home.social

#institute — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #institute, aggregated by home.social.

  1. A Bonanza For Fans Of The Natural World - The Digital Library Sharing 64 million Pages Of Scientific Knowledge With Everyone
    --
    theguardian.com/environment/20 ← shared technical media article
    --
    biodiversitylibrary.org/ <-- shared BHL home page / data portal
    --
    [glorious resource!]
    “The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.“
    --
    “The Biodiversity Heritage Library [BHL} is an invaluable online archive of historic texts on species living and lost supplied by the world’s leading museums and universities...
    Some go there to read about the wood that Victorian manufacturers used to make walking sticks. Others want to see an illustration of a Tasmanian tiger or marvel at the field diary of one of the first known botanists to explore the Antarctic.
    Over the past 20 years, more than 64m pages have been made freely available through the... BHL – a digital treasure trove for fans of the natural world. More than 680 museums, universities, libraries and scientific institutions from China, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand to Europe, Africa, Mexico, Canada and the US, have contributed to the library.
    This week, a report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew... revealed the crucial role digitisation [like BHL’s] is playing in “transforming our ability to understand and respond to the climate and biodiversity crises”, but it was the creation of the BHL 20 years ago that first demonstrated how bringing centuries of scientific knowledge online can unlock transformative discoveries and insights about the natural world.
    David Iggulden, who chairs the BHL executive committee alongside his job as head of data and digital, library and archives at RBG Kew, describes the library as an invaluable and “absolutely essential” resource for scientists in the field. But it is also used by scientific researchers, environmental historians, educators, art historians, artists, citizen scientists and members of the public who – like Iggulden – simply enjoy browsing its contents on a rainy weekend.
    “I just get caught up in it sometimes, looking at the various collections,” he says. “I think it’s amazing that we can explore such a vast array of different collections from very different institutions.”
    As well as published biodiversity literature and journals, there are letters, illustrations, climate records, field diaries, ecosystem profiles, distribution records and manuscripts containing the original collecting stories of a particular species or detailing voyages of discovery…”
    #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary #BHL #Biodiversity #library #literature #illustrations #UK #texts #historic #reference #online #opendata #visualisation #museum #walkingstick #university #research #institute #species #ecosystems #habitat #data #digital #climatechange #response #reference #resource #correspondence #illustrations #records #manuscripts
    @BiodiversityHeritageLibrary

  2. Stephen Wolfe grew up in Napa, California,
    and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

    After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to
    “do the Wendell Berry thing”
    in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

    Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe”
    and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.”

    The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online.

    He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure.

    Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited.

    Women would not be allowed to vote
    —instead, men would vote for their households.

    When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed.

    “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy,
    but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper,
    suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.”

    The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty,
    so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

    We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé:
    “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity,
    or Judeo-Christian worldview,
    or Judeo-Christian whatever,
    and really eradicate that from our thinking.

    Because if we say that America is a
    Judeo-Christian country,
    then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

    What role, I asked him, would Jews play?

    After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

    We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech,
    and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about
    "America as a people".

    The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.”

    America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness,
    but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.”

    Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America
    —as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

    In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all,
    but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate.

    Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him.

    “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life,
    and to seek to restore that,” he said.

    “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was"

    In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,”
    Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot
    “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.”

    WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted,

    and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate.

    As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.”

    Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

    motherjones.com/politics/2024/

    #Heritage #Action #Andrew #Isker #Andrew #Torba #Gab #refugees #Paul #Gottfried #Richard #Spencer #William #Wolfe #Big #Eva #Josh #Abbotoy #Claremont #Institute #Project2025 #Heritage #Foundation #Chris #Buskirk #Rockbridge #Network #Leonard #Leo #Peter #Thiel #Vance #Josh #Clemans #Charles #Haywood #warlord #Nate #Fischer #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

  3. William Wolfe served in the Trump administration
    both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense
    and as director of House affairs at the Department of State.

    He is also an alumnus of #Heritage #Action,
    a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation,
    the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025,
    whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.”

    A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists.

    The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors
    and Oklahoma Sen. #Dusty #Deevers as a co-author,
    called for “civil magistrates” to usher in 💥“the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

    The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals.

    As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses,
    including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.”

    The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

    Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage.
    There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says.

    “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

    William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media,
    but in mainstream conservative outlets,
    it was #Stephen #Wolfe
    (no relation to William)
    who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world.

