#Vermont Public Interest Research Group

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is very concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on “Big Oil” alone in what will likely be a grueling legal fight. But he acknowledged that he understands something has to be done to address the toll of climate change.

“I understand the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways,” Scott, a moderate Republican in the largely blue state of Vermont, wrote in a letter to lawmakers.

The popular governor who recently announced that he’s running for reelection to a fifth two-year term, has been at odds with the Democrat-controlled Legislature, which he has called out of balance. He was expected by environmental advocates to veto the bill but then allowed it to be enacted. Scott wrote to lawmakers that he was comforted that the Agency of Natural Resources is required to report back to the Legislature on the feasibility of the effort.

Last July’s flooding from torrential rains inundated Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier, the nearby city Barre, some southern Vermont communities and ripped through homes and washed away roads around the rural state. Some saw it as the state’s worst natural disaster since a 1927 flood that killed dozens of people and caused widespread destruction. It took months for businesses — from restaurants to shops — to rebuild, losing out on their summer and even fall seasons. Several have just recently reopened while scores of homeowners were left with flood-ravaged homes heading into the cold season.

Under the legislation, the Vermont state treasurer, in consultation with the Agency of Natural Resources, would provide a report by Jan. 15, 2026, on the total cost to Vermonters and the state from the emission of greenhouse gases from Jan. 1, 1995, to Dec. 31, 2024. The assessment would look at the effects on public health, natural resources, agriculture, economic development, housing and other areas. The state would use federal data to determine the amount of covered greenhouse gas emissions attributed to a fossil fuel company.

It’s a polluter-pays model affecting companies engaged in the trade or business of extracting fossil fuel or refining crude oil attributable to more than 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions during the time period. The funds could be used by the state for such things as upgrading stormwater drainage systems; upgrading roads, bridges and railroads; relocating, elevating or retrofitting sewage treatment plants; and making energy efficient weatherization upgrades to public and private buildings. It’s modeled after the federal Superfund pollution cleanup program.

“For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption without being required to do a thing to put out the fire,” Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said in a statement. “Finally, maybe for the first time anywhere, Vermont is going to hold the companies most responsible for climate-driven floods, fires and heat waves financially accountable for a fair share of the damages they’ve caused.”

Maryland, Massachusetts and New York are considering similar measures.

The American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, has said it’s extremely concerned the legislation “retroactively imposes costs and liability on prior activities that were legal, violates equal protection and due process rights by holding companies responsible for the actions of society at large; and is preempted by federal law.”

“This punitive new fee represents yet another step in a coordinated campaign to undermine America’s energy advantage and the economic and national security benefits it provides,” spokesman Scott Lauermann said in a statement Friday.

Vermont lawmakers know the state will face legal challenges, but the governor worries about the costs and what it means for other states if Vermont fails.

State Rep. Martin LaLonde, a Democrat and an attorney, believes Vermont has a solid legal case. Legislators worked closely with many legal scholars in crafting the bill, he said in statement.

“Most importantly, the stakes are too high – and the costs too steep for Vermonters – to release corporations that caused the mess from their obligation to help clean it up,” he said.

[allthegeopolitics]

It's high time the companies most responsible for climate change pay for the damage it causes, says environmental advocate Ben Edgerly Walsh. Walsh is the climate and energy program director with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. The non-profit environmental and consumer advocacy group has been pushing for legislation to force fossil fuel companies to shoulder some of the costs dealing with climate change. On Thursday, the group achieved its goal when Vermont became the first state to enact such a law. "The reality is they are the ones responsible for the pollution that caused the climate crisis. They've made an enormous amount of money on the product that caused that pollution. And they very clearly knew what they were doing," Walsh told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "We think it's only fair that they pay their fair share of the costs."

Continue Reading.

[michiganprelawland]

The Right-to-Repair Debate in Congress

By Taylor Trenta, Calvin University Class of 2025

August 18, 2023

Throughout 2023, there has been an uptick in attention granted to the concept of right-to-repair, especially with technology and auto parts. In 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York signed the Digital Fair Repair Act, then saying New York was the “first state in the nation to guarantee the right to repair.” Many states followed, leading to attention throughout 2023. [1] Throughout the summer, a panel of experts made the case to dismantle right-to-repair restrictions on a Congressional level. [2] The group argues that consumers should have access to cheaper and more accessible part replacements and services, rather than only the original manufacturers. [2]

According to Nathan Proctor, a campaign director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, TV and radio repair shops have been replaced in a push towards replacements and repairs from the manufacturer. He said: “We've been pushed into this... How did we wake up in a world where changing a battery was too dangerous to do? They benefit from us not having that power.” [1] While this is becoming a more prevalent problem, powerful technology producers have led to this for decades. For instance, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act expanded protections for code in the growing market of software embedded products. [1] Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s intellectual property panel, said during the July hearing: “Let there be no doubt that the right to repair the product that you have purchased is a fundamental principle... and individuals and businesses should not under any circumstances have any doubt as to where the bright lines are in their rights.” [2] One key roadblock in accessing data for necessary repairs is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; this prevents consumers from working around technological safeguards due to their copyright. The intention was to prevent piracy. However, this prevents users from accessing some aspects of repair manuals, which some say reaches beyond the scope of the law. [2]

In March, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel worked with 28 other attorneys general to call upon the 118th Congress to pass Right-to-Repair legislation; in this movement, the coalition targeted automobiles, agriculture equipment, and electronic equipment. [3] With this, the purpose is also to keep small businesses competitive against closed systems that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) favor. [3] Nessel stated: “The monopoly on repairs hurts consumers...Original Equipment Manufacturers restrict competition for repair services by limiting the availability of parts, making diagnostic software unavailable, or using adhesives that make parts difficult to replace, all of which can result in higher product and repair prices. I stand with my colleagues in asking Congress to pass Right-to-Repair legislation that not only protects consumers, but protects the laborers and farmers who help build and feed our nation.” [3] The letter sent in by this group included attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. [3] The group also encouraged Congress to consider three major pieces of proposed legislation that received support, but were never passed: The Fair Repair Act, the SMART Act, and the REPAIR Act. [3]

From the University of Michigan, Professor Aaron Perzanowski testified on the concept of right-to-repair before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. [4] In regard to Section 1201, Perzanowski stated, “Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it practically impossible for consumers to exercise their lawful right to repair a wide range of devices, from tractors to home electronics, even though the copyright office says those activities are non-infringing.” [2] With his testimony, he emphasized the gravity of the situation: “The right to repair is a longstanding principle, reflected in both personal property and IP law. Without it, the fundamental notion of ownership—of our cars, our communications devices, our home appliances—is under threat. Safeguarding that right to repair is a complex legal problem that has no single solution. Beyond IP law, it presents questions of antitrust, consumer protection, and contract law, among others. Nonetheless, by addressing the ways in which IP law interferes with rights of Americans to fix the things they buy, Congress is positioned to help maintain and restore this core right of property owners.” [4]

During the same July 18th House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, most shared the perspective of Perzanowski. However, Devlin Hartline from the Hudson Institute’s Forum for Intellectual Property said: “The right-to-repair movement isn’t based on a preexisting right; it’s instead asking lawmakers to create a new right at the expense of the existing rights of IP owners.” [5] Even those who support the right-to-repair movement noted some concerns over safety; in the food and auto industries, Perzanowski said this type of Intellectual Property law is not always the right way to go. However, these risks of flawed production are present even with the original manufacturer. [5]

With this increase in attention, other members of Congress have looked to introduce legislation against other barriers. One bill looks to shorten the enforcement period for patents on some auto parts. Another bill proposed by Neal Dunn in February also hopes to prevent auto manufacturers from hiding data that would enable replacement parts to be manufactured. [2] While this issue is not yet resolved, the debate over the right-to-repair will likely continue to gain momentum throughout the country.

______________________________________________________________

Taylor Trenta is a pre-law student at Calvin University, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is currently studying history and economics as an Honors Scholars student.

______________________________________________________________

[1] Clark, Peter Allen. (January 23, 2023). “Flood of “right to repair��� bills signals DIY watershed.” Axios. AxiosFlood of "right to repair" bills signals watershed moment for movementThe “Right to Repair” movement championing owners' freedom to fix everything from smartphones to tractors is set for a landmark new year,....Jan 23, 2023.

[2] Weiss, Benjamin S. (July 18, 2023). “Congress takes on ‘right to repair’ consumer reforms.” Courthouse News. Courthouse News ServiceCongress takes on 'right to repair' consumer reformsLawmakers want federal copyright law amended so that third parties can access the parts and data necessary to repair cars, electronics and....4 weeks ago.

[3] Michigan Gov. (March 28, 2023). “AG Nessel Joins Coalition Urging Congress to Pass Right-To-Repair Legislation.” Michigan Gov. https://www.michigan.gov/ag/news/press-releases/2023/03/28/ag-nessel-joins-coalition-urging-congress-to-pass-right-to-repair-legislation.

[4] Needham, Bob. (August 7, 2023). “Perzanowski Testifies at Congressional Subcommittee on Right to Repair.” Michigan Law.

https://michigan.law.umich.edu/news/perzanowski-testifies-congressional-subcommittee-right-repair.

[5] McDermott, Eileen. (July 18, 2023). “House IP Subcommittee Mulls Copyright and Design Patent Revisions Amid Right-to-Repair Debate.” IP Watchdog.

[sciencespies]

Bee lawns generate national buzz

https://sciencespies.com/biology/bee-lawns-generate-national-buzz/

Bee lawns generate national buzz

Credit: Lilla Frerichs/public domain

Bees are excellent dancers. When a forager bee alights upon an Eden of pollen and nectar, it goes home to tell its hive mates. The greater the intensity of the dance, the richer the source of food being indicated.

In Minnesota, more bees are going to be dancing intensely this spring.

Researchers have found that homeowners who seed their lawns with a special grass mix can feed dozens of species of bees that would otherwise go hungry. So, beginning this spring, Minnesota will pay thousands of residents to plant “bee lawns” under a new state program that has attracted attention from other states. Each homeowner will get as much as $350 to do the work.

“A lot of people are watching this,” said Marla Spivak, the University of Minnesota entomologist who came up with the idea for bee lawns, a mix of traditional lawn grass and low-growing flowers.

The stakes are high: More than 1 in 3 bites of food taken in the United States depends on bees and other pollinators. But bee populations have been declining at unusually high rates in recent years.

According to the most recent data from the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit based in College Park, Md., nearly 38% of managed honey bee colonies in the United States were lost in the winter of 2018-2019. This represents an increase of 7 percentage points above the previous year, and the highest loss recorded since the survey began in 2006.

Minnesota lawmakers last year put $900,000 toward the grant program and this year are weighing a bill to double that amount. Already 10 states have expressed interest in the program, including two states—Wisconsin and Washington—with legislative and agency proposals underway.

But critics say there isn’t enough evidence to justify spending so much.

“Minnesota is already the third- or fourth-highest-taxed state in the nation,” Republican state Sen. Mark Johnson told Stateline. Johnson has co-sponsored legislation that would cut funding for the program by close to $100,000. “What is the return on investment here? We’ve not seen evidence to say this is making an impact on bees.”

Nevertheless, Minnesota policymakers say they have heard from officials in Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Virginia who are interested in bee lawn grants.

At least 28 states have enacted pollinator health laws in recent years, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Legislation generally addresses habitat protection, research, pesticides, beekeeping and public awareness.

Nationwide, honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Minnesota alone sold nearly $14 million of honey in 2018, according to the USDA.

“Pollinators sound like they’re cute, but they’re really fundamental—unless you don’t want to eat,” said state Sen. Jim Abeler, a Republican who co-sponsored the bee lawn bill in the Minnesota Senate last year.

Some states took aim at pesticides after bees vanished in droves because of colony collapse disorder—the disappearance of the majority of worker bees in a colony with a few dead bees left behind. But chemical companies and the farming industry have fought chemical regulations. They say pesticides are safe and reject findings that pesticides are responsible for bee population loss.

In Minnesota, for example, then-Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton’s task force to protect pollinators, which met from 2016 to 2018, got logjammed every time it brought up pesticides, Spivak said. “But everyone could agree on increasing habitat for bees,” she said.

And habitat loss—not pesticides—is the No. 1 cause of bee deaths, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Other factors, such as climate change, also play a role.

In Wisconsin, Democratic state Rep. Melissa Sargent was inspired by her teenage son to propose a bee lawn measure. Bailey Sargent, 19, brought his mother’s attention to the issue two years ago, as he planted bee lawns across Dane County, Wisconsin, for his Eagle Scout project.

“Pollinators are one of the biggest things we can be working on,” the lawmaker said.

Her bill would set aside $500,000 in grants to homeowners and local governments to plant bee lawns. The Wisconsin Legislative Council, which provides legislative analysis for state lawmakers, is expected to study the bill this summer, and Sargent plans to introduce it during the next legislative session.

In Washington state, creating a bee lawn program like the one in Minnesota will be a high priority recommendation of the state’s pollinator health task force, according to Katie Buckley, a coordinator at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. The working group is set to give lawmakers its recommendations in November.

In addition, the Evergreen State is retooling its Department of Fish and Wildlife backyard wildlife habitat program to focus on bee habitat and include patios and porches, according to Taylor Cotten, a conservation manager at the agency. The agency does not currently know how many of the habitat program’s 7,000 certified members provide habitat for bees.

Minnesota last year named an official state bee: The Rusty patched bumblebee, which has been decimated, declining by 87% nationwide in the past 20 years, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency in 2017 declared the bee an endangered species.

Minnesota’s bee lawn program will be paid for with lottery revenue. More than 4,000 residents applied for the grants, far more than would be able to receive funding under the current program.

Between 300 and 400 residents will receive the $350 grants this month, said John Bly, director of education at the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Metro Blooms, a state partner that helps administer the program. Recipients can be reimbursed for hiring a contractor or for buying do-it-yourself project materials, Bly said.

Metro Blooms installed its mix of fine fescue turfgrass, self-heal, Dutch white clover and creeping thyme at 15 residences, or more than 3,000 square feet of bee lawns, according to James Wolfin, sustainable land care manager, adding that bee lawns attract more than 60 species of bees, compared with zero for regular turfgrass.

Minnesota Native Landscapes, in Otsego, sold about 160 lawns’ worth of seed mix last year, up from 40 in 2018, according to sales manager Josh Rosinger, adding that he expects to increase sales again this year.

Organic Bob, in Minneapolis, did 15 bee lawn seedings and installations for residents in the Twin Cities area last year, according to Katie Allen, the sales manager. Organic Bob will install bee lawns of about 1,000 square feet for the grant amount, $350, but it will charge more for larger lawns, say $1,500 for a lawn of 6,000 square feet.

“It wasn’t meant to be a boon to the landscaping industry,” said Abeler, the senator who co-sponsored the bee lawn legislation. “Minnesota is a state of do-it-yourselfers. We don’t need to be giving money to people to bring in a lawn service, unless they’re seniors, for heaven’s sake.”

Before expanding the program, Abeler said, he wants to see how the program goes, making sure he doesn’t hear from constituents saying that they’re getting bilked by landscapers over it.

Minnesota state Rep. Kelly Morrison, of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, says the volume of applicants speaks to the popularity of the program and its likely success in boosting bee populations.

Morrison proposes to double the funding for the bee lawns program this year in a bill she introduced last month.

