R.L. MILLER, - Think Progress
Stephan: More about willful ignorance; pay attention, this one names names. This denierism is a huge trend, that hangs over us like a large dark cloud.
Every Republican candidate for House, Senate, and Governor who claims that global warming is a hoax, doubts the science of climate change, and wants a new Dark Ages for America.
After researching the causes of temperature fluctuations on earth, I found the largest factor to be the sun. The earth’s orbit changes. Also the earth’s spin and axis change over time. When areas of the earth are closer to the sun, the temperature is hotter and when they are further away, cooler. The sun also has more activity at times and less at other times. They have been able to map out large changes in the earth’s temperature over time to the sun. Times with no polar ice caps have corresponded to times when we were closer to the sun. Ice ages have corresponded to times when we were further from the sun. We should not punish the people of the United States financially by legislating on pseudo-science that has not been proven.
That’s no ordinary tea partier. That’s a candidate for Congress. And she’s not alone.
Meet the Climate Zombies.
A couple of weeks ago, the Wonk Room had a story: Every GOP NH Senate candidate is […]
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Thursday, July 26th, 2012
ANDREW POLLACK, - The New York Times
Stephan: The latest development in gene research. Although this report is couched in the terms of disease I believe its ultimate significance lies in its acceleration of the emergence of Homo Superiorus. I first wrote about this trend in the March 2006 issue of Explore. (See: Homo Superiorus http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2806%2900027-9/fulltext.) You might consider taking a look. Its all happening and the trend I described there has only become more advanced.
After more than two decades of dashed expectations, the field of gene therapy appears close to reaching a milestone: a regulatory approval.
The European Medicines Agency has recommended approval of a gene therapy to treat a rare genetic disease, according to the agency’s Web site.
If the European Commission follows the advice, as it usually does, this would be the first regulatory approval of a gene therapy drug in the Western world. That could give a boost to the field, which at times has struggled for credibility and financing.
An approval ‘is really potentially going to change the way the field is looked at,
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Thursday, July 26th, 2012
Stephan: Drip by drip we are learning more and more about the soft police state that is emerging in America. Here is the latest. If you find it scary, you're not alone.
The TSA, DHS and countless other security agencies have been established to keep America safe from terrorist attacks in post-9/11 America. How far beyond that does the feds’ reach really go, though?
The attacks September 11, 2001, were instrumental in enabling the US government to establish counterterrorism agencies to prevent future tragedies. Some officials say that they haven’t stopped there, though, and are spying on everyone in America - all in the name of national security.
Testimonies delivered in recent weeks by former employees of the National Security Agency suggest that the US government is granting itself surveillance powers far beyond what most Americans consider the proper role of the federal government.
In an interview broadcast on Current TV’s ‘Viewpoint
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Thursday, July 26th, 2012
ANDY COGHLAN and DEBORA MACKENZIE, - New Scientist (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a report on the careful academic research showing the point I have made many time in the pages of SR and in Explore: The transition from a world geopolitically controlled by nation states to one controlled by Virtual States -- multinational corporations, and the small group of people who control them, and use them as the expression of their power without consideration for national interest. National governments are vassals to this new elite. We are entering a geopolitically different era, just as we are also entering the reality of climate change.
'147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. 'In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,' says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions,' the report says. One hundred and forty seven companies control the economy of the world.
In this new geopolitical era there has been the rise of a new planetary aristocracy which like all aristocracies in history is already showing signs of becoming hereditary, callous, and corrupt. As you read this, keep in mind this is not a report from some partisan or polemic journal, but a research journal of great reputation reporting on the work of a rigorous and careful study.
Please click through to see the chart that accompanies this report. You can also download the entire research paper the New Scientist is reporting on at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf. I urge you to do so. This affects your life in a thousand ways every day.
As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).
‘Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,’ says James Glattfelder. ‘Our analysis is reality-based.’
Previous studies have found […]
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Thursday, July 26th, 2012
JOE ROMM, - Think Progress
Stephan: I have said over and over again -- apparently I have to do this because it never quite gets through to some -- that my positions have nothing to do with political partisanship. All I care about is data and social outcomes. My criterion for all programs is: Do they place wellness first -- individual, familial, community, regional, national, planetary -- and do they deliver what they claim? I don't give a damn whether the policies are propounded by Democrats or Republicans only whether they meet that criterion. Please remember that as you read this.
National Journal: ‘The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones.
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