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Public

Podcast Public
Michael Shellenberger
Reporting on humanity, civilization, and the environment www.public.news

Available Episodes

5 of 100
  • Jonathan Keeperman: “We need to reassert a healthy masculinity”
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsPresident Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID were cruel, said Democrats and the media. Indeed, they argue, the underlying cause of most of society’s problems is lack of empathy. If only we were kinder and gentler with each other, they say, we would finally be able to end poverty, inequality, homelessness, war, and oppression generally.But societies have become vastly kinder and gentler over time. Levels of poverty have declined dramatically in part because we redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. And racial and sexual minorities experience less oppression and greater freedom today than at any point in recorded history.Of course, more should still be done to enable all humans to flourish. For example, the United States is in the midst of a severe crisis of homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction.But those problems do not result from a lack of empathy or care. California, for example, has spent $24 billion on homelessness since 2019; it grew 40% in that time period.In fact, the increase in homelessness, addiction, and untreated mental illness is more the result of enabling and even subsidizing them than cracking down on them. That’s because being arrested and being mandated rehab or psychiatric care is often the only way that addicts and mentally ill people are able to escape life on the streets.A similar story can be told about many other social problems. Psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt, have found that coddling children results in them being discouraged more easily when they encounter problems. Their challenges continue in schools when teachers allow children to pass classes despite not being able to read.In fact, argues author and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, who I interviewed recently for this podcast, there has been a “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced ‘The End of Men.’ Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: ‘The future is female.’ She was correct.”In a viral 2023 essay in First Things, “What is the Longhouse,” Keeperman used the metaphor of the indigenous Longhouse to describe female-dominated and overly feminized institutions.“The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother,” he writes. “As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S.… And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.”The increase of women in our institutions is not the only reason for the rising power of feminine values in society. Other factors play a key role. One of them is likely the success of civilization itself in reducing violence and obviating the need for traditionally masculine norms. Another factor is the well-intended turn toward values of openness and inclusion after the horrors of the First and Second World Wars.
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  • Jefferson Morley: “ The people behind JFK’s murder had impunity”
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor many, the Executive Order issued last month by President Donald Trump to declassify and release the remaining records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not that interesting or important. There’s little evidence to support the conspiracy theories that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed former President John F. Kennedy, say journalists and historians. Oswald was a Left-wing extremist who had strong rifle skills from his time in the military. He could have shot Kennedy from the book depository behind the former president. Neither the investigation of the murder by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren nor any other in the 60 years since has produced evidence that can’t be explained.In truth, there are significant problems with the conventional explanation of Kennedy’s assassination, and understanding what happened is essential to protecting America’s democratic system, which assassinations, particularly ones that may have involved US government officials and agencies, undermine. There is evidence that Oswald didn’t hate and rather admired Kennedy, particularly for what he had done for civil rights. And if Oswald had been motivated by politics to kill Kennedy, why would he have denied it when caught, claiming to be a “patsy,” a person set up to take the blame for a crime they didn’t commit? If no other shooters were involved, then why does the famous Zapruder film of the assassination show Kennedy being shot in the front of the head at an angle Oswald did not have? And why did a man tied to the criminal underworld kill Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination?
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  • Ben Schreckinger: On Biden’s Long History Of Shady Deals
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsBen Schreckinger is an old-fashioned investigative journalist with Politico who wrote the best book on Joe Biden. Schreckinger’s book is called, simply, The Bidens. Hachette published the book in 2021. “It got a fair amount of attention in the conservative press,” he told me recently, “but in terms of mainstream media attention, it was pretty muted. It was inconvenient for a lot of media outlets to have a more unvarnished look at these business dealings. It was the first mainstream book to say that the [Hunter Biden] laptop was largely genuine.”In truth, the book shows that Joe Biden has been involved in shady influence-peddling his entire career. While intense focus has rightly been paid to the Biden family’s influence peddling with America’s foreign adversaries, the evidence assembled by Schreckinger suggests that Biden owes his political career to election interference by the mafia.
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  • Peter Schweizer: Biden Legacy Is Taking Tens Of Millions From America's Adversaries
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe mainstream story about Joe Biden has long been that he would bring “adult supervision or gravitas” to political life, notes investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. As someone who had served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden ostensibly offered a “greater understanding of politics…. Joe Biden has made a career off that. When he ran against Donald Trump in 2020, he tried to make the case that the adults are back in town.”In truth, says Schweizer in a new interview with Public, Biden was a pioneer in “offshoring his corruption.” As soon as he became Vice President, Biden’s son Hunter and his brother James “started doing deals, not in Tokyo, not in London, but in Ukraine, Russia and China.Haven’t other political leaders made money by having family members sell access to them? Sure, say Schweizer. The difference with Biden was both the scale of the influence peddling, and that it happened with so many enemies of the United States.“The Biden family has taken in tens of millions of dollars. The people who send him millions of dollars with nothing discernible being given in return are directly tied to the spy apparatus of China. All the people involved had ties to Chinese intelligence. And there's no discernible evidence that Hunter Biden brought anything of value to the table other than his name and his connections to his father and his father's political power.”And the millions from China appear to have changed Biden’s behavior.
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  • Jon Keeley: “L.A. Fires Not The Result Of Climate Change”
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsTwo people are dead, and 80,000 have been forced to evacuate neighborhoods in Los Angeles thanks to fires raging out of control. According to the media and some scientists, climate change is causing the fires. “Researchers believe that a warming world is increasing the conditions that are conducive to wildland fire, including low relative humidity,” reported the BBC.But one of the country’s top fire experts disagrees. “I don't think these fires are the result of climate change,” Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist, told Public. “You certainly could get these events without climate change.”Keeley has researched the topic for 40 years. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state,” said Keeley, “and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”What about scientists who claim that the dry conditions are unusual? “If you look at the past 100 years of climates in Southern California,” said Keeley, “you will find there have been Januaries that have been very dry. And there's been autumns that have been very dry. There have been Santa Ana winds in January. So these sorts of conditions are what contribute to a fire being particularly destructive at this time of the year. But it's not the result of climate change.”
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