House may nullify millions of votes to get back at states that disqualified Trump: GOP congressman

Stephan: 

I have been wondering how the MAGAt christofascist plan to respond to Maine, Colorado, and possibly other states, taking criminal Trump off their state ballots. Here’s a statement from MAGAt Kentucky Representative Thomas Massive proposing one response. If there is a third state that takes Trump off their ballot, in my opinion this is going to become a major crisis. What the SUpreme Court may do is let the D.C. Appeals Court make the decision so the Supremes don’t have to take a public position.

U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie speaking with attendees at the 2018 Young Americans for Liberty National Convention at the Sheraton Reston Hotel in Reston, Virginia. Credit: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons

On Friday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) issued a veiled threat to states considering the disqualification of former President Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot.

“Maine, Colorado, and other states that might try to bureaucratically deny ballot access to any Republican nominee should remember the US House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether to certify electors from those states,” Massie wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Massie’s threat seems to suggest that any state that excludes Trump from its respective ballot could face severe consequences, including having their state’s chosen Electoral College representatives potentially excluded from the final electoral vote count. Hypothetically, this could mean that if the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) upholds the Colorado supreme court’s disqualification of the former president, the Centennial State’s 10 Electoral College members may not be certified by the full House of Representatives — […]

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Spirituality Among Americans

Stephan: 

Americans are leaving affiliation with organized religion but, and I consider this very good news, they are increasingly recognizing nonlocal consciousness and that all living beings have a measure of consciousness. This is central to seeing all consciousness as interconnected and interdependent and that we exist in a matrix of consciousness. This has nothing to with religion in the sense various religions conceive of consciousness. The good news is that this emerging view will. make it possible for the American culture to recognize that fostering wellbeing at every level is the key to creating a new culture that recognizes the matrix and demands that social policies reflect the matrix. It is also important that science is beginning to recognize that consciousness is causal and fundamental, and that this will help this cultural change to occur.

In recent decades, Americans have become less likely to identify with an organized religion. Yet a new Pew Research Center survey shows that belief in spirits or a spiritual realm beyond this world is widespread, even among those who don’t consider themselves religious. The survey finds that: 

  • 83% of all U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.
  • 81% say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.
  • 74% say there are some things that science cannot possibly explain.
  • 45% say they have had a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world.
  • 38% say they have had a strong feeling that someone who has passed away was communicating with them from beyond this world.
  • 30% say they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force.

Overall, 70% of U.S. adults can be considered “spiritual” in some way, because they think of themselves as spiritual people or say spirituality is very important in their lives.

These are among the […]

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Poll: Discrimination against Asian Americans is rampant but ignored

Stephan: 

White nationalism is having a serious impact on the Asian community, as this Pew Research Center study reveals. White nationalism, I see, as a form of mental illness afflicting mostly, but not entirely, low education, low IQ Whites who see other races as a threat to their wellbeing. They think they are being replaced, but when you ask them what that means, they just babble MAGAt fantasies. Fear not rational thought dominates their thinking. And their response is often violence.

Asian Americans continue to face widespread discrimination, which is exacerbated by fears that the broader public doesn’t particularly care, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

Why it matters: Asian Americans are among the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the country. But Asian Americans have historically been “invisible” in society, Norman Chen, CEO of The Asian American Foundation, a national nonprofit with offices in New York and San Francisco, told Axios,

By the numbers: In the largest survey of its kind, Pew asked more than 7,000 adults of Asian descent about their experiences with racism and discrimination in the U.S.

  • 57% say discrimination is a major problem. And an even bigger majority — 63% — say the issues they face receive “too little attention.”

Context: The U.S. government treated immigrants from Asia as a kind of “unassimilable” outsider, Karthick Ramakrishnan, a University of California Riverside professor, previously told Axios’ Niala Boodhoo.

  • It’s no surprise, then, that 78% of Asian adults in the Pew study say they’ve been treated as a foreigner in some way, even if they were born in the U.S.

What […]

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The link between climate change and a spate of rare disease outbreaks in 2023

Stephan: 

I told you this was going to happen and now it has. Covid is far from the last pandemic. Because we are not taking climate change seriously enough viruses and pathogens are going to spread and mutate to accommodate their changed environments. A lot of people are going to die as a result. Here is the first report I have seen that spells this out.

A 16-month-old boy was playing in a splash pad at a country club in Little Rock, Arkansas, this summer when water containing a very rare and deadly brain-eating amoeba went up his nose. He died a few days later in the hospital. The toddler wasn’t the first person in the United States to contract the freshwater amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, this year. In February, a man in Florida died after rinsing his sinuses with unboiled water — the first Naegleria fowleri-linked death to occur in winter in the U.S. 

2023 was also an active year for Vibrio vulnificus, a type of flesh-eating bacteria. There were 11 deaths connected to the bacteria in Florida, three deaths in North Carolina, and another three deaths in New York and Connecticut. Then there was the first-ever locally transmitted case of mosquito-borne dengue fever in Southern California in October, followed by another case a couple of weeks later. 

Scientists have warned that climate change would […]

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Media Confidence in U.S. Matches 2016 Record Low

Stephan: 

Americans have very little trust in the corporate media, and even less in the Congress and Supreme Court. I take this as signs of a dying society, caused by greed, corruption, and lack of ethics. The only thing that is going to change this is how we vote in November. It has to be for Democrats. Not because they are anything close to perfect but because we are a two party system and the Republicans no longer support democracy. Since he cannot possibly win a majority a vote for a third party candidate, such as RFK, Jr. is actually a vote for Trump. I hope my readers understand that.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016. Although trust in media currently matches the historical low, it was statistically similar in 2021 (36%) and 2022 (34%).

Another 29% of U.S. adults have “not very much” trust, while a record-high 39% register “none at all.” This nearly four in 10 Americans who completely lack confidence in the media is the highest on record by one percentage point. It is 12 points higher than the 2016 reading, which came amid sharp criticism of the media from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump — making the current assessment of the media the grimmest in Gallup’s history. In 2016, U.S. adults were most likely to say they had “not very much” trust (41%).

The latest poll, conducted Sept. 1-23, marks just the second time, along with last year, that the share of Americans who have no confidence at all in the media has surpassed […]

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