Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
DAVID KEYS, - The Independent (UK)
Stephan: For many years I have felt the evidence supported the diffusionist explanation, not the simple linear narrative that was dogma in archaeology until very recently. As late as the 1990s the gospel of archaeology was no inhabitation before Clovis. In my first book, The Secret Vaults of Time (1978) I discussed my sense of that model and its failures, proposing instead a model that Dennis Stanford, mentioned in this report, also supported. Little-by-little the Diffusionist scenario has proven to be correct, and we now know there was life long before Clovis, and that the discovery of America doesn't look at all like the simple Columbus story.
New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.
A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.
The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades – and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity’s spread around the globe.
The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and […]
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
WENONAH HAUTER, - Other Words
Stephan: Having first worked to make sure governments do not maintain public infrastructure, these same economic forces now propose to privatize that infrastructure and to be paid from the public till to do so. It is really daringly greedy. They are doing this with prisons, roads, and water systems, and we are all financing this rape.
Ruby Williams, a 78-year-old Aqua Pennsylvania customer, got stuck with a $40,000 water bill because of a serious leak in the pipes under her home in Bristol Township, Pennsylvania. After her situation garnered national media attention, the private company agreed to reduce her bill to a few hundred dollars.
Likewise, the Price family of Stallings, North Carolina recently had their sewage service cut off by Aqua North Carolina despite having paid an overdue bill. The company demanded $1,000 to restore it – hundreds of dollars more than the actual cost to do the work. Again, thanks to bad publicity and public outrage, Aqua backed down.
It’s not just American consumers that feel the pinch as our municipal water systems change from public to private hands – and it’s not just that Aqua America is one bad actor, either. Private interests worldwide increasingly control our water. Too often, customers are getting a raw deal.
Nestlé, Veolia, and Suez Environnement are just a few of the multinational corporations that either provide water services to our homes, bottle our communities’ spring water, or otherwise control the vast amounts of water needed to power our industries. All of us, like Ruby Williams and the Price family, will […]
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
AMANDA PETERSON BEADLE, - Think Progress
Stephan: This transvaginal business is not just something happening in Virginia., as this Alabama bill makes clear. There really is something sexually disturbed about the Theocratic Rightists. The idea of a government mandated medically useless procedure requiring sticking a dildo shaped foot long instrument into a woman's body and moving it around simply, as an act of legislation simply wouldn't occur to a person who was sexually healthy.
When a woman in Alabama seeks an abortion procedure, she already has to sign that her doctor has performed an ultrasound and that she either viewed the ultrasound image or rejected seeing it. But state Sen. Clay Scofield (R) is pushing SB 12, a bill in the Alabama legislature that would mandate the physician ‘to perform an ultrasound, provide verbal explanation of the ultrasound, and display the images to the pregnant woman before performing an abortion.
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
PAUL BEDARD, - The Examiner
Stephan: This is what happens when a country doesn't keep its infrastructure up to date and in good repair. This is something only governments are capable of handling. And, because it wasn't done, you and I are about to be rolled.
First high gas prices, now water. A shocking new report about the nation’s crumbling drinking water system says that Americans should expect their bills to double or triple to cover repairs just to keep their faucets pouring. That means adding up to $900 a year more for water, nearly equal the amount of the newly extended payroll tax cut.
Fixing and expanding underground drinking water systems will cost over $1 trillion in the next 25 years and users will get socked with the bill, according to the American Water Works Association.
As with most infrastructure investments, spending heavily now means less costs down the road. But with little appetite in the country for even trickling taxes now, a delayed and more expensive fix is almost guaranteed. The association figures that spending to fix leaky water systems will double from roughly $13 billion a year today to $30 billion annually by 2040.
‘Because pipe assets last a long time, water systems that were built in the later part of the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th century have, for the most part, never experienced the need for pipe replacement on a large scale,’ said the report provided to Washington Secrets. ‘The dawn […]
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Monday, February 27th, 2012
Stephan: This is a good assessment of where the country stands on the sexual issues that seem to obsess the Theocratic Right. Increasingly I find the Right's arguments bizarrely archaic. I was speaking today with several people in their 20-30s, and asked them about their views on this. I have been doing this in grocery stores, gas stations, anywhere a conversation opportunity arises. Almost to a person both men and women tell me that they consider same-sex marriage a non-issue, contraception a given, and abortion a difficult but sometimes necessary option. We will see in the election, but I think this fixation on sex that dominates our public political conversation will prove a painful mistake by the Republicans.
These days, watching politicians debate sex legislation feels a lot like watching footage from decades ago. In the last few months alone, Rick Santorum has called contraception ‘dangerous,
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