“Restoring habitat for honey bees and our native pollinators is one of the most important conservation concerns of our lifetime,” said Elsa Gallagher, a biologist at the Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund, a nonprofit that has planted 82 larger-scale projects in Minnesota. Some are residential, but all are larger than a typical bee lawn.

“Bees don’t care what the land is called,” said Clint Otto, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey stationed at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in North Dakota, adding that bee lawns do need to be cared for.

“Managed properly, high-diversity mixes routinely generate more bee visits, and are aesthetically pleasing,” Otto said.

Bee lawns debuted at four parks in Minneapolis last year, and scientists such as Hannah Ramer and Kristen Nelson at the University of Minnesota surveyed park visitors for their reactions and published their findings in a 2019 article in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

Only 1% of children and 3% of adults in the United States are allergic to bee stings. But Ramer and Nelson found that more than half of visitors to Minneapolis parks with bee lawns last year said they were worried about bee stings. Still, visitors overwhelmingly (more than 95%) approved of the bee lawns.

“Bees are aggressive when defending their hive; not when out foraging on flowers,” said Washington state’s Buckley, adding that it once took her and her fellow researchers half an hour of harassing a bee to get it to sting one of them.

Scientists found in a 2015 article in the Journal of Asthma and Allergy that bees sting only “as a defensive maneuver,” unlike wasps.

Other Minneapolis respondents objected to the look of bee lawns, with one saying they “could look trashy.” Buckley disagrees. “Personally, I happen to like flowers and think they’re pretty,” she said.

In the legislature, according to the lead sponsor of the Minnesota bee lawns bill, state Rep. Rick Hansen of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, opponents mocked bees as unimportant and unworthy of spending. But Hansen said he was confident bee lawns would expand in Minnesota and around the country.

“We have more people who support the bill,” Hansen said, “and we will prevail.”

Explore further

Backyard gardeners can act to help bee populations

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#Biology

[nasa]

People of OSIRIS-REx

As OSIRIS-REx closes in on its target destination—asteroid Bennu—anticipation is building for the first-ever, close-up glimpse of this small world. It took thousands of people to come this far. Get to know a few members of the team:

1. Carl Hergenrother, Astronomy Working Group Lead & Strategic and Tactical Scientist

Job Location: University of Arizona, Tucson Expertise: Asteroids & Comets Time on mission: Since before there was a mission Age: 45 Hometown: Oakland, New Jersey

“When you’re observing Bennu with a telescope, you see it as a dot. … So when it actually becomes its own little world, it’s really exciting—and almost a little sad. Up until that point, it can be anything. And now, there it is and that’s it.”

2. Heather Roper, Graphic Designer

Job Location: University of Arizona, Tucson Job Title: Graphic Designer Expertise: Visual Communications Time on mission: 5 years Age: 25 Hometown: Tucson, Arizona

“I really like the challenge of visually depicting the science of the mission and getting to show people things that we can’t see.”

3. Jason Dworkin, Project Scientist

Job Location: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland Expertise: Origin-of-life Chemistry Time on mission: Since before there was a mission Age: 49 Hometown: Houston, Texas

"In 10th grade, I had to do a science fair project for biology class. … I wanted to expand on chemistry experiments from old journal papers; but that could have been dangerous. I got in touch with … a pioneering scientist in origin-of-life research and asked for advice. He was worried that I would accidentally injure myself, so he invited me into his lab . . . that helped set my career.”

4. Sara Balram Knutson, Science Operations Lead Engineer

Job Location: University of Arizona, Tucson Expertise: Aerospace Engineering Time on mission: 6 years Age: 31 Hometown: Vacaville, California

“My dad was in the Air Force, so I grew up being a bit of an airplane nerd. When I was in high school, I really liked math, science, and anything having to do with flight. I looked for a field where I could combine all those interests and I found aerospace engineering.”

5. Nancy Neal Jones, Public Affairs Lead

Job Location: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland Expertise: Science Communications Time on mission: 7 years Age: 51 Hometown: New York, New York

“We’re going to a pristine asteroid to take a sample to bring to Earth. This means that my children and grandchildren, if they decide to go into the sciences, may have an opportunity analyze the Bennu samples.”

6. Javier Cerna, Communications System Engineer

Job Location: Lockheed Martin Corporation, Littleton, Colorado Expertise: Electrical Engineering Time on mission: Since before there was a mission Age: 37 Hometown: Born in Mexico City, and raised in Los Angeles, and Las Cruces, New Mexico

“One thing we do is evaluate how strong the signal from the spacecraft is—kind of like checking the strength of the WiFi connection. Basically, we’re ensuring that the link from the spacecraft to the ground, and vice versa, stays strong.”

7. Jamie Moore, Contamination Control Engineer

Job Location: Lockheed Martin Corporation, Littleton, Colorado Expertise: Chemistry Time on mission: 5 years Age: 32 Hometown: Apple Valley, Minnesota & Orlando, Florida

“I was there for just about every deployment of the sampling hardware to make sure it was kept clean and to evaluate the tools engineers were using. I even went to Florida with the spacecraft to make sure it stayed clean until launch.”

8. Mike Moreau, Flight Dynamics System Manager

Job Location: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; Littleton, Colorado Expertise: Mechanical and aerospace engineering Time on mission: 5 years Age: 47 Hometown: Swanton, Vermont

“I grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont, which is a world away from working for NASA. But I can trace a lot of my success as an engineer and a leader back to things that I learned on my dad’s farm.”

9. Johnna L. McDaniel, Contamination Control Specialist

Job Location: NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida Expertise: Anti-Contamination Cleaning Time on Mission: 4 months Age: 53 Hometown: Cocoa, Florida

“The clothing requirements depend on the payload. With OSIRIS-Rex, we could not wear any items made with nylon. This was because they have amino acid-based polymers in them and would have contaminated the spacecraft. I even had a special bucket for mopping.”

10. Annie Hasten, Senior Financial Analyst

Job Location: Lockheed Martin Corporation, Steamboat Springs, Colorado Expertise: Business Time on Mission: 1.5 years Age: 30 Hometown: Littleton, Colorado

“I think it’s a pleasure to work with people who are so intensely passionate about their jobs. These engineers are doing their dream jobs, so you feed off of that positive energy.”

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

[johnheintz]

Winners and Losers in the Coronavirus Stimulus

I have a group chat I share with three friends. We are old friends with wildly different life paths. I’m a teacher, lawyer, writer in Chicago, and Jim in an entrepreneur in Chicago.  Steve is a hospital administrator in New York. Pete is a scientist in Vermont. 

Early in January, Pete heard the news of this new virus from a Wuhan, China, wet market. Pete researches disease and drugs for a living, and since he’s talking with friends, he occasionally lets himself be wrong for dramatic effect. 

Coronavirus was big. His posts were dramatic, and when the rest of us teased him, he pushed back, explaining how “we’re screwed.” Over the next month, Pete would be proven entirely correct. By mid-March no one on earth hadn’t heard of Covid-19 and its cause, the novel coronavirus. Even Congress was listening. 

Two disasters loomed. The millions likely to die would only be outweighed by the total failure of the global economy that could impoverish the world in a way never seen in modern times. No reasonable person disagreed with either disaster. 

For the first time in a decade, Democrats and Republicans in Congress started talking. The health crisis required instantaneous action mostly already within the statutory authority of the Executive branch. The economic crisis needed legislative action. People needed to stop moving around and spreading the virus, and it had to happen immediately. This meant no one who couldn’t work from home could work at all. No work meant no money. No money meant no food and no home. People with no money in the bank, which meant most Americans, needed money immediately or they would go to work and spread the virus because they would have no other choice. 

I need to defend Congress here. The President dithered, but the Majority and Minority leaders in the House and Senate moved quickly to act. 

Quick action reveals instincts. When you’re in a crisis, you respond using the reasoning capacities you’ve built up prior to the crisis. When in the crisis itself, you react. Congress reacted, and the subsequent bill tells us a lot about the default positions of the Democratic and Republican parties. 

What is the Act?

It’s called the CARES Act, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. You’ve already heard it’s $2 trillion. The government is spending money, so that’s why it’s being called a “stimulus.” There are good reasons not to call it a stimulus, since governments take stimulus actions to encourage economic growth. This bill is doing the opposite. It’s encouraging people to stop economic activity, or at least to stop economic activity that is not essential. The goal of the bill? ”Freezing the economy in amber“ or ”putting the economy into an induced coma” are two metaphors explaining the goal of the stimulus, but for those of us who live in a partisan world, a world where government is either spending or not spending money, this is massive government spending that can comfortably be called a stimulus.   

Who are the winners?

There are three big winners in the bill. Individuals get 30% of the stimulus. Big corporations get 25%. And small business, state and local governments and public services share the remaining 45%. Democrats insisted on the direct payments and the unemployment increases, and Republicans insisted on saving big businesses, especially the airlines. 

The remaining 45% breaks down with 19% for small businesses, 17% for state and local governments and 9% for public services, mostly hospitals.  

It’s already clear the next bill will help states and local governments. Lobbying is happening at a furious, socially distant pace, but state and local governments cannot run deficits like the federal government. That is, states and localities cannot simply print money, like the The feds will have to provide them support or the downstream effects will create an economic tsunami as great as the coming federal one.   

It may seem like Congress acted quickly, but plenty of horse trading went into the preparation of this bill. Only the cruelest free marketeers can stand up and say government should stay out of this crisis. Those people exist, and they seem to want a certain number of dead bodies before they act. Luckily, enough Americans understand the gravity of the crisis and drown out partisan drum beating in the name of saving our loved ones’ lives. 

Who are the losers?

The worst losers are people on fixed incomes and future debt payers, like today’s college and younger kids. No matter what the feds call it, the US is taking on debt. Since Donald Trump arrived in office, the debt went up $3 trillion bringing the pre-coronavirus stimulus to $23.5 trillion or $70,000 for every person living in the US. Now that debt will be $25.5 trillion. Future generations have to pay. 

A quick side note, this stimulus is a necessary and good kind of debt. As Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff has said, "The whole point of not relying on debt excessively in normal times is precisely to be able to use debt massively and without hesitation in situations like this." Borrowing costs money, but saving lives at this scale is worth it. 

The primary losers, then, are future generations. But that’s a generic reality for government debt. The primary losers that could have been named in this bill but weren’t are more interesting. 

Small businesses are definitely losers. Unlike the checks written to individuals, small businesses has strings attached to most of the money in the stimulus. Small businesses are asking right now whether they are able to keep everyone on their payroll, which is the stated purpose of the stimulus loans. The primary question is whether, if they are already heavily leveraged, they will be able to take on this additional debt. The stimulus provides that any small business that keeps paying its workers will receive forgivable loans, but small businesses aren’t sure how or if that will really work. Small businesses face this uncertainty despite the desire of Congress to pass a decisive bill that would remove uncertainty in the economy. Why? 

At least a sectional of the Democratic Party does not like business. They are still reeling from the Great Recession when, according to the left, bailouts should have gone to individual homeowners and not big banks. Democrats make little distinction between big business and small business. Terms like “profiteers” and “capitalists” don’t allow for subtle distinctions like separating Boeing from your corner mom and pop coffeeshop. Blue Chip Republicans don’t care about small companies much either. They want to ensure companies already running and already providing big products and big services to big quantities of people keep running. That’s why the second biggest winner of the stimulus are large corporations. 

Small business is a blend of Democrat and Republican, so when the crisis arrived and wish lists were created, small business took a back seat to the Democrats’ individual payments and the Republicans’ corporate payments. 

Losers in the stimulus are the environment, education, youth, poor, infrastructure and essential workers. 

Carbon offsets and clean energy incentives like solar, wind and nuclear never made it into the bill. The impact of climate change like mass migrations, regional armed conflicts, ecosystems failed and lives lost will make this pandemic’s worst death toll estimates of 2-5% of those infected truly seem like the seasonal flu. 

Education got money in the stimulus, but it’s not what you think. States run education, not the feds, and federal involvement in education is, compared to the big money spent by states and local governments, miniscule. Schools that are keeping staff won’t be doing it for long. Tax revenues will be small as the effects of shelter-in-place kick in. Schools will be the hardest hit since in most states schools are the largest recipient of state and local revenue that will disappear. Schools will likely hold onto all their workers, even if they know they’ll have to borrow to pay them. States and local governments assume federal help is coming, and Speaker Pelosi has already said the next legislation will help state and local governments, which is code for schools and other less expensive essential services like police and fire. But it’s notable that education didn’t make it into the first stimulus bill. It signals, however slightly, that neither the Dems nor the Republicans care to prop up the existing school system exactly the way it exists today. 

Youth are a big loser in the stimulus. College kids dependent on their parents will not get a check, which should draw the attention of college kids who are going to join the workforce in what’s shaping out to be another Great Recession. Bigger is the future bill youth will have to pay for the excesses of this generation. 

Are you under 30? If so, consider that you will live in a world your parents and grandparents created that benefitted them enormously but that you will never enjoy. China will be the world’s biggest economy soon, and just as the US set the rules when it was the biggest economy, you can be sure China will set the rules when it’s number one. You will be working in a smaller economy and paying bills your parents ran up today based on poor planning. 

Another loser in the stimulus is the poor. Cataloging the ways the stimulus fails the poor require too much space, so let’s focus on the big, obvious ways. First, poverty means people are less likely to file taxes, which means they won’t get a check. Second, poverty means jobs are more precarious, low wage workers were the first to be let go, and they will be the first to run through the additional unemployment benefits in the stimulus, if they can get through to their state’s unemployment agency before they are evicted, have the internet turned off at home or don’t have time to file because they are homeschooling their children since the schools are closed. If the poor have jobs, they will likely need to go and have fewer protections to avoid catching the virus. Mobile phone location data is already coming out showing poor neighborhoods are staying-at-home far less than wealthier areas. But most of all, the stimulus targets the economy as a whole. The American economy as a whole never did much for the poor. They still don’t have quality health care or any health care. They still have worse schools. They still have worse food. This stimulus improves nothing for the poor. 

Buzz in Washington is that another $2 trillion bill for infrastructure is being negotiated. If the feds want to inject a big stimulus in the economy, it should have passed that infrastructure bill in the first bill. We have all heard the list of infrastructure needs, but each is essential. First, the US needs national broadband. Second, the US needs a web of connected transportation options, from transit and air to railways, roads, and waterways, as a means to reduce congestion, protect the environment, and stimulate economic development. Third, the US needs a massive workforce development program to transform workers for the digital economy. Fourth, the US needs to up its funding of Pre-K-12 and higher education to ensure every child is ready for the new economy. Fifth, the US needs a far better public safety program including offering federal leadership for technical assistance that helps all levels of government develop evidence-based community policing programs that build trust, improve community relations and reduce racial tensions and crime rates. 

Essential workers were losers in this stimulus bill, too. The stimulus provides big money for Covid-19 responses that should include making sure essential workers are well protected and well paid. Other countries like the UK and Germany have provided additional benefits to essential workers, identifying them by name and marshaling national resources to ensure they have protective gear and abundant equipment. The stimulus echoes the current US response. It’s vague and indirect. Chicago where I live keeps sending emergency  notifications to all cell phones even while almost every health care worker I know on the front line is telling me they want to quit. Spain is the worst example of endangered essential workers. Garbage bags, old shirts and duct tape do not provide the kind of protection they need, and the US isn’t doing much better. 

Why should we care?

