Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
MARK STEVENSON, - The Associated Press
Stephan: It looks like we are now facing another crisis like the bee crisis. These are the canaries in the mine, and few seem to be interested. We don't seem to be able to develop the political will to do anything about these species wide failures, so we may soon follow them.
MEXICO CITY — The number of Monarch butterflies making it to their winter refuge in Mexico dropped 59 percent this year, falling to the lowest level since comparable record-keeping began 20 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday.
It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States and Canada to spend the winter sheltering in mountaintop fir forests in central Mexico. Six of the last seven years have shown drops, and there are now only one-fifteenth as many butterflies as there were in 1997.
The decline in the Monarch population now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, the experts said.
But they differed on the possible causes.
Illegal logging in the reserve established in the Monarch wintering grounds was long thought to contribute, but such logging has been vastly reduced by increased protection, enforcement and alternative development programs in Mexico.
The World Wildlife Fund, one of the groups that sponsored the butterfly census, blamed climate conditions and agricultural practices, especially the use of pesticides that kill off the Monarchs’ main food source, milkweed. The butterflies breed and live in the north in the summer, and […]
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Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
WILLIAM BOARDMAN, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Part of the reason our economy is in such terrible shape is the way we choose to spend money. Here is a classic example. To say it is insane is an understatement, as this report makes clear. All I could think about, as I read it, was that 17 million American children face hunger because they do not have enough to eat. We can't feed our children, but we can make a few companies very very rich building something that doesn't work, and that we don't need.
According to one of its supporters, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is not ‘what our troops need,’ is ‘too costly’ and ‘poorly managed,’ and its ‘present difficulties are too numerous to detail.’
The F-35 is a case study of government failure at all levels – civilian and military, federal, state, local, even airport authority. Not one critical government agency is meeting its obligation to protect the people it presumably represents. Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who wrote the F-35 critique above, is hardly unique as an illustration of how government fails, but he sees no alternative to failure.
Up for re-election in 2014 and long a supporter of basing the F-35 in Vermont, Leahy put those thoughts in a letter to a constituent made public March 13. This is Leahy’s most recent public communication since December 2012, when he refused to meet with opponents of the F-35 and his web site listed a page of ‘public discussion’ events mostly from the spring, including private briefings with public officials, without responding to any substantive issues.
The F-35 is a nuclear-capable weapon of mass destruction that was supposed to be the ‘fighter of the future’ when it was undertaken in 2001. Now, more than a decade […]
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Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
Stephan: If you read SR regularly you know I have been focused on the New American slavery trend for several years now (see The New American Slavery: http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900043-7/fulltext.
We are becoming a country I hardly recognize. I hate these stories, and the trends they represent. But I deal in facts, and have to report the trends whether I like them or not. Part of what concerns me about social progressives is that many don't like to read or hear about what is actually happening. It is the left-wing version of Willful Ignorance. You can't change what you won't look at.
If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, ‘the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons
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Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
GIDEON RACHMAN, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: I don't think it is really clear to people how fragile the world economy is. I am in Paris right now to make a presentation at the Sorbonne -- which I did tonight -- and have been struck by how stressed people are about the Euro and the EU itself. This report gives a good assessment of the situation. If the Euro crashes the American economy will be deeply affected.
European leaders must surely know that they are taking a big risk with Cyprus. The danger is obvious. Now that everybody with money in Cypriot banks is being forced to take a hit, nervous depositors elsewhere in Europe might notice that a dangerous precedent has been set. Rather than run even a small risk of an unwanted financial ‘haircut
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Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
ADAM LEE, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This report helps explain the intense pressure the Theocratic Right is attempting to exert on the Congress to breach the Church/State firewall the Founders went to such effort to put in place. This is a movement whose purpose is to assure that a dwindling minority can exercise power disproportionate to its numbers.
Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting: for the first time in its history, this country is no longer majority Protestant [3]. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans now identify as Protestant Christians of any denomination.
This change has come on surprisingly recently, and from a historical perspective, with breathtaking speed. As recently as 1993, almost two-thirds of Americans identified as Protestants [4], a number that had remained stable for the several preceding decades. But sometime in the 1990s, the ground started to shift, and it’s been sliding ever since. Whether it’s the ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations like Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Presbyterians, or the independent evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist sects, the decline is happening across the board. The rise of so-called megachurches [5], like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California or Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill in Seattle, represents not growth, but consolidation.
What’s happening to these vanishing Protestants? For the most part, they’re not converting to any other religion, but rather are walking away from religion entirely. They’re becoming ‘nones [6],’ as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts it. It seems likely that this is the same secularizing trend being observed in […]
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