Saturday, July 28th, 2012
KURT EICHENWALD, - Vanity Fair
Stephan:
To the saccharine rhythm of a Muzak clip, Steve Ballmer crouched into a tackling stance and dashed across a ballroom stage at the Venetian Las Vegas. A 20-foot wall of video screens flashed his name as the 55-year-old Microsoft chief executive bear-hugged Ryan Seacrest, the ubiquitous television and radio host, who had just introduced Ballmer’s keynote speech for the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show.
More than 150,000 techies and executives were swarming the city’s hotels last January in the annual bacchanalia of cutting-edge gizmos and gadgets. Attendees ran from one vendor to the next, snapping up fistfuls of freebies, inhaling flavored oxygen, and rubbing elbows with stars such as LL Cool J and Justin Bieber.
But this night, an air of discomfort filled the Palazzo Ballroom, where Ballmer was about to give the show’s opening presentation, one delivered by Microsoft’s C.E.O. for 14 of the previous 17 years-the first 11 by Bill Gates and the rest by Ballmer. Weeks earlier, the company had declared that this would be its final keynote-and, worse, that it wouldn’t even be back next year as an exhibitor to showcase new innovations. The timing for big news about its products, it said, didn’t match that of the […]
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Saturday, July 28th, 2012
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, Senior Contributing Writer - The Daily Beast
Stephan: This is the latest and, in some ways the scariest develop in the Willful Ignorance Trend. One can actually see a new Dark Ages being created by people so enthrall to ideology or theology often both) that their ability to think rationally has been impaired. Now they are attempting to write their ignorance and disdain for facts into law.
The 8th Circuit basically ruled that legislatures are free to pick and choose which ‘science’ they’d prefer to believe. What abortion law’s backers are hiding about suicide risks.
Ordinarily, when a doctor warns you of the risks connected to a medical procedure, you can trust that you’re being told the truth, or at least what your doctor believes to be true. For any woman seeking an abortion in South Dakota, though, this is no longer the case. Thanks to an 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this week with far-reaching implications, doctors performing abortions will now be legally mandated to mislead their patients. The result is not just an attack on abortion rights that’s likely to be copied in other states-it’s an attack on the broader idea that policymaking should privilege fact over fantasy.
At issue is a 2005 law that, among other things, requires doctors to warn women that abortion would subject them to increased risk of ‘[d]epression and related psychological distress
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DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This commitment to willful ignorance, this disdain for facts, manipulated to benefit the few is one of the most toxic trends in the U.S.. It is causing the breakdown of democracy, and it is potentially fatal. Climate change is not the time to have a self-imposed new Dark Ages.
Conservative Republicans who believe President Barack Obama is a Muslim have more than doubled since 2008, according to a survey on religion and politics released on Thursday.
The Pew Research Center found that 34 percent of conservative Republicans now believe Obama, who is a Christian, is actually a Muslim, compared with the 16 percent that believed that in 2008. When moderate and liberal Republicans are included, the number who believed that the president a Muslim still nearly doubled from 16 percent in 2008 to 30 percent in 2012.
Among all voters, only 49 percent were able to correctly identify that the president is a Christian.
Sixty-five percent of those who incorrectly believed Obama is a Muslim were not comfortable with his religion. However, voters who knew that he is a Christian said they were comfortable with his religion by a margin of 82 percent to 12 percent.
At the same time, the number of voters who could correctly identify that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is a Mormon had increased from 48 percent in November of 2011 to 60 percent in July of this year.
Seventy-five percent of Republicans who knew that Romney is a Mormon were comfortable with his religion, although only 50 […]
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SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: You have probably already seen the charts, if not please click through and look at them. They are stunning. So radical that I have waited a couple of days on this story, to make sure it was not being overstated. I did this because the implications are so dire I did not want to be charged with over-reacting. Two days of research leaves me convinced that it really is that bad, and I am not.
This story also illustrates what I have said before: the one thing that changes in the climate change we are experiencing is the collapse of the time line.
The rise of sea level is going to impact the world's coasts, and coastal cities sooner than expected, it is now clear. The time to prepare for this rise just shrank. Your life just got more complicated. If you live on the coast somewhere I would start watching this trend very very closely. The beginning of the migration away from those coastal regions will start when the reinsurance giants like Zurich stop writing policies, or price them beyond most buyer's limits.
The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.
The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.
In a statement posted on Nasa’s website on Tuesday, scientists admitted the satellite data was so striking they thought at first there had to be a mistake.
‘This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?’ Son Nghiem of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said in the release.
He consulted with several colleagues, who confirmed his findings. Dorothy Hall, who studies the surface temperature of Greenland at Nasa’s space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, confirmed that the area experienced unusually high temperatures in mid-July, and that there was widespread melting over the surface of the ice sheet.
Climatologists Thomas Mote, at the University of Georgia, and Marco Tedesco, of the City University of New York, also confirmed the melt recorded by the satellites.
However, scientists were still coming to grips with the shocking […]
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ROBIN SHREEVES, - Mother Nature Network
Stephan: I love popcorn, particularly with nutritional yeast sprinkled on it. The Clyde, an old-fashioned cinema in the village of Langley, the only theater on the south end of our island, has films selected by owner Lynn Willeford and her husband chosen with impeccable taste. They also serve the best theater popcorn I have ever eaten, and offer nutritional yeast. Yummy. A large bag costs just $3. Since most corn now is GMO, getting healthy corn is not a trivial task. Here's what I have been able to learn.
It’s estimated that 90 percent of the corn grown in the United States is from genetically modified seed. If you rely on popcorn for a high fiber, healthy snack, you need to be careful about the corn that it comes from. If you’re not sure that it’s non-GMO, chances are that it is grown from genetically modified seed.
We pop a lot of popcorn in our house. It’s always a hit with my sons’ friends. The older my boys and their friends get, the bigger their appetites get. Popping popcorn for them is one way to fill them up, keep them happy, and not go broke.
Fortunately, there are plenty of non-GMO popcorn options available. Any certified organic popcorn will be non-GMO because genetically modified ingredients are prohibited for organics. Other than looking for organic certification, you can also look for the Non-GMO label. I went to Amazon to see what they have, and I found quite a bit. You can also look in your local grocery store for these brands of popcorn or others that aren’t made from genetically modified seed. The links take you to Amazon where you can buy these brands, or you can look for them or other […]
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