Crises come suddenly, and they reveal core priorities and levels of preparedness. How prepared the US was for this crisis will be readily apparent in the next 6-12 months. What core priorities the US holds is already apparent. We should care about the apparent core priorities of our elected leaders because, if they don’t match our priorities, they need to be held accountable at election time. 

That Republicans support big business and the Democrats support individual workers is no surprise. This is the first crisis felt by all Americans with such far reaching effects. Being optimistic, let’s say a vaccine is developed quickly and life returns quickly to close to its pre-pandemic rhythm. No one will ever forget that when a crisis hit, government was called on to solve it. No matter whether you have a righty Republican’s healthy mistrust of government or a lefty Democrat’s exuberant trust of government, responding to catastrophes is what governments need to be prepared to do. To the extent we are not prepared, it’s time to make a mental note for the future.  

We need to care about the winners and losers of the first stimulus for two major reasons. First, the first time a big bill is passed, it sets the cap on what will be passed in future legislation. The stimulus was the bigest gun Congress could fire in defense of the US. Future legislation could go bigger, but if the infection rate doesn’t decline, and if a vaccine isn’t discovered quickly, the gun wasn’t big enough. Once the infection rate declines a bit, we can expect more politics, more friction, slower decision-making and less powerful effects from the next rounds of legislation.  

Second, when in crisis and you have to negotiate, you resort to your biggest wants. We need to work to ensure the environment, education, youth, poor, infrastructure and essential workers are front of mind, as we continue responding to this crisis and for the next one.  

 The macroeconomic effects of this global shock will almost certainly be felt for decades. China’s claim of a V-shaped recovery seems overblown for China, so the odds of that happening in the US are slim. A big drop is rarely followed by an equally big increase. Make a gun with your left hand. A gun-shaped recovery seems more optimistically realistic. The thumb is the drop, and the pointer finger is the recovery. In other words,  return to normalcy will likely come slowly as winners build their strength and losers lose even more. 

Pete my friend’s worst fear seems right now to be untrue. It’s still early days understanding this virus, but if it mutates, come back annually in winter or never leaves and keeps mutating, the harm to lives and economies will return annually as well. The Spanish Flu came back a second time and killed more people in the second wave than the first. Right now, rumblings from scientists are that this virus isn’t mutating. If it’s not, that means that once there is a vaccine, it will stop the virus completely and allow us to rebuild our economies before they impoverish too many people. 

The question we should be asking ourselves in the moments we can see beyond the immediate crisis is this. Are we happy with the winners and losers Congress chose to create with the largest economic stimulus bill in the history of the world? 

John Heintz is based in Chicago.

[margotryan]

hey cuties!!! my name is fiona and i’m here and i’m EXCITED!!!! this is margot (but her CLOSE friends call her marley) , and i apologize ahead of time. she’s hard to unpack, but she’s a whole lotta fun!! give this post a like if you want to plot!! i have some wc’s listed on my blog, but TBH i prefer brainstorming sometimes??? depends on the muses! but without further adieux, here she is!

CISFEMALE — ever hear people say MARGOT RYAN looks a lot like KENDALL JENNER? I think SHE is about TWENTY-TWO, so it doesn’t really work. The BARTENDER has lived in Livingstone for TWENTY-TWO. They can be +PASSIONATE, but they can also be -VOLATILE. I think MARLEY might be A SHEEP. ( f. 19. est. she/her. )

BASICS

full name: MARGOT JEAN MARTIN

nicknames: MAR, MARLEY ( given to her by her friends after watching marley and me)

age: 22

dob: feb 3, 1997.

zodiac: aquarius.

occupation: bartender/instagram model.

THE PAST

mar was born and raised in livingstone, vermont to an extremely successful lawyer couple. 

the ryans work out of new york city mostly, so growing up marley grew bonds with her babysitters, nannies, teachers instead of her parents

BUT they work there because they’re celebrity lawyers, getting paid a pretty penny for representing high profile criminals, as well as your everyday tabloid actress/musician/you name it. 

her whole life, her parents bragged about how their only daughter (unless someone wants a siblings plot?? im down!) would follow in their footsteps eventually

despite how some people might react after growing up in this lifestyle, marley always had a deep love and respect for her parents and their goal-oriented view of things. so, despite being more of a creative and having no real desire to fulfill her parents’ wishes for her career, growing up she would just smile and nod along at whatever they said

TW MURDER: in her freshman year of high school, she began growing popularity. (this is also when she met her boyfriend, kieran.) her parents were representing an actor going through an extremely public murder case, which meant everyone knew her last name. it started out as whispers and stares, and marley didn’t even know why. her parents could never talk to her about their cases, so she was completely unaware of the case until finally, one of her friends pulled up the article

she went home and began researching herself, and mar was genuinely interested in it. she watched the news and read all the gossip about the theories simply because she found the dark undertones fascinating. it was something she hadn’t really been exposed to in her life. everything had been glitz and glam and smiles and money and parties, and it was like she was seeing a different side of the world she never knew about

now that she was informed about the case, she began answering her peers’ prying questions. she wasn’t doing anything wrong since all her information was obtained from the internet and not her parents, and suddenly people seemed to be a lot more interested in her

it also didn’t hurt that this was around the time she started caring about her appearance. she was berated with paparazzi every time she left her house during this time period, and she couldn’t escape the watchful eyes even at school. so, with her parents’ credit card in hand she went on a shopping spree, redesigning her entire wardrobe as well as practically cleaning out sephora’s entire stock

kieran had been the first to notice this new look, and they soon began dating. he was her first love, and she was absolutely infatuated. perhaps an unlikely couple, but Marley couldn’t care less about that. she still doodled his name all over her notebooks, and told him all about her plans for their future

after some time, the case came to a close and by the time she graduated it was long forgotten about. but marley was never forgotten about. she solidified her place as the queen bee for the rest of her high school career. and just like she nodded along with her parents’ plans for her, she did the same with her popularity. her main focus, however, was on kieran. 

she ended up the captain of the cheerleading team, prom queen, as well as class president and valedictorian. 

she was never a mean girl, which is probably why she was so well liked. she was the kind of girl you looked at and you were like “damn, she’s so beautiful, there’s no way she’s nice too” but then bam. and then she’s smart too?? how could you not love her???

she was also a bit naive. because she’d never really experienced pain or any misfortune at all, she never even considered the possibility of anything bad happening to her. that was until she found out kieran had been cheating on her. practically the entire time they had been together. thankfully, this knowledge came to light after graduation, just before she was to leave for college.

this personality followed her through college, and yes, she did attend harvard like her parents had begged her to. it wasn’t hard considering her parents had attended there, and they’d donated more than their fair share to the school. however, it was because of the pain of being cheated on, and the alluring sense of being in a new place all on her own that she discovered her love for the arts. she began drawing, painting.. anything from portraits, to abstract pieces, to fashion designs. she also picked up the piano, and she did sing and write a little bit of music, but she was far too embarrassed of it to tell anyone. she won’t even sing in front of anyone. 

however, she entered harvard with a major in pre-law, but after taking a random art class as an elective her first semester, she changed it to business. she knew she couldn’t switch to art without an entire revolution from her parents, so she concocted some excuse about wanting to be the CEO of her own corporation. this, of course, was equally as acceptable to her parents 

but in reality, she just wanted to learn how to market herself as a creative. whether she decided to be an artist, a fashion designer, a singer, or whatever else it was, she knew a degree in that field would do almost nothing for her, while business knowledge could make or break her

THE PRESENT

Marley graduated in 2018, and moved back home to livingstone where she met who else but michael green. the two became friends soon enough, and her parents were absolutely thrilled

her parents were the main driving force between the two getting together. they hated kieran, of course, when they were together. but michael green was the golden boy of livingstone, so he was perfect for the golden girl of living stone. 

ever since high school, marley had been blissfully separated from the rest of her parents’ cases. however, she hadn’t escaped the courtroom just yet

although this time, she was taking the stand in defense of michael, her boyfriend, in the trial for the murder of kieran, her first love. none of it seemed real. it still doesn’t seem real to her 

she tries her absolute best to stay away from the entire situation. she hasn’t opened the app once since it’s been on her phone, and she hasn’t even spoken to her parents since court. 

she lives by herself in an apartment she pays for with her bartending job that her parents have no idea about. but, it pays her bills while she gets to create art - her favorite coping mechanism

but this is the first time she’s ever experienced hate online. she’d been receiving negative press from those same sites she had bookmarked on her laptop. ever since that first case she’d grown an obsession with the macabre, and frequently checked up on her favorite news sites, conspiracy theory sites, and other things of the sort. she knew so much about serial killers and other high profile crimes that she could probably conduct the perfect one and get away with it scot free. hmmmmm. anyway.

now these sites were posting about her, questioning her involvement in the whole thing. even she had to admit that her presence in the case was simply uncanny

but just like everything else in her life, she never asked for this. now, she wishes she could just go back to being the girl who got good grades, wore ugly wire glasses, and always had greasy hair. 

PERSONALITY

marley loves to shock people. whether intentionally or unintentionally, it constantly happens. at first glance, she’s just another rich, pretty girl who’s been pampered every moment of her life. after everything she’s been through, that’s the distance she likes to keep between her and most people. sure, she’s kind to everyone she meets, but it can come off as fake to those that don’t know her. she just has that face. queen of rbf. but, her true heart and her mind are reserved for those who have proven to be worthy of it. 

she is fiercely independent. that’s shown by the way that she defied her parents, while still maintaining her adoration and respect for them. she never had a rebellious phase, never let their controlling nature change who she was. she never lets people tell her how to think. and as she grows older and experiences more, she’s breaking her silence. she’s starting to not bite her tongue and smile and nod so as to keep being a nice little girl and not start any trouble. instead, she’s starting to voice her opinion, despite what anyone else thinks of it. 

she definitely has a laaaarge group of friends. the kind of person that just gets along with everyone?? if they’re so lucky as to keep her attention, that is. sure, she’s nice to everyone she meets and if they ask to exchange numbers she’ll oblige. but that doesn’t mean she won’t block that number as soon as she leaves or simply ignore all the texts and calls from her ‘new friend.’ if there’s something off about you, she cuts you off before you get too close to know too much about her. simple as that. 

but despite that she considers herself mainly a lone wolf. no one has your back like you do kind of thing. she doesn’t believe people have it in them to genuinely love and care for another person, especially when it comes to her. as far as she’s concerned, she has yet to see proof of that and she is a very ‘i need to see it to believe it’ kind of person

her inner workings and thought processes are certainly intense, but outwardly, she’s pretty laidback and likes to joke around. 

she’s also beginning to party more. she starts by drinking and trying drugs alone in her apartment, but if she met someone who was well versed in those kinds of things??? yeah they’d get into trouble

[libidinaleconomyberlin]

Participants

Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His research focuses on contemporary Continental theory, cultural politics, literature, and avant-garde and popular culture. His books include Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, The Culture of Death and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. He also edited Communization and its Discontents and has numerous essays on topics such as anti-critique, the aesthetics of financial crisis, drones, time, Ballard, vampies, neurosis and Brexit. 

Hannah Proctor works on revolutionary psychologies, communist neurologies and red therapies. She’s broadly interested in intersections between left-wing politics and psychology, histories and theories of radical psychiatry, and emotional histories of the Left. She’s currently a fellow affiliated with the ICI Berlin. Her forthcoming book, Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria, Soviet Subjectivites and Cultural History, situates the innovative cross-disciplinary clinical research of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria in its politicised historical context. She is also working on a book project for Verso on the psychic aftermath of political struggle. She has an ongoing project on femininity and hardness – with the working title 'Stone Femme.’

Leon Brenner is a post-doc fellow at the University of Potsdam, specializing in the fields of Lacanian psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy and autism research. Brenner has previously worked on the subject of Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivity and love. His doctoral dissertation—conducted at Tel-Aviv University and the Freie Universität, Berlin—concerned the subject of autistic subjectivity in psychoanalytic thought. Today Brenner works on the subject of the anthropological philosophy of autism at the University of Potsdam's institute for philosophy. He is a founder of the Lacanian Affinities Berlin group (laLAB) and teaches courses on the subject of psychoanalysis in Berlin.

Kerstin Stakemeier is a Professor for Art Education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. She has been teaching since the early 2000s in the fields of political, art, cultural and media theory, art history and on topics of artistic and political theory and practice as well as modern, postmodern and contemporary history of exhibition practice. With others she is the initiator of the long-term exhibition, magazine and discussion project Klassensprachen / Class Languages (from 2017). She has published, among others, "Painting-The Implicit Horizon" (2012) with Avigail Moss and "Power of Materials/Politics of Material” and “The Present of the Future“ (2014-16) with Susanne Witzgall. She writes among others for Artforum and Texte zur Kunst. In 2016, she published Reproducing Autonomy with Marina Vishmidt.

Jule Govrin is a philosopher; her research is situated at the interface of political theory, social philosophy, and aesthetics. She holds a PhD from the FU Berlin on the history of the theory of desire and economics. She investigated how the notion of desire is linked to economic theories in the history of philosophy. She currently works at the Philosophical Seminar at the European University of Flensburg and investigates the relationship between authenticity and authority in the political history of ideas of modernity and late modernity. She is the author, in German, of Sex, God and Capital: Houellebecq’s Subjugation between Neoreactionary Rhetoric and Post-secular Politics and, in addition to her academic work, is also active as a journalist, e.g. for »ZEIT Online«.

Luce de Lire is a ship with eight sails and she lays off the quay. A time traveller and collector of mediocre jokes by day, when night falls, she turns into a philosopher, performer and media theorist. She loves visual art, installations, video art etc. She could be seen curating, performing, directing, planning and publishing (on) various events. She is working on and with treason, post secularism, self destruction, fascism and seduction – all in mixed media.

Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is currently research associate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. (Although from next week, he will be a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.) His research areas comprise contemporary European philosophy, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), epistemology, and political philosophy. His publications include The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (2019), The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2015). Plus two edited books, Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives: New Conceptions of Geometry and Space in Freud and Lacan (ed. with Michael Friedman) and Jacques Lacan. Between Psychoanalysis and Politics (ed. with Andreja Zevnik, 2015).

Dominiek Hoens is a philosopher and doctor of psychology, and teaches philosophy of art at two university colleges in Belgium. Recent publications include articles on the logic of the Lacanian ‘not-all’ (in Crisis and Critique) and on Lacan and Pascal, and a chapter on Lacan in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. Currently, he is co-editing with Sigi Jöttkandt a special issue of their journal, S, on Duras and Lacan.

Julie Gaillard was recently appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Illinois. She was previously a fellow at ICI Berlin. She co-edited the volume Traversals of Affect: On Jean-François Lyotard (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current research continues her investigation of Lyotard’s work and its import at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, arts, and politics.

Daniel Tutt is a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University. His academic training is in philosophy and religion with a focus on contemporary continental philosophy, the history of philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics. His interests include Marxism and post-Marxist thought, contemporary social and political movements, political Islam, Islamophobia, Islamic philosophy, historicism and the philosophy of history and post-Lacanian thought. He has published articles on Badiou, Zizek, Islam and contributed to the recent edited volume, Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy.

Adriana Zaharijević combines political philosophy, feminist theory and social history of the 19th century. She is a senior researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, and an assistant professor at the University of Novi Sad. She is the author of more than sixty articles and two books, unfortunately not (yet) available in English – Becoming Woman (2010) and Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of a Citizen (2014). Among other essays in English, she has a forthcoming paper on Robinson Crusoe, invulnerability and bodilessness.

