ANS -- Naomi Klein: Only a Reverse Shock Doctrine Can Save Our Climate

Here's an interview with Naomi Klein on climate change versus Capitalism.  Read it.   I've included the comments so far.  The interview is from Bill Moyers' studio.
Find it here:  http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/16/naomi-klein-only-a-reverse-shock-doctrine-can-save-our-climate/    
--Kim


ENVIRONMENT

Naomi Klein: Only a Reverse Shock Doctrine Can Save Our Climate

September 16, 2014
by Joshua Holland

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Young girls protest in front of the Polish Ministry of Economy, where a coal industry meeting took place in Warsaw, Poland, Monday, Nov. 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,Naomi Klein argues that if we had taken action years ago when scientists first established that human activities were changing our climate, we might have been able to deal with the problem of global warming with only minimal disruption to our economic system. But as we approach a tipping point, and the consequences of climate change come into sharper focus, that time has passed, and we now have to acknowledge that preserving humans' habitat requires a paradigm change.

But Klein doesn't just offer us a depressing litany of the damage we've already done. She calls on us to seriously rethink the way our economy is structured to address not only climate change, but also other longstanding social problems like persistent global poverty and rising inequality.

BillMoyers.com spoke with Klein about the fundamental challenges – and opportunities – that come from dealing with a warming planet at this stage of the game. Below is a transcript of our discussion that's been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Holland: Please briefly lay out the thesis of the book and then we can drill down into a few points.

Naomi Klein: The thesis of the book is that by responding robustly to climate change ­ in line with what scientists tell us we have to do ­ we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to solve some of the biggest and most intractable problems facing our economy. I'm talking about creating countless good jobs, rebuilding ailing infrastructure to help protect us from the heavy weather that we've already locked in, and lowering our emissions so it doesn't get markedly worse.

We also have an incredible opportunity to address our most intransigent economic problem, which is inequality within our countries, and also between our countries. We can also have safer, more livable cities and cleaner air. So there is a lot of potentially good news.

The bad news is that we can't do any of this by just changing our light bulbs or politely lobbying governments behind the scenes. We need to have a robust public debate about what values we want to have govern our society. The argument I make in the first part of the book is that the reason we've failed so spectacularly to rise to this existential crisis ­ and by failed I mean our emissions are up 61 percent since we started working on this issue in the early 1990s ­ is because the things we have to do clash fundamentally with the core ideology that has reigned in this same period, which is market fundamentalism.

This is a crisis with spectacularly bad timing because it fell in our laps at the very moment that history was being declared over and liberals around the world were exporting this market fundamentalism. They're telling us we can't regulate just when we need to regulate and that we can't invest in the public sphere just when we need to do exactly that. They say there's no such thing as society, when what we need more than anything is to come together and act collectively.

Holland: You talk about many of the ways that modern capitalism as we know it has failed a lot of people. And you're calling for this dramatic rethink of how we structure our economy. I kept thinking that this is like your book The Shock Doctrine in reverse – we have a crisis and also an opportunity. Only it's not an opportunity for a small group of us to get filthy rich but rather to advance the greater good. Was that conscious?

Klein: It's definitely conscious ­ I call it a "people shock." It's an inverse of The Shock Doctrine in the sense that what I documented in that book is how crises are systematically used by our elite to capitalize on fear and disorientation to push through policies that consolidate wealth at the top.

Here I'm arguing that we need to get smart in the midst of crisis, and the truth is that it either goes one way or the other: One of the things I learned while I was writing The Shock Doctrine is that crisis either makes us grow up fast or fall apart. And I'm saying that we can grow up really fast ­ that we can come together in this crisis. We've done it before.

We really need to receive the message that this crisis is sending, which is that our current system is failing. It's failing on multiple levels. And the solutions are not ones that will consolidate wealth, but would do the exact opposite. And those policies tend to be popular, so you don't need to engage in the sort of devious trickery that I documented in The Shock Doctrine.

