EPA Administrator |
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Sunday, 10 June 2018 13:33 |
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Palmer writes: "Environmentalism and American evangelicals are like oil and water. Joel Hunter was one of a small number of high-profile leaders who worked, over decades, to try to mix the two."
Scott Pruitt. (photo: AP)
God's EPA Administrator
By Brian Palmer, Slate
10 June 18
Did the politics and history of evangelical Christianity create Scott Pruitt?
 n 2007, the Rev. Joel Hunter formed a creation care team at his Northland evangelical megachurch in central Florida. “Creation care” describes a movement within the U.S. Christian community to better steward God’s creation, aka the Earth—it is, in short, environmentalism for the faithful. Many embraced Hunter’s initiative. Many did not.
“What are you doing? Are you going liberal on us?” Hunter remembers some of his congregants complaining.
Ten years later, Hunter left Northland. His gentle push toward environmental responsibility wasn’t the only factor in his departure—Hunter also urged his congregation to consider its views on racism, gun violence, and homophobia, especially in light of the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed 49 people not far from the church’s campus. But his environmentalist nudge certainly contributed to the overall perception that Hunter no longer held the same views as his congregants.
Environmentalism and American evangelicals are like oil and water. Joel Hunter was one of a small number of high-profile leaders who worked, over decades, to try to mix the two. The effort has yielded minimal results: Just 20 percent of committed Christians consider themselves active participants in the environmental movement—a number that has barely moved for a quarter-century and represents less than half the proportion of environmentalists in the general population. The proportion of Christians who prioritize environmental concerns over energy production has dropped by about 20 percentage points in the last 25 years. And indications are that the more ardently Christian an American becomes, the less he or she cares about the environment. Evangelicals are the least environmentally inclined of committed U.S. Christians.
This is the biggest obstacle to the American environmental movement. About one-quarter of Americans are evangelical Christians. They also appear to turn out to vote at higher rates than other religious groups, so they wield considerable political power. Then there is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently headed by an evangelical, the now-infamous Scott Pruitt. His antics have turned him into a laughingstock for his self-dealing, science denial, and cartoonish lack of concern for environmental protection, the mission of the agency he runs. He’s unscrupulous, hypocritical, and dishonest—a walking caricature of the Trump era. He spent $1,560 on fancy fountain pens. And then there’s the bizarre hand lotion scandal.
But outside of the mainstream media and the coastal cities, Pruitt has supporters who like him so much that they’re willing to ignore his petty scandals and Napoleon complex. They like him because he thinks like them: He puts people before the environment, just like God does.
Pruitt has been polishing his evangelical bona fides for years, building a bulwark of unwavering Christian support. In 2003, as an Oklahoma state senator, he championed a bill to insert a disclaimer into school textbooks noting that evolution is just a theory. He has been photographed at religious gatherings making the face evangelicals make when they’re feeling the spirit of God wash over them. He attends Bible study with Ralph Drollinger, pastor to the Republican political elite. Pruitt’s evangelical firewall likely helps to keep him in office. And Pruitt’s evangelical faith almost certainly informs what he does with the office.
Before delving any further into the issue, I should acknowledge that I’m completely secular. I wouldn’t even call myself an atheist, because I don’t spend enough time thinking about God to have an opinion. The evangelical mind is foreign to me, which may be part of why I find this so fascinating. To me, as an outsider, it seems natural that a person of faith would want to keep God’s creation as pristine as possible. And yet that does not seem to be the case.
The conventional explanation is that this is simply due to an alignment of interests: American Protestants have cast their lot with the Republican Party, and since the business arm of the GOP opposes environmental regulation, Christians have gone along. This is Joel Hunter’s point of view. “People are so politicized that they take what is meant to be a practical and spiritual principle of caring for the gift of creation, and they park it in some sort of leftist political agenda,” Hunter laments.
The politicization is clearly a large factor here, and Hunter isn’t the only one to have been chased out of his church because of it—Richard Cizik, the former vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, walked basically the same path as Hunter. He spoke up about a cocktail of “leftist” political issues, including environmentalism, and was abruptly forced out.