Sami Khatib is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo. Sami's research spans the fields of Aesthetic Theory, Critical Theory, Visual Arts, Media Theory, and Cultural Studies with a special focus on the thought of Walter Benjamin. He is a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). His ongoing research project “Aesthetics of the ‘Sensuous-Supra Sensuous” examines the aesthetic scope and political relevance of Marx’s discovery of the commodity form. His publications include articles on violence, pedagogy, the aesthetics of real abstraction, temporality and Walter Benjamin.

Jason Read is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He specialises in the areas of Social and Political Philosophy, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Spinoza. His two books are The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015) and The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003). He has many articles and book chapters on topics including work, affect, precarity, Balibar, ideology and Althusser.

Vladimir Safatle holds several international appointments. Primarily, Vladimir is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at University of São Paulo. He is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Invited professor at Université de Paris VII (Department of Psychoanalysis), Paris VIII (Department of Music), Toulouse (Department of Philosophy) and Louvain (Department of Philosophy). Fellow of Stellenboch Institute for Advanced Studies (South Africa) and formerly responsible for seminars at Collège International de Philosophie. Vladimir is the author of Grand Hotel Abyss: Desire, Recognition and the Restoration of the Subject (Leuven, 2016) and many further texts in English, as well as Portuguese and French. He is responsible for the new Brazilian edition of Theodor Adorno's complete work and is a coordinator of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. He has published essays on Hegel, Adorno, desire, servitude, democracy and Lacan. He is also an outspoken critic in Brazilian media of Bolsonaro and the turn to far-right politics.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont in the US. He has just published Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). His previous books include Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), Spike Lee (2014), The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2013), Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013), Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (2012, with Paul Eisenstein), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and The Impossible David Lynch (2007).

Yahya M. Madra is an associate professor of economics at Drew University, Madison, NJ. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism since 1998 and served as an associate editor of the journal between 2010-12. He specialises in the History of Economic Thought; International Political Economy; Political Economy and Cultural Formations; Psychoanalysis and Capitalism and Current Heterodox Approaches. He has published and co-authored articles on various issues in political economy and on the history of recent economics in edited book volumes and a number of academic journals in English and Turkish. His first book in English is LATE NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS: RESTORATION OF THEORETICAL HUMANISM IN CONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC THEORY from 2017.

Ceren Özselçuk is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has recently published and co-published in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Rethinking Marxism, and in edited volumes. She is on the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism and also its current managing editor. She and Yahya are working on a book manuscript related to their talk today. She is also developing research on the associations among populism, neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, with a geographical focus in Turkey, and interrogating the relations between populism and contemporary forms of authoritarianism and violence, on the one hand, and the role of populist identifications both in democratic as well as neoliberal transformations, on the other.

Merritt Symes (www.merrittsymes.com) is a video artist who creates audio-visual “resonance machines” from both found and original footage. Her short films are concerned with creaturely lives, uncanny affinities, impersonal intimacies, the unraveling of forms, and the spaces between things. Dominic Pettman (www.dominicpettman.com) is Professor of Culture & Media at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research. His numerous books include Sonic Intimacy, Creaturely Love, and Metagestures (with Carla Nappi).

Margret Grebowicz’s writings on mountaineering have appeared in The Atlantic, The Philosophical Salon, and the minnesota review, and she is currently writing her next book, Mountains and Desire, for Repeater. She is the author of Whale Song (Bloomsbury), Why Internet Porn Matters and The National Park to Come (both Stanford), and co-author of Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (Columbia). She teaches philosophy and environmental humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, in Siberia.

Ania Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland and former Senior Fulbright Fellow at the New School of Social Research in New York, USA where she was working on a research project “Feeling(s) Without Organs. Love in Contemporary Technoculture”. She is a coeditor of (with Karolina Lebek) Materiality and Popular Culture. The Popular Life of Things (Routledge 2017), (with Michael Gratzke) The Materiality of Love. Essays of Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge 2018), and (with Toby Miller) “Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture” (a special issue of Open Cultural Studies, 2017). She has authored many papers and chapters in cultural and media studies regarding love, social norms, codes of feelings and technology.

Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at The University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (2012), and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014). He recently completed his new book, Algorithmic Desire: Towards a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media. He is currently working on a project that examines the aesthetics, rhetorics, and ethics of new materialist, posthumanist, and accelerationist theory.

Ben Gook is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is also an honorary fellow at the School of Social & Political Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne. His books include Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany after 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and the forthcoming Feeling Alienated: How Alienation Returned in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2020).

[bountyofbeads]

Russian Effort to Influence 2016 Election Targeted African-Americans https://nyti.ms/2R2pmzO

Russian Effort to Influence 2016 Election Targeted African-Americans

By Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel | Dec. 17, 2018 | New York Times | Posted December 17, 2018 |

The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of posts on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its Facebook operations, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.

“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there.

The New Knowledge report, which was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled release on Monday, is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. They are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and the other companies whose platforms were used.

The second report was written by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University along with Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media. The Washington Post first reported on the Oxford report on Sunday.

The Russian influence campaign in 2016 was run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency, owned by a businessman, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who is a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Prigozhin and a dozen of the company’s employees were indicted last February as part of the investigation of Russian interference by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.

Both reports stress that the Internet Research Agency created social media accounts under fake names on virtually every available platform. A major goal was to support Donald Trump, first against his Republican rivals in the presidential race, then in the general election, and as president since his inauguration.

Creating accounts designed to pass as belonging to Americans, the Internet Research Agency spread its messages not only via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which have drawn the most attention, but also on YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+, among other platforms. Its attack on the United States used almost exclusively high-tech tools created by American companies.

The New Knowledge researchers discovered many examples of the Russian operators building an audience with one theme and then shifting to another, often more provocative, set of messages. For instance, an Instagram account called @army_of_jesus_ first posted in January 2015 images from The Muppet Show, then shifted to The Simpsons and by early 2016 became Jesus-focused. Multiple memes associated Jesus with Mr. Trump’s campaign and Satan with Mrs. Clinton’s.

The Russian campaign was the subject of Senate hearings last year and has been widely scrutinized by academic experts. The new reports largely confirm earlier findings: that the campaign was designed to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Mr. Trump and exacerbate existing divisions in American society.

But the New Knowledge report gives particular attention to the Russians’ focus on African-Americans, which is evident to anyone who examines collections of their memes and messages.

“The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,” the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.

The report says that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens.” In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.”

The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African Americans. But the Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife.

Renee DiResta, one of the report’s authors and director of research at New Knowledge, said the Internet Research Agency “leveraged pre-existing, legitimate grievances wherever they could.” As the election effort geared up, the Black Lives Matter movement was at the center of national attention in the United States, so the Russian operation took advantage of it, she said — and added “Blue Lives Matter” material when a pro-police pushback emerged.

“Very real racial tensions and feelings of alienation exist in America, and have for decades,” Ms. DiResta said. “The I.R.A. didn’t create them. It exploits them.”

Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency in the Senate’s data, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers. Just seven pages focused on the political left, drawing 689,045 followers.

While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.

Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.

The New Knowledge report argues that the Internet Research Agency’s presence on Instagram has been underestimated and may have been as effective or more effective than its Facebook effort. The report says there were 187 million engagements on Instagram — users “liking” or sharing the content created in Russia — compared 76.5 million engagements on Facebook.

In 2017, as the American news media focused on the Russian operations on Facebook and Twitter, the Russian effort shifted strongly to Instagram, the report says.

The New Knowledge report criticizes social media companies for misleading the public.

“Regrettably, it appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress,” the report says, noting what it calls one false claim that specific population groups were not targeted by the influence operation and another that the campaign did not seek to discourage voting.

“It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion,” the report says.

The report suggests a grudging respect for the scale and creativity of Russian influence operations. But the Russians were not eager to take credit for their own efforts.

After the election, the report says, the Internet Research Agency put up some 70 posts on Facebook and Instagram that mocked the claims that Russia had interfered in the election.

“You’ve lost and don’t know what to do?” said one such post. “Just blame it on Russian hackers.”

[monteleoneerica-blog]

Infographic Project

So, I decided to go with my Idea #1 for this project, but I changed it up a bit. I will be concentrating more on the most up-to-date trends in traveling. Just interesting statistics. I will have the design of a map and have each country be a picture of some sort, that will relate to whatever statistic I put in that spot. 

Read further for some data I have researched.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-travel-smartphone-usage/

Leisure travel accounted for 80 percent of all U.S. domestic travel in 2017. Domestic business travel increased 1.3 percent from 2016 to 462 million person-trips. International visitations to the U.S. (including overnight visits from Canada and Mexico) increased 0.7 percent and totaled 76.9 million in 2017.

U.S. domestic travel increased 1.9 percent from 2016 to a total of 2.25 billion person-trips in 2017.

Foodservices and lodging are the top two spending categories by domestic and international travelers. Travelers spent $258 billion on food services, which accounted for 25 percent of total travelers spending.

https://www.ustravel.org/system/files/media_root/document/Research_Fact-Sheet_US-Travel-and-Tourism-Overview.pdf

$1,036 billion was spent on traveling in 2017 (US     Travel Association)

26% of American domestic travel expenses go towards food services,     20% towards public transportation, 20% towards lodging, 17% towards auto     transportation, 10% towards recreation/amusement and 7% towards retail (US Travel Association)

47% of millennials say cost is a barrier for why they won’t travel (AARP)

40% of Millennial travelers will take a vacation with their friends     in the next year (Resonance Consultancy)

American women rank first in solo traveling and are more likely to     take three trips or more in a given year (Resonance Consultancy)

80% of families take a vacation during summer (NYU)

The Southeast region of the U.S. (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana)     captured the largest share of domestic online searches for vacation     lodging at 34% followed by the Far West (Washington, Oregon, California,     Nevada) at 23%, the Mideast (New York, New Jersey, Maryland,     Delaware, Pennsylvania) at 14%, the Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico,     Texas, Oklahoma) at 11%, Great Lakes Region (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana,     Michigan, Ohio) at 7%, Rocky Mountain Range (Idaho, Utah, Wyoming,     Montana, Colorado) at 5%, the Plains Region (North Dakota, South     Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri) at 3% and the New     England Region  (Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut,     Massachusetts, Maine) at 3% (US Travel Association)

Top 10 international travel locations for travel agencies in 2018     include: Caribbean Cruise (34.7%), Cancun (28.3%), Cruise – Europe (River)     (23.1%),  Cruise – Europe (Mediterranean) (17.4%), Punta Cana,     Dominican Republic (17.2%), Rome (16%), London (15.5%), Amsterdam and     Montego Bay, Jamaica (12.6%), Playa del Carmen/Riviera Maya, Mexico     (11.4%), and Pairs (11.1%) (Travel Leaders Group)

39.5% of people travel within their home state (Travel Leaders Group)

U.S. travelers took 466.2 million domestic trips for business, and     1,779.7 million for leisure (Statista). That compares with 458.9     million domestic business trips (Statista) and 1,745.5 million domestic     trips for leisure purposes (Statista) in 2016

Sunset cruise excursions have gone up by 89% in bookings since 2017     (TripAdvisor)

[evoldir]

Postdoc: UVermont.EvolutionOfEpigenetics

Post-doctoral Research Associate - Epigenetics of thermal plasticity in Drosophila A post-doctoral position is available in the Helms Cahan lab at the University of Vermont to join a new NSF/EPSCoR-funded project on epigenetic regulation of thermal plasticity in Drosophila. The overarching goals of the project are to characterize and test molecular mechanisms driving plastic adjustment of upper and lower thermal limits occurring across a range of timescales, from developmental acclimation to rapid hardening, and role of shifts in epigenetic drivers in the process of thermal adaptation within and among species across the genus. The post-doctoral associate will use cutting-edge approaches in high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatic network analysis to identify putative epigenetic regulators in D. melanogaster and experimentally test their roles using functional genetic techniques. The successful candidate will join a multi-investigator collaborative team with complementary expertise in epigenomics and systems biology (Seth Frietze, UVM), biochemical adaptation and thermal physiology (Nick Teets, UKY and Brent Lockwood, UVM), insect respiratory physiology (James Waters, Providence College) and phylogeography (Heather Axen, Salve Regina Univ.). There will be plenty of opportunities for additional self-designed projects in the candidate's area of interest. The Biology Department at the University of Vermont is a research-intensive integrative department, with internationally-recognized faculty conducting both theoretical and empirical research in disciplines from cells to ecosystems. The department has a vibrant PhD program and is dedicated to a teacher-scholar model of engaging undergraduates in the research enterprise. Founded in 1791, UVM is consistently ranked as one of the top public universities in the United States. The University is located in Burlington, Vermont, a vibrant and environmentally-minded small city rich in cultural and recreational activities for graduate students and their families. Applicants for the position should have a strong interest in evolutionary genetics and a PhD in a relevant discipline. Familiarity with high-throughput genomics benchwork and/or bioinformatics, and prior experience working with Drosophila or other insects, are desirable. The position is available beginning January 1 for two years, with the possibility of renewal. Our team is dedicated to promoting diversity of experience and perspective in the scientific enterprise; we encourage applicants from under-represented groups to apply. To apply, please send a cover letter detailing your interest and qualifications for the position, a current CV, and the names and e-mail addresses of two potential references to Sara Helms Cahan (scahan@uvm.edu). We will begin reviewing applications November 1st until the position is filled. To find out more about research in the Helms Cahan lab, go to: http://bit.ly/2O2OV2W To find out more about the Biology Department, go to: http://bit.ly/2QoCyuQ Sara Helms Cahan Associate Professor and Chair Department of Biology University of Vermont Burlington, Vermont 05405 (802)656-2962 scahan@uvm.edu Sara Cahan via Gmail

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Gods

Religious Worlds (1994)

“This book is a good introduction to the phenomenology of religion. Stressing that religions are not just systems of belief, but forms of behavior…William E. Paden focuses on four key complementary categories: myth, ritual, gods and systems of purity.”

This book is something of a landmark work within its field. "From gods to ritual observance to the language of myth and the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Religious Worlds explores the structures common to the most diverse spiritual traditions.” In other words, Paden is studying the concept of religion itself and how it manifests across the spectrum of available world religions. He is not surveying what individual religions have to say and then comparing his findings to find a right one. Paden asks questions like: What function do rituals serve across all religions? And, what about sacred writings and histories (properly called "myth" within comparative religion); how do these shape and fashion religion?

From his perspective, Paden is attempting to let each religion speak on its own terms and simply listen to what each is saying. Paden seeks to classify these facts, or "phenomena," in the search for religious structures, or "forms of expression," from any emerging patterns. Throughout the process, respect must be given to each religion's complexity of contexts (geographic, historical, sociological, etc.); each one sees the world in its way because of these dynamics, what Paden calls a "religious world," and engages the world accordingly. Only when we shed our "religious world" and enter into those of others can we truly understand them. Finally, Paden also stresses sensitivity for the sacred while surveying religions to help discern what is religious by nature. His goal is to understand and survey each world's respective landscape in a spirit of tolerance and diversity, and let the reader evaluate from there as necessary.

William E. Paden University of Vermont, Professor Emeritus

Area of expertise: Cross-cultural patterns of religious behavior.

Professor Paden had been a member of the Department from 1965 until his retirement in the spring of 2009. He served as Chair from 1972-78 and 1990-2005. His M.A. and Ph.D. (1963, 1967) in comparative religion are from Claremont Graduate University, and his B.A. (1961) from Occidental College (philosophy). He has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford (1999, 1992), and spent time as a research fellow and lecturer in Japan (1999, 1992).