Holland: I've long had a problem with the idea that our under-regulated form of capitalism, where corporations wield huge amounts of power, is the only form of capitalism we can imagine. Is it capitalism that's inherently oppositional to saving humanity, or is it what some have called "ravage capitalism?"

Klein: I agree with you that there are different forms of capitalism. This deregulated corporatism we have now is a particular strain. We've had others in the past.

Because this crisis hit us when it did ­ when this perverted strain of capitalism was so triumphant – we have not only failed to act to solve the problem, we've actively made it much worse.

That said, I don't think the solution is just reverting to a more mixed economy. As Michael Mann, the climate scientist at Penn State, said, there's a "procrastination penalty" when it comes to emissions. All this time that we've been failing to respond, emissions have been going up, and they stick around, they accumulate. Because we have waited so long, we now need to cut our emissions so deeply and rapidly that it does present a challenge to economic growth. This is why I called the book Capitalism vs. the Climate – because I do think the logic of economic growth is very much at the heart of this system. Maybe it is possible to have a form of capitalism that doesn't focus on growth, but it's really hard to pry apart the capitalism that we have from the idea of endless growth.

Holland: You don't take it easy on the big environmental groups in this book – you reject the idea that they can politely persuade powerful economic actors to do what's necessary to address this problem. But what about the argument that transitioning to a sustainable, green economy would require huge investments, lead to new technological innovations and employ lots of people? The classic green jobs argument doesn't see capitalism as being inherently incompatible with protecting the climate.

Klein: I think there's a very strong green jobs argument to be made, but a lot of these groups don't want to talk about the need to really step back and design the economy that we want. They think we can put a few incentives in place, leave it to the market, and that will get us there. But there has to be much more top-down regulation. We need to say "no" to the fossil fuel companies that want to open up all these carbon reserves.

So yes, we have to switch to the green technologies. Yes, it will create lots of jobs. I'm not disputing that. But at the same time, if we're going to get off fossil fuels by midcentury, which we need to do, we are also going to need to consume less. And that's the piece that nobody wants to talk about. These big green groups are only interested in talking about win-win solutions. Ideas that are genuinely a threat to elites like keeping fossil fuel reserves in the ground are basically off the table.

Holland: What about people who aren't elites? You're talking about a drastic rethink of our economy and our society. Do you worry that people are more fearful of that kind of change than they are of the threat of a changing climate, which is still somewhat remote for many of us?

Klein: I think the opposite is true, in that there's a huge amount of debate and discontent about our economic model right now. There's a huge appetite for addressing inequality, for a model that promises to create better jobs and different kinds of jobs and values work differently and has stronger communities. I think most of us actually know there's a problem with capitalism right now and that by shifting the focus to our economy, climate change becomes a convenient truth rather than an inconvenient truth. Because we need to fix the economy anyway, right?

Again and again we pit the economy against the environment. When the economic crisis hit Europe, all this austerity came down and not only were millions of people laid off and public services cut back, but Europeans were also told they could no longer afford their green policies anymore. So the system isn't working for workers and it isn't working for the environment. This economic system is failing us on so many levels, and it also happens to be destabilizing the systems on which all life depends.

The fact that there is so much science backing up the need for a different system should be hugely motivating ­ like a shot of adrenaline for our movement.

Holland: Throughout the book I got the sense that you, like many people, have completely given up on our institutional capacity to deal with these problems. You talk about how our elites have failed to address this. You write that slavery wasn't a crisis for American elites until abolitionism came along. You write that Apartheid wasn't a crisis for South Africa's elites until the anti-Apartheid movement turned it into a crisis. What is the equivalent here – how do we make an ecological crisis that for the moment disproportionally hurts the poorinto a crisis felt by our elites?

Klein: Every once in a while you'll hear a politician like John Kerry say that climate change is like a weapon of mass destruction, but they're certainly not on a war footing with this crisis. In fact, they're doubling down. But a grassroots movement can declare a crisis when our elites are not behaving as if they see it that way.

