Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
Stephan: Justice Aito attempts here to justify his vote on Citizens United. It astonishes me that someone on the highest court in the country can be this dumb. I don't think he is, and I do not think he is being candid. It is my belief that Citizens United resulted from a conscious decision on the part of five Justices to serve corporate interests. I can't prove it, but I find it impossible that it was not obvious that what has happened, would happen. It is particularly hypocritical for Alito and Scalia, who claim to be originalists, to have voted the way they did. The Founders had no idea corporations such as we have today would ever exist, and the Justices know this. Their actions are shameful.
Last week, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. speciously defended the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case by arguing that the ruling, which allowed unlimited independent campaign spending by corporations and unions, was not really groundbreaking at all. In fact, he said, all it did was reaffirm that corporations have free speech rights and that, without such rights, newspapers would have lost the major press freedom rulings that allowed the publication of the Pentagon Papers and made it easier for newspapers to defend themselves against libel suits in New York Times v. Sullivan.
‘The question is whether speech that goes to the very heart of government should be limited to certain preferred corporations; namely, media corporations,
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
Stephan: One of the fundamental principles of mystical alchemy is: as above so below. That insight arose from experiential insights achieved during altered states of consciousness. Science is now saying much the same.
SOURCE: Dmitri Krioukov, Maksim Kitsak, Robert S. Sinkovits, David Rideout, David Meyer, Marián Boguñá. Network Cosmology. Scientific Reports, 2012; 2 DOI: 10.1038/srep00793
The structure of the universe and the laws that govern its growth may be more similar than previously thought to the structure and growth of the human brain and other complex networks, such as the Internet or a social network of trust relationships between people, according to a new paper published in the science journal Nature’s Scientific Reports.
‘By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer,’ said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the paper, published by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. ‘But the discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems.’
Having the ability to predict — let alone trying to control — the dynamics of complex networks remains a central challenge throughout network science. Structural and dynamical similarities among different real networks suggest that some universal laws might be in action, although the nature and common origin of such laws remain elusive.
By performing complex supercomputer simulations of the universe and using a variety of other calculations, researchers have […]
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
, - CBS (Dallas-Fort Worth)
Stephan: I have come to see air travel as positively dangerous, not because of air flight, but because of the condition of the planes, their bathrooms, rugs, tables, the recycled air, and the seats. I have gotten sick several times after flying six or 18 hours sitting next to someone obviously unwell. This story confirms my concern. Wash your hands frequently, don't touch your face, raise or lower the toilet seat while holding a piece of towel or kleenex. Now I think I will wipe down the folding table with one of those antibacterial wipes.
Do you know what these are? Well, you may have been sitting next to them on your last airplane flight?
These big words are the names of germs. CBS 11 found these bacteria breeding on planes after we randomly swabbed 10-surfaces on two planes.
‘We found roughly 3000 bacteria on this plate,
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Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
CRYSTAL PHEND, Senior Staff Writer - ABC News
Stephan: I am amazed that this wasn't intuitively and logically obvious. So I see it as a failure of both the education and illness profit systems.
The youngest kids in the class may have a tougher time with academics and behavior, a new study found.
Icelandic elementary school students in the bottom third of their fourth-grade class for age were almost twice as likely to score low on math and language arts standardized tests, study author Helga Zoëga of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and colleagues found.
They were also 50 percent more likely to be prescribed stimulants for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by seventh grade than the oldest kids in their class, the group reported in the December issue of Pediatrics.
‘Birthday cutoffs for school entry necessarily lead to an age span of at least 12 months within a classroom,’ they noted. ‘At age 5, this span accounts for 20 percent of the child’s age and presents a difference in maturity and performance between the youngest and the oldest child in class.’
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Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
BRAD PLUMER, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is the World Bank's latest assessment concerning climate change (click through to download the full report). It should alarm all of us. Not only this story, but the report itself) makes it clear that these changes have certainly scared the WB analysts.
Frankly I think this trend is going to play into the worst scenario. I say this because even if a new non-carbon based energy technology emerged in 2013, and the old energy virtual corporate states did not attempt to block its adaptation, it would take several decades for the conversion to eventuate, and in some countries many decades. There is already enough inertia in the climate systems that a 4º increase would still occur.
Over the years at the U.N. climate talks, the goal has been to keep future global warming below 2°C. But as those talks have faltered, emissions have kept rising, and that 2°C goal is now looking increasingly out of reach. Lately, the conversation has shifted toward how to deal with 3°C of warming. Or 4°C. Or potentially more.
And that topic has made a lot of people awfully nervous. Case in point: The World Bank just commissioned an analysis (pdf) by scientists at the Potsdam Institute looking at the consequences of a 4°C rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels by 2100. And the report appears to have unnerved many bank officials. ‘The latest predictions on climate change should shock us into action,
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