NEIL TICKNER, - University of Maryland
Stephan: I read this to say that the survey shows what the public wants, and the Congressional and administration budgets show varying degrees of allegiance to what the uber-rich and corporations want.
This disconnect is eating away at our social fabric, and what is really concerning is how fast this is all happening.
A complete report on the new analysis is available online, click through to obtain it.
The original study, which produced the public results, was fielded December 18-29, 2010 with a sample of 793 respondents (margin of error plus or minus 3.5 percent). It was conducted using the web-enabled KnowledgePanel®, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The public is on a different page than either the House of Representatives or the Obama Administration when it comes to the federal budget – with a different set of priorities and a greater willingness to cut spending and increase taxes – concludes a new analysis by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation2 (PPC).
This new analysis compares the House and administration budget proposals with those produced by a representative sample of U.S. adults. These public budgets were part of an innovative study released3 last month.
While there were some partisan differences in the magnitude of spending changes, two thirds of the time, the average Republican, Democrat and Independent in the survey agreed on the items that should be cut or increased.
* Defense: Public favors deep cuts while the administration and the House propose modest increases.
* Domestic: Public favors substantially more spending on job training, education and pollution control than either the House or the administration.
* Level of Cuts: On average the public made a net reduction in spending of $146 billion – far more than either the administration or […]
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KEVIN STACEY, - University of Chicago
Stephan: The idea that early humans were stupid or primitive is just simply wrong. Most of what you learned about early man in school has been shown to be nonsense.
That human evolution follows a progressive trajectory is one of the most deeply-entrenched assumptions about our species. This assumption is often expressed in popular media by showing cavemen speaking in grunts and monosyllables (the GEICO Cavemen being a notable exception). But is this assumption correct? Were the earliest humans significantly different from us?
In a paper published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologist John Shea (Stony Brook University) shows they were not.
The problem, Shea argues, is that archaeologists have been focusing on the wrong measurement of early human behavior. Archaeologists have been searching for evidence of ‘behavioral modernity’, a quality supposedly unique to Homo sapiens, when they ought to have been investigating ‘behavioral variability,’ a quantitative dimension to the behavior of all living things.
Human origins research began in Europe, and the European Upper Paleolithic archaeological record has long been the standard against which the behavior of earlier and non-European humans is compared. During the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-12,000 years ago), Homo sapiens fossils first appear in Europe together with complex stone tool technology, carved bone tools, complex projectile weapons, advanced techniques for using fire, cave art, beads and other personal adornments. Similar behaviors are either universal or very nearly so […]
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ROGER LOWENSTEIN, - The New York Times Magazine
Stephan: Here, I think, is an excellent assessment of the municipal situation. Ugly, very ugly.
Roger Lowenstein (elrogl@gmail.com) is a contributing writer and the author of 'While America Aged
Vallejo, a city about 25 miles north of San Francisco, offers a sneak preview of what could be the latest version of economic disaster. When the foreclosure wave hit, local tax revenue evaporated. The city managers couldn’t make their budget and eliminated financing for the local museum, the symphony and the senior center. The city begged the public-employee unions for pay cuts - all to no avail. In May 2008, Vallejo filed for bankruptcy. The filing drew little national attention; most people were too busy watching banks fail to worry about cities. But while the banks have largely recovered, Vallejo is still in bankruptcy. The police force has shrunk from 153 officers to 92. Calls for any but the most serious crimes go unanswered. Residents who complain about prostitutes or vandals are told to fill out a form. Three of the city’s firehouses were closed. Last summer, a fire ravaged a house in one of the city’s better neighborhoods; one of the firetrucks came from another town, 15 miles away. Is this America’s future?
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Jonathan Fickies/Bloomberg
Cities on the Verge ‘You could see 50 to 100 sizable defaults,
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, - The Times of India (India)
Stephan:
LONDON — Developing diabetes in middle age may cut your life short by about six years, a new study has suggested. The study, involving over 250 scientists from 25 countries, was the first such research that linked reduction of life expectancy to having type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes is known to double the risk of heart attacks and strokes, but the new findings showed that people with type 2 diabetes are also at greater risk of dying from cancer, infection and mental disorders, the Daily Mail said.
Scientists from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration - co-ordinated by the University of Cambridge - analysed data on 820,900 people.
After accounting for other risk factors like age, sex, obesity and smoking, the researchers found people with diabetes were at increased risk of death from cancers, infections, mental disorders, liver, digestive, kidney and lung diseases.
Researcher Naveed Sattar of University of Glasgow said: ‘The findings not only show the extensive range of complications linked to diabetes, but also the importance of raised sugar levels, as opposed to cholesterol and blood pressure to such complications.’
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STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The Willful Ignorance of the far Right is what makes them so dangerous. If you base your decisions on ideology not facts, you only get it correct by chance. That people like this are making policy ought to concern all of us. If you are a woman I do not understand why you are not outraged, although I know there are many women who support this intrusion into a woman's control over her own body -- unbelievable, as I find that.
Imagine men being required to account for every sperm. If it had the same level of priority as this madness about controlling women, some kind of technology would arise. Suppose each fertile man had to go in each month to a government office where they would measure this. You have expended 1 trillion sperm this month -- the average is 111 million per ejaculation -- please answer under penalty of perjury, how many wet dreams did you have? How often did you masturbate? How many times did you have sex with your partner? How many times with somebody else?
Abortion is already a heavily regulated medical procedure, but Republicans in South Dakota are poised to mandate the harshest regulations of any state yet, including a requirement that women visit an anti-abortion ‘crisis pregnancy center’ before the procedure.
The new requirements are part of a bill that cleared the state’s legislature yesterday. It would require not only a visit to an anti-abortion group, but also a 72 hour wait before seeing a doctor. About half of states require patients to wait 24 hours, making South Dakota’s the longest wait requirement in the nation.
But in conversations with Raw Story, the bill’s cosponsor in the S. Dakota Senate, along with one of its chief proponents in private life, both appeared to be confused on the basic truth of what Planned Parenthood is.
In short, both key anti-abortion advocates appear to be operating under deeply flawed assumptions about the nature of womens’ health services in the United States.
And now, they’re actually writing the laws.
Planning for parenthood
The Planned Parenthood Federation of American (PPFA) is perhaps best known for abortion services, thanks to media campaigns launched by its religious conservative critics.
In actuality, the vast majority of their services have nothing to do with providing abortions.
PPFA, one of […]
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