But there’s something that bothers me about the simplicity and convenience of explaining this all by the transitive logic of evangelicals are Republicans, Republicans hate environmental regulation, so evangelicals hate environmental regulation. It suggests that Christians are willing to cast off their moral obligations for political convenience. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe they don’t feel a moral obligation to protect Earth in the first place.
It’s useful to look back to the dawn of the modern environmental movement, which began in the late 1960s, a time of terrible environmental degradation. American cities were choking in smog thick enough to obscure buildings on the same block, toxic waste flowed out of exposed drainpipes, and rivers were catching fire. The Republican Party of the 1960s wasn’t ideologically opposed to environmental regulation. Richard Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency. Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey co-chaired the first Earth Day. But even then, American Christians were leery of the environmental movement. Why?
Historian Lynn White Jr. offered a theory that remains explosive today: Christianity is inherently anti-environmental. He pointed out that many pre-Christian religions worshipped the natural world, and Christianity defined itself partially in opposition to that worldview. Writing in 1967 in Science, White argued, “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. … By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”
White’s bombshell has reverberated through the decades. Scholars still write entire books about it. And it came up in most of the interviews I conducted with academics and pastors.
“Christianity has been competing for market share against nature-venerating pagan groups from its inception, and that continues today,” says Lucas Johnston, a Wake Forest University professor who studies evangelicals and the environmental movement. “The Christians who rejected the environmental consciousness in the 1960s and ’70s perceived a dangerous, nature-venerating, pagan-esque religious sentiment.”
Although his theory has an off-putting whiff of anti-Christian bias, White was onto something. Browse the aggressive anti-environmentalist writing in Christianity today, and you’ll hear echoes of anti-animism.
Read the Cornwall Declaration, for example, a statement signed in 2000 by a collection of Christian leaders opposed to what they perceived to be a runaway environmental crusade. It’s sort of the Constitution of Christian anti-environmentalism. “We deny that forests and trees, mountains and rocks, oceans and lakes and streams, and animals are persons,” the declaration states. Without the context of Christianity’s anti-animist past, that statement seems wholly unnecessary.
Hunter, though, doesn’t buy any of this. “The animism idea means nothing to an average person,” he says. “That’s a theologically esoteric approach. No one I know thinks or talks about it.”
I talked to a series of evangelical Christians, none of whom agreed to be named. Many are obviously uncomfortable with the leftness of environmentalism—one of them told me that conservationists aren’t really “our people.” And while none of my “evangelical on the street” interviews revealed an explicit aversion to animism, there was an inchoate sense that aggressive environmentalism was somehow ungodly.
“What’s animism?” a New York evangelical asked when I probed him about White’s theory. After I told him it was the idea that animals and plants have spirits, he shrugged it off as an irrelevance. But he still added, “People are more important than animals or trees.” It was as if he had intuited White’s theory without knowing the fancy academic jargon.
Calvin Beisner, the primary author of the Cornwall Declaration, wrote to me in an email, “Plenty of environmentalists … have a pretty derogatory view of human beings. That results in phrases like ‘people pollution,’ ‘population bomb,’ or, as Rockefeller Foundation spokesman Merton Lambert put it in 1962, ‘The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man.’ I think a little differently. People aren’t pollution, they’re the solution.”
It’s so hard to tease apart the politics, the theology, and the simple indifference. Just as I spend very little time thinking about God, many Christians spend very little time thinking about the environment—so little time that maybe even they don’t understand the sources of their instincts.
“It is just not something that is discussed too often in the average Evangelical church,” says Hannah James, a Ph.D. candidate who studies these issues with Johnston. “It’s not vocally denounced, nor actively rejected, but it’s just not a concern or even on most churches’ theological radars.”
This is the challenge facing environmentalists. A large number of evangelicals, arguably the most powerful voting bloc in America, barely ever think about the environment. And when they do, the framework they’re working through suggests that they might be committing a venial sin by putting trees above people.