In that passage from the book, I'm making the point that it's not just about waiting for our politicians to say, "This is really, really serious." Social movements have the ability to lend that sense of urgency to an issue. In fact, this is how change happens. This is how change has always happened. So during the upcoming climate summit in New York there will be huge numbers of people on the street sending the message to our leaders that we believe this to be a crisis that requires a real sense of urgency.

Holland: You take us to the frontlines of this grassroots battle to push back against fossil fuel companies. We meet people all over the world who already are being impacted by global warming and are fighting back, like "Blockadia." What is "Blockadia" and what was it like researching these efforts?

Klein: "Blockadia" is a term that was first coined in the movement against the Keystone XL Pipeline in Texas. These are the people who are blocking the fossil fuel projects with their bodies and in the courts and in the streets. And we see these choke-points being developed and people are realizing, "If we block the coal ports in Washington State and Oregon, then there's no point digging it out in Montana because they're not going to be able to get the coal shipped out to China. So let's pour our energy into stopping those coal ports." And that's what people have been doing. The same is true of the pipeline fights – and not just against the Keystone Pipeline, but the Northern Gateway Pipeline and others as well. And people in Alberta are really panicked because they're landlocked ­ they don't have a way to get their tar sands oil to the sea.

The best moments for me researching the book were just hanging out with people who really love where they live. I have a chapter in the book called Love and Water and I quote an activist named Alexis Bonogofsky in Billings, Montana. She's a rancher and an environmental activist and she talks about taking on the coal companies and she says, "You know, the thing that Arch Coal doesn't understand is that it's not hate and anger that will save this place. Love will save this place." And so often when I was in this transnational space called Blockadia, I felt that this is a genuinely positive movement. It's a movement driven by people falling in love with where they live because they're faced with the prospect of losing something as fundamental as clean water or clean air.

It's really a beautiful movement, and that's counterbalanced this grim work of immersing myself in the scary science. Communities are being transformed through this resistance. And not just by saying no to these projects that they don't want, but also by building real alternatives to those projects and proving to themselves and their neighbors that another economy is both possible and desirable.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He's the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.

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ANS -- Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

Here is yet another article about the differences in the psychology of conservatives and liberals.  The body of knowledge is growing and the consensus is forming.  Conservatives are fear -based.  Notice, it doesn't describe the other side much.  Except to say liberals are more neurotic.  (I'd guess that's because of less certainty.)
Find it here:  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/biology-ideology-john-hibbing-negativity-bias   
--kim



POLITICS
 Religion, Science, Top Stories

Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

Ten years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it's becoming hard not to.

­By Chris Mooney
| Tue Jul. 15, 2014 5:00 AM EDT

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Scientists are using eye-tracking devices to detect automatic response differences between liberals and conservatives. University of Nebraska-Lincoln

You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Click here to read more from Mooney on the science of why people don't believe in science.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics­upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).
It is a "virtually inescapable conclusion" that the "cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different."

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets­centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns­would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, and he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what's truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, "22 or 23 accept the general idea" of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of "modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work," and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. [Italics added]

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what's clear is that today, they've more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.
"One possibility," note the authors, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but not-paradigm-shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that "successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience."

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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CHRIS MOONEY

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science. He was a science journalist and podcaster for Mother Jones and host of Climate Desk Live from 2012 to 2014. He is now a staff writer at The Washington Post.

ANS -- Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Is a Pending Disaster

In case you don't already know how bad TPP will be for us, here's a summary of what it will do. 
Find it here:   http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/27904-why-the-trans-pacific-partnership-agreement-is  
--Kim




 
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)

Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Is a Pending Disaster

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

06 January 15

 

epublicans who now run Congress say they want to cooperate with President Obama, and point to the administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, as the model. The only problem is the TPP would be a disaster.

If you haven't heard much about the TPP, that's part of the problem right there. It would be the largest trade deal in history ­ involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy – yet it's been devised in secret.

