Saturday, June 25th, 2011
CAROL CLARK, - Emory University
Stephan: Here we have another comfortable assumption -- the initiation of farming made us healthier -- overturned by modern research.
When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.
‘This broad and consistent pattern holds up when you look at standardized studies of whole skeletons in populations,
No Comments
TIM KARR, - Common Dreams
Stephan: This is technology and the state conjoining in shared intention. If Apple doesn't make this technology available, some other company will. The only thing that will stop this is citizen pushback.
As the Campaign Director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com, Karr oversees campaigns on public broadcasting and noncommercial media, fake news and propaganda, journalism in crisis, and the future of the Internet. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network.
So you think you control your smartphone? Think again.
Late last week reports uncovered a plan by Apple, manufacturer of the iPhone, to patent technology that can detect when people are using their phone cameras and shut them down.
Apple says this technology was intended to stop people from recording video at live concerts, which should worry the creative commons crowd. But a remote ‘kill switch’ has far more sinister applications in the hands of repressive governments. And it further raises concerns about the power new media companies hold over our right to connect and communicate.
Imagine if Apple’s device had been available to the Mubarak regime earlier this year, and Egyptian security forces had deployed it around Tahrir Square to disable cameras just before they sent in their thugs to disperse the crowd.
Would the global outcry that helped drive Mubarak from office have occurred if a blackout of protest videos had prevented us from viewing the crackdown?
What would we know of Neda had it not been for one witness holding up a cellphone?
This is more than speculation. Thousands of people across the Middle East and North Africa have used cellphone cameras to document human rights abuses and share them with millions via […]
No Comments
CHRIS HEDGES, - Adbusters
Stephan: Many of us act as if democracy is a constant. It is not. In the history of humanity, across the globe, it is very rare and not long enduring. Because it is the expression of collective intent, when intention waivers democracy is in jeopardy. It requires constant attention from all its citizens, not just the extremes. And we don't seem to be able to muster that.
This essay by Chris Hedges is more extreme than I would depict things, and does not acknowledge alternatives, but the trends its describes are factually accurate, and undeniable. This is why I have focused on seeing what can be done to create thriving and resilient communities. I think it is going to be very important to know how to maintain a decent quality of life in a perfect storm of transition, and its going to take at least community sized intention and cooperation.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.
The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and […]
No Comments
HOPE YEN, - The Associated Press
Stephan: This is the latest evidence of the trend of America to become a majority non-white society, a multiple minority culture. Black youth culture already dominates. Walk into any mall and you see it. This is part of what drives the tea party movement. Not just race per se, but the change in culture. This group is also defined by rigid and conservative religious views. Tony Perkins is speaking for them. This trend is going to be with us for a long time; it is an expression of the process driving the country into regionalism.
WASHINGTON — the first time, minorities make up a majority of babies in the U.S., part of a sweeping race change and growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and predominantly minority youths that could reshape government policies.
Preliminary census estimates also show the share of African-American households headed by women – made up of mostly single mothers – now exceeds African-American households with married couples, a sign of declining U.S. marriages overall but also continuing challenges for black youths without involved fathers.
The findings, based on the latest government data, offer a preview of final 2010 census results being released this summer that provide detailed breakdowns by age, race and householder relationships such as same-sex couples.
Demographers say the numbers provide the clearest confirmation yet of a changing social order, one in which racial and ethnic minorities will become the U.S. majority by midcentury.
‘We’re moving toward an acknowledgment that we’re living in a different world than the 1950s, where married or two-parent heterosexual couples are now no longer the norm for a lot of kids, especially kids of color,’ said Laura Speer, coordinator of the Kids Count project for the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation.
‘It’s clear the younger generation is very […]
No Comments
DAVID G. SAVAGE, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: If you're like me and take a generic drug you just got screwed. We owe these decisions to the conservative majority, at least two of whose members have a record of giving at least the appearance of being compromised by corporate sponsors. To get a sense of how tortured this decision is note particularly the views of Clarence Thomas.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court gave the pharmaceutical industry a pair of victories, shielding the makers of generic drugs from most lawsuits by injured patients and declaring that drug makers have a free-speech right to buy private prescription records to boost their sales pitches to doctors.
In both decisions Thursday, the court’s conservative bloc formed the majority, and most of its liberals dissented.
About 75% of the prescriptions written in this country are for lower-cost generic versions of brand-name drugs. Federal law requires the makers of brand-name drugs to label their products with FDA-approved warning information and to update the warnings when reports of new problems arise.
But in a 5-4 decision, the high court said this same legal duty to warn patients of newly revealed dangers did not extend to the makers of copy-cat generic drugs.
Justice Clarence Thomas reasoned that the warning labels were the responsibility of the brand-name makers and the Food and Drug Administration. He said that because generics were just copies, their makers could not be sued for inadequate warnings if those warnings didn’t exist on the original.
Thomas said the federal regulatory law trumped the state liability law in this instance and therefore shielded the generic makers. ‘We acknowledge […]
No Comments
