My last post reference generational attributes and biases. Now as a person of African-American/Afro-Bermudian heritage born in the mid-1950s, I’m lumped into a Boomer generational definition that has absolutely no relevance to the Black experience of the Jim Crow world of my childhood.
I love some music, food, motorcycles, cars and guitars of the 1950s and 60s, but those were NOT “Happy Days” for me or any other Black families throughout the US. Nothing I’ve ever read or heard about “Boomers” is relatable.
Adam Conover asks Jean Twenge, “Do Generations Exist?” | Factually! Podcast
Are Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers truly distinct groups or just convenient labels? With millions of individuals in each category, it’s hard to imagine they all share common experiences. Together with renowned psychologist Jean Twenge, Adam unravels the conventional notions of generations, exploring when these labels can be helpful and when they might miss the mark.
Find Jean’s book at factually.com/books
Effectiveness and safety of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in real-world studies: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Qiao Liu, Chenyuan Qin, Min Liu & Jue Liu
Published: November 14, 2021
With 5,571 reports accessible via just this single aggregated authoritative institution, the National Library of Medicine, no reasonable person would consider this statement hyperbole.
Whether driven by fear or dishonesty, the problem is that people are not being reasonable. Search results on “covid vaccine efficacy” here. #SARS-CoV-2, #Vaccine, #Effectiveness, #Safety, #Meta-analysis
Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this groundbreaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change.
Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is incapable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform.
In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.
The Majority Report’s Emma Vigeland hosts Matt Huber, professor of Geography at Syracuse University, to discuss the book.
U.N. Warns: “The Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived” | Democracy Now!
July is on pace to be the hottest month ever recorded, and the impact of the soaring temperatures is being felt across the globe in massive heat waves, wildfires, flooding and more. On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the world has entered the “era of global boiling,” and President Joe Biden gave a major speech to unveil new measures to combat the crisis but resisted calls to declare a climate emergency.
David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for The New York Times and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, says the world is not moving quickly enough to phase out fossil fuels, and even some of the progress that has been made is easily erased by massive wildfires like those burning in Canada right now.
We also speak with Dharna Noor, fossil fuels and climate reporter at The Guardian US who wrote an exposé on “Project 2025,” a right-wing plan to dismantle environmental policies and many regulatory protections if a Republican takes the White House in the next election. She calls the document’s drafters “a who’s who of the far right.”
As the planet gets hotter, more people use air conditioners to keep cool. Running these takes lots of energy, which means emissions that then further speed up global warming. Rethinking our architecture and using more efficient cooling technologies could help us break this vicious circle. #ClimateAdaptive#DistrictCooling#DistrictHeating#MicroGrid#PermacultureCooling#IntentionalCommunity
What is the RISKIEST Region in the US as the Climate Changes? | PBS Terra
Climate Change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters all around the world. And in the United States, more and more people seem to be moving to the places that are projected to be most impacted by climate change, from hazards such as flooding, wildfire, storms, drought and extreme heat, and leaving the most climate-resilient areas. At first glance, this seems like a bizarre and paradoxical trend. So, for this episode of Weathered, we decided to see if we could get to the bottom of it.
We spoke to experts and sifted through lots of data about moving trends and shifting climate patterns to figure out what’s really going on here and what you can do to avoid moving into harm’s way. Weathered is a show hosted by weather expert Maiya May and produced by Balance Media that helps explain the most common natural disasters, what causes them, how they’re changing, and what we can do to prepare.
I’m 66 years old and have always stood by Black Women personally and politically, despite the fact the majority, including Black women of the FIC, do not accept me as a woman, nor acknowledge that I carry the same burdens of discrimination and violence. The passive-aggressive ostracization by the women of the FIC BIPOC Fund speaks volumes.
Kimberlé Crenshaw on Black Women Killed by Police & DeSantis’s Pro-Slavery Curriculum | Democracy Now!
We speak with acclaimed scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about her new book #SayHerName_, which honors the stories of 177 Black women and girls killed by police between 1975 and 2022 whose deaths received little media coverage or other attention.
“We can’t give these women back to their families, but we can make sure that they are not lost to history,” Crenshaw tells Democracy Now! She also discusses the ongoing right-wing “attack on Black knowledge,” such as Florida’s new education curriculum that claims slavery had “personal benefit” for enslaved people, as well as the recent death of civil rights scholar Charles Ogletree.