Lobbyists from America's biggest corporations and Wall Street's biggest banks have been involved but not the American public. That's a recipe for fatter profits and bigger paychecks at the top, but not a good deal for most of us, or even for most of the rest of the world.

First some background. We used to think about trade policy as a choice between "free trade" and "protectionism." Free trade meant opening our borders to products made elsewhere. Protectionism meant putting up tariffs and quotas to keep them out.

In the decades after World War II, America chose free trade. The idea was that each country would specialize in goods it produced best and at least cost. That way, living standards would rise here and abroad. New jobs would be created to take the place of jobs that were lost. And communism would be contained.

For three decades, free trade worked. It was a win-win-win.

But in more recent decades the choice has become far more complicated and the payoff from trade agreements more skewed to those at the top.

Tariffs are already low. Negotiations now involve such things as intellectual property, financial regulations, labor laws, and rules for health, safety, and the environment.

It's no longer free trade versus protectionism. Big corporations and Wall Street want some of both.

They want more international protection when it comes to their intellectual property and other assets. So they've been seeking trade rules that secure and extend their patents, trademarks, and copyrights abroad, and protect their global franchise agreements, securities, and loans.

But they want less protection of consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment, because these interfere with their profits. So they've been seeking trade rules that allow them to override these protections.

Not surprisingly for a deal that's been drafted mostly by corporate and Wall Street lobbyists, the TPP provides exactly this mix.

What's been leaked about it so far reveals, for example, that the pharmaceutical industry gets stronger patent protections, delaying cheaper generic versions of drugs. That will be a good deal for Big Pharma but not necessarily for the inhabitants of developing nations who won't get certain life-saving drugs at a cost they can afford.

The TPP also gives global corporations an international tribunal of private attorneys, outside any nation's legal system, who can order compensation for any "unjust expropriation" of foreign assets. 

Even better for global companies, the tribunal can order compensation for any lost profits found to result from a nation's regulations. Philip Morris is using a similar provision against Uruguay (the provision appears in a bilateral trade treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland), claiming that Uruguay's strong anti-smoking regulations unfairly diminish the company's profits.

Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits – say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions.

The administration says the trade deal will boost U.S. exports in the fast-growing Pacific basin where the United States faces growing economic competition from China. The TPP is part of Obama's strategy to contain China's economic and strategic prowess.

Fine. But the deal will also allow American corporations to outsource even more jobs abroad.

In other words, the TPP is a Trojan horse in a global race to the bottom, giving big corporations and Wall Street banks a way to eliminate any and all laws and regulations that get in the way of their profits.

At a time when corporate profits are at record highs and the real median wage is lower than it's been in four decades, most Americans need protection – not from international trade but from the political power of large corporations and Wall Street.

The Trans Pacific Partnership is the wrong remedy to the wrong problem. Any way you look at it, it's just plain wrong.

Fwd: don't know how many are true/avail., but very inventive ! + happy 2015

Subject: GREAT IDEAS...

A lot of GREAT IDEAS.. Wonder how many make it?

 

 

 

 Movie theaters with screens in the bathroom so you don't miss anything.

Even better if the theater has bean bag seats.

 

Traffic lights with countdown indicators

.

 

A pen that lets you scan and write in any color.

Wall outlets with USB chargers.

It should also come with a built-in night light.

And the ultimate outlet would also have extension cords built into the wall.

Small tiles you can attach to your keys, wallet, computer, or pretty much anything. If you lose anything, you can then look up their location on your smartphone.

Fresh pizza vending machines.

Benches that you can turn to always have a dry seat.

Power strips that you can expand and rotate.

Mug that catches any drips.

Parking garages with lights showing open spaces.

Stairs with slides.

Supermarkets with build your own 12-packs of soda.

How to stop littering.

Where was this when I was in school?

Device that charges your phone from hot or cold drinks.

Or this solar powered charger.

Water fountains with built-in water bottle filling station.

Subways where you can pay by recycling.

Device to lift the Pringles up.

I would totally love this.

