Monday, January 20th, 2014
, - Jakarta Post (Indonesia)
Stephan: Did you think cigarettes were so yesterday? Then this is going to surprise you. What it left me with was yet further revulsion for the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs. There is not a single case of a person dying from Marijuana, and it is Federally illegal. Tobacco which is legally available, in contrast, just gets more deadly, and kills tens of thousands.
A newly released US Surgeon General’s report shows that cigarette smoking is even more hazardous than previously thought. The report reveals that smoking causes more diseases, kills more people and costs the United States more in medical bills and other economic losses than has previously been reported.
Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids president Matthew L. Myers said cigarettes were more deadly today than they were 50 years ago because of actions taken by the tobacco industry.
‘Smokers’ risk of death from all causes, compared to those who never smoked, has gone up significantly over the past 50 years,” said Myers on the report, which comes 50 years after the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health.
Citing the report, Myers further said: ‘Today’s cigarette smokers, both men and women, have a much higher risk of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease than smokers in 1964 despite smoking fewer cigarettes.”
The report points to changes in the design and composition of cigarettes as the only reasonable explanation for the increased risk of lung cancer.
It is said that the United States has actually made remarkable progress in the past 50 years and cut smoking rates to 18.1 percent in 2012, or by more than half […]
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Sunday, January 19th, 2014
GREGOR PETER SCHMITZ, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: If you have any questions about which are the real power centers in our world this story should disabuse you of illusions. The Virtual Corporate States that are the actual power centers in the 21st century do not like regulations in general and climate change regulations in particular. And so, once again, the profit for the few trumps the well-being of the many, indeed, the planet.
These are such sad stories. A child can look at the data and see where this is headed.
BRUSSELS — The EU’s reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking — jeopardizing Germany’s touted energy revolution in the process.
The climate between Brussels and Berlin is polluted, something European Commission officials attribute, among other things, to the “reckless” way German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate.
But now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, either. Commission sources have long been hinting that the body intends to move away from ambitious climate protection goals. On Tuesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported as much.
At the request of Commission President José Manuel Barroso, EU member states are no longer to receive specific guidelines for the development ofrenewable energy. The stated aim of increasing the share of green energy across the EU to up to 27 percent will hold. But how seriously countries tackle this project will no longer be regulated within the plan. As […]
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Sunday, January 19th, 2014
GEORGE CHIDI, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The Theocratic Right is so good at manipulating the media, and the media is so uninterested in digging into the real story that very few except scholars know that this community of people are more violent, more likely to abuse their children, and their spouses, and more likely to divorce, for all the family values talk. It is all part of the great hypocrisy of this trend. Here is yet another research survey proving these points. (See At the Cost of Your Life: Social Value, Social Wellness. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900249-8/fulltext. Also Social Values, Social Wellness: Can We Know What Works? http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900346-6/fulltext.
For all the talk about the conservative family values of marriage in Bible-belt, red-state America, a new study to be published this month notes that the more religiously conservative protestant an area is, the higher the divorce rate … even for non-protestants.
Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked county-by-county at divorces for a study to be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology.
Their study controlled for the effect of poverty, which is greater in the southern Bible belt and is known to contribute to higher divorce rates. Even accounting for income and the higher rate of marriage overall in southern states – an alternative to unmarried cohabitation more common in less conservative households – divorce rates in counties with higher proportions of conservative protestants remained higher.
The religiously conservative states of Alabama and Arkansas have the second and third highest divorce rates in the U.S., the authors noted. at 13 per 1000 people per year while New Jersey and Massachusetts, more liberal states, are two of the lowest at 6 and 7 per 1000 people per year.
The strongest correlation showed that early marriage and low income among religious […]
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Sunday, January 19th, 2014
ALAN FARAGO, President of Friends of the Everglades - Counter Punch
Stephan: Here is a very important essay about the lessons to be learned from the West Virginia spill, a story that has gotten remarkably little in-depth coverage by the corporate media. I read today that the supposedly safe water trucks that have been bringing water to the people in fact having been filling from the same river downstream from where the leak occurred.
This disaster, like the Texas explosion that destroyed a town a few months back, occurred because there had been no regulatory oversight of this facility in over two decades. It is a Goebbels' Big Lie to say we have too much regulation in this country. The problem is exactly the opposite.
The vaunted capacity of enlightened corporations to do better than government to protect the public interest in clean, safe water just cracked a big leak in West Virginia.
Here is the most curious omission in media coverage of the West Virginia pollution disaster: how politics in West Virginia harbors antipathy to the very environmental regulations that ought to protect the state’s drinking water.
It is also an outstanding example how politics have consequences like those depriving 300,000 people in Charleston of safe drinking water. It is almost as though the media – that knows no boundaries when it comes to matching mayhem to eyeballs – has discovered in the underbrush of West Virginia politics a tragedy that is too horrible: the indelicate matter of voters supporting choices that undermine their own existence.
Curious, too, the media has no difficulty macerating an event in New Jersey that is similarly totemic: traffic flow on the George Washington Bridge traffic constipated by political ambition. Arguably the Elk River in West Virginia represents the same theme of politics making mince-meat of citizen safety with a significantly more dire outcome. Yet the media holds its nose.
Although both US Senators from West Virginia are Democrats, they are a […]
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Sunday, January 19th, 2014
TARA CULP-RESSLER, - Think Progress
Stephan: There just is no limit to the perfidy of the Theocratic Right. I thought this was a joke, something from the Onion, masquerading as a real news story, when I first read what a reader had sent me. Then I went to the source and realized this was for real. This is, as the piece notes not a new thing, but the continuation of a trend. To the Theocratic Right women are second class, and must be subordinated. They aren't smart enough to make decisions about their own bodies, and can't be trusted to tell the truth.
House Republicans are currently advancing the ‘No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act,” or HR 7, a measure that would impose sweeping restrictions on abortion coverage that could make the procedure less affordable for Americans across the country. In addition to preventing low-income women from using their Medicaid coverage to access abortion, HR 7 could also have dramatic implications for the tax code and the private insurance market. One of its most controversial provisions could actually require the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits of rape victims.
Why? Because HR 7 eliminates medical-expense deductions for abortion care, essentially raising taxes on the women who opt to have an abortion. Like many abortion restrictions, this provision includes an exemption for victims of rape and incest, as well as women who encounter life-threatening complications from their pregnancies. But in order to enforce those exceptions, the IRS would have to verify that the women who are claiming a medical-expense deduction for an abortion fall into one of those three categories, to ensure they’re not committing tax fraud.
Essentially, that would empower the government agency to have the final say over what ‘counts” as a sexual assault or a life-threatening situation. And that, in turn, would force […]
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