Billionaires and multi-millionaires love to pat themselves on the back for their charitable giving. But what if we just taxed the rich and regulated their business practices instead of letting them get away with theft and atrocity while still getting to pad their reputation by giving away the millions of dollars they stole from their laborers?
When Social Control Masquerades as Social Justice | WHAT IS POLITICS?
When ideas and movements that threaten to overturn established hierarchies of power are absorbed into elite institutions like Ivy League universities and for-profit corporations, they get transformed into ideas that support the status quo, while remaining cloaked in the language and symbols of radicalism and egalitarianism.
The replacement of the word “equality” by the word “equity” in the worlds of academia, NGOs, activism, and corporate HR departments, is an example of the attempts by elite people and institutions to transform historical movements for racial and gender equality, into ideas that promote the interest of elites – in particular, economic inequality and the division of the working classes.
In this episode, we explore how forms of oppression based on cultural factors like skin colour or gender or religion, etc, can only be understood and effectively combatted by understanding them in the context of economic exploitation and economic competition which is what the human propensity to discriminate evolved for in the first place.
A higher seat at the table of an unjust system,
diversity among the ruling class,
is not progress, it is a bribe!
― Muirén Ní Sídach
Reach me muiren@m3it.app, @muiren@sfba.social, Discord, LinkedIn
How Liberal Comedians Became Lap Dogs for Establishment Power w/Lee Camp | The Chris Hedges Report
The fusion of politics, news, and entertainment has given prominence to comics like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Bill Maher, who serve as attack dogs for the Democratic Party, which has joined forces with the establishment wing of the old Republican Party against Donald Trump and his supporters.
By belittling Trump and his followers, these comics feed the smug, self-righteousness of the ruling establishment, bolstering their sense of moral and intellectual superiority. All the while, they remain comfortably constrained by the corporations and advertisers that employ them. They function as court jesters, never questioning the right of the rulers to rule, or the terrible social injustices built into a rigged system.
They serve as attack dogs for establishment power, directing their comedic barbs at critics of the system, even if these critics come from the left. Comedian and political commentator Lee Camp joins The Chris Hedges Report discussing the transformation of comedy from an art form rooted in the counterculture to one that has largely become a megaphone for power.
Lee Camp is a comedian, political commentator, and former head writer and host of the national TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America. He’s a former contributor to The Onion, former staff humor writer for HuffPost, and his web series “Moment of Clarity” has been viewed by millions. Camp has toured the country and the world with his fierce brand of standup comedy, and George Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, credited him as one of the few comics keeping her father’s torch lit. His website is https://LeeCamp.com
On this episode of the Grassroots Economic Organizing podcast, Mike Leung talks with Josh Davis about a paradox in how start-up losses are handled in worker cooperatives.
Unschooling: Why Parents Remove Their Kids From School
A growing number of parents believe in unschooling — the process of learning through life, outside classrooms. Similar to homeschooling it usually happens at home or within the community. But while homeschooling usually follows a formal curriculum, unschooling doesn’t. So how does it work, and why do parents advocate for it?
Sociocracy: Manifesto for Wholesome Cooperation | Grassroots Economic Organizing
The Sociocracy for All Co-op Circle, writes about why they believe sociocracy is especially suited to cooperatives, how it embodies the 7 cooperative principles, and why they think that sociocracy has the potential to act as the “operating system of the new economy.”
The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy by Jon Shelton | The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
“The Education Myth” challenges the prevailing notion that education is the primary avenue to economic opportunity in America. Author Jon Shelton, associate professor and chair of Democracy & Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, explores the historical shift in the perception of education’s role in society, revealing that its connection to economic well-being was not always inevitable.
While early public education aimed to foster democratic participation, the mid-20th century saw the rise of the education myth, stifling social democratic alternatives and sidelining notions of economic security and social dignity for all.
Shelton tracks the transformation from the 1960s onward, as both Democrats and Republicans, including figures like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, perpetuated this myth, leading to an unequal economy and a deeply divided political landscape over the past four decades. Link to the book at Cornell University Press
When millions of French protesters shut down their country over the president’s decision to raise the retirement age, U.S. commentators said it could never happen here. But why?
To find out why, we went back through decades of U.S. and French history. We took a look at the different narratives we tell ourselves about strikes and the different laws protecting the right to collective action in the United States and Europe.
