Saturday, March 8th, 2014
INNA GAISLER-SALOMON, - The New York Times
Stephan: There is a reason Bible stories have survived for millennia. Not because they are the inerrant dictated word of God, but because they tell us truths about cultures that develop from generations of direct observation. One of these is: We reap what we sow. Because we do not make national wellness a priority, and place profit above all other considerations, we are a deeply unhappy country with tens of millions of over-stressed individuals. As this report makes clear we are seeing social karma in action as a result.
We intuitively understand, and scientific studies confirm, that if a woman experiences stress during her pregnancy, it can affect the health of her baby. But what about stress that a woman experiences before getting pregnant – perhaps long before?
It may seem unlikely that the effects of such stress could be directly transmitted to the child. After all, stress experienced before pregnancy is not part of a mother’s DNA, nor does it overlap with the nine months of fetal development.
Nonetheless, it is undeniable that stress experienced during a person’s lifetime is often correlated with stress-related problems in that person’s offspring – and even in the offspring’s offspring. Perhaps the best-studied example is that of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Research shows that survivors’ children have greater-than-average chances of having stress-related psychiatric illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder, even without being exposed to higher levels of stress in their own lives.
Similar correlations are found in other populations. Studies suggest that genocides in Rwanda, Nigeria, Cambodia, Armenia and the former Yugoslavia have brought about distinct psychopathological symptoms in the offspring of survivors.
What explains this pattern? Does trauma lead to suboptimal parenting, which leads to abnormal behavior in children, which later affects their […]
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Saturday, March 8th, 2014
, - Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends
Stephan: The United States, led by the Theocratic Right, has a demonstrated track record of being indifferent to its young. Surprise. Our young, as a result, don't care much for our social institutions or religion. This trend is going to have enormous implications for the American future.
One upside. This is why the Theocratic Right, made up mostly of older angry white people -- the average age of a Fox News viewer is 68 -- is doomed.
Click through to see the accompanying charts.
The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 331, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry- and optimistic about the future.
They are also America’s most racially diverse generation. In all of these dimensions, they are different from today’s older generations. And in many, they are also different from older adults back when they were the age Millennials are now.
Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.
At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues, ranging from a belief in an activist government to support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. (For more on these views, see Chapters 1 and 2.)
The Decline in Marriage Among the YoungThese findings are based on […]
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Saturday, March 8th, 2014
Stephan: It is the nature of implemented war technologies that they create arms races that always have unintended consequences. The use of drones is the latest example. It is just a matter of time until American officials start being killed by drones, probably beginning when they are out of the country. Technologies of violence feed on themselves. Consider the epidemic of gun violence that is killing 10s of thousands of Americans every year.
All of this violent death, of course, is immensely profitable for the few.
The defense industry dreams of genies.
That’s because it is really hard to get the genie back into bottle after you let it loose.
Really, the only option after releasing a genie is to invent new, expensive ways to combat it. And that’s been the story of America’s persistent gift to posterity-the ‘nuclear genie.”
Just ask the people who refuse to return to the site of America’s most notorious above-ground nuclear test-the bombing of Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. That hydrogen bomb, codenamed ‘Shrimp,” remains the largest bomb ever tested by the United States. It’s also known as a ‘thermonuclear weapon” because it uses high temperatures to trigger four cascading stages, each magnifying the power of the explosion. It was an ‘advance” on the run-of-the-mill atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was a response to the Soviet Union’s emerging atomic weapon program, which was, in turn, a response to America’s pioneering effort to weaponize the atom.
In fact, six years after the H-bomb spread nuclear fallout onto nearby islands and their inhabitants like radioactive snow, the Soviets kicked it up a notch by testing ‘Tsar Bomba”-the biggest bomb ever to explode in the history of mankind. It was 1,400 times […]
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Saturday, March 8th, 2014
DEREK THOMPSON, - The Atlantic
Stephan: None of the advanced nations has a replacement fertility rate -- roughly 2.1 births per fertile woman. The U.S. once did, but that was because of immigration. Immigration has now dropped and we are part of the pack. This has enormous long term economic and social consequences, but it is a subject almost never mentioned in the American media. Here is a rare story that makes at least a few of the salient points.
Click through to see the very useful graphs and charts that accompany this story.
Last September, the U.S. government announced that our birthrate fell to “another record low” in 2012, following a long, steady slide since the Baby Boom after World War II.
It goes without saying that, morally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s natural, in a way. All over the world, birthrates tend to fall along with economic development, for numerous reasons including (a) the move away from a labor-intensive small-farm economy and (b) women’s ascendance in the workforce, which uses time that used to be devoted to child-rearing. Families in richer countries tend to have fewer kids. In places like Japan and Western Europe, national populations are actually peaking.
The thing about an increasingly childless economy is that it has major implications for consumption. Just look at this new data from a Gallup survey released today on the average daily spending of families. Even after you control for income, age, education, and marital status, families with young kids spend more every day. These are the sort of spenders you want in a weak economy following a great de-leveraging.
What are parents spending on? Not just books, toys, and games. The Department of Agriculture (weirdly enough) annually surveys the many ways we lavish […]
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Saturday, March 8th, 2014
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN, - Bloomberg Sustainability
Stephan: Here is some very good news; a potential game changer. As this technology comes on line the transition from the carbon era to the green era will be greatly speeded up.
A 40-foot trailer loaded with 25 tons of liquid metals may be the solution to the renewable-energy industry’s biggest challenge: making sure electricity is available whenever it’s needed.
A Boston-area startup founded by MIT researchers is working to turn this new concept into a commercially viable product, liquid-metal batteries that will store power for less than $500 a kilowatt-hour. That’s less than a third the cost of some current battery technologies.
The technology promises an alternative to the massive pumped-water systems that make up 95 percent of U.S. energy-storage capacity. At that price, developers will be able to build wind and solar projects that can deliver power to the grid anytime, making renewable energy as reliable as natural gas and coal without the greenhouse-gas emissions.
‘If we can get liquid-metal batteries down to $500 a kilowatt-hour, we’ll change the world,” Donald Sadoway, chief scientific adviser at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Ambri Inc., said in an interview.
Power storage will compensate for the intermittent nature of renewable energy. Batteries can store energy when the wind blows at night, and then send electricity to the grid the next day when it’s needed.
First Prototypes
Ambri won a $250,000 grant Feb. 5 from New York state to develop and test […]
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