    In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative,
    Wolfe paints America as a “#gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders.
    (Sound familiar?)

    He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

    #Andrew #Isker #Andrew #Torba #Gab #refugees #Paul #Gottfried #Richard #Spencer #William #Wolfe #Big #Eva #Josh #Abbotoy #Claremont #Institute #Project2025 #Heritage #Foundation #Chris #Buskirk #Rockbridge #Network #Leonard #Leo #Peter #Thiel #Vance #Josh #Clemans #Charles #Haywood #warlord #Nate #Fischer #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

  4. One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro #Andrew #Isker
    —the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church,
    studied divinity at New Saint Andrews,
    and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with #Andrew #Torba,
    the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform #Gab.

    In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee.

    Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion,
    not to mention how hospitable the state has been to #refugees.

    “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

    That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the
    “war on white America”
    alongside #Paul #Gottfried,
    the mentor of prominent white nationalist #Richard #Spencer.

    The conference was hosted by the "True Texas Project",
    a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

    Like many TheoBros,
    Isker sees much to like in Vance.

    In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as
    “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).”

    In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers,
    “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse.
    Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them.
    She wants them destroyed.
    She wants you to never be able to have this.
    She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

    One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to.

    Enter #William #Wolfe,
    the founder of the
    "Center for Baptist Leadership", which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it,
    the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States,
    has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism.

    Baptists are only the beginning.

    Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream,
    which he and other TheoBros refer to as “#Big #Eva.”

    In August, he posted on X,
    “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation
    than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

    #Josh #Abbotoy #Claremont #Institute #Project2025 #Heritage #Foundation #Chris #Buskirk #Rockbridge #Network #Leonard #Leo #Peter #Thiel #Vance #Josh #Clemans #Charles #Haywood #warlord #Nate #Fischer #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

  5. An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is
    #Josh #Abbotoy,
    executive director of "American Reformer"
    and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called "New Founding".

    A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the #Claremont #Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a #Project2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session”
    hosted by the right-wing think tank the #Heritage #Foundation.

    Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist #Chris #Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher.

    In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the #Rockbridge #Network,
    a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker #Leonard #Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire #Peter #Thiel.

    Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network?
    None other than
    JD #Vance.

    Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement.

    Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign.

    In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate,
    Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director,
    #Josh #Clemans:
    a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers.

    The caption read “Our guy.”

    New Founding lists as a partner the "Society for American Civic Renewal",
    a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron #Charles #Haywood,

    who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “#warlord.”

    According to founder #Nate #Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime”
    and that its members
    “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.”

    But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities.

    Promotional materials describe a community of
    “unmatched seclusion”
    where
    “simple country faith”
    protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime.

    Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay.

    “Who’s going to grab the land?
    Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring,
    something authentic to the region’s history,
    or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

    #Brian #Sauvé #Mefferd #Joel #Webbon #dominant #man #submissive #woman #Hawley #Johnson #Lee #Vance #Trump #Turning #Point #USA #Tucker #Carlson #flamethrower #Douglas #Wilson #Calvinism #Vance #hypermasculinity #birthrates #ethnonationalism #misogyny #TheoBros #Calvin #Rushdoony #homeschooling #charismatic #New #Apostolic #Reformation #reformed #TheoBros #apostles #prophets #Bible #postmillennialism #Aaron #Renn #Andrew #Isker #Douglas #Wilson #shared #history #patriarchal #Christian #nationalism #young #pastors #Christian #prince #women #flogging #Franco #multiculturalism #Taylor #Swift

  6. Clarence Thomas accused of accepting luxury trips from billionaire Republican donor

    For over twenty years, #Clarence #Thomas has accepted multiple luxury trips from #Harlan #Crow, a Republican real estate developer and #megadonor, according to a new ProPublica investigation.

    Despite accepting these luxury trips for over two decades, Thomas has **not listed them on his financial disclosures**, according to the report

    The report found that the conservative justice frequently travels internationally on Crow’s luxury 162ft yacht, often wearing custom polo shirts gifted by Crow to commemorate the trips which included scuba diving in Indonesia and a cruise in New Zealand.

    The justice also frequently visits Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks known as Camp Topridge. In addition to being served by private chefs, Thomas has mingled with top Republican executives at these retreats. In July 2017, Thomas was accompanied by “major #Republican #donors and one of the #leaders of the #American #Enterprise #Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank,” the investigation found.

    theguardian.com/us-news/live/2