Contents

Preface to the 1994 Edition    vii

Preface to the 1988 Edition    xiii

Introduction     1

One: Religion and Comparative Perspective

1 Some Traditional Strategies of Comparison   15

2 Religion as a Subject Matter    35

3 Worlds    51

Two: Structures and Variations in Religious Worlds

4 Myth    69

5 Ritual and Time    93

6 Gods    121

7 Systems of Purity    141

8 Comparative Perspective: Some Concluding Points    161

Notes       171

Index       187

Preface to the 1994 Edition

In the five years since Religious Worlds was published, the need to understand the plurality of culture and religion has become even more apparent. Issues of pluralism indeed seem to have become part of the tasks and riddles of civilization itself. The profound differences between human worldviews have not been erased by information technology or international business networks, with their appearance of having so easily unified the surface of the globe. Beneath the surface, the earth is still a patchwork of bounded loyalties and hallowed mythologies, a checkerboard of collective, sacred identities. The theater of ethnic and religious diversity has not gone away. The variety of human worlds, with all their conflicts, is still there despite the facade of unity.

Pluralism refers not only to cultural diversity but also to the many kinds of “knowledges” or lenses humans use to perceive and construe their universe. With increasing clarity we see how inevitably the world forms itself according to our different frames of reference. A chemical lens will only register a chemical world; a poetic lens uncovers a poetic world; a religious lens yields a religious world. These multiple frames whereby telescopes picture the universe one way and religious symbols picture it another simply coexist. Alter the lens and you alter the data; change the receiving channel and you change the program; switch groups and you exchange one world for another.

Models of knowledge based on an exclusive, privileged, single lens—whether that of the sciences or the religions or white middle-class Americans—have come under challenge. In a new, pluralistic setting, in this new openness to the many architectural possibilities of what we take to be the world, the study of religious diversity has a definite role to play.

When in 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the practice of prayer in public schools, it advocated at the same time that the comparative study of religions should be an indispensable part of education. Yet the study of religion has long been controlled by what might be called the interests of private ownership, that is, the religious groups themselves, so that the subject matter of “the gods” has until recent times lacked an appropriately unbiased vocabulary parallel to those in the study of the physical and social worlds. There cannot be a study of religion that is not at the same time the study of all religion, just as one cannot have a “geology” based only on impressions of the rocks in one’s backyard. Religious Worlds, which works at broadening, purging, and reshaping our otherwise provincial language about religious life, is a small contribution to this new globally oriented era of religious studies and I am gratified that it has found a wide readership in college classes and in Japanese and German translations.

I continue to be impressed by how useful, synthesizing, and far-reaching the concept of “world” is as an organizing category for the study of religion. “World” is not just a philosophical abstraction nor a word for the endless galactic stardust. In more human, experiential terms, it is an actual habitat, a lived environment, a place. It is what we need to understand about others in order to understand their life and behavior.

A “world” is the operating environment of language and behavioral options that persons presuppose and inhabit at any given point in time and from which they choose their course of action. The term has enough flexibility to refer to the scripts and horizons of an entire culture, a subculture, or an individual. Within a single tradition like Christianity, there are thousands of religious worlds, because of the many ways they are packaged by cultures and history. “World,” then, becomes a tool for getting at the shaping power of context in the fullest sense of the word, and the idea of multiple worlds helps us to recognize and take seriously the distinctive life-categories of the insider, however different they may be from our own.

Here variety and paradox abound. Some religious worlds are tightly bounded by rigid laws, others rely on individual conscience and no boundaries. Some are hierarchical, with stratified ecclesiastical functions, others dispense with all social roles and distinctions. Some worlds are fixed on tradition and the past, others on awareness of the moment. Some focus on everyday duties, others on states of ecstasy and escaping the mundane. Some revolve around worship, others around self-reflection and meditation. And everywhere cultures configure religious life with their unique styles and language.

Comparative method in the study of religion is still in its formative stages, still seeking self-definition as a tool in research, education, and interpretation, and Religious Worlds attempts to contribute to certain aspects of this process. While we have always made comparisons, the important issue now is the purpose for doing so. In the West, comparison has been used to attack Christian claims to uniqueness, to establish those claims, or to prove that all religions are really one. I do not take any of these traditional, political approaches here. Nothing is compared to show that one religion is better than another, or that some are exactly the same, or that none of them is true. Instead, what I submit is a framework for dealing evenhandedly and integrally with both difference and commonality.

Religious Worlds advocates the approach of a balanced comparative sense which neither ignores resemblances nor simplistically collapses them into superficial sameness; which neither ignores differences nor magnifies them out of proportion to the human, cross-cultural commonalities of structure and function that run through them. Every religious expression is different from others but also has something in common with them. My hope is that this book, while not pretending to represent any final, normative model for comparative work, will at least help stimulate further thinking along these lines. Clearly more historians of religion are now realizing that cross-cultural analysis is a tool not for dissolving variety, but for discerning and appreciating it; and this is a promising development. But you cannot analyze diversity without understanding commonality, too. The two go together.

A religious world is one that structures existence around sacred things. An important point of the book is that “the sacred” can be described without taking a position on whether it is something that exists or does not exist outside the participant’s own world. It exists to the insiders, to the believers. That is enough; that is the fact. Sacred objects play a powerful role in organizing human behavior. To the insider, the holiness of Christ, or Amida Buddha, or the Qur’an is absolute; to the outsider, in contrast, these symbols have no special value at all and may even be considered illusory. Holy objects, in this sense, are world specific. The most sacred and inviolable sacraments, traditions, gods, authorities, places, and times of one world are irrelevant or do not exist in another. One person’s “holiest day of the year” is just another working day for someone else. In a Buddhist world, the Muslim “center of the world,” the Kaaba in Mecca, is not on the map. Who among the Irish think that the Ganges River is holy? Taoists do not face Jerusalem for their meditations, and Protestants give no special role to the Roman Catholic pope.

Comparative religion makes this diversity intelligible. It shows that the very nature of a religious world is to experience the universe through its own focal symbols, to see the whole of time in terms of its own history, to find the absolute in its own churches and temples, and to equate its particular moral order with the ultimate order of the entire world.

Does the book itself have a point of view? General readers may find its approach peculiarly nonjudgmental. I do give priority to describing the insiders’ religious worlds before interpreting them by outsiders’ evaluations. And there is certainly something quite open-ended, enigmatically so, in the image that the world—whether that of the religious insider or that of the nonreligious outsider—exists in accordance with the lenses, contexts, and locations of its inhabitants. Religion scholars will recognize that Religious Worlds reforms and applies some aspects of phenomenological methodology, which attempted to delineate the structures of religious life (or the “phenomenon” of religion) without imposing metaphysical judgments. But more particularly, they may also notice that it presents a direction for comparative religion that invites convergence with socio-historical and anthropological levels of description and that, through the centralizing concept of world construction, brings to bear the contributions of scholars as otherwise different as Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade. Since Religious Worlds first appeared I have published a sequel, Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), which does deal directly with the radically different ways of explaining religion and in that sense takes up where Religious Worlds leaves off.

Changes to the actual text of this edition of Religious Worlds are strictly minimal, comprising only a few minor word substitutions where specific clarification or correction seemed necessary. Bibliographic references have been updated where relevant. Readers will understand that most references to socialist rituals in Eastern Europe should now be read in the past tense—indeed, the change of staging that hauled down socialist icons, removed the honor guard at the tomb of Lenin, and piped in Christmas carols to Red Square gives dramatic, contemporary illustration to the historically changing nature of world creation and definition.

When first-year college students come to orientation, I sometimes give a talk about liberal arts education. In a word, it is this. Welcome to the artes liberales, the arts of free persons (liberi). You are not here just to train for a job, in order to take a niche in someone else’s notion of reality, but you are free to study the nature of the world itself and come to your own views about it. Each department here offers a different set of glasses for seeing the world, so you will find that the universe in fact consists of a dazzling array of worlds and that each world has even more within it. Science guides you to some, history and sociology to others, art and music to still others. Now the world will appear one way, now quite another. Whose world will we choose to engage? Which world will we choose to live in?

Religious worlds should be studied, too, alongside all the others. Can anyone be truly educated about the complexity or scope of human existence and values who has never engaged the question of religious lenses, and who has never asked what can be learned from their global and inexhaustible variety?

Burlington, Vermont November 1993

page 121

Gods

Gods are a central, unavoidable subject matter for the study of religious life and require phenomenological analysis that is not governed by Western, theistic premises. Although gods are in some ways aspects of myth, they are also important enough structures in their own right to deserve special focus.

Gods as Religious Structures

We shall use the expression gods to represent a general type of religious experience. We will examine gods not for their intrinsic qualities as distinct, supernatural beings but as instances of a form of religious language and behavior. Gods are not just names and representations, not just literary, artistic or philosophic images, but the points at which humans relate to “the other.” We adopt here not a traditional theological approach that assumes one god, “God”—with a capital G— to be the reality behind all worlds and religions, but rather a descriptive approach that examines how any god represents a way of structuring existence and hence amplifies our thematic understanding of religious beings and objects. We set aside unresolvable evaluative questions about whether gods exist outside of human lives, and directly address how gods do in fact function in religious worlds.

The word god is used generically here to mean any superior being that humans religiously engage. Any being, visible or invisible, inhabiting past, present, or future, can function as a god. There are all kinds of such entities. For our thematic purposes, the category comprises a whole spectrum of mythic beings—more than what Westerners habitually associate with the term. Buddhas and bodhisattvas function as gods in many ways, even though they are a very different genre of being than the gods of theism. In traditional China the difference between ancestors and deities is sometimes hard to make. Kings, gurus, and other holy persons may be approached with the same behavior as that directed to divinity. The Greeks offered sacrifices to “heroes” and other demigods. Spirits and gods overlap in their functions and characteristics, and in Shintoist Japan everything has a kami—a term that, depending on the context, is translatable as soul, spirit, or deity. But there are kami of different powers and levels of importance.

Like myth and ritual, a god is a form of religion that can have any content. The content can be demonic or benign, male or female, limited or unlimited in power. It can represent the power of vengeance, kingship, love, ancestry, luck, territory, wisdom, fertility, consciousness, or being itself. A god can be endowed with specific character or personality—and given biographies—or simply representative of a force or function such as good fortune or cattle protection. Even within a tradition that has only one god, the images of that mythic being can be quite diverse. Phenomenologically, there have been many radically different experiences of the god of the biblical traditions, even though these are theologically understood as referring to one and the same god—namely, God.

Once again, in pursuing a comparative approach we must acknowledge the nets of semantic ambiguity. The term god means many things in modern Western culture, and understanding gods is easily impeded by any one of four thickly sedimented cultural predispositions.

First, it is not easy for a monotheistic culture to take an even-handed attitude toward gods when the very word God serves as the proper name of the Supreme Being of the universe, the one “before Whom there are no others.” We have seen above how “gods” in the plural conjures up idols of tin and wood, the hapless competitors, so railed against in the Bible, of “the one true Lord.” By definition, monotheism scorns polytheism and animism except occasionally to show that they are stages on the way to “pure” theism. In contrast to the observation of the Greek philosopher Thales that “the world is full of gods,” the central creed of Islam begins, “There is no God but Allah,” and the warning “You shall have no other gods before me” heads the list of the Ten Commandments.

A second bias comes from the side of rationalism, which typically takes all gods, including the biblical God, as fictions. Scientific explanation has done away with gods. Demystification of the universe is the goal of rationalism. Gods are merely projections of natural realities.

The third approach is the deistic, conceptualist one that accepts the general idea of a supreme being but takes it as an abstract, philosophical concept rather than as a religious presence. For many, the god of the West has been relegated to a principle—designating the ultimate force of order in the universe. God here is like a metaphysical hypothesis, to be either accepted as semantic currency or proved by argumentation. In this semantic context the word God often summons up a series of arguments for or against the existence of a supreme being. God is something to be argued about, not something to be sacrificed to.

The fourth bias is the universalist one that the main gods of the world religions are all versions of the same ineffable divine reality. Here Allah, God, Brahman, Buddha, and even Tao are but the various names for this transcendent mystery.

These approaches have their function within the world of their adherents, but tend to close off the process of observing and comparing what gods mean in people’s lives. Rationalist and conceptualist frameworks see god language as on the same level with rational language, yet we have seen that religion does not share the same territory as science but is a different sort of language altogether. The discourse of science is disengaged, objective, and neutral to issues of the significance of human life or how one should behave. The language of gods—as part of mythic expression—has to do with what acts one must take to lead a meaningful life. A world inhabited by gods is therefore not just a prescientific world but a completely different genre of worldview and world behavior. The two realms can certainly exist side by side, as they often do in modern culture, where the sheer differentness of their semantic form and context can provide for a degree of mutual autonomy.

As for the universalist view, there has been a definite value and truth to some of the parallels to which it has called attention. But insofar as it reduces gods to the same reality, it is engaging in metaphysical affirmations and transcends any real interest in comparative differences and hence specific worldviews.

The most important word in Western languages is the word God. Yet it is a term about which we have little reflexive or comparative awareness. It is typically insulated from inclusion in the cross-cultural subject matter of religious studies by its privileged place in living biblical language. In this chapter the god of monotheism is respectfully incorporated into a wider generic framework.

With these clarifications in mind we may proceed to examine further the idea of gods as experiential structures.

A god is not just a bare object—like a statue in a museum—but part of a bilateral relationship. A god is a god of someone or to someone. Only in the eyes of a religious person can a god be a god as such. A god is a category of social, interactive behavior, experienced in a way that is analogous to the experience of other selves. With gods one receives, gives, follows, loves, imitates, communes, negotiates, contests, entrusts. A god is a subject to us as objects and an object to us as subjects. We address it, or it can address us. Part of this relational quality is even evident in the etymology of the English term god, which traces back to a root that means either “to invoke” or “sacrificed to.”1

The religious meaning of a god lies in what one does in the presence of the god. If gods are not just objects but constituted by forms of behavior between subjects, this relational universe sharply contrasts with the antiseptic, demystified world of scientific language where the earth is not a place of any exchange or engagement—where nothing is addressable. In this absence of dialogue, scientific language flattens everything it sees into data, but in the language of gods, the world is experienced through categories of invocation, listening, and respect.

This dialogical factor may be understood better if we see how virtually any object can function as a “being.” Anything can be spoken to. Poetry has always known this. And any form can confront us with its own power and message. An “it” can become “you” or “thou.” It can be apprehended as “the one” that brings to us this or that effect. The evening news reported a falsely imprisoned man who found a turning point in his life when he met an object “he could talk to”: a button. With the button he became friends and found solace. Religiously endowed objects easily become personified: the sabbath has been addressed as God’s “bride”; Tibetan Buddhist shrines (stupas) are sometimes called “precious one” (rimpoche); the Sikh scripture is “the ultimate guru”; and the sacred fires of Zoroastrianism are addressed as though they were special beings. Any object, any “other” thing, can assume a temporary absoluteness in the way it faces and dominates us, in the way it forms a conduit between us and the infinite “wholly other,” the “thou” that is the self’s perpetual, complementary counterpart. Again, we both address and are addressed.

In the following sections we will examine two sets of variations related to the theme of gods. There are many others, but these are especially germane to our examination of the religious structuring of worlds. We will first see how kinds of gods correlate with kinds of worlds, and then look at the typical patterns that channel the interaction of gods and humans.