A fun way to clean.

A hair brush that is easy to clean.

Earbuds that won't tangle.

 

ANS -- Progressive Christians and the Bible

This article, which I got from a group called The Christian Left, is an interesting take on the way Christians look at the bible: it makes the case that Jesus himself modeled not taking the bible literally. 
Find it here:  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2014/06/progressive-christians-and-the-bible-2.html  
--Kim



« Sneaky Trick

Evolution Misunderstood or Misrepresented? »

Progressive Christians and the Bible

June 18, 2014 by James F. McGrath 26 Comments

I'm delighted to be a participant in a multi-blog conversation on Patheos, about progressive Christians and Scripture. Let me start by giving readers the prompt for what I and others have written:

Progressive Christianity is moving into the 21st century with a freedom to challenge and question tradition and scripture in ways that simultaneously respect the past and look for fresh ways to live into the future. Traditional Christian interpretations of scriptures on a wide variety of issues ­ hell, gender, sexuality, marriage, community, atonement, social justice, and leadership ­ are giving way to more nuanced understandings of authorial intent, deeper explorations of the linguistic and cultural realities of the biblical world, and broader definitions of Christian identity. What is the role of Scripture for progressives? How do we define its authority? To what extent is it prescriptive for 21st-century Christians?

Progressive Christians hold a range of views, and so I won't presume to speak for other Christians. And so what I give here is my own viewpoint, which I know many but not all progressive Christians share (you can read the views of other bloggers on the hub page for this discussion).

I'd like to begin by challenging the notion that progressive Christians' approach to and understanding of the Bible deserves to be contrasted with "traditional" interpretations. Progressive Christianity is itself a tradition, and one with deep roots. It is a more postmodern manifestation of something that could be found in earlier liberal Protestantism, which drew on Martin Luther's challenges to church authority, which stemmed at least in part from his discovery that what were proffered as "traditional" interpretations in his own time were in fact subsequent developments. We find elements of continuity between modern progressive Christianity and the ancient Christian thinkers who interacted and drew upon other philosophies, and acknowledged that Scripture is full of things which cannot be understood literally.

I emphasize this because conservative Christians have long been engaged in a remarkably successful PR exercise to give the impression that they are the ones who are faithful to the Bible and historic Christianity. But in fact, what they conserve is an older but non-original form of Christianity as it came to be expressed in a particular historical and cultural context, which they have mistaken for (or deliberately misrepresent as) unchanging truth.

This is important, because as atheist P. Z. Myers said to Ken Ham (a representative of the sort of view I just mentioned) in a recent blog post:

Please, please, please keep it up ­ these Bible literalists do so much to help the cause of atheism. When you insist that a short page of fuzzy poetry must supplant all of biology and mustbe regarded as absolutely, literally true in every word, rational people are given cause to doubt…and once they begin to doubt the first page of your sacred holy book, they begin to question page 2, and page 3, and page whatever, and quite soon the dedicated priests of your cult are wondering why there is a sudden, catastrophic loss of believers.

I myself also recently pointed out this self-fulfilling prophecy of so-called Biblical literalists. Fundamentalists offer the false antithesis that you must either accept everything the Bible says ("even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff," as Ned Flanders once put it), or throw it away. It is no surprise that some people do as they have been instructed, when they discover that it is in fact impossible to accept everything the Bible says, since the Bible does not say only one thing. But ancient readers were often much more capable of appreciating diversity and contradictions, myth and poetry, than modern fundamentalists are.

Progressive Christianity's approach to the Bible is one that doesn't offer this sort of false advertising. We recognize that the Bible bears witness not to divinely-revealed timeless truths but to an ongoing human conversation, and it invites us to join in that conversation. When we disagree with something that Biblical authors say, that is itself "Biblical" because Biblical authors did that too, and despite what fundamentalists may tell you, when someone like Paul or Luke wrote, their writings were not yet Scripture. And so the fundamentalist approach ignores what these authors' words indicated when they were written: a willingness to rethink things, to challenge, to change, and in so doing seeking to preserve core principles and give faithful expression to core convictions.