Thirty-seven years ago, in a discussion of conservation, Interior Secretary James G. Watt mused to Congress, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” You can draw a straight line backward from Scott Pruitt’s scripture-based support for oil exploration, through Watt’s wait-for-Jesus stewardship philosophy, to evangelical ambivalence for the environmental movement of the early 1970s. And if Lynn White Jr. is correct, you can keep drawing that line backward 2,000 years.
In other words, Scott Pruitt isn’t an anomaly. He’s carrying forth a tradition.
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FOCUS: This Is What It Feels Like to Be Black in White Spaces |
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Sunday, 10 June 2018 11:46 |
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Anderson writes: "Almost every black person in America has experienced the sting of disrespect on the basis of being black. A large but undetermined number of black people feel acutely disrespected in their everyday lives, discrimination they see as both subtle and explicit."
Black voters go to the polls in the 2008 presidential election. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
This Is What It Feels Like to Be Black in White Spaces
By Elijah Anderson, Guardian UK
10 June 18
Black people experience discrimination every day – it’s knowledge inaccessible to white people and, when confronted with it, most are incredulous
 lmost every black person in America has experienced the sting of disrespect on the basis of being black. A large but undetermined number of black people feel acutely disrespected in their everyday lives, discrimination they see as both subtle and explicit. Black folk know everyday racism – that becomes powerfully underscored by highly publicized racial incidents like the incident at Starbucks, the recent spate of police killings of black men, or the calling of police on a black female student while napping in a common area of a Yale dormitory.
In the face of these realities, black people everywhere take note and manage themselves in a largely white-dominated society, learning and sharing the peculiar rules of a white-dominated society in which expressions of white racism are becoming increasingly explicit.
While American society purports to be open and egalitarian, or “equal opportunity”, such everyday outcomes leave black people deeply doubtful. Moreover, black people are generally convinced that they must work twice as hard to get half as far in life.
Among their own, black people affirm and reaffirm these central lessons and, out of a sense of duty, try to pass them along to others they care about, and especially to their children.
For black people, experience holds a dear school, and the knowledge they acquire is based largely on the experience of living while black in a society that is dominated by white people.
Therefore, this cultural knowledge is most often inaccessible to white people, and when confronted with it, most white people are incredulous.
The historical context
When US supreme court chief justice Roger Taney declared in 1857 that black people had no rights that white people were bound to respect, he was observing the social reality of his day. Slavery effectively established black people at the bottom of the American racial order, a position that allowed every white person to feel superior to any black person.
After Emancipation, as black people migrated to cities in the north and south, their stigma both followed and preceded them. When black people settled in their new communities, their reception was decidedly mixed, but as their numbers grew, local white people worked to contain them. Over time, the lowly position of black people became institutionalized, and passed from racist generation to racist generation.
Thus, black people usually were relegated to the least desirable sections of a city, often “across the tracks” from the white communities, or in the “black sections” of town, the precursor to the iconic black ghetto.
As black people operate in these segregated spaces, they can “be themselves”, away from the direct control of white people. Yet, there is still a general sense that white people and their agents ultimately control the ghetto’s racial reality, notably the financial, legal and criminal-justice systems.
While American society is often ideologically characterized as privileging equal opportunity, the everyday reality of the masses of black people is that of being peculiarly subordinate in almost every way, but this is especially true when they venture into essentially white spaces.
Navigating the white space
Following the civil rights movement, a “racial incorporation” process of the 1970s and 1980s was established, and along with “fair housing”, school integration, and “affirmative action, it benefited many black people . Many of these people have joined the larger American middle class, and they and their children have become increasingly assimilated. But this assimilation is essentially into what they know and perceive as white space, which they often navigate haltingly, and essentially alone.
Yet, large numbers of black people continue to reside in segregated neighborhoods, and their children attend largely segregated schools. When venturing outside their local neighborhoods, particularly into spaces that are overwhelmingly white, they are often surveilled, and at times questioned, harassed, or occasionally arrested by the police – all for essentially “living while black”.
In navigating these white spaces, they may feel themselves to be tokens, as symbolic representatives of the urban black ghetto. When encountering a white person in this setting, they tend to assume that person is likely to be racially insensitive, if not openly prejudiced, and before giving the person full trust, they hesitate.