Gods and Worlds

Gods go with their worlds. It would be worth investigating the extent to which a god—in traditional geographies—could not really be worshipped outside its own land. In ancient Semitic religion the term baal—“master” of a house, “owner” of a field, “husband”—meant the god who possessed some place or district. In the ancient world, priests were customarily not priests of gods in general, and not even of one god or goddess in general, but of a particular god at a particular site. The Bible tells of Syrian armies that, after being defeated in the hill country of Samaria, held nevertheless that the gods of the hills would have no power in the plains.2 The god has its polis, its relative totality of influence. My great ancestors and heroes may not be yours. The territory of Ares is not the territory of Aphrodite. Nor does gentle Jesus the bambino rule over the same world as Christ the apocalyptic world judge. Protestants know nothing of the domain of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Gods are not just fantasy symbols but beings whose realms cannot be violated with impunity. Where sacrilege does take place with no consequence, the gods have fled. We see this in the historical transition between religious worlds: when missionaries hewed down pagan oaks with no divine punishment, and when Polynesian taboos were neglected without repercussion, the pagan world orders with their ruling gods had already been abandoned. In a similar way, secular cultures have replaced impotent historical sacralities. Behavior that under the sanctions and surveillance of the gods would have been unthinkable in one generation is routine in the next.

Gods correlate with the critical points of a world where humans are most open to the power of “the other.” If a world is crucially subject to what comes from the sky, from animal or plant life, from clan or political order, or from ritual purity, we may expect to find gods located in these junctures and conceived in these categories. In societies based firmly on family relationships and social hierarchy, such as traditional China, we are not surprised to find ancestors, elders, and emperors receiving the same reverence as gods. If a community or individual is weary of a despotic, alien world, we are not surprised to find gods appearing as messiahs, redeemers, and inner guides, delivering us to another, better place altogether.

Because the location of gods follows the location of the sacred, we get used to gods of mountains, rivers, vegetation, and fire; gods of the hearth, village, tribe, nation, and humanity; gods of thieves, merchants, smiths, hermits, priests, and mystics. There are gods such as the “One Great Source of the Date Clusters” (Amaushumagalanna of Uruk), and also the “one great source of yogic power” (Shiva). There are gods of the whole complexity of time (e.g., the ancient Iranian cosmic god Zurvan), but also gods for collecting wood, gods for cutting wood, and gods for burning wood. There are gods of longevity, child protection, health, and success; there are gods of death, misfortune, and every disease; and there are gods who are called “The True Parent.” There are gods who are the sun itself and gods of the inner light. Gods are the looming masks of the ultimate confrontational points of success and disaster, life and death. The history of gods is linked with the history of those points, with the succession of zones of sacredness.

…

This extraordinary specificity of gods extended even to powers of the moment. The Greeks “saw a special divine being, a daimon, in each piece of fortune or misfortune. The tragedians speak repeatedly of ton paronta daimona, the god who dominates someone at a particular moment, for instance during mourning over a dead person or on being shamed. ”6 Lightning and sheaves of grain were other instances of “momentary deities.”

In traditional Roman Catholicism the polytheistic outlook was carried on to some degree in the veneration of a multitude of saints. Forty different saints were invoked in the French Vosges, as “guardians of livestock and protectors from all kinds of sickness, such as gout, toothache, and burns (St. Augustine, for instance, protected one from warts), as protectors in storms and against fleas.”7 In Asia we find a similar assimilation of native spirits to Buddhist saints. The name of invocation could change, but the domain (childbirth, smallpox) of the god or saint remained the same.

One class of supernatural beings is that of the negative gods: demons. Every world has its negating forces. The Satan figure in the West became elaborated as a diabolical antagonist to the biblical God. Minor demons, though, may be limited to specific functions, like drought, leprosy, or the weakness of hunters. The Ifugao of the Philippines count thirty-one gods who send dysentery and twenty-one who produce boils and abscesses.8

Some gods are patrons of specific communities of people. In traditional cultures every significant collectivity would have a sacred group spirit of some kind. Each of more than 400 Australian aboriginal tribes had its own, different totemic being—usually a certain species of animal or plant. Each village in Bali had its own barong, a patron protector in the form of a supernatural dragon mask. Latin American villages each have their special saint. In many societies domestic spirits or ancestors rule the household circle. The Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu, is the ancestress of all the gods, the imperial family, and ultimately the Japanese people. Traditional Near Eastern city states each had their divinity: Melkarth was the god of Tyre, Moloch of Carthage, Astarte of Byblus, Marduk of Babylon, Jupiter of Rome, Yahweh of Jerusalem. Moreover, within a society certain classes of people were accountable to certain gods—such as warriors to Mars, seamen to Neptune, merchants to Mercury, and farmers to Ceres. Juno presided at marriages. In Greece youths identified with Apollo, maidens with Artemis, married women with Hera.

These examples should help us to see how complex are the domains and nature of the so-called supreme beings of the world religions. The supreme being is that god that grounds the entire world, not just some part of it. There are several versions of such unity—different families, as it were, of supreme gods. Many tribal systems refer to a creator god who is ultimately responsible for the world but has withdrawn from activity in it. In biblical traditions, theocratic images of power over the world—such as God as creator, king, and lord—are central. In Hindu tradition, ontological metaphors dominate; a common name for Brahman is “being, consciousness, joy” (satchitananda), and Shiva and Shakti are the “perpetual union of consciousness and energy”—that is, existence itself. Buddhas are defined in terms of primal, archetypal virtues such as wisdom and compassion. Chinese religion pictures the cosmos as the harmonious “Way” (Tao) of “heaven and earth.”

For illustrative purposes consider the difference between Hindu and biblical images a little further. In the former, the supreme being is the indwelling reality of the world. In the latter, the world is under the monarchical power of the god, and there is an unbridgeable distance between the holiness of the Creator and the finitude of the creation. In the Hindu conception, all the countless gods are only the million faces of the one god. Krishna, as the supreme god in the Bhagavad Gita can say,

I [am] the oblation and I the flame into which it is offered.

I am the sire of the world, and this world’s mother and grandsire: ... I am the end of the path, the witness, the Lord, the sustainer: I am... the beginning, the friend and the refuge: I am the breaking-apart, and the storehouse of life’s dissolution: I lie under the seen, of all creatures the seed that is changeless. I am the heat of the sun; and the heat of the fire am I also: Life eternal and death. I let loose the rain, or withhold it. ... I am the cosmos revealed, and its germ that lies hidden.9

The biblical god Yahweh is more intrinsically connected with the symbolism of power, reflecting the kingship imagery so characteristic of the great gods of the ancient Near East. The Lord’s “answer” to the suffering Job makes quite a different point than Krishna’s:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me, if you have understanding. … Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? … Do you know when the mountain goats bring forth? ... Who has let the wild ass go free? ... Do you give the horse his might? … Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? ... Will you play with him as with a bird? … Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.10

Here the god is not establishing his identity with creation, but his rule and mastery over it—the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, has an etymological connotation of “power” or “strong. ” There is nothing He cannot do: He made the world, parted the Red Sea, and called forth his Son from the realm of the dead.

Understanding the nature of the supreme being has been the endeavor of philosophers and theologians East and West. How are the many things of the world, including negativity and opposition, related to this one principle? Why is there evil if God is good?

But religion is not philosophy. Religiousness means engaging the sacred. It means having a focus, a point of engagement. These points are the earthly embodiments of the gods: incarnations, authorities, priests, and a multitude of symbolic objects.

The institution of the guru-disciple relationship illustrates this idea of focus.11 In Asian traditions the guru has some of the functions of a god. The guru is a living embodiment of the divine, a “realized being,” a “living master.” True progress is possible only with the guidance of such a person, who initiates and prescribes one’s spiritual path. To be in the presence of the guru is to be in the presence of a god. The entire focus of Christianity is on one great manifestation of the supreme god—Jesus Christ, the Christian guru, so to speak. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” he enjoins, and “no one comes to the Father, but by me.”12

A god’s presence can be experienced in virtually anything, in shrines, words, and sacraments, in stones, and in people. Hindu scriptures teach that the supreme being is to be seen in all life. Sacramental religion finds the god in the rites of church and shrine. Some ethically oriented Christian worldviews are guided by the words of Jesus: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”13 The religious person always knows where to find and honor the god, and with what actions.

Gods also appear within the self, as spirit allies or as indwelling elements of the supreme god. We have seen that shamanic cultures give importance to the individual’s knowledge of personal supernatural entities. Many Christians testify to the presence of Christ within: “I have Jesus in my heart and I am no longer alone.” Mahayana Buddhist traditions speak of everyone being “the Buddha.” Islamic mysticism takes its cue from the Qur’anic phrase that Allah is closer to us than our very jugular vein.

Not all religious systems limit themselves to the idea that the supreme reality of the world is a being per se. Most noticeably in Asia, but also in some Western theologies and mysticisms, we find the notion of ultimate, divine reality as something utterly and intrinsically beyond any naming or representation. Hindu and Buddhist systems often point to an inexpressible unity of things that lies behind all human, subject-object distinctions. Said one Zen abbot, “There is Buddha for those who do not know who he is really, but there is no Buddha for those who know who he is really.” The image of the empty circle in Zen symbolizes this state of having gone beyond the process of mental objectivizing. Buddhism is perhaps the religion that offers the most illustrations of the attempt to transcend gods and other objectifications in the pursuit of enlightenment.

Often we find two or more religious systems interwoven or side by side in one culture, such as an ethical tradition like Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity coexisting with an indigenous system of spirit observance. The realms of the nats in Burma, the yang in Indonesia, and the jinn in Arabia are examples of the latter. In Japan the buddhas cohabit the land with thousands of Shinto kami, the latter governing the forces of everyday life. Residents do not find these systems contradictory. In India by traditional count there are 330 million gods—and yet ultimately there is only one.

The religious significance of gods is not fathomed by just showing and comparing their respective realms. The spatial metaphor has its limits. We understand the life of a god even more fully when we examine the actual ways humans interact with it. The most intimately local ancestral spirit profoundly approached may reflect a richer religious phenomenology than a sublimely conceived being that has only a philosophical or literary existence. So we must now turn to the question of how gods are approached. If a god is a god only in relationship to a human, then how is this relationship enacted? How is a god’s existence or presence acknowledged? Once again, we enter a world of variations.

Patterns in the Experience of the “Other”

Recall the principal: Gods appear to us reciprocally according to our attitudes toward them, and our attitudes toward them are reciprocal with the way gods appear to us. As the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart put it, the eye by which we see God is the same eye by which He sees us.

These patterns of interaction can be understood in terms of two main types. The first comprises those ways humans experience themselves on the receiving end of the relation; the second includes those ways humans are the active agent in the relation.

Receiving the Gods

Preeminently, a god is something received. This is connected with the sense of the numinous. Rudolf Otto’s term is useful here for naming the feeling of being encountered by a powerful “other”—of being faced by a reality or being that is astonishingly greater than one’s self. The contrast between this greater presence and one’s ordinary reality is dramatic and produces awe, amazement, ecstasy. Otto and many historians of religion have taken this sense of the holy to be the source of religion, suggesting that doctrines and rites are but elaborations of numinous experience.

While the numinous is something that comes to us, it does come channeled through given cultural forms. Religious systems, by definition, anticipate the points at which interaction with things supernatural might or will occur. For some these points are visions and dreams, for others ritually induced states of possession, conversion experiences, church services, sacraments, faith healing, illnesses, contact with a holy person, divination, contact with nature, meditation, or private prayer. Many religions have begun with visions or voices. Moses is reported to have seen the majesty of Yahweh on Mt. Sinai, and the Hebrew prophets felt “the Word of the Lord” come upon them. The Christian apostles ecstatically experienced the appearance of the resurrected Christ. Islam is the direct result of the words of Allah that came to the nonliterate Muhammad via the Archangel Gabriel, words that were thereafter enshrined as the holy Qur’an. None of these experiences were solicited.

The experience of possession is common in many traditional cultures. Here a spirit, which may be either negative, positive, or something in between, takes over a body or personality. There are many societies for whom states of possession or trance are the regular religious avenues for contacting the supernatural.14 The assumption is that humans cannot communicate with the gods in a merely ordinary mode of consciousness. But even in the modern West, faith-healing rallies continue to fill stages with the entranced, prostrate bodies of those who have been touched by the “spirit of God.” Pentecostal and other charismatic groups make the direct experience of the Holy Spirit central to their faith. The power of their god is demonstrated to them regularly in such phenomena as “speaking in tongues” and spiritual healing. Worldwide we find practices aimed to demonstrate the direct power of spirit over matter—such as fire-walking or the handling of poisonous serpents.

Mystical experience, in contrast, is not a semiconscious or trance state but an intensely conscious state of union with or apprehension of the numinous. The experience itself is often felt as involuntary or spontaneous, as the grace of the god. Precisely because it is conscious, the effect of mystical experience is great on one’s life and dramatically transforms, through its searing impress, one’s normal system of priorities and attitudes. Many are the reports like those described extensively in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which speak of “that one great moment in my life spent in the presence of God.”

For some the presence of the supernatural is received intensely in holy objects such as relics or icons. “Seeing” the divine image, or darshan, is central to Hindu worship. A Hindu goes to a temple, pilgrimage site, or holy person not for “worship” but “for darshan.” The deity or holy person “gives darshan” and the people “take darshan.”15 Catholic and Orthodox Christianity focus on the presence of God in the rites of the Eucharist, in which the consecrated bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine are not just symbols but divine presences. Moreover, any object associated with the divine can have the same effect as the presence of the god itself, and it is not surprising that “miraculous” cures are regularly claimed as issuing from contact with the humblest of these vehicles. Recently a thirteen-year-old boy was reported as having recovered from leukemia after the skullcap of the late Cardinal Cooke was placed on his stomach.

A broad, universally found form in which divinity is manifest is that of dispenser of fate. Humans find themselves on the receiving end of life. Gods allot destinies. They are often synonyms for fate itself. Relating to this “givenness” of the will of the god can even constitute a large part of daily religious life—as in the Dantean phrase, “In His will is our peace.” Some terms for god actually mean “dispenser.”16 A true devotee is apt to “read” all events, negative or positive, as lessons in divine edification. The puritan Thomas Shepard thus wrote in his autobiography,

He is the God who took me up when my own mother died, who loved me, and when my stepmother cared not for me, and when lastly my father also died and forsook me, when I was young and little and could take no care for myself ... He is the God that brought me out of Egypt, that profane and wicked town where I was born and bred, ... He is the God that brought me, the least and most despised of my father’s house, to the University of Cambridge and strangely made way for me there. ... He is the God that carried me into Essex from Cambridge and gave me the most sweet society of so many godly ministers, ... 17

Many will dedicate themselves to a religious life as a result of feeling specially touched by some extraordinary event. In return for having his life spared during a terrible lightning storm, the young Martin Luther vowed to pursue a monastic vocation.

As Job found, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Gods dispense affliction, humiliation, chastisement, and destruction as well as blessing and mercy. The same puritan quoted above lost his wife and son through a tempestuous sea passage to America. His reading: divine instruction in humility. Certainly gods are not just expressions of solace for the ego, and any theory of religion based on such a concept is just neglecting the contrary evidence. Gods punish offenses, any violation of their order. They bring down pride. Hinduism has innumerable and terrifying representations of “the Destroyer,” such as the devouring goddess Kali, pictured with necklaces of skulls and bones. As a refrain, biblical monotheism speaks of the judging, punishing, wrathful side of God.

