Thursday, August 16th, 2012
Stephan: If it is butterflies it is other species as well. Fukushima has changed Japan forever. I don't think anyone yet quite realizes how profoundly.
A team of researchers have revealed that a specific species of local butterfly in Japan have mutated since the Fukushima disaster back in March 2011. The species and the massive changes in physical and genetic development suggest that radiation levels continue to be a threat in the region, and may also serve as indicator of how slowly the breakdown of radioactive materials might be.
After over a year of research, the group published their findings in the scientific journal, Nature, and roundly concluded that, ‘radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to this species.
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Thursday, August 16th, 2012
PATRIK JONSSON, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: We are growing apart as a country. The difference between the red value states and the blue value ones seems to become more pronounced day by day. One thing is becoming increasingly clear. Living in red value states, particularly red value southern states is not good for your health. As a Virginian this makes me very sad.
ATLANTA — Fried catfish, hush puppies, piles of pork, shrimp po’boys – the delicacies of the South, as a recent obesity report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta seems to suggest, are also its enemy.
Southern states are, on par, the chubbiest (with Mississippi topping the list for the sixth year with 1 in 3 adults technically obese).
Most curiously, while the Southern diet hasn’t really changed much, the percentage of Mississippians who are obese has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 15 to 35 percent since 1991 – mirroring in large part what the CDC calls a ‘dramatic
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Thursday, August 16th, 2012
ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The soft police state trend is becoming ever more pervasive and entwined within the U.S. social structure. It is amazing to me that it is happening almost without protest.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled Tuesday that police can use cell phone data obtained without a warrant to establish an individual’s location.
The case, United States v. Skinner, involved a suspected drug trafficker, Melvin Skinner, who was tracked and arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
‘The drug runners in this case used pay-as-you-go (and thus presumably more difficult to trace) cell phones to communicate during the cross country shipment of drugs,
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Wednesday, August 15th, 2012
Stephan: This is the naked corruption that is attempting to subvert our democracy. Let me say this very clearly: It is absolutely essential that you vote and that you vote for Obama. It has nothing to do with his politics. The point is to demonstrate that the election cannot be bought. If Rightists like Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers, as well as all those who are funding these conservative dark money operations, spend their hundreds of millions of dollars, and do not achieve their goal, I think they will be unlikely to do it again. People who live and die over profit don't like to be publicly humiliated -- as they will be -- by making bad investments. It is urgently important that these big money operations fail if our democracy is to survive. If they carry the day, the election in November will prove to them they can buy the process outright, and it is a cheap investment. What is a hundred million if it gives one the power to make hundreds of billions? There has never been an election like this one. We literally stand on the edge of a precipice, and what we do as individuals with our vote will determine every election that follows.
Its totals differ from actual spending reported to the Federal Election Commission in several ways. CMAG’s numbers reflect expenditures on broadcast TV ads, but not on ads aired on local cable or radio. They also exclude robo-calls and mailers that some groups must report to election officials. In some cases, however, CMAG’s estimates include TV ads that social-welfare nonprofits do not have to report to the FEC because of their content or the time frame in which they ran.
After the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January 2010, which paved the way for unlimited corporate and union spending on federal elections, many predicted that super PACs would become the biggest vehicle for outside spending. Hundreds of super PACs soon sprang up, some of which paired up with c4s.
But it’s the sidekicks, the c4s, that have proved more muscular. Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads, has spent an estimated $6.6 million on broadcast TV ads mentioning a candidate for president, CMAG data shows. Crossroads GPS has spent more than six times as much.
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Wednesday, August 15th, 2012
SALVATORE BABONES, - Truthout.org
Stephan: As I have written here several time already in my view the issue of who gets to go into space will represent an existential change in our culture. This is all part of the New Aristocracy trend, which accompanies the great geopolitical transition trend: The rise of the virtual corporate state.
The fact that this 1% luxury space cruise will also negatively impact the planet is just the cost the 99 per cent will bear to support the New Aristocrats, as serfs once gave a large portion of their harvest to their lord.
If two words can capture the extraordinary redistribution of wealth from workers to the wealthy over the past forty years, the flagrant shamelessness of contemporary conspicuous consumption, the privatization of what used to be public privileges and the wanton destruction of our atmosphere that is rapidly leading toward the extinction of nearly all non-human life on earth, all covered in a hypocritical pretense of pious environmental virtue … those two words are Virgin Galactic.
Virgin Galactic, billionaire Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, is charging $200,000 a seat for a few minutes of weightlessness and a view from outer space. The firm has so far taken in $70 million in deposits from 536 passengers, according to an August 1 report from Reuters.
Call me old-fashioned, but I personally find it morally offensive that some people can afford to spend $200,000 on a three-minute experience when others can’t afford food. Food first, luxury yachts second and $200,000 suborbital flights last. That’s my motto.
The explosion in private wealth, however, means that more than a few people can afford those $200,000 flights. A study paid for by the Federal Aviation Administration (that is, by you and me) concluded that more than 1,000 people a year would […]
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