In the thinking of many black people, it is a highly unusual or even rare to encounter white people who do not share a negative opinion of them and their kind. At the same time, they know and believe there are non-racist white people; they know that such white people exist and may refer to them as “decent” or “good” white people. Here, black people at times see a class divide – they tend to be biased in favor of the well-off white people, those they guess are less likely express prejudice toward black people.
When navigating the white space, black people are typically on the hunt for this type of person, thinking that such people might be supportive and friendly or serve them as allies in their struggles, are likely to understand, or at least are not so likely to exhibit the kind of racial animus against them which they strongly associate with most other white people.
For black people navigating white space, such allies are critically important, since black folk know there are in fact white people who absolutely hate them but don’t say so to their faces. In fact, a major problem for black people is to figure out which white persons are decent and trustworthy and which ones are covertly racist; they worry about misplacing their trust, as they commonly experience “let downs” and racial setbacks.
Because of these challenges, many black people are suspicious of white spaces and hesitate to invest in relationships with white people they find there. Finding such relations too problematic, they tend to disengage with white people both in public and in private, keeping such relations somewhat superficial.
Given the rigid distinctions between black and white people, black people know very little about how white people actually live, and vice versa.
In fact, profound borders between ordinary white people and ordinary black people have always existed in this country. Since black and white people have lived apart for centuries, their coming together in a cosmopolitan urban society is often a major challenge, and it presents many issues for black people as they move about. Black people tread lightly and exit from stressful situations as soon as they can.
In the white space, white people and others often stigmatize anonymous black persons by associating them with the putative danger, crime and poverty of the iconic ghetto, typically leaving black people with much to prove before being able to establish trusting relations with them. Accordingly, the most easily tolerated black person in the white space is often one who is “in his place”– that is, one who is working as a janitor or a service person or one who has been vouched for by white people in good standing. Such a person may be believed to be less likely to disturb the implicit racial order – white people as dominant and black people as subordinate.
Strikingly, a black person’s deficit of credibility – a function of history of white supremacy, but also their more recent association with the iconic ghetto – may be minimized or tentatively overcome by a performance, a negotiation, or what some black people derisively refer to as a “dance”, through which individual black people may be required to show that the ghetto stereotypes do not apply to them; in effect, they perform to be accepted. This performance can be as deliberate as dressing well and speaking in an educated way or as simple as producing an ID or a driver’s license in situations in which this would never be demanded of white people.
The nod
As black people move about the white space, often the first thing they note is the number of black people present. The presence of familiar faces, or simply other black faces, brings a measure of comfort.
Being generally outnumbered by white people, black people feel a peculiar vulnerability, and they assume that other black people understand the challenges of this space in ways that white people cannot. Since the white space can turn hostile at any moment, the implicit promise of support black people sense from other black people serves as a defense, and it is part of the reason that black people acknowledge one another in this space, with the racial nod – an informal greeting serving as a trigger that activates black solidarity in this space.
First, the strangers’ eyes meet. If both “pass inspection”, mutual nods likely follow, communicating, “I see you.” Those who project negative images of the iconic ghetto will be ignored. This differentiation reflects how today’s black ghetto differs from the ghetto under the rule of Jim Crow. Then the ghetto included upper-class, middle-class and working-class people, as well as the poor. Excluded from white neighborhoods, all black people lived there, as a caste apart from white society. While desperately poor black people resided in that community, it also included well-educated professional people, supportive social structures, and a strong focus on propriety and decency.
Today, black people inhabit all levels of the American class and occupational structure. They attend the best schools, pursue the professions of their choosing, and occupy various positions of power, privilege and prestige. But for the ascendant black upper middle class, in the shadows lurks the specter of the urban ghetto. The iconic ghetto is always in the background, shaping Americans’ conception of the anonymous black person as well as the circumstances of black people in all walks of life.
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I Don't Need to 'Understand' Anyone Who Still Supports This President |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 10 June 2018 08:15 |
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Pierce writes: "The New York Times had a story on Friday that should’ve brought shame and derision upon anyone who voted for the racist monster in the White House, and upon the racist monster that the other racist monster installed at the head of the Department of Justice."
