Michael E. Mann, - Reader Supoported News/Scientific American
Stephan: 2036. That's when the full Monty begins, and we live in the climate we have created. This is an excellent exegesis on where we stand in our knowledge of our climate future.
Temperatures have been flat for 15 years-nobody can properly explain it,” the Wall Street Journal says. ‘Global warming “pause’ may last for 20 more years, and Arctic sea ice has already started to recover,” the Daily Mail says. Such reassuring claims about climate abound in the popular media, but they are misleading at best. Global warming continues unabated, and it remains an urgent problem.
The misunderstanding stems from data showing that during the past decade there was a slowing in the rate at which the earth’s average surface temperature had been increasing. The event is commonly referred to as ‘the pause,” but that is a misnomer: temperatures still rose, just not as fast as during the prior decade. The important question is, What does the short-term slowdown portend for how the world may warm in the future?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is charged with answering such questions. In response to the data, the IPCC in its September 2013 report lowered one aspect of its prediction for future warming. Its forecasts, released every five to seven years, drive climate policy worldwide, so even the small change raised debate over how fast the planet is warming and how much time we […]
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NINA MARTIN, - Pro Publica/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This excellent interview with Professor Katherine Franke, Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School articulates very well what the strategy of the Theocratic Right is about. What they are trying to achieve.
There is a reason the Founders put up a firewall between the church and the state, and would not support any particular religion -- Ben Franklin paid for pews in a church of every major denomination in Philadelphia, and very infrequently attended any of them. The Founders understood that what is trying to happen today is exactly what they feared would happen if they did not build the firewall. In many cases they, their parents, or grandparents, or all three, had suffered because Anglicanism was the state religion of the United Kingdom, and the monarch was the head of both church and state.
As conservatives grapple with the reality of gay marriage and the Supreme Court weighs whether companies should be forced to offer birth control to employees, it’s very clear: The conflict between religious freedom and gender/sexual equality has become ‘the most important civil rights issue of this time.”
So says Professor Katherine Franke [3], director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School [4] and one of the driving forces behind the school’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, a new initiative that seeks to shift the way people look at religious and secular values – and to bridge a divide that has come to seem insurmountable. Here, Franke talks with ProPublica’s Sex and Gender reporter, Nina Martin.
NM: Let’s start with why these two things – religious belief and civil rights – have come to seem so at odds.
KF: Part of the problem is the way we’re currently framing the issue. On the one hand, we have the free exercise of religion, which is largely based in an appeal to revelation, to the truths of religious texts and religious doctrine. And on the other hand we have rights of equality and liberty, which are based in rational arguments – […]
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LINDSAY ABRAMS, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: Now you see the curtain pulled back. The Keystone pipeline is a classic example of profit for the few -- the Koch's could make many many billions from Keystone -- and potential disaster for the many. It is now completely transparent. And yet it could still happen.
UPDATE 3/20/2014 7PM: An earlier version of this post misstated the previous report’s findings. The Koch brothers were first estimated to hold 2 million acres, an amount of land potentially worth $100 billion.
The Keystone XL pipeline isn’t just about oil and gas companies. It’s also about the Koch brothers and their vast influence over the Republican party. That influence extends as well to Canada’s oil sands, the Washington Post reports: a subsidiary of Koch Industries, owned by bros Charles and David, is the land’s largest lease holder.
The parcel of land controlled by the Kochs covers 1.1 million acres, according to the International Forum on Globalization, a liberal think tank. That’s an area roughly the size of Delaware, and more than what’s owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Conoco Phillips, Suncor, Exxon Mobil, Chevron or any of the Chinese companies that have invested in the oil sands.
An earlier report from IGF put the Koch’s land holdings at nearly 2 million acres, an amount, it estimated, that put them in a position to reap as much as $100 billion from Keystone. This new report revises down the estimate, but an oil sands expert at the University of Alberta who was contacted by […]
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KYLE MANTYLA, - Right Wing Watch
Stephan: I lost respect for Billy Graham because of his behavior during the Civil Rights era but I recognize he is still well-thought of in many quarters. His children Franklin and Anne get a lot of attention because of their father's name and, are both articulate spokespersons for the Theocratic Right. I think it is important for social progressives to be familiar with what they are saying.
Back in 2011, when a series of tornadoes ripped through several southern states and killed more than 300 people, we were told that this was just “a little taste” of what God’s judgment upon humanity was going to look like.
Today, it seems that the mystery surrounding missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is just a little taste of what The Rapture is going to look like, according to Anne Graham Lotz.
Lotz, the daughter of Billy Graham and sister of Franklin Graham, wrote on her blog that the mystery and confusion over what happened to the plane is just a “small snapshot” of what the world will experience in the wake of The Rapture when millions of Christians instantaneously disappear:
Where have all the people gone?The pictures of grieving friends and family members of those who are missing are heart-wrenching. I have prayed for God’s peace and comfort for them, as well as God’s direction of the search and rescue teams who are desperately looking for clues that will solve the mystery. But the unanswered questions seem to intensify the horror…
How could a modern airliner drop out of sight so quickly and completely?
[…]
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Thursday, March 20th, 2014
AARON CANTÚ, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This kind of report should engender outrage. We can not feed little children nor care properly for the poor and disabled. But welfare for corporations knows no bounds. It is absolutely mad, and it is destroying us.
Most of us are aware that the government gives mountains of cash to powerful corporations in the form of tax breaks, grants, loans and subsidies–what some have called “corporate welfare.” However, little has been revealed about exactly how much money Washington is forking over to mega businesses.
Until now.
A new venture called Open the Books, based in Illinois, was founded with a mission to bring transparency to how the federal budget is spent. And what they found is shocking: between 2000 and 2012, the top Fortune 100 companies received $1.2 trillion from the government. That doesn’t include all the billions of dollars doled out to housing, auto and banking enterprises in 2008-2009, nor does it include ethanol subsidies to agribusiness or tax breaks for wind turbine makers.
What Open the Book’s forthcoming report [3] does reveal is that the most valuable contracts between the government and private firms were for military procrument deals, including Lockheed Martin ($392 billion), General Dynamics ($170 billion), and United Technologies ($73 billion).
After military contractors, $21.8 billion was granted out to corporate recipients in the form of direct subsidies; literally transfers of cash from the pockets of Americans to major corporations. The biggest winners were General […]
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