Saturday, October 26th, 2013
CHRIS KIRK and DAN KOIS, - Slate
Stephan: The carnage continues. That it goes along with so little public discussion tells us something about the gun psychosis that cripples the U.S. And these numbers are known to be under-reported, and they are five weeks out-of-date. The real number is much larger.
Click through to see the remarkble graphics that accompany this report.
The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive). But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please email a link to a news report to slatedata@gmail.com. And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.
Update, June 19, 2013: As time goes on, our count gets further and further away from the likely actual number of gun deaths in America-because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides, which are very rarely reported. When discussing this issue, please note that our number is by design not accurate and represents only the number of gun deaths that the media can find out about contemporaneously. Part of the purpose of this interactive is to […]
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Friday, October 25th, 2013
TOM SIMONITE, - MIT Technology Review
Stephan: I loathe Wikipedia. I fought for months through their arcane rules to have a mass of misinformation about myself and my work deleted. And many of my friends and colleagues tell similar stories. Nothing that has anything to do consciousness research can trusted to be accurate on Wikipedia. In fact there is a group called Guerrilla Skeptics that makes a point of distorting anything having to do with consciousness or parapsychological research. I can only assume that there are many other areas where there may be controversy that are similarly rigged. NEVER, EVER use Wikipedia if accuracy matters.
The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to ‘compile the sum of all human knowledge
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Friday, October 25th, 2013
LINDSAY ABRAMS, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: One of the most toxic aspects of the Theocratic Right is its complete disdain for actual facts, and its endless and constant disinformation operations. Here is a story that makes the case.
A study on the impact of climate change on Nebraska, recently approved by the state, may not be carried out - because its own scientists are refusing to be a part of it.
The problem, according to members of the governor-appointed Climate Assessment and Response Committee, is that the bill behind the study specifically calls for the researchers to look at ‘cyclical
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Friday, October 25th, 2013
STEPHANIE MENCIMER, - Mother Jones
Stephan: I have done a number of stories on this trend; this is the latest. It is my view that if a hospital takes Federal money they must abide by Federal laws, no exceptions. The use of religion is just another gimmick used by the Theocratic Right to advance their social agenda.
One morning in November 2010, an ambulance brought a woman who was 15 weeks pregnant to the emergency room at Sierra Vista Regional Health Center, 70 miles outside Tucson, Arizona. She had been carrying twins and had miscarried one at home in the bathtub. The chances of the second fetus making it were ‘minuscule,’ Dr. Robert Holder, the OB-GYN on call that day, later recalled in an affidavit [1]. He told the woman and her husband that trying to continue the pregnancy would put her at risk of severe bleeding and infection. In short, she needed an emergency abortion.
But there was a problem: Sierra Vista was in the midst of a trial merger with a Catholic hospital company, Carondelet Health Network, which required its doctors to abide by the church’s ethical and religious directives. Hospital administrators told Holder that because the surviving fetus still had a heartbeat, he could not perform an abortion. Holder had to send the patient to a hospital in Tucson-a three-hour delay that he believed put her at risk for life-threatening complications.
The doctors at Sierra Vista aren’t the only ones to struggle with submitting their medical decisions to a higher authority. A growing number of patients […]
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Friday, October 25th, 2013
COLUM LYNCH, SHANE HARRIS, and JOHN HUDSON, - Foreign Policy
Stephan: The outrageous surveillance state begun by the Bush Administration, and brought to a previously unimagined Orwellian level by the Obama Administration has become the source of growing anti-Americanism. It is the nature of secret organizations to expand as far as they can get away with, and the Obama Administration took it past our borders to a level of spying that is simply unacceptable to the rest of the world. The price we are going to pay for this over-reaching is going to haunt us for decades. And there is no meaningful denial possible because the documents revealing it are American and official.
Brazil and Germany today joined forces to press for the adoption of a U.N. General Resolution that promotes the right of privacy on the internet, marking the first major international effort to restrain the National Security Agency’s intrusions into the online communications of foreigners, according to diplomatic sources familiar with the push.
The effort follows a German claim that the American spy agency may have tapped the private telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and dozens of other world leaders. It also comes about one month after Brazilian leader Dilma Rousseff denounced NSA espionage against her country as ‘a breach of international law’ in a General Assembly speech and proposed that the U.N. establish legal guidelines to prevent ‘cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war.’
Brazilian and German diplomats met in New York today with a small group of Latin American and European governments to consider a draft resolution that calls for expanding privacy rights contained in the International Covenant Civil and Political Rights to the online world. The draft does not refer to a flurry of American spying revelations that have caused a political uproar around the world, particularly in Brazil and Germany. But it was clear that the […]
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