And so if there is one key point that I think it is important to make about how progressive Christians approach the Bible, it is this. Progressive Christians reject the false antithesis that fundamentalists offer between being faithful to our Christian heritage and being willing to change our minds, and believe and do things differently than other Christians did in the past. Doing things differently is precisely how Christians in the past were faithful – by relativizing the importance of ritual in relation to concern for others, by pushing the boundaries of categories like "neighbor" and "children of Abraham" to welcome those previously excluded.

There have always been voices that sought to pull in boundaries, to exclude, to pride themselves on accepting beliefs or accomplishing ritual as the things that matter most, rather than caring for others. And there have always been those who claimed to be believing and doing everything the Bible said – even though it has never been true. And so progressive Christianity's stance on the Bible is not the historic Christian stance. But it is a historic Christian stance, and one that is faithful to the approach Jesus himself took to Scripture, such as when he elevated making people well over rules that forbid touching them.



 


Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2014/06/progressive-christians-and-the-bible-2.html#ixzz3NdPqx5Mg

ANS -- Fox News Ratings Plummet As Dish Network Proves Ideological Bullying Doesn’t Buy Air Time

Here's a wonderfully biased news article.  It's short, so take a look.  Fox is fuming.  Send a missive to Dish to let them know if you agree with their policy.  Sent to me by one of our readers.
Find it here:   http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/01/01/fox-news-ratings-plummet-as-dish-network-proves-ideological-bullying-doesnt-buy-air-time/   
--Kim

Fox News Ratings Plummet As Dish Network Proves Ideological Bullying Doesn�t Buy Air Time

Author: Stephen D Foster Jr January 1, 2015 11:00 am

The folks over at Fox News had hoped to bully Dish Network into giving their toxic channel the cheap air time it demands, but going into a second week of being banished from the television lineup is only proving that Dish has more clout.

Because Fox News has played the victim instead of offering a fair price to for its weak programming, Dish dropped the conservative propaganda channel, including Fox Business, much to the delight of Americans who value their brains.

Of course, this made Fox News go ballistic and conservative heads everywhere begin to explode. Fox even urged their viewers to declare war on Dish Network, telling them to drop their subscriptions in an effort to force Dish�s hand. According to Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen, Fox is the first channel to throw such a temper tantrum.

�Ironically, Fox News would be the first network to decry this kind of deal-making,� Ergen said. �There�s nothing about this extortion attempt that was fair or balanced.�

Earlier in the year, Dish Network had dropped Cartoon Network and a host of other channels during negotiations with Turner Broadcasting. But both sides worked for an agreement and the channels were restored. Fox, however, chose to wage ideological warfare rather than negotiate in good faith.

The only problem is that Fox is beginning to feel the pain and Dish is only too happy to sit there and watch the right-wing network implode.

As it turns out, Fox�s ratings have plummeted since the blackout of the channel began earlier this month. How�s that for leverage, Rupert Murdoch?

On December 21-28, Fox News found themselves without a huge part of their normal audience. Approximately 939,000 nut jobs were able to tune in for their daily dose of brain drain that week compared to the 1.65 million viewers who watched during the same week in 2013. That�s quite a drop in viewership.

On the other hand, Dish Network serves 13 million customers so those who watch Fox are a mere drop in the bucket by comparison. In other words, Fox can whine all it wants, Dish Network is perfectly content to allow Fox to keep hitting itself in the face. And the fact is, a majority of America would be ecstatic if Fox continued to be blacked out permanently. So be sure to contact Dish and tell them you support their decision to take Fox off the air. Also, be sure to tell them that you would prefer Fox News never be allowed to return. After all, it�s more important now than ever before to protect America�s IQ and prevent lies, sexism, racism, and hate from taking over the media. If the FCC won�t do something about Fox, perhaps it�s time to ask private television service providers to do so.

Featured Image courtesy of Nerve.com