Gods dispense, but also empower. They give power to help against otherwise insuperable odds. Gods offer adherents part of their own “life.” Thus the great Buddha Amitabha (Amida in Japan) aeons ago made a vow that he would not enter nirvana himself until he had achieved such magnitude of virtue and enlightenment that ordinary beings could share in his liberation through sincerely calling on his name. This invocation, the nembutsu, is the primary religious affirmation of Japanese Pure Land Buddhist adherents, and consists precisely in the act of accepting a salvation that has already been given or made accessible. This religious mode of acceptance is an important strand of Christian tradition, too, as interpreted in the phrasing of a revivalist who preached, “In giving you Christ, it is like God is giving you a one hundred dollar bill: all you have to do is just accept it!” The affirmation that salvation is not man’s accomplishment but rather God’s grace is central to all major forms of Christianity. Hindu devotees receive a new life when a guru bestows shaktipad—a touch on the forehead.

Responses to Gods

Human responses to gods follow certain patterns. There are identifiable, thematic ways that people relate to numinous objects, and these actions form the stuff of much daily religious life. Two kinds of relationships are discernable here: the longterm relation to the god, and the set of short-term occasions where the superior being is enjoined in particular ways.

The long-term relationship is characterized by the theme of service and attitudes such as faith and trust. This is the realm of loyalty, steadfastness, and commitment.

One aspect of service is obedience or allegiance. Gods, after all, are “lords” of the world they embody. They have authority and in turn require fealty or loyalty. They are guarantors and maintainers of world and moral order. Authority is expressed positively in terms of obligations, and negatively in terms of interdictions and sanctions. Yet in the subject matter of religious allegiance we once again acknowledge cultural variations. There are different social forms of loyalty, and onto the idea of deity are projected the modes of allegiance familiar to the group’s tradition. Traditional monotheism, reflecting the imagery of the king-subject relationship, made homage and obedience the primary themes of scriptures and worship, and made disloyalty to the god the greatest sin. An apostate was a traitor. There was a joint obligation here, as in feudalism: if the people serve obediently, the lord protects; if people uphold their world, their world will uphold them.

But serving a god is certainly not limited to simple obedience. The variations on service to gods are revealing and instructive. Gods are served in conformity with their nature, and followers seek to imitate or participate in the nature of their gods. One serves the god of wisdom through wisdom, the god of love through love, the god of compassion through compassion. The divinity who challenges false rulers, who liberates slaves, who cares for “the orphan, the widow, the poor, the outcaste,” is a god served through social caring. At one point in the Bible, the Lord is satisfied by detailed kinds of animal sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple, but at another, when the religious world reflects the values of the prophets, we hear, “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?���18

Thus there is some correlation between the nature of a god and the act of serving it. Demons have their followers. Where fanatic devotees of Kali the Devourer took it as their divine responsibility to murder on her behalf, adherents of the peaceful Tao aspire to be like the Tao. Where gods are departmental bureaucrats, the employees behave accordingly. What the gods are determines what it is that belongs to them, and what it is that humans have received and hence should give back.

There are also more specific, patterned ways that the behavioral relationship between humans and gods is acted out. By distinguishing and comparing these ways we get a sense of the spectrum of responses to deity that are religiously possible as well as a sense of the cross-cultural nature of the patterns. We identify here the following: (1) petition, (2) atonement or confession, (3) offering, (4) celebration, and (5) divination. These indicate that in relation to gods humans ask, purify, give, honor, and inquire.

The first type of behavior, petitionary, is that connected with prayer and propitiation. Humans need and desire things, and what they cannot obtain on their own they need to seek and receive from a higher, other power. In religious terms, success in life lies outside the control of the human ego and reason. People perceive themselves as dependent on higher powers, and acknowledge that their well-being is in the hands of those powers. Humans approach gods in order to receive critical guidance and support and to avoid negative or disastrous outcomes. To many an adherent, prayer is not an episodic formality but a sustaining way of life, and existence would be unlivable without it.

Asking things of gods does not necessarily take the form of simple petition. There are all kinds of ways to ask for something, and each religious system has its own protocol for what it takes to be effective propitiation, such as self-accusation, flattery, vows, conciliation, and meditation. Some words for prayer mean ask; others mean seek, long for, speak in a formal manner, or soften. Proper propitiation may take the aspect of formal rites, spontaneous personal prayer, or acts of asceticism. Different gods will have different expectations and standards for determining the adherent’s sincerity.

Consider one example of propitiation from the realm of shamanism. Specialists in communicating with spirits while in trance, shamans are particularly adept in methods of direct negotiation. This usually involves a “journey.” The shaman knows spirit geographies and languages intimately and is a master intermediary between his or her audiences and the spirits who control the affairs of the local universe. Our illustration concerns the descent of an Eskimo shaman to the abode of Takanakapsaluk, the mother of the sea beasts. This is done in time of illness or famine and is conducted in the format of a seance. In trance the shaman successfully overcomes a series of obstacles (such as crushing rocks and vicious beasts) believed to be preventing access to the goddess. Finally reaching her marine domain, the shaman finds a pool of sea animals. The report of this seance continues as follows:

The goddess’s hair hangs down over her face and she is dirty and slovenly; this is the effect of men’s sins, which have almost made her ill. The shaman must approach her, take her by the shoulder, and comb her hair (for the goddess has no fingers with which to comb herself). ... As he combs Takanakapsaluk’s hair, the shaman tells her that men have no more seal. And the goddess answers in the spirit language: “The secret miscarriages of the women and breaches of taboo in eating boiled meat bar the way for the animals.” The shaman now has to summon all his powers to appease her anger; finally she opens the pool and sets the animals free.19

The shaman “returns” to the seance, gasping for breath, and asks the audience for confession of their sins.

This points to a second pattern; atonement and purification. One must actively remove offense to the gods in order to avoid their judgment and be a recipient of their benefits. Petition is often accompanied by acts of purification. One needs to make up for something done wrong, make oneself worthy of that which is desired, rid oneself of any impurity that may be obstructing one’s goals. Confession of sins is one format. Another is that of Chief Sitting Bull, who before an important battle would face the sun and make a hundred cuts in his arm. Prayer itself is often not just a form of communication but an act of humility, involving the chastening of self (or community) in order to be worthy of the god’s gifts.

The third pattern is giving. One gives—just as one serves, asks, and atones—according to the nature of the god. Some offerings to gods are like tributes or even taxes, but while a material offering may be appropriate for continuing land rights, in return for salvation one offers one’s entire allegiance and moral life.

There is reciprocity to giving, and Gerardus van der Leeuw saw perceptively that “the gift allows a stream to flow, which from the moment of the giving runs uninterruptedly from donor to recipient and from receiver to giver: ‘the recipient is in the power of the giver.’ ”20 The gift or offering sets in motion a cycle of giving. Giver and receiver are united in this binding quality of the offering. The more we give, the more the god gives; the more we have received, the more we must give back.

Sacrifices and offerings are the common external forms of giving. But to be effective they must always involve giving something that is one’s own possession or part of one’s own self. When an animal is sacrificed, it is not a wild animal but a domesticated one. In the bear sacrifice of the Ainu of Japan, the animal is reared among the villagers and treated as a member of the family before it is ultimately sent back to the gods. It is only a natural step in the logic of religious giving to shift from the sacrifice of foods and animals to the sacrifice of one’s own self-possession, one’s own ego. “My self belongs to God,” say the mystics. The dynamics of sacrifice and its endless contexts and variations form an enormous part of the subject matter of religious life.

A fourth pattern of action is celebration, the human response to blessings received. This is the behavior of thanksgiving, worship, and praise, again as expressed in countless cultural styles. We have already seen in the analysis of festival times how celebration follows the nature of its objects and goals. The gods may be honored by formal composure but also by exuberant singing and dancing.

The fifth pattern of relating to the gods is through divination. The Latin term divinatio (from divus, “divine” or “of the gods”) means the act of “reading” objects in the physical world to see how they express the activity or inclination of the gods. The premise of divination is that there is a synchronistic sympathy between the wholeness of life and each fragment of it, and, therefore, the action of gods can be deciphered by scrutinizing certain patterns in nature and interpreting them as signs or adumbrations of the future. Augurs look to the sky for such premonitory signs. Others scan the livers of animals, consult the “fall” of objects such as sticks, dice, or coins, or analyze dreams. Divining is often connected with the need for auspicious timing. A leader might consult a diviner to determine the right day for a certain military venture; or a wedding day may be selected astrologically. The act of opening a scripture at random in order to find the divine “will” is a spontaneous application of the divinatory principle, as is, in a purely secular sense, the act of deciding what action to take by tossing a coin.

Gods are religious forms that have had every conceivable content and scope, and endless local inflections. This experiential richness and diversity is often obscured by theological, con-ceptualist approaches that look at a god in terms of what it is ideally believed to be rather than in the phenomenological terms of how it is actually experienced. In seeing gods and their followers in experiential perspective, we emerge with another component of our framework for understanding and interpreting religious history.

Comparative perspective is not just a matter of judging the worth of gods, as in a beauty contest. It creates a broad cumulative outlook for appreciating any particular god or act connected with a god. It brings out both unity and difference in human experience.

There is no disparaging insinuation here that gods are mere inventions. In describing worlds, not only is the line between invention and discovery impossible to draw, but gods, whatever they may or may not be ultimately, present themselves to human experience as “other” and as primordially given. Even from the point of view of invention, gods and their worlds would surely be among the astonishing creations and creative acts of our human species, and unavoidable subject matter for any student of how humans choose to live.

The Unification Church and shamanism. At its heart the UC is not Christian; but it presents a Christian facade.

How “God’s Day” was established

The FFWPU is unequivocally not Christian

The Moons’ God is not the God of Judeo-Christianity

Hananim and other Spirits in Korean Shamanism

[srinathpanugantismrc]

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[patriotsnet]

How Many Democrats Vs Republicans In America

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-democrats-vs-republicans-in-america/

How Many Democrats Vs Republicans In America

Facts About Us Political Independents

Democrats vs Republicans Explained In 5 Minutes! | US Politics Summary Narrated By Barbara Njau

Partisan divides in the United States are as wide as theyve ever been in the modern political era. But what about the large share of Americans who identify as independents?

A recent Pew Research Center report took a detailed look at these Americans. Among other things, it illustrated that independents have lower levels of political participation and are demographically different from those who affiliate with a party and that their views are often as divided as those of self-identified partisans.

Here are six facts about political independents:

1Nearly four-in-ten U.S. adults identify as politically independent, but most lean toward one of the two major parties. Only 7% of Americans overall dont express a partisan leaning, while 13% lean toward the Republican Party and 17% lean toward the Democratic Party.

2Independents who lean to one of the two parties are often much closer to partisans in their views than they are to independents who lean to the other party. For example, while 34% of independents as a whole said they approved of the way Donald Trump was handling his job as president in a , the gap between independents who lean to the GOP and those who lean to the Democratic Party was nearly as wide as the gap between Republicans and Democrats .

In a survey last fall, clear majorities of Democrats , Democratic-leaning independents and Republican-leaning independents favored marijuana legalization, but Republicans were divided .

Recent Polling From Gallup Finds 50 Percent Of In Addition More Poll Respondents Than Ever Before62 Percentsay That Republicans And Democrats Do There Is No Room In The Us For A Third Party At The National/topdown/mass Level

Noted for expanding the federal government and battling big business, teddy roosevelt was a republican before forming the progressive party later in his career. Also has several smaller political parties known as third parties. Senators should not have term limits. There are more democrats than republicans in congress b. Executives of americas large public companies have long played a role in public policy by advising leaders of both parties but those corporate chieftains themselves are far more likely to be republicans than democrats, a new study shows. Most contentious issues in the united states and thats of abortion a liberal would view this as a the liberal point of view is yes we have a very unequal society theres a lot of discrimination race should be considered military and likewise you could find republicans who similarly have a mix of viewpoints. Even more than their republican counterparts, highly educated democrats tend to live in exclusively democratic enclaves. It said in a statement that once. It was, however, a divided party. The main purpose of this initial analysis will be. Conservative democrats, have more in common with republicans than liberal democrats. Start studying democrat vs republican. Weve heard it over and over:

Red States Outnumber Blue States

In February 2016, Gallup reported that for the first time since Gallup started tracking, red states now outnumber blue states.

In 2008, 35 states leaned Democratic and this number is down to only 14 now. In the same time, the number of Republican leaning states rose from 5 to 20. Gallup determined 16 states to be competitive, i.e., they leaned toward neither party. Wyoming, Idaho and Utah were the most Republican states, while states that leaned the most Democratic were Vermont, Hawaii and Rhode Island.

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Origins Of The Color Scheme

The colors red and blue are also featured on the United States flag. Traditional political mapmakers, at least throughout the 20th century, had used blue to represent the modern-day Republicans, as well as the earlier Federalist Party. This may have been a holdover from the Civil War, during which the predominantly Republican north was considered “blue”. However, at that time, a maker of widely-sold maps accompanied them with blue pencils in order to mark Confederate force movements, while red was for the union.

Later, in the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison used maps that coded blue for the Republicans, the color perceived to represent the Union and “Lincoln‘s Party”, and red for the Democrats. The parties themselves had no official colors, with candidates variously using either or both of the national color palette of red and blue .

List Of Current United States Governors

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The following is a list of current governors of U.S. states and territories.

In the United States, a governor is the chief executive officer of a state or a territory. The partisan affiliations of American governors are close to being even among the fifty states. As of January 2021, there are 23 states with Democratic governors and 27 states with Republican governors. Additionally, three U.S. territories have Democratic governors, while one has a Republican governor. Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico is a member of the New Progressive Party, although he is also affiliated with the Democratic Party.

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C Republicans Vs Democrats

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

It seemed like Bill Clinton had everything going for him. He defeated an incumbent President and became the first Democrat to win the White House since Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford. He had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate to work with him.

One of the first major initiatives he began was health care reform. Many Americans were concerned about spiraling medical costs. Medicare did not cover prescription drugs and only paid a portion of health care costs. Over 20 million Americans had no health insurance whatsoever. Clinton assembled a task force to study the problem and assigned his wife Hillary to head the committee. She became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.

Eventually Clinton presented a plan to limit costs and insure each American citizen to the Congress. Powerful interest groups representing doctors and insurance companies opposed Clinton. Many in the Congress thought the program too costly. Conservatives compared the plan to socialized medicine. Despite a “friendly” Democratic Congress, the Clintons’ proposal was defeated.

The Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives since 1954. Many Republicans had gotten used to acting like an opposition party. When the votes were counted, Republicans outscored Democrats in House seats 230-205. Gingrich was rewarded for his efforts by being named Speaker of the House.

A Plurality Believe History Will Judge Trump As A The Worst President Ever; Less Than A Quarter Of Young Americans Want Trump To Play A Key Role In The Future Of Republican Politics; Young Republicans Are Divided

Thirty percent of young Americans believe that history will judge Donald Trump as the worst president ever. Overall, 26% give the 45th president positive marks , while 54% give Trump negative marks ; 11% believe he will go down as an average president.

Twenty-two percent of young Americans surveyed agree with the statement, I want Donald Trump to play a key role in the future of Republican politics, 58% disagreed, and 19% neither agreed nor disagreed. Among young Republicans, 56% agreed while 22% disagreed, and 21% were neutral. Only 61% of those who voted for Trump in the 2020 general indicated their desire for him to remain active in the GOP.

