SANJAY GUPTA, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent - CNN
Stephan: This is an important milestone in the end of Marijuana Prohibition. Sanjay Gupta has become one of the culture's iconic physicians, and medical authorities. His publicly doubling down means there has been a shift in the social gestalt.
It’s been eight months since I last wrote about medical marijuana, apologizing for having not dug deeply into the beneficial effects of this plant and for writing articles dismissing its potential. I apologized for my own role in previously misleading people, and I feel very badly that people have suffered for too long, unable to obtain the legitimate medicine that may have helped them.
I have been reminded that a true and productive scientific journey involves a willingness to let go of established notions and get at the truth, even if it is uncomfortable and even it means having to say “sorry.”
It is not easy to apologize and take your lumps, but this was never about me.
This scientific journey is about a growing number of patients who want the cannabis plant as a genuine medicine, not to get high.
It is about emerging science that not only shows and proves what marijuana can do for the body but provides better insights into the mechanisms of marijuana in the brain, helping us better understand a plant whose benefits have been documented for thousands of years. This journey is also about a Draconian system where politics override science and patients are caught in the […]
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PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: I have held this piece for a couple days waiting to see if there was a response; so you may have already seen it. There hasn't been a serious response from Ryan. Once again Paul Krugman is both correct and places the right emphasis.
The fact is if you are going to put yourself forward as an economic specialist it does help to command the skills necessary to do a competent job of it. Ryan obviously simply doesn't have them, for all the media attention he gets.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.
And the big new poverty report from the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul Ryan, offers additional reasons for optimism. Mr. Ryan used to rely on ‘scholarship” from places like the Heritage Foundation. Remember when Heritage declared that the Ryan budget would reduce unemployment to a ludicrous 2.8 percent, then tried to cover its tracks? This time, however, Mr. Ryan is citing a lot of actual social science research.
Unfortunately, the research he cites doesn’t actually support his assertions. Even more important, his whole premise about why poverty persists is demonstrably wrong.
To understand where the new report is coming from, it helps to recall something Mr. Ryan said two years ago: ‘We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” There are actually two assertions here. […]
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AMANDA MARCOTTE, - Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: One of the central techniques used by Theocratic Rightist movements, one they have been using for centuries regardless of the faith, is to build up in their constituency the attitude that you are oppressed and under attack. It allows people to paper over smaller differences and remain a coherent whole. The linkage of guns and fundamentalism is one response, but by no means the only one.
I read TR writings and websites and, over the past several years, what has really begun to stand out for me is their cultivated sense of persecution. You can hear it in a lot of the CPAC video clips now airing. Here are some more. The piece is too polemic, but I see so few reports that actually address this issue that I am using it.
You could call it chutzpah, except they’d probably claim that word oppresses them: Conservative Christian film production companies are making not one, but two movies this year called Persecuted, to promote the myth that conservative Christians have reason to fear they are being oppressed by an evil, secularist government. At least one of them is set in the Soviet Union (clearly analogized to the modern United States), but the other is a stretch that puts even the goofiest science fiction to shame, featuring an imaginary American government that requires religious broadcasters to ‘present all religious points of view when presenting their own point of view.” ( There are over 4,000 religions, easily, in the world, to give you an idea of how little thought went into this script.)
It’s easy to laugh at how ridiculous these fantasies of persecution are, but what other choice do they have? Attempts to create real-life examples of anti-Christian or anti-conservative oppression are, if anything, even more laughable than the lurid attempts to come up with hypotheticals. Indeed, looking over conservative complaints about persecution, either against Christians or just against conservatives, one gets the distinct impression that what oppresses them the most is other people having […]
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KATE SHEPPARD, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: This report is, I think, a pretty good assessment of how climate change is going to play out in the beginning. As a country we are utterly unprepared for this. Instead we squander our money on one insane war after another. And, if the Republicans become the majority in the Senate, as many analysts predict, even the modest little efforts put forward by Obama will come to an end.
I think one should assume that we are going to face climate change unprepared except for what communities and individual families do.
WASHINGTON — From roads and bridges to power plants and gas pipelines, American infrastructure is vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a pair of government reports released Thursday.
The reports are technical documents supporting the National Climate Assessment, a major review compiled by 13 government agencies that the U.S. Global Change Research Program is expected to release in April. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory put together the reports, which warn that climate-fueled storms, flooding and droughts could cause “cascading system failures” unless there are changes made to minimize those effects. Island Press has published the full-length version of the reports, which focus on energy and infrastructure more broadly.
Thomas Wilbanks, a research fellow at Oak Ridge and the lead author and editor of the reports, said this is the first attempt to look at the climate implications across all sectors and regions. Rather than isolating specific types of infrastructure, Wilbanks said, the report looks at how “one impact can have impacts on the others.”
Previous extreme weather events, which scientists warn may be exacerbated by climate change, offer insight to the types of failures they’re talking about. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, the loss of […]
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ARTURO GARCIA, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I always find it astounding how blatant the Theocratic Right is when they think they are only talking to themselves. Yet over and over the truth comes out.
Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (retired), the executive vice president of the conservative Family Research Council, was caught on a ‘hot mic” on Thursday joking that ‘the Jews are the problem” to an Israeli reporter and pitching his theory about President Barack Obama using ‘subliminal messages” to signal support for al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, in audio posted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Friday.
‘If you understand anything about Islam, there are subliminal messages,” Boykin can be heard saying. ‘His message, really, I believe was, “I understand you, and I support you.’”
Boykin’s remarks were captured after an online broadcast of a panel at the National Security Action Summit. The SPLC reported that the event is held as a counter to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and features speakers who, like Boykin, have not been allowed to participate there.
Though the panel’s video feed shut down, the audio continued broadcasting, enabling Boykin to be heard as he argued that, as a result of the ‘messages,” al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood saw that ‘that they have a president that identifies with them, that has been supportive of them inside the United States and is unwilling to go against them.”
According to the SPLC, […]
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