Friday, February 24th, 2012
MARVIN MEADORS, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: One of the peculiarities of the climate change argument has been the general denierism on the part of the TV meteorologist community. Very little has been written about this oddity -- since 96% plus of climate scientists not only accept the reality of climate change, but are running banging alarms. This essay at least raises the relevant issues.
John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel and the original weatherman on Good Morning America: ‘There isn’t any climate crisis,’ he said. ‘It’s totally manufactured.’
Meteorologists are notoriously reluctant to accept climate change. Why so? Theirs is a profession that studies the weather, which is akin to what climate scientists do by studying the weather over relatively long periods. Of course, they are not as educated as climate scientists who have PhD’s in their field, while many meteorologists have college degrees unrelated to meteorology. Meteorologists know the pitfalls of being wrong when making a forecast, however, they do not seem to realize that the conclusions of climate scientists are not the same as saying there is a 50% chance of precipitation tomorrow. The International Panel on Climate Change or IPCC put a probability that it is more than 90% likely that man is causing climate change. Do meteorologists, weathermen to use a more prosaic term, just feel inferior to climate scientists or just why are they so dismissive about climate change?
According to a 2010 survey…
Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed …–not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a […]
No Comments
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
CAROL J. WILLIAMS, - Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times
Stephan: This is good news for fairness. Let me say again, what I have written here many times before: marriage is a civil property and rights contract (what it has always been historically). It should be open to any two people who wish to establish an enduring intimate domestic partnership. If they wish to consecrate it with a religious ceremony, and can find some species of cleric to perform the ceremony they should be free to do so.
A judge on Wednesday declared the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and ordered the federal government to ignore the statute and provide health benefits to the wife of a lesbian federal court employee.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White was the first since the Obama administration announced a year ago that it would no longer defend a law it considers discriminatory and reflective of a long history of denying equal rights to gays and lesbians.
White ordered the federal Office of Personnel Management to enroll the wife of Karen Golinski, an attorney for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in the health benefits program available to other employees of the federal judiciary. The Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the extension of federal benefits to same-sex spouses, and Golinski’s wife, Amy Cunninghis, had been repeatedly denied coverage since the couple married in 2008.
‘The court finds that DOMA, as applied to Ms. Golinski, violates her right to equal protection of the law
No Comments
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
PAUL FASSA, - Natural News
Stephan: I don't take this as the last word, but I do take it as an alarm telling us this trend needs to be reconsidered, and followed closely. I will do additional pieces as warranted. But it looks like the whole cholesterol issue is up for review.
The idea of cholesterol creating cardiac problems has caused obsessive cholesterol count blood testing for decades. Another outcome of this scare was obsessively avoiding fat, especially saturated fats.
The food industry responded with low and no fat foods from milk to cottage cheese and more. Processed foods promoted their low or no fat contents as though they were the healthiest foods in the freezer.
Healthy fats such as coconut oil and palm oil were spurned and replaced by very unhealthy trans-fat, processed and heated cooking oils. Relatively healthy whole butters were replaced by plastic margarines.
However, this myth of cholesterol dangers lurking in saturated fats waiting to clog your arteries and cause you to die of cardiac arrest is beginning to unravel.
Unraveling the myth of cholesterol
A meta-analysis of properly performed previous studies on heart health and saturated fats concluded there was no association between cardiac issues and saturated fats. This was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) on January 13th, 2010. (1)
Meta-analysis is a statistical method of proving or disproving varied epidemiological studies within a set topic. The AJCN meta-analysis covered studies involving 350,000 subjects who were followed for 5 to 23 years.
The trend set by the saturated fat […]
No Comments
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
PAT GAROFALO, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is an early warning alarm telling us the inequities that contributed to the current crisis are not being fixed, and this crisis will recur again. A stable democracy cannot be maintained when the wealth disparity is this great.
As we’ve been noting, corporate profits have made it back to their pre-recession heights (even if corporate tax revenue hasn’t followed suit). In fact, in 2011, corporate profits hit their highest level since 1950. But as Bloomberg News noted today, this hasn’t translated into wage growth or more purchasing power for workers:
Companies are improving margins and generating profits as wage growth for the American worker lags behind the prices of goods and services
No Comments
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
JAMES RIDGEWAY and JEAN CASELLA, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is shameful, and wrong for so many reasons. The American Gulag has grown as much under Obama as it did under any conservative. Keeping Gitmo open is a violation of a campaign pledge. The whole thing is nasty and sad. I do so wish there was a viable third party.
I find the Republican Presidential candidates embarrassing, and am glad I have no overseas travel this year on my schedule until after the election. It would be too excruciating to sit through dinner parties and social gatherings having to answer the questions of the other guests: 'Stephan, can you explain to us how is it possible America could even consider a man like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney for the Presidency?' 'What has happened to the United States?' 'Are there that many haters in your country?' And so on... and so on...
I will hold my nose and vote for Obama. But I will not be happy.
President Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2013 includes cuts to everything from Medicare and Medicaid to defense and even homeland security. But federal prisons are among its ‘biggest winners,’ according to an analysis by the Federal Times. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is seeking a 4.2 percent increase, one of the largest of any federal agency, which would bring its total budget to more than $6.9 billion.
So what kind of criminals are we spending all this money to incarcerate? If you’re thinking terrorists and kidnappers, think again. According to the Sentencing Project, only 1 in 10 federal prisoners is locked up for a violent offense of any kind. More than half are drug offenders-hardly surprising, since federal prosecutions for drug offenses more than doubled between 1984 and 2005. The 1980s also produced mandatory minimum sentences, which meant we were not only sending more people to prison, we were keeping them there far longer-a perfect formula for an exploding prison population.
‘Increasing funding for more prison beds has been shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy,’ notes the Justice Policy Institute. ‘If you build it, they will come.’
Indeed, the federal prison population ballooned from fewer than 25,000 inmates in 1980 […]
No Comments