If they had to choose, 42% of young Republicans consider themselves supporters of the Republican party, and not Donald Trump. A quarter indicated they are Trump supporters first, 24% said they support both.

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At Least 60 Afghans And 13 Us Service Members Killed By Suicide Bombers And Gunmen Outside Kabul Airport: Us Officials

Two suicide bombers and gunmen attacked crowds of Afghans flocking to Kabul’s airport Thursday, transforming a scene of desperation into one of horror in the waning days of an airlift for those fleeing the Taliban takeover. At least 60 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed, Afghan and U.S. officials said.

What Is The Difference Between Republicans And Democrats

Democrats vs Republicans – Which Brain is Better?

Republicans and Democrats are the two main and historically the largest political parties in the US and, after every election, hold the majority seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the highest number of Governors. Though both the parties mean well for the US citizens, they have distinct differences that manifest in their comments, decisions, and history. These differences are mainly ideological, political, social, and economic paths to making the US successful and the world a better place for all. Differences between the two parties that are covered in this article rely on the majority position though individual politicians may have varied preferences.

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Map 1 And Table : Party Registration Totals By State July 2018

Democrats no longer control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or for that matter most of the governorships or state legislatures. But they still maintain a toehold in the political process with their edge in the realm of voter registration. At least that is the case in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that register voters by political party. As of this month, 13 of these states boast a Democratic plurality in registered voters, compared to eight states where there is a Republican plurality. In the other 10 states, there are more registered independents than either Democrats or Republicans, with Democrats out-registering the Republicans in six of these states and the GOP with more voters than the Democrats in the other four. They are indicated in the chart as I or I. Nationally, four out of every 10 registered voters in party registration states are Democrats, with slightly less than three out of every 10 registered as Republicans or independents. Overall, the current Democratic advantage over Republicans in the party registration states approaches 12 million.

Recent party registration numbers used here are from state election websites and are based on totals compiled in early July 2018. Registration data are as of the following months: October 2016 ; February 2017 ; November 2017 ; January 2018 ; March 2018 ; April 2018 ; May 2018 ; June 2018 ; and July 2018 .

Where Do Trump And Biden Stand On Key Issues

Reuters: Brian Snyder/AP: Julio Cortez

The key issues grappling the country can be broken down into five main categories: coronavirus, health care, foreign policy, immigration and criminal justice.

This year, a big focus of the election has been the coronavirus pandemic, which could be a deciding factor in how people vote, as the country’s contentious healthcare system struggles to cope.

The average healthcare costs for COVID-19 treatment is up to $US30,000 , an Americas Health Insurance Plans 2020 study has found.

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Religious Affiliation And Party Identification

White evangelical Protestants remain one of the most reliably Republican groups of voters, and the GOPs advantage among this segment of the population has continued to grow in recent years: 77% of white evangelical voters lean toward or identify with the Republican Party, while just 18% have a Democratic orientation.

White mainline Protestant voters are more divided in their political identities. As has been the case for the last several years, a narrow majority affiliates with or leans to the GOP, while 41% lean toward or identify with the Democratic Party.

Black Protestant voters remain solidly Democratic in their partisan loyalties. Almost nine-in-ten lean toward or identify with the Democratic Party.

Overall, Catholic voters are roughly evenly split between the share who identify with or lean to the Republican and Democratic parties. But white Catholics and Hispanic Catholics diverge politically.

White Catholic voters now are more Republican than Democratic . While the partisan balance among white Catholic voters is little changed in recent years, this group was more evenly divided in their partisan loyalties about a decade ago.

Hispanic Catholics, who represent a growing share of the Catholic population in the U.S., are substantially more Democratic in their orientation .

While Mormon voters remain a solidly Republican group , in recent years Mormons have been less likely to identify as Republican than in the past.

Poring Over Party Registration

This is not the best of times for the Democratic Party. No White House; no Senate; no House of Representatives; and a clear minority of governorships and state legislatures in their possession. Yet the Democrats approach this falls midterm elections with an advantage in one key aspect of the political process their strength in states where voters register by party.

Altogether, there are 31 states with party registration; in the others, such as Virginia, voters register without reference to party. Among the party registration states are some of the nations most populous: California, New York, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, and Massachusetts.

The basic facts: In 19 states and the District, there are more registered Democrats than Republicans. In 12 states, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats. In aggregate, 40% of all voters in party registration states are Democrats, 29% are Republicans, and 28% are independents. Nationally, the Democratic advantage in the party registration states approaches 12 million.

Still, Republican Donald Trump found a route to victory in 2016 that went through the party registration states. He scored a near sweep of those where there were more Republicans than Democrats, winning 11 of the 12, while also taking six of the 19 states where there were more Democrats than Republicans a group that included the pivotal battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

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Corruption By The Numbers: Republicans Versus Democrats

Although I often use materials Ive read in journals and other publications as the starting point for blog posts, I rarely reproduce an entire article or commentary. When I received the following analysis in an email, however, I asked for permission to do just that.

There is a widespread impression that Democrats are less upstanding and law-abiding than Republicans. That may be a side effect of the excessive public piety affected by so many Republican officeholders, or the belief that a willingness to compromise on matters of policy signifies a corrupt wheeler/dealer mentality.

Until I read this, my own impression had been that there isnt much difference between the parties when it comes to bad behavior, so I was pretty surprised by this data.

Here it is, unaltered:

Wow. Just wow.

Democratic Drama That Might Matter

Meanwhile, in Washington, there was some drama on Capitol Hill last night.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and centrist House Democrats, locked in a standoff over the order the House should vote on bills, failed to reach a resolution by sundown as the two sides remained at odds over how to proceed after a series of meetings, NBCs Sahil Kapur writes.

The group of centrist Democrats object to Pelosi’s plan to begin work on the budget measure and to wait to pass the infrastructure bill.

But since this infrastructure-reconciliation effort by Democrats is going to continue to play out through the fall, were not getting worked up about a procedural ideological standoff in late August. At least right now.

Its kind of like the equivalent of a preseason NFL game. It could matter. Or it might not.

Its still really early.

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Which Party Is The Party Of The 1 Percent

First, both parties receive substantial support. Much of it comes from registered voters who make $100K+ annually. However, Democrats actually come out ahead when it comes to fundraising for campaigns. In many cases, Democrats have been able to raise twice as much in private political contributions. But what about outside of politicians? Does that mean Democrats are the wealthier party? Which American families are wealthier? Republicans or Democrats?

Honestly, it is probably Republicans. When it comes down to it, the richest families in America tend to donate to Republican candidates. Forbes reported out of the 50 richest families in the United States, 28 donate to Republican candidates. Another seven donate to Democrats. Additionally, 15 of the richest families in the U.S. donate to both parties.

List Of Presidents Of The United States

Democrats Vs Republicans | What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans?

The president of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States, indirectly elected to a four-year term by the American people through the Electoral College. The officeholder leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.

Since the office was established in 1789, 45 people have served in 46 presidencies. The first president, George Washington, won a unanimous vote of the Electoral College; one, Grover Cleveland, served two non-consecutive terms and is therefore counted as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States .

There are five living former presidents. The most recent to die was George H. W. Bush, on November 30, 2018.

The presidency of William Henry Harrison, who died 31 days after taking office in 1841, was the shortest in American history. Franklin D. Roosevelt served the longest, over twelve years, before dying early in his fourth term in 1945. He is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms. Since the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1951, no person may be elected president more than twice, and no one who has served more than two years of a term to which someone else was elected may be elected more than once.

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[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll of the week

Let’s keep things simple this week: Morning Consult just released its latest edition of President Trump’s approval ratings by state. We know generally that Trump is less popular overall than at the start of his term. But there are pretty wide variations in how much his popularity has shifted by state.1

1. Trump’s net approval has declined in all 50 states since he took office

This isn’t totally surprising, as Trump’s net approval rating — the percentage of people who approve of the president minus the percentage who disapprove — has declined nationally since January 2017. But it’s still noteworthy. It often seems as if American politics is split between two immutable camps: Trump loyalists and Trump haters, and neither group ever changes its mind about anything. But the data here suggests more fluidity — and in Trump’s case, the movement is against him. Trump does have near-ironclad support (close to 90 percent approval, according to Gallup) among self-described Republicans nationally. But a Gallup poll conducted last year found that only about 40 percent of U.S. adults identify themselves as either Republicans or leaning toward the GOP. So that remaining 60 percent of the U.S. that identifies as Democrats and independents is likely where Trump has grown more unpopular.

How Trump’s net approval rating has changed, by state

Net Approval state Jan. 2017 May 2018 CHANGE New Mexico +17 -14 -31 Illinois +9 -22 -31 New York +8 -21 -29 D.C. -31 -58 -27 Utah +27 0 -27 Vermont -2 -27 -25 Delaware +8 -17 -25 Washington +1 -23 -24 Oklahoma +34 +11 -23 Massachusetts -4 -26 -22 Connecticut +5 -16 -21 Montana +24 +3 -21 Oregon +2 -19 -21 Rhode Island -4 -24 -20 Kentucky +34 +15 -19 Arizona +20 +2 -18 Minnesota +3 -15 -18 New Jersey +2 -16 -18 Ohio +14 -4 -18 Wisconsin +6 -12 -18 Alaska +24 +7 -17 Colorado +1 -16 -17 Florida +22 +5 -17 North Dakota +23 +6 -17 Nebraska +23 +6 -17 Arkansas +30 +13 -17 Michigan +8 -9 -17 Kansas +24 +8 -16 New Hampshire +1 -15 -16 Iowa +9 -7 -16 North Carolina +18 +2 -16 Texas +20 +5 -15 California -6 -21 -15 Indiana +22 +8 -14 Manie +8 -6 -14 Missouri +19 +5 -14 Pennsylvania +10 -4 -14 Virginia +8 -6 -14 Tennessee +33 +20 -13 Hawaii -13 -26 -13 Idaho +29 +16 -13 Nevada +10 -2 -12 Wyoming +40 +28 -12 Georgia +18 +7 -11 Mississippi +34 +23 -11 South Carolina +25 +14 -11 West Virgina +37 +27 -10 Maryland -13 -20 -7 South Dakota +21 +14 -7 Alabama +36 +30 -6 Louisana +31 +25 -6

Source: Morning Consult

The states where Trump’s numbers have tanked the most among registered voters are fairly liberal: Illinois and New Mexico. But even in Louisiana, where Trump has seen the smallest decline, he has dipped 6 percentage points in net approval (from 59 percent approve, 28 percent disapprove in January 2017, to 60-35 in May 2018).

All that said, Trump’s approval declining in every state isn’t as bad for the president as you might think. According to Gallup, Obama’s approval rating dropped in all 50 states from 2009 to 2010, again as part of his general decline in popularity. Most presidents’ popularity peaks as they start their tenures.2

2. Trump has seen big declines in some red states but not others

Eight of the 10 states (I’m treating Washington, D.C., as a state for these purposes.) where Trump’s net approval declined the most are places where the president lost in 2016. But his popularity has plunged more in ruby-red Utah (-27 points), Oklahoma (-23) and Montana (-21) than in swingy Colorado (-17) and blue California (-15). (Trump of course started with pretty lackluster numbers California and Colorado, so he had more room to fall in the red states.) That said, his numbers have held up much better in states such as South Carolina (-11), West Virginia (-10) and South Dakota (-7).

Trump was always politically weak in Utah for a Republican. But I will be curious to see if other polls continue to find the president in such decline in some of these red states. His disapproval rating in Oklahoma is 42 percent, according to Morning Consult; it’s 40 percent in Kentucky. (He won more than 60 percent of the vote in both states in 2016.)

3. The Deep South is stable in its views on Trump

The 10 states were Trump’s numbers are closest to where they were in January 2017 include Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.

I expected this, as these are fairly inelastic states overall, meaning that they have very few swing voters. All five states have large black populations that overwhelmingly vote Democratic and white populations that overwhelmingly vote Republican. Take Georgia, for example: Trump started off there with 53 percent approval and 35 percent disapproval, and it looks like the state’s Democrats have united in hating him over the last 17 months (taking him to 44 percent disapproval) but Republicans haven’t moved, so his approval rate is at 51 percent.

Other polling nuggets

Good news for Democrats in a key battleground state where they lost in 2016. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio well ahead in his re-election race against his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci, 51-34. The same poll showed the Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio, Richard Cordray, effectively tied with his Republican opponent, Ohio Attorney General Mike Dewine — Cordray led 42-40.

A Cincinnati Enquirer/Suffolk University poll of Ohio out this week shows similar results, but they are even better for Democrats in the gubernatorial race. In that poll of likely voters, Cordray had a 43-36 lead over DeWine, and Brown had a 53-37 advantage over Renacci.

In Pennsylvania, another key battleground state the Democrats lost in 2016, a new Franklin and Marshall College poll shows Democratic Sen. Bob Casey ahead 44-27 over his challenger, U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta. Gov. Tom Wolf, also a Democrat, had a 48-29 lead in his re-election campaign against his Republican opponent, former state Sen. Scott Wagner, according to this survey.

A YouGov poll found that about half of Americans (including about 3 in 4 Republicans and about 1 in 4 Democrats) support proposals to increase surveillance of American Muslims, including at mosques within the U.S. and at U.S. airports. Those numbers are consistent with YouGov’s findings in July of 2017.

The Republican tax plan that was passed into law in December faces more opposition than support according to a new Public Policy Polling survey. Fifty-one percent of respondents said that the plan would mostly benefit the rich, 30 percent said it would benefit the middle class, and only 7 percent said it would mostly benefit the poor.

About half of Americans believe that within the next 50 years, people will routinely travel to space as tourists, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-eight percent, however, said they would not be interested a space vacation, while 42 percent would.

21 percent of registered voters believe that it is legally permissible for the president to pardon himself, according to a poll by Morning Consult; 58 percent believe it is not legal.3

According to a PPP poll, 37 percent of registered voters believe that the FBI put a spy in Donald Trump’s campaign for president, 42 percent believe the agency did not spy on the campaign, and 22 percent are not sure. Predictably, that number is split along party lines, with 60 percent of Republicans believing the assertion, which the president calls “Spygate.”

58 percent of Americans (43 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans) believe that the U.S. benefits from having a class of rich people, according to a new Gallup poll. That’s a 9-percentage-point decrease in Democrats who believe a rich class is beneficial since 2012. Still, Democrats are just as likely as Republicans to want to be rich.

According to a YouGov poll, a majority of Americans (53 percent) said they know what the letters in “LGBTQ” stand for; 80 percent said they know the meaning of “LGBT,” but only 13 percent said they know “LGBTQIA.” Respondents were evenly divided on the question of whether having a term for people with non-cisgender and non-heterosexual identities is important or not.

71 percent of Americans support allowing people under 30 who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay, according to a Fox News poll. That number remains unchanged since January.

A Pew Research Center study analyzed 102 countries and found an inverse correlation between the GDP of a country and the percent of people who said they pray daily. The U.S., however, is a big outlier — the only country with a GDP of over $30,000 per capita where more than half of the adult population reported praying daily.

Trump approval

The president’s approval (42 percent) and disapproval (52 percent) ratings are about the same as this time last month.

Generic ballot

The Democrats have an 8 percentage-point edge on the generic congressional ballot, up from a 6-point advantage this time last month.

[srinathpanuganti]

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