Thursday, August 11th, 2011
Kristen Gwynne, - AlterNet
Stephan: Here is the latest temperature taking of this important trend. The money wasted in the War on Drugs and the damage it has done to the lives of millions in a hundred ways could and should be turned to other more life-affirming uses.
A recent Angus Reid Public Opinion poll found that, of a sample of 1,0003 American adults, 55 percent of respondents support the legalization of marijuana, though the majority do not support the legalization of other drugs, like cocaine or heroin.
However, in a move towards removing the stigma of drug users and addicts, 64 percent of respondents believe our country has a serious drug problem that affects the United States, and only 20 percent consider drugs a problem that effect only certain people or areas. Suggestive of a widespread belief in an un-treated problem, only 5 percent of respondents said America does not have a drug problem, and 67 percent of respondents call the war on drugs a failure. On an ironically positive note, only 9 percent of respondents consider the war on drugs a success. Is this a step in the right direction? According to Angus Reid,
‘The survey shows a country that is concerned about the effects of drugs, and at the same time deeply disappointed with the efforts of the U.S. government to deal with the drug trade.’
Forty years after the failed war on drugs kicked off and cost our country a wasted $50 […]
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Thursday, August 11th, 2011
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: This use of social media presages a developing new trend that has profound social implications. It could be positive and useful, or it could turn us into a community of East German neighborhoods at the height of the Soviet era, in which, by some measures, a third of the population were informants.
AFP – Britons took to social networking sites on Wednesday to expose the rioters who went on the rampage for four nights, posting photos of masked gangs looting and hurling missiles.
Much of the violence, which started in London but has since spread to other parts of the country, was captured on mobile phone cameras, video recorders or CCTV, and the images quickly found their way into cyberspace.
London’s Metropolitan Police made a tentative attempt to use social media to track down suspects, putting up 25 photos of youths breaking into shops and lobbing missiles on photo-sharing site flickr.
But the official effort paled in comparison to the surge of activity by amateur web investigators.
One such project is a web page called ‘Catch A Looter’, which has been set up on blog-hosting website tumblr and features dozens of photos from the London riots.
Images showed looters walking out of shops with electrical goods, clothes and bottles and close-up shots of rioters hurling missiles.
The anonymous creator of the site urged web surfers to get in touch with Crimestoppers, a charity that allows people to anonymously pass on information about crimes, if they recognised anyone on the site.
But just a day after it was set up, […]
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
Stephan: One would think that it would be obvious that Gay Marriage would have no real impact on the lives of anyone other than those involved in the nuptials and their family and friends. But one would be wrong. The Right argues that civil society will collapse if same sex marriage is permitted. Well, here is some actual data speaking to the point. As can be seen the Right, once again, demonstrates that it lives in a fact free reality.
Proponents of gay marriage scored a huge victory in June when the New York Legislature passed a law legalizing it, advocates celebrated when Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed it, and Mayor Bloomberg marked the occasion by officiating the wedding of two top staffers. In short, the political establishment embraced gay marriage in New York, and now it’s a part of life in the state.
In Vermont, it’s been part of life since April of 2009. A new survey from Public Policy Polling provides a look into how the law is viewed by Vermont residents, who have clearly accepted it as part of the state’s social fabric: 58% say that same sex marriage should be legal.
Even more more instructive was one of the questions in the poll that asked if ‘…the legalization of gay marriage in Vermont had a positive or negative impact on your life, or has it not had any impact at all?’ Overall, 60% of respondents said it hadn’t had any impact at all, but a look inside the numbers saw that this opinion was held by a majority of most voters in the state by ideology. The crosstabs show that 73% of political moderates said there was no impact […]
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
KEVIN BOGARDUS, - The Hill
Stephan: Corporations are spending as never before to keep their Congressional minions in line. However, the polls showing how even long serving incumbents are in trouble may trump the money. For the moment votes still are more important than money.
Business for Republican-leaning lobbying firms has grown this year, despite lobbying revenue declining for many on K Street.
Several shops with ties to GOP leadership in the House and Senate have signed up new clients and seen their revenue grow in the first half of the year. Lobbying has risen by almost half for some, nearly doubling for others.
Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock has reported making more than $5.2 million in lobbying fees so far this year, according to disclosure records. That’s a 44 percent jump from the $3.6 million it had taken in at this point in 2010.
‘A lot of it is new business combined with the existing book of business that has stayed with us,
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
Stephan: Until we begin to recognize nature's systems are planetary in scale, we are not going to be capable of understanding what is going on.
REENBELT, Md. — The giant March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated Japan also had effects a hemisphere away, breaking off icebergs in Antarctica, according to a study published Tuesday.
Scientists found that sea swell from the tsunami rippled through the Pacific basin and hit Antarctica, 8,000 miles (13,000 km) away. About 18 hours after the massive quake struck, waves broke off chunks of an ice-shelf that had been intact for nearly 50 years.
Together, the size of those icebergs torn from the shelf equaled 48 square miles (125 square km), or about two times the surface area of Manhattan.
‘This study presents the first observational evidence linking a tsunami to ice-shelf calving,’ its authors wrote in the Journal of Glaciology.
Douglas MacAyeal, one of the authors, said in a statement, ‘This is an example not only of the way in which events are connected across great ranges of oceanic distance, but also how events in one kind of Earth system, i.e., the plate tectonic system, can connect with another kind of seemingly unrelated event: the calving of icebergs from Antarctica’s ice sheet.’
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