Supporters of Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
I Don't Need to 'Understand' Anyone Who Still Supports This President
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
10 June 18
What his administration* is doing to these migrant children is a national disgrace.
 he New York Times had a story on Friday that should’ve brought shame and derision upon anyone who voted for the racist monster in the White House, and upon the racist monster that the other racist monster installed at the head of the Department of Justice. The United States government is now committing human rights atrocities within its own borders and against the most vulnerable people it can find. I don’t need to “understand,” much less take seriously, anyone who still supports this president* and his administration* because, if you do, you’ve taken the idea of America and run battery acid through its veins.
An American government escort handed over the 5-year-old child, identified on his travel documents as José, to the American woman whose family was entrusted with caring for him. He refused to take her hand. He did not cry. He was silent on the ride “home.” The first few nights, he cried himself to sleep. Then it turned into “just moaning and moaning,” said Janice, his foster mother. He recently slept through the night for the first time, though he still insists on tucking the family pictures under his pillow.
José’s separation from his father is part of the Trump administration’s latest and most widely debated border enforcement policy. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally, a directive that is already leading to the breakup of hundreds of migrant families and channeling children into shelters and foster homes across the country.
Does it get worse? Trick question.
Among other children recently fostered by Bethany families is an 18-month-old girl separated from her father, who has been detained. The child cries frequently, especially when she changes settings, such as leaving her foster family’s home to attend a doctor’s appointment.
Dona Abbott, Bethany’s refugee program director, said that these newly separated children frequently have nightmares, anxiety and stomachaches. A 3-year-old boy taken from his mother at the border was inconsolable during his flight to Michigan and cried incessantly on arrival at his new home last month, she said. He recently has begun to bond with his foster mother, from whom he is now reluctant to be apart. “He seems fearful of losing yet another attachment,” Ms. Abbott said.
What in the hell are we doing calling ourselves civilized, let alone a free nation?
The one thing that animated him was discussing his “photos,” as he called the family drawings. He introduced “mi familia,” pointing to the figures of his parents, brother and younger sister. Staring intensely at the sketch of his father, with a slight mustache and a cap, he repeated his name out loud again and again. It was “just me and him” on the trip from Honduras, he told Janice one night as he lay in bed shuffling the pictures, taking turns looking at one and then the other.
“He holds onto the two pictures for dear life,” Janice said, through tears. “It’s heart-wrenching.”… When sirens pierced the quiet of the night last week, José’s eyes widened with fear. “La violencia, la violencia,” he said. The family assured him that it was not violence; it was fire trucks.
Fire trucks. Jesus. Janice, the foster mother in the story, is practically the only person in it with whom I’m happy to share a planet.
“It’s incredibly conflicting for me as a parent to watch this little boy begin to just have fun and experience joy in simple pleasures,” Janice said. “His dad doesn’t get to see him being joyful. It’s as if these moments with his son have been stolen from him. I am no substitute.”
For sure, the boy’s family always seems to be on his mind.
At bedtime one night last week, he announced: “I am going with my papa on Saturday.”
To which Janice responded, “You know, mi amor, I don’t think it will be Saturday. First we have to get more information about where your dad is so that we can call him, and then we’ll see.”
He listened, and then asked her to remain in the room. “I don’t want to be alone,” he said.
So, thanks to this president* and his 63 million enablers, and his acolytes in the media, and all the people who didn’t care enough to stop him in 2016, and all the people who don’t care enough to stop him now, we have our own American variations on the Tuam babies and the Magdalene Laundries.
Children are being punished, cruelly and mindlessly, for the perceived sins of their parents and, because we are a secular republic, it is not being done in the name of God but, rather, on the behalf of everybody in this country. That does not make this better. Not by a longshot.
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very minute, every single day, the equivalent of a truckload of plastic enters our oceans. In the name of profit and convenience, corporations are literally choking our planet with a substance that does not just “go away” when we toss it into a bin. Since the 1950s, some 8.3bn tons of plastic have been produced worldwide, and to date, only 9% of that has been recycled. Our oceans bear the brunt of our plastics epidemic – up to 12.7m tons of plastic end up in them every year.
