Friday, September 9th, 2011
PATRICK J. KIGER, - National Geographic
Stephan: Here is a very interesting story about SR reader Dr. Roger Nelson and his Global Consciousness Project. I urge you to click through to the primary site and watch the video interview you will find there. Until we recognize that all life is interconnected and interdependent we will not be able to make the right policy choices about our future. Roger is providing hard data that this interconnection is an objective reality, not just a metaphysical concept.
Chances are, you probably remember exactly what you were doing on the morning of September 11, 2001, at the moment when you first learned about the attack on the World Trade Center. And if you were one of the millions who stared in horror at the television images of smoke billowing from the crippled towers, you undoubtedly can recall the intense, excruciatingly painful surge of grief and anger and sadness that you felt.
You may be surprised, however, to learn that Princeton University researchers believe that so many people around the world were affected in the same way that their collective mental energy actually altered the operation of computers.
Those findings, which have aroused some controversy in the scientific world, were produced by Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, whose goal is to determine whether, and if so to what extent, human consciousness-that is, our minds’ awareness of the world in which we exist-can synchronize and act coherently.
‘I think the data are pretty much indisputably in support of that we do interconnect, we interact, we’re not isolated,
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Friday, September 9th, 2011
Stephan: Read this, and consider your own life style, and that of your family.
LONDON — Healthier lifestyles and better diets could prevent up to 2.8 million cases of cancer each year, the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) said on Wednesday, calling on governments to ‘avoid a public health disaster’.
The number of global cancers has increased by a fifth in less than a decade to around 12 million new cases a year, and along with other chronic diseases like heart and lung disease and diabetes are the world’s biggest health challenges, the Fund said.
In a report released two weeks before a United Nations summit on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the charity said political leaders had a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to tackle a wave of cancer and other lifestyle diseases.
Global health experts say many deaths from NCDs, including around a third of all common cancers, could be prevented by curbing excessive alcohol intake, improving diets, discouraging smoking and promoting more physical activity.
But these measures often need government action such as taxation, regulation and advertising curbs, bringing politicians into conflict with tobacco, food and alcohol industries.
‘With millions of lives at risk around the world, the stakes are incredibly high,’ said Martin Wiseman, WCRF’s medical and scientific adviser.
‘People are still unaware that risk factors such as […]
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Stephan: The American illness profit system, having reduced are national health to second and third world outcome levels, is now destroying the physicians who serve the system. As I have written earlier (see the SR archives) the number of primary care physicians is now dangerously below what is needed for national health. Yet the Congress continues to serve its corporate masters, and the President cannot rise to the leadership the nation requires.
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Feelings of burnout persist among internal medicine residents despite significant cutbacks in duty hours for doctors-in-training in recent years, a national study by Mayo Clinic found.
A poor quality of life took a toll on performance: Stressors affecting well-being such as lack of a work-life balance contributed to lower test scores on a standardized exam. Residents reporting a quality of life ‘as bad as it could be’ and daily burnout symptoms attained mean scores nearly 3 percent lower than their counterparts with a good quality of life.
Heavy student debts made things even worse. Residents more than $200,000 in debt had mean scores 5 percent lower than debt-free colleagues, according to the study, published in the Sept. 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers surveyed and tested 16,394 residents in training in the United States in 2008-09, a number representing three-fourths of U.S. internal medicine residents. The study, overseen by Mayo Clinic general internist and biostatistician Colin West, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of the Mayo Department of Medicine Program on Physician Well-Being, reveals that 51.5 percent of residents reported burnout symptoms, 45.8 percent noted emotional exhaustion and 28.9 percent had feelings of depersonalization, reflected in cynicism and/or […]
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
, - Institute of Science in Society
Stephan: Four companies now control 90 of the seed market. All of human agriculture is based on seeds, which is to say all of human nutrition is now dependent on these companies. As this report makes clear -- and it is but one of a growing list of such reports -- the behavior of these corporations is no different than other corporate performance. Which is to say profit comes first and everything else comes a distant second.
I cannot urge you too strongly to begin to grow as much of your own food as you can, and to use unmanipulated traditional seed stocks, saving seeds from year to year. It is already getting difficult to get unmanipulated seeds. GMO is of a different order from the ancient practice of cross-breeding, because the manipulation is linked to specific patented pesticides and herbicides.
A team of independent scientists led by Gilles-Eric Séralini at Caen University in France carried out a meta-analysis combining the results of 19 previous studies [1], and their report concluded: ‘From the regulatory tests performed today, it is unacceptable to submit 500 million Europeans and several billions of consumers worldwide to the new pesticide GM-derived foods or feed, this being done without more controls (if any) than the only 3-month-long toxicological tests and using only one mammalian species, especially since there is growing evidence of concern.
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
JANE MAYER, - The New Yorker
Stephan:
On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.
The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, […]
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