Saturday, November 2nd, 2013
OLIVER MILMAN, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is one of those stories that makes me think about giving up on SR because the human species is just too stupid collectivey to survive, so what's the point. I confess I do despair that we are literally killing ourselves. Our greed simply trumps all other considerations. This story just makes you want to weep.
Talks to create the world’s two largest marine reserves in the Antarctic have broken down, with conservationists branding Russia a ‘repeat offender’ for blocking an international agreement.
Delegates from 24 nations and the European Union have been locked in talks in Hobart for the past 10 days at the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
But the negotiations have ended in frustration for the nations, including Australia and the US, that proposed vast protected zones around Antarctica, with Russia, Ukraine and China refusing to back the plans.
The US and New Zealand had proposed a 1.3m square kilometre protected area in the Ross Sea. A separate plan put forward by Australia, France and the EU would have kept 1.6m square kilometres of East Antarctica off-limits to fishing. Consensus among the nations was required to ratify the plans.
The failure of the talks is the third time in the past year that the proposals for protected zones have failed to find agreement among the commission’s nations. Previously, Russia and Ukraine questioned the legal status of the protected areas.
Andrea Kavanagh, the director of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Southern Ocean sanctuaries project, told Guardian Australia that the failure of […]
No Comments
Saturday, November 2nd, 2013
DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Religion, racism, and guns, the hallmarks of the Theocratic Right. What were once just anecdotal reports has yielded to actual research data.
Note the last paragraph's observation about the suppression of gun research by the government through non-funding. This in the face of the holocaust of gun deaths in the U.S.
A study published in the scientific journal forum PLOS ONE found that the presence of firearms in white homes in the U.S. is associated with higher incidences of racism and stiffer resistance to gun control policies. According to a press release from the University of Manchester, the study was led by University of Manchester and Monash University professor of Behavioral Studies Dr. Kerry O’Brien.
The study analyzed data from a large swath of white U.S. voters and was spurred by the vehemence of the gun control debate in this country in the wake of the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut. O’Brien and his team mainly hail from the U.K., New Zealand and Australia and were curious about U.S. attitudes toward gun ownership.
‘Coming from countries with strong gun control policies, and a 30-fold lower rate of gun-related homicides, we found the arguments for opposing gun control counterintuitive and somewhat illogical. For example, US whites oppose gun control to a far greater extent than do blacks, but whites are actually more likely to kill themselves with their guns, than be killed by someone else. Why would you keep them? So we decided to examine what social and […]
No Comments
Saturday, November 2nd, 2013
KARA BRANDEISKY and MIKE TIGAS, - ProPublica
Stephan: Citizens United I believe will rank, along with the Dred Scott decision as one of the most egregiously obtuse and stupidest decisions ever made by the Supreme Court. Even the original judge who first ruled on it before it went to the Supreme Court has repudiated it. And it was followed by another truly awful decision by the conservative bloc on the Court, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The 1858 Dred Scott decision played a role in the lead up to the Civil War. The two modern decisions have fundamentally changed American democracy -- for the worse. It should have been obvious how bad these decisions were, so obvious in fact that one can only wonder whether these conservative activist justices don't have a political agenda. Here is an excellent assessment of what the Voting Rights Act decision has led to. The flood of money that preceded it, with Citiziens is already well-known.
The racial implications of the Voting Rights Act decision have gotten a lot of coverage. Much less discussed is the suppression of women voters, with Texas leading the way in ignominy.
Click through to see the useful map that accompanies this report.
Last year, we wrote extensively about photo ID laws and the Supreme Court’s decision to strike a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, with gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and the debt ceiling and healthcare debates already shaping the 2014 midterms, we’re revisiting voting policies to see which states have enacted tougher restrictions since the Supreme Court ruling in June.
Remind me – what is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act?
Under the Voting Rights Act, states and localities with a history of racial discrimination needed to get permission from the federal government to enact any changes to their voting laws, in a process called ‘preclearance.
No Comments
Saturday, November 2nd, 2013
Stephan: Several people contacted me about the little recipe for butter and Flax seed oil, including my wife Ronlyn, who informed me I had screwed up her recipe. The proportions are correct, but not the technique for making it. One does not melt the butter, one leaves it out until it softens, then blends everything together. My apologies
No Comments
Friday, November 1st, 2013
JOANNA BLYTHMAN, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It is so hard to get reliable information about nutrition first, because so much of the published peer review literature in this area is compromised, and, second because of the hundreds of millions of dollars corporations spend to steer your choices to products that are good for their bottom, if not for you.
Ronlyn makes a butter mixture that I use and cook with:
2 Cups of melted butter (one pound)
2 Cups of organic sunflower or safflower oil
3/4 Cup of Flax seed oil.
She melts it together and pours it into three small glass bowls, caps them and puts them in the freezer, then moves them one at a time to the fridge, where I can use them.
Government and health charities have been doling out duff healthy eating advice for decades, but when are they going to admit it? That’s the question raised by the remarks of cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, who writing in the BMJ has challenged the orthodoxy that the consumption of foods containing saturated fat, such as butter and red meat, causes heart disease.
Malhotra is brave and principled to speak out, yet he is far from a lone voice. In 2010, a major review of scientific studies on fat, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded that contrary to what we have been lead to believe, ‘there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease’. In the UK, other independent-minded nutritionists and medics, including John Briffa, Zoe Harcombe, and Malcolm Kendrick, have vociferously countered the biggest public health dogma of our times. It’s the same story in the US, where influential voices, such as Garry Taubes, Michael Pollan and Robert Lustig, have all called time on the notion that saturated fat is the devil incarnate.
Why? Counter-intuitive though it might seem, there’s no evidence that fat is fattening. Indeed by sating the appetite effectively, it may prevent overeating. To quote Kendrick, ‘there […]
No Comments
