Tuesday, September 24th, 2013
Susan Hagen, - University of Rochester
Stephan: The nasty truth about the enduring racism in the South is something few want to talk about. Almost nothing serious appears in the corporate media. I knew it and worked against it as a youth in Virginia, and continue to be surprised at how fundamental it still is to Southern whites. It is notable that almost all of these Southern racists are Republicans
Please click through to see the very useful charts.
Although slavery was abolished 150 years ago, its political legacy is alive and well, according to researchers who performed a new county-by-county analysis of census data and opinion polls of more than 39,000 southern whites.
The team of political scientists found that white Southerners who live today in the Cotton Belt where slavery and the plantation economy dominated are much more likely to express more negative attitudes toward blacks than their fellow Southerners who live in nearby areas that had few slaves. Residents of these former slavery strongholds are also more likely to identify as Republican and to express opposition to race-related policies such as affirmative action.
Slaves were concentrated in counties where cotton thrived, as shown in the above map based on the 1860 census. White Southerners in these same areas today express more racial resentment and are more likely to be Republican and oppose affirmative action, than other Southerners.
Conducted by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen from the University of Rochester, the research is believed to be the first to demonstrate quantitatively the lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South. The findings hold even when other dynamics often associated with racial animosity are factored […]
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Tuesday, September 24th, 2013
GEORGE CHIDI, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I confess this trend about taking food away from poor people upsets me more than almost anything else. I consider the Theocratic Right Republican position on food assistance to be essentially evil. It is a kind of crime against humanity. But one has to face the truth that people like Representative Kevin Cramer (R-ND) are in office because American voters put them there. So the shame lies with the people of North Dakota.
A Facebook question from a Bismark, North Dakota resident to his congressman started off rockily yesterday, when the congressman dismissed a religious argument opposed to cuts in the federal food stamp program with a religious quote.
‘2 Thessalonians 3:10 English Standard Version (ESV) 10 For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat,
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Monday, September 23rd, 2013
Stephan: Benjamin Franklin understood the truth this report discusses. In his will of 1789, Franklin left money for the building of parks to Boston and Philadelphia, because he believed that creating aesthetic public spaces created greater comity in the community. More than two centuries later we are still learning this lesson.
Last year, a group of Edinburgh architecture researchers asked a dozen students to take a walk. They began on a tree-lined shopping drag, turned along the tranquil northern edge of the Meadows, one of the city’s larger parks, and wound up in a busy commercial district some half-hour later. The pastoral section of an otherwise urban jaunt, the researchers found, induced a significant increase in meditative thinking.
This may not strike you as a novel discovery. Thanks to Henry Thoreau’s trip to Walden Pond, Teddy Roosevelt’s sojourn in the Badlands, and America’s other legends of retreat, the idea that nature has restorative powers is deeply embedded in our culture. Science is in support: A raft of studies credit bucolic settings with reducing aggression, alleviating depression, and improving mental function.
This is not quite the same old story, though. The results of the Edinburgh study were obtained through mobile electroencephalography (EEG) technology. Participants took their 25-minute walk with a web of electrodes glued to their scalps and a laptop computer in a backpack to record their neural impressions, step by step. When the paper says that the transition to North Meadow Lane was marked by ‘reductions in arousal, frustration and engagement, and an […]
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Monday, September 23rd, 2013
JAKE THOMPSON and ELIZABETH HEYD, - National Resources Defense Council
Stephan: That non-carbon energy is both cheaper and less damaging to the environment is becoming ever more evident, as this report explains. Now we will see how great a stranglehold carbon energy interests have on the Congress and the economy. I predict that because of the extreme corruption in our government this is going to be a painful struggle, and many are going to be hurt before we accept this reality. But it is inevitable.
WASHINGTON — It’s less costly to get electricity from wind turbines and solar panels than coal-fired power plants when climate change costs and other health impacts are factored in, according to a new study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.
In fact-using the official U.S. government estimates of health and environmental costs from burning fossil fuels-the study shows it’s cheaper to replace a typical existing coal-fired power plant with a wind turbine than to keep the old plant running. And new electricity generation from wind could be more economically efficient than natural gas.
The findings show the nation can cut carbon pollution from power plants in a cost-effective way, by replacing coal-fired generation with cleaner options like wind, solar, and natural gas.
‘Burning coal is a very costly way to make electricity. There are more efficient and sustainable ways to get power,
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Monday, September 23rd, 2013
CAROLYN LOCHHEAD, - SFGate
Stephan: The overuse of antibiotics in industrial animal husbandry is an enormous threat to all of us. It is instrumental in creating superbugs. This is a failed system of food production, propped up and permitted through lack of regulation. It enriches the few while threatening the wellbeing of the many. Ironically, even the uber-rich will be at risk. That this use of antibiotics is allowed is another example of the corruption that is destroying the country.
WASHINGTON — The Centers for Disease Control on Monday confirmed a link between routine use of antibiotics in livestock and growing bacterial resistance that is killing at least 23,000 people a year.
The report is the first by the government to estimate how many people die annually of infections that no longer respond to antibiotics because of overuse in people and animals.
CDC Director Thomas Frieden called for urgent steps to scale back and monitor use, or risk reverting to an era when common bacterial infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream, respiratory system and skin routinely killed and maimed.
‘We will soon be in a post-antibiotic era if we’re not careful,’ Frieden said. ‘For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.’
The discovery of penicillin in 1928 transformed medicine. But because bacteria rapidly evolve to resist the drugs, and resistance is encouraged with each use, antibiotics are a limited resource.
2 million infections
Along with the annual fatalities, the report estimated at least 2 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur each year. Frieden said these are ‘minimal estimates’ because they count only microbes that are resistant to multiple antibiotics and include only hospital infections, omitting cases from dialysis centers, nursing homes and other medical settings.
At […]
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