Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
ALEXANDER JUNG and ALEXANDER NEUBACHER, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: I am writing this on the plane as I fly to Tucson to present a paper at the big consciousness research conference held there each year. To get to the airport from my island I take the shuttle, which we meet at a gas station. As we were sitting there I looked up and saw that gas had gone up nearly a quarter a gallon in the past three days. Surprise, suprise. Not. It happens every Easter, or Christmas, or Fourth of July, as you have probably noticed yourself.
Mainstream media will not really cover this story, except to report the price increase, so I went searching to see if some real journalists outside the U.S. have done work on this trend. They have. This story is centered on Germany, but the basics of the report are the same as those found in the U.S. As you read this remember that Big Oil owns, or at least rents, a passel of Senators and Representatives to do its bidding, and they make sure that billions of dollars of subsidies also roll in to Big Oil each year. One just can't make too much profit -- who cares about the social consequences.
It’s Easter weekend and, if all goes as usual, motorists will be hopping mad during the holiday. Their frustration will boil over when the needle reaches the red zone and they pull into the nearest filling station: first at the pump, then at the cash register.
That’s where they’ll note with dismay that the oil companies never tire of playing the same old game in the run-up to Easter. As in previous years, gas prices soared in the days leading up to the Friday before Easter — just when millions of Germans head off on vacation.
In 2009, prices jumped by as much as 11 euro cents per liter ($0.54 per gallon) compared to weeks prior, as was documented in the Cologne area by a report released last year by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office. At the time, the Bonn-based anti-trust agency said it was ‘plausible’ that the oil industry was ‘purposely raising prices.’
The study generated a great deal of attention, but failed to impact business practices in the sector because the Cartel Office was unable to prove that the companies had engaged in illegal price-fixing. Now, one year after the report’s release, the profiteering practices of the oil companies have reached such […]
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Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
Amina Khan AMINA KHAN, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: People worry about over-population. I'm not so sure. Between climate change and bad life habits, I think we are going to kill hundreds of millions over the next few decades, and those children who are born will have a much higher incidence of illness. Coupled with the low birth rates in almost all developed nations, and the picture is no longer the linear narrative of over population.
How important is this linkage between obesity and autism? Two-thirds of the adult women in the U.S. are over weight, and half are morbidly obese. And, once again it is very state specific. In those states with Theo-rightist driven social policies obesity is much greater. In fact, as I travel around the U.S. recently, I have found it visually quite amazing. In Seattle you don't see that many obese people. I am sitting in a late night restaurant in Tucson right now finishing SR and two thirds of the women, mostly in their 20s to 30s, are obese. One hundred to 150 pounds overweight seems typical. Arizona, an almost fanatically red state, has a major health problem in just this one issue. And they have just cut out almost all support for women's health care.
Pregnant women might now have one more good reason to watch their diet and exercise: A new study links autism and developmental delays in young children to metabolic conditions, like obesity and diabetes, in their mothers.
The findings, published in Monday’s edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that women who had diabetes or hypertension or were obese were 1.61 times as likely as healthy women to have children with autism spectrum disorders. They also were 2.35 times as likely to have children with developmental delays.
Child development experts said the findings were interesting but that it would be premature to suggest that the results could help explain the dramatic rise in diagnosed cases of autism over the last decade.
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the autism rate among 8-year-olds in the U.S. had risen to 1 in 88, from 1 in 110 a few years earlier. Some of the change reflects a growing awareness of the disorder that leads to more diagnoses. Whether there is an actual increase in affected children is a source of great debate.
Several studies since the 1990s have indicated that there may be a link between diabetes in mothers and developmental delays […]
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Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
MARY ELIZABETH DALLAS, - Health Day News
Stephan: Here is a dimension of climate change effects you may not have considered. With a large percentage of our population aging -- all the baby boomers, and pre-boomers like me -- this looks like a crisis in waiting. And, as you can see from this report, it doesn't take big temperature swings to cause problems.
SOURCE: Harvard School of Public Health, news release, April 9, 2012
Even small swings in temperatures could put elderly people with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart failure and lung disease at greater risk of death throughout the coming summer, a new study indicates.
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston found temperature fluctuations related to climate change could claim thousands of lives every year.
Experts predict climate change could increase variations in summer temperatures, particularly in the mid-Atlantic states and in parts of France, Spain and Italy. In these more volatile regions, this could pose a serious public health risk, the study authors claimed.
‘The effect of temperature patterns on long-term mortality has not been clear to this point. We found that, independent of heat waves, high day-to-day variability in summer temperatures shortens life expectancy,’ study author Antonella Zanobetti, a senior research scientist in the department of environmental health at Harvard, said in a news release from the university. ‘This variability can be harmful for susceptible people.’
Using Medicare data from 1985 to 2006, the researchers tracked the long-term health of 3.7 million chronically ill people older than 65 living in 135 American cities. After considering each person’s individual risk factors, they determined if any of these people died due to […]
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Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
DAVID FREEMAN, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: I have become increasingly concerned that something very profound is going on in the American populace. It is happening elsewhere as well but it seems particularly divisive in the U.S. The hallmark is a level of irrationality that must have a data based -- as opposed to partisan -- explanation. Clearly, I am not the only researcher worried about this.
The study covered in this report has just appeared online in the journal 'Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,' a serious and well-respected peer-reviewed journal with no particular political axe to grind.
Conservatives and liberals don’t seem to agree about much, and they might not agree about recent studies linking conservatism to low intelligence and ‘low-effort’ thinking.
As The Huffington Post reported in February, a study published in the journal ‘Psychological Science’ showed that children who score low on intelligence tests gravitate toward socially conservative political views in adulthood–perhaps because conservative ideologies stress ‘structure and order’ that make it easier to understand a complicated world.
Ouch.
And now there’s the new study linking conservative ideologies to ‘low-effort’ thinking.
‘People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,’ the study’s lead author, University of Arkansas psychologist Dr. Scott Eidelman, said in a written statement released by the university.
Does the finding suggest that conservatives are lazy thinkers?
‘Not quite,’ Dr. Eidelman told The Huffington Post in an email. ‘Our research shows that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, not that political conservatives use low-effort thinking.’
For the study, a team of psychologists led by Dr. Eidelman asked people about their political viewpoints in a bar and in a laboratory setting.
Bar patrons were asked about social issues before blowing into a Breathalyzer. As it turned out, the political viewpoints of patrons with high blood alcohol levels […]
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A. L. BARDACH, - The Wall Street Journal Magazine
Stephan: I found this a fascinating essay on the origins of yoga in the U.S.
By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents’ sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at ‘The New Yorker,’ he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.
Though the iconic author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Franny and Zooey’ published his last story in 1965, he did not stop writing. From the early 1950s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta monks and fellow devotees.
After all, the central, guiding light of Salinger’s spiritual quest was the teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta-born monk who popularized Vedanta and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.
These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not somewhat alarmed. ‘As soon as I think of myself as a little body,’ he warned, ‘I want to preserve it, […]
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