Saturday, September 7th, 2013
ALANA SEMUELS, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: About 40 miles up the mainland on Interstate 5 a bridge collapsed earlier this summer fundamentally changing traffic patterns and resulting in many people driving down my island, and taking the ferry. It has made getting on the ferry on time much more problematic. The bridge failures for lack of maintenance are of a piece with tearing up the pavement on rural roads, a quickening decay of American infrastructure that is reducing large parts of rural America to third world status.
SCHWENKSVILLE, PA. – Engineers think that three of the bridges closest to Dave Wisler’s home are about ready to collapse.
One, a picturesque one-lane structure built in 1893, became so perilous it was closed last summer, and the county doesn’t have the money to fix it. Another bridge, just down the road, is well-known for the concrete that chips off the bottom as children play in the creek below – it’s currently under repair.
Traffic was diverted to a third bridge nearby, but some drivers noticed a worrying humming noise as they drove over it, and their windows rattled. Authorities have since found that bridge is too dangerous to drive over too, and don’t know when they’ll be able to reopen it.
To get to a barn that he’s restoring across the river, about 300 yards away, Wisler now has to drive 15 minutes past homes and parks and blinking orange and white construction signs.
‘I can’t get there from here,’ said Wisler, peering over the small creek that winds through this rural town just outside Philadelphia.
America’s roads and bridges have been eroding for decades, but the deeper they fall into disrepair, the less money there is to fix them. First, the recession crippled […]
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Saturday, September 7th, 2013
SCOTT KEYES, - Think Progress
Stephan: Here is yet another manifestation of the secession trend, a subset of the Great Schism Trend. There is a growing rightist rejection of the United States that corporate media will not talk about but which I see growing day-by-day.
The truth is, of course, that Texas could not survive as a separate country, not least because they are going to have a terrible water problem in the future. There are already 30 towns in Texas projected to run out of water this year, and Fracking is exacerbating the problem enormously.
Commissioner Barry Smitherman, who is running to be the next state Attorney General, is preparing his state to secede from the United States and become an ‘independent nation.
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Saturday, September 7th, 2013
DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Here is an example of what I mean about the danger of the Theocratic Right. It is easy to make fun of Fox News; its on air personalities are buffoons, and it is only tangentially a news organization. It is really a political and social disinformation operation designed to create fear and anxiety in the service of Rightist political goals. But its intellectual shoddiness and over-the-top posturing is effective and toxic. These are dangerous people.
Click through to see the video.
Fox News host Dana Perino this week suggested that atheists should leave the country instead of trying to maintain the separation of church and state.
In a case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, atheist lawyer David Niose argued that the words ‘under God
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Saturday, September 7th, 2013
REBECCA SAVASTIO, - Guardian Express
Stephan: I personally think religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or whatever is a sign of mental illness. The universal repression and subjugation of women, the intolerant rigidity, the anti-life positions, the judgmental self-righteousness if expressed in a secular context would be considered signs of mental illness. But, because we cloak it in the guise of religion it is accepted. As I have said here many times in my view the Theocratic Right, in all its forms, is the most toxic and dangerous social force in the world today.
A neurologist has published a new book in which she asserts that religious fundamentalism could soon be classified as a mental illness. University of Oxford neurologist Kathleen Taylor says that it’s not only religious fundamentalism that could be categorized as a mental illness, but other forms of extreme or radical beliefs as well.
The Times reports that Taylor says people who have fundamentalist religious beliefs, cult members, and even people who think it is a good idea to beat their children could soon be viewed as mentally ill and received corresponded treatment to cure their illness. Taylor explained:
One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology - we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance
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Saturday, September 7th, 2013
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Once again, water is destiny. And also once again, one can see the effects of short-term profit gain, trumping long term wellness and sustainability considerations.
Like dot-com moguls in the ’90s and real estate gurus in the 2000s, farmers in western Kansas are enjoying the fruits of a bubble: Their crop yields have been boosted by a gusher of soon-to-vanish irrigation water. That’s the message of a new study by Kansas State University researchers. Drawing down their region’s groundwater at more than six times the natural rate of recharge, farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts ‘the highest total market value of agriculture products’ of any congressional district in the nation, the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots; and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.
But they’re on the verge of essentially sucking dry a large swath of the High Plains Aquifer, one of the United States’ greatest water resources. The researchers found that 30 percent of the region’s groundwater has been tapped out, and if present trends continue, another 39 percent will be gone within 50 years. As the water stock dwindles, of course, pumping what’s left gets more and more expensive-and farming becomes less profitable and ultimately uneconomical. But all isn’t necessarily lost. The authors calculate that if the region’s farmers can […]
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