Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
JIM HIGHTOWER, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The point this study makes is largely ignored by the media but, in my view, is very important. A millionaire just by the nature of their financial security simply cannot understand the world of someone who lives pay check to pay check, with no assurance the next paycheck will be there. You have to live that life to know it. I think this explains a great deal about why the Congress acts as it does.
The rich truly are different from you and me — they tend to hold seats in Congress.
Our nation purports to be a representative democracy, yet you don’t find many plumbers, mineworkers, dirt farmers, Wal-Mart associates, roofers, beauty parlor operators, taxi drivers, or other “get-the-job-done” Americans among the 535 members of the U.S. House and Senate.
What you do find is an over-supply of lawmakers drawn from a very thin strata of America’s population: Millionaires. In fact, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that last year — for the first time in history — more than half of our senators and House members are in the Millionaires Club. Indeed, the average net worth (the value of what they own minus what they owe) for all lawmakers now totals more than $7 million.
In short, the world in which our “representatives” live is light years from where the majority of people live, and the divide between the governors and the governees is especially stark for the 40 percent of people whose net worth is zero (or, technically, less than zero, […]
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
, - National Center for Science Education
Stephan: More on the gathering strength of the Dark Ages Trend. I see more and more of these stories. As a country a large percentage of the population is losing its moorings in a fact based world. For scientists this is increasingly alarming, but in the general population and media it seems a matter of little interest.
Missouri’s House Bill 1472, introduced in the House of Representatives on January 16, 2013, is the third antiscience bill of the year, following Virginia’s HB 207 and Oklahoma’s SB 1765. If enacted, the bill would require “[a]ny school district or charter school which provides instruction relating to the theory of evolution by natural selection” to have “a policy on parental notification and a mechanism where a parent can choose to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s instruction on evolution.” Parents and guardians would receive a notification containing “[t]he basic content of the district’s or school’s evolution instruction to be provided to the student” and “[t]he parent’s right to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s evolution instruction.”
NCSE’s deputy director Glenn Branch commented, “House Bill 1472 would eviscerate the teaching of biology in Missouri.” Quoting “The OOPSIE Compromise – A Big Mistake,” which Eugenie C. Scott and he wrote for Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2008, he added, “Evolution inextricably pervades the biological sciences; it therefore pervades, or at any rate ought to pervade, biology education at the K-12 level. There simply is no alternative to learning about it; there is no […]
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
MELISSA BARNHART, Reporter - CP Church & Ministry
Stephan: This is the minister of the largest church in Texas. That such despicable things are routinely said from the pulpits of the Theocratic Right, and reported in the religious press as straight news, with no pushback from the congregation gives us, I think, a sense of where these people are psychologically. That it receives almost no coverage in the general corporate media is also very revealing. This is all feeding into the Schism Trend and the Dark Ages Trend that are splitting the country in two.
DALLAS, Texas – Pastor Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the 11,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, has released a new book that answers people’s most pressing questions about heaven and what the end times will look like to Christians and those who do not believe in Jesus Christ.
In an interview with The Christian Post on Thursday, Pastor Jeffress spoke about what has become the most controversial part of his book, Perfect Ending: Why Your Eternal Future Matters Today, in which he highlights how President Barack Obama’s policies are paving the way for a future world dictator, known as the Antichrist.
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Jeffress emphasizes that he’s not at all saying that Obama is the Antichrist, only that his Administration’s policies are conditioning society to slowly accept the giving up of their rights. The megachurch pastor jokingly said he knows Obama is not the Antichrist, because as the Bible indicates, the Antichrist will have higher poll numbers.
The Antichrist, Jeffress said, will “usurp people’s basic freedoms such as speech, worship and commerce,” and will “launch an attack on God’s people, and will seek to change God’s moral law, according to Daniel 7:25. And, he will be able to accomplish […]
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
DAVID EDWARDS, Editor - The Raw Story
Stephan: Doing SR every day I see so many stories about the racist, hateful, ignorant things said and proposed by the Theocratic Right that it has left me with the sense that the Republican Party isn't really a political party in the traditional sense, it is a cult. And sometimes, when I think I have seen everything, something comes along that just leaves me with my mouth hanging open. That was the case with this report.
Click through to see the actual video.
A Republican county official in Michigan is in hot water after making racial comments about Detroit, including the idea that the city should be turned into a detention center for ‘all the Indians.”
In a recent interview for a profile by The New Yorker titled ‘Drop Dead, Detroit!” Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson admitted, ‘Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough sh*t.”
Patterson recalled telling his children to ‘get in and get out” if they needed to go to Detroit.
‘And, before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking,” he said.
Patterson also proposed a fix to Detroit’s financial problems: Turn the city into a reservation for Native Americans.
‘I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and the corn.’”
After Detroit officials and activists reacted with […]
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
DINA SPECTOR, - Business Insider
Stephan: A new door opens to provide us with a glimpse as to how the Universe is structured. It is fascinating. In addition to the story itself, not something particularly. The cosmic web is described as being 10 million light-years across. I wonder how the Creationist who see the world as 6,000 years old will deal with this, if they do at all. Willful ignorance is such a crude and shabby closet.
You need to click through and look at the images to really understand this report.
This deep image shows the Nebula (cyan) with a size of 2 million light-years discovered around the quasar UM287 (at the center of the image). The energetic radiation of the quasar makes the surrounding intergalactic gas glow revealing the physical structure of a cosmic web filament.
For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.
Scientists believe that matter in the universe is arranged into a gigantic web-like structure. This is called the cosmic web.
There are signatures of this structure in the remaining radiation from the Big Bang and in the layout of the universe itself. Without some mysterious force pulling visible matter into this web, galaxies would be randomly scattered across the universe. But they aren’t.
We can see that galaxies are found in groups and those groups come together in larger clusters.
Computer models tell us that those galaxy clusters are linked by long filaments of hot gas and dark matter – a mystery substance that we can’t see because it doesn’t radiate or scatter light but that makes […]
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