YAMICHE ALCINDOR, - USA TODAY
Stephan: This is how a country eats itself alive. By failing to compassionately manage poverty as, say, the Scandinavian nations do, we are condemning growing populations to live outside of society. It began under Nixon when public residential mental health facilities were closed, and patient populations were dumped on the streets.
These people, now far greater in numbers because of the financial collapse and the loss of the social safety network, are not going to vaporize and disappear. When there are enough of them they will begin to congregate somewhere and create squatter settlements like the favelas of Brazil.
A growing number of cities across the United States are making it harder to be homeless.
Philadelphia recently banned outdoor feeding of people in city parks. Denver has begun enforcing a ban on eating and sleeping on property without permission. And this month, lawmakers in Ashland, Ore., will consider strengthening the town’s ban on camping and making noise in public.
And the list goes on: Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Oklahoma City and more than 50 other cities have previously adopted some kind of anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.
The ordinances are pitting city officials against homeless advocates. City leaders say they want to improve the lives of homeless people and ensure public safety, while supporters of the homeless argue that such regulations criminalize homelessness and make it harder to live on the nation’s streets.
‘We’re seeing these types of laws being proposed and passed all over the country,’ said Heather Johnson, a civil rights attorney at the homeless and poverty law center, which opposes many of the measures. ‘We think that criminalization measures such as these are counterproductive. Rather than address the root cause of homelessness, they perpetuate homelessness.’
Vagrancy laws
Cities that […]
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JONATHAN TERBUSH, - The Raw Story
Stephan: We won't listen, but we will learn.
Adding to a slew of recent dire news about the global climate, a report released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that March through May of this year was the warmest such stretch ever in the contiguous United States since record keeping began in 1895.
According to the report, the national temperature for the past three months averaged 57.1 degrees, easily topping the previous high of 55.1 degrees set over a century ago, in 1910. That mark was also over five degrees higher than the long-term average, making it the largest departure from average for any season on record in the U.S.
Further, the report found that the one-year period from last June through May was the also warmest ever recorded in the mainland United States, with an average temperature an even five degrees above the long-term average.
The abnormal temperatures over the past three months resulted in the warmest March, third warmest April, and second-warmest May on record for the nation as well. It’s the first time all three months in one season - the NOAA demotes March through April as spring for record keeping purposes -ranked in the 10 warmest since record keeping began.
The report comes days after […]
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JOHN TIERNEY, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is fascinating and reminds us, once again, that we are high order mammals, subject to the same mammalian signals that drive breeding in other animal cousins.
Thanks to James Spottiswoode.
The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt.
Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here - but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.
The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.
This experiment was part of a […]
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SOFIA RESNICK, - The American Independent
Stephan: This is what happens when the firewall the Founders put in place to separate church and state is breached. Are you happy your tax dollars are being used in this way?
Across the country, explicitly religious groups running ‘crisis pregnancy centers
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Stephan: I was interested in this story not because of its partisan aspect, but because of its information technology angle. Coupled with the unlimited dark money made possible by Citizens United it suggests a great darkness is coming over American democracy, and that is the trend I wish to emphasize.
CHICAGO - On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election.
The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation - from data mining to online organizing - reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the president’s much-heralded 2008 social media juggernaut - which raised half billion dollars and revolutionized politics - look like cavemen with stone tablets.
Mitt Romney indeed is ramping up his digital effort after a debilitating primary and, for sure, the notion that Democrats have a monopoly on cutting edge technology no longer holds water.
But it’s also not at all clear that Romney can come close to achieving the same level of technological sophistication and reach as his opponent. (The campaign was mercilessly ridiculed last month when it rolled out a new App misspelling America.)
‘It’s all about the data this year and […]
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