MARK FOLLMAN, - Mother Jones
Stephan: I hope this works. Something must break America's gun psychosis.
Click through to see the video.
For years, advocates of stricter gun laws have rallied at the barricades of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. But this year, as the gun lobby convenes in Indianapolis, there’s a new posse in town. They’re mothers, they’re survivors of gun violence, and some of them are both. And they’re dead set on disarming the NRA of its outsize political power.
They operate as Everytown for Gun Safety, a new organization combining the grassroots group Moms Demand Action, launched after the Sandy Hook massacre, and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. At a press conference in a packed downtown hotel conference room on Friday, the group unveiled a forceful new report and political ad.
“We are in Indianapolis to send the NRA leadership a message,” said Shannon Watts, the 43-year-old mother of five who founded Moms Demand Action. Americans can no longer abide by “a Washington lobby run by extremists,” she said.
“Not Your Grandparents’ NRA,” a heavily annotated 21-page report, makes the case that there’s a schism within the nation’s biggest firearms group. “Today’s NRA has remained true to its roots in some important ways,” it begins. “The organization’s gun safety and marksmanship programs remain useful contributions to the shooting […]
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DOUG HORN, - Design & Trend
Stephan: Beginning in late 1994 I started a biotechnology company to do exactly this, for exactly the same reasons. The technology never came together, perhaps we were too far ahead of the curve, but reading this story today made me feel very good; the goal has been achieved. Untold thousands of rabbits and other creatures will no longer have to die to justify a new mascara formula.
Scientists from King’s College London and San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center have successfully grown an epidermis in a lab, a breakthrough that could save millions of animals from testing. (Photo : Commons/Helena Paffen)
Scientists from King’s College London and San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center have successfully grown an epidermis in a lab. The research was not easy, and the scientists faced many hurdles in accomplishing this impressive feat.
According to The Westside Story, “the epidermis is highly complex as it protects the human body from the dehydration and the harmful microbes and the bacteria. It acts as a shield between the body and the environment and stops the harmful bodies from entering into the skin. The lab generated epidermis was grown in a low humidity environment and was capable of stopping the water to come inside or the bodily fluids to drain out.”
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With this method, the cells of the epidermis that ended up being generated were identical to the sample.
“Our new method can be used to grow much greater quantities of lab-grown human epidermal equivalents, and thus could be scaled up for commercial testing of drugs and cosmetics. We can use this model to study how the […]
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ROBERT M. SOLOW, Nobel Laureate Economist and MIT Professor Emeritus - New Republic
Stephan: Thomas Piketty and his team have in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" written the most provocative treatise on economics in years. Here is a very wise and helpful assessment by MIT Economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Solow of this brilliant book. It will give you the gist of the book, as well as great insight as to what it means.
Not surprisingly, as you may have already discovered, the Corporatist Theocratic Right is doing everything they can to discredit the book. But there is this problem about facts. To about a third of the country that won't matter but the rest of us need to take what Pietty and his team are saying to heart. We need to vote what they recommend into existence. The clock is ticking.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press)
Income inequality in the United States and elsewhere has been worsening since the 1970s. The most striking aspect has been the widening gap between the rich and the rest. This ominous anti-democratic trend has finally found its way into public consciousness and political rhetoric. A rational and effective policy for dealing with it-if there is to be one-will have to rest on an understanding of the causes of increasing inequality. The discussion so far has turned up a number of causal factors: the erosion of the real minimum wage; the decay of labor unions and collective bargaining; globalization and intensified competition from low-wage workers in poor countries; technological changes and shifts in demand that eliminate mid-level jobs and leave the labor market polarized between the highly educated and skilled at the top and the mass of poorly educated and unskilled at the bottom.
Each of these candidate causes seems to capture a bit of the truth. But even taken together they do not seem to provide a thoroughly satisfactory picture. They have at least two deficiencies. First, they do not speak to the really dramatic issue: the tendency […]
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Stephan: I am just back from the hospital, and doing much better now. It seems that my schedule of presenting at academic conferences and teaching workshops for six weeks with no breaks was not the best plan. Particularly since, while I was in the Bay area, I also got a serious case of food poisoning that almost hospitalized me, and had a very bad cold/flu almost the entire trip, because I was not able to stop and rest. That left me vulnerable and I picked up something that inflamed my pancreas which, in turn, over-stressed my kidneys, which dropped my blood pressure to 65/50 -- thus off to the hospital in an ambulance. I have to say in self-assessment that I certainly had to learn I was no longer 30 the hard way.
Thanks to all of you who wrote or posted your wishes and prayers for my quick recovery. I was very touched and want you to know how much I appreciate that.
-- Stephan
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CANDICE BERND, - Truthout
Stephan: The growth of the American police state, as this report spells out, continues to grow.
The intricate surveillance equipment used by the federal government to track and store the cellphone data of millions of people and to monitor terrorism suspects is making its way to Main Street.
Police departments across the nation have been trying to conceal their use of cellphone tracking equipment from local courts because of nondisclosure agreements that allow the departments to use the devices on loan – as long as they promise the manufacturer they will keep it a secret.
The devices, manufactured by the Florida-based Harris Corporation, are commonly used at the federal level, but are also proliferating across local and state police departments. The technology has been purchased under various names, including StingRay, HailStorm, Harpoon, AmberJack, KingFish and RayFish, and mimics a cellphone tower.
When cellphones connect to the device, it can record the phone’s unique information and traffic data, as well as its location. The devices can triangulate the position of a particular cellphone in relation to its antenna and other towers in the area with greater accuracy than would be possible from a network provider’s permanent tower location.
The devices are used to gather information about both specific individuals and large groups (including people involved in political dissent). They also sweep […]
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