ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: More on Neo-medievalsim and the Willful Ignorance Trend. Click through to see the actual video.
One of the founding border members of the Creationist organization Answers in Genesis believes that dinosaurs accompanied Noah on his Ark as the entire world was flooded by God.
Speaking to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association on Thursday, Carl Kerby insisted it wasn’t infeasible for the giant reptilian creatures to have been on Noah’s Ark.
The self-described ‘creation scientist” said he had debunked the notion that two of every animal could not have possibly fit on Noah’s Ark. The Bible states that the boat was about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 50 feet high, Kerby explained.
‘I see some people that like to mock and ridicule, especially about the dinosaurs, how did they put the big old dinosaurs on there?” he said. ‘Well, I would suggest to you they didn’t take the big old dinosaur – they would have taken the younger ones. You think of a guy like me, if you’re going to go repopulate a planet, you’re not taking me with you. I’m old. My repopulating days are done. You take my son or my grandson. My grandson is a whole lot smaller than I am.”
Creationists believe that the Flood began approximately 4,359 years ago. Scientists have […]
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CHAUNCEY DEVEGA, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I think this essay about Theocratic Right violence is a very accurate assessment. We simply do not treat this white Rightist violence as the terrorism it is, and we should. I am much more concerned about the activities of white Supremist Fundamentalist than I am Muslim jihadists.
The shooting deaths of three people near Kansas City by the noted Neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Miller has refocused the public’s attention on the violent tendencies of the White Right in the United States.
On the Tuesday edition of her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow concluded a segment on the Republican Party’s deep denial about (and active protection of) its violent ‘Patriot” and militia wing by asking the following question: why do we overlook right-wing violence and refuse to call it terrorism?
The answer to Maddow’s question is simple.
“We” don’t talk about right-wing domestic terrorists and other extremists because ‘they” are largely white and male.
The language used by Rachel Maddow-and how it undermines the scurrilous Right-wing lie that there is such a thing as a ‘liberal media”-helps to demonstrate the above claim. Once more, a “liberal” news analyst talks around the obvious and is afraid to connect the words “white” and “male” and “conservative” in their discussions of white violence, murder, mayhem, and treason.
Domestic terrorism is an oxymoron in America when white folks are involved. Whiteness imagines itself as kind, benign, safe, neutral, normal, and good. “Terrorism” is something those “other people” do, i.e. the Muslims, or some other ambiguous cohort of black and […]
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Stephan: Rasmussen is a right leaning survey operation. I mention this because context matters and a Right leaning poll with these results is worthy of close attention. I think this is telling us that the basis of trust upon which our democracy was based is eroding as quickly as the ice sheet covering Greenland.
Thirty-seven percent (37%) of Likely U.S. Voters now fear the federal government, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Forty-seven percent (47%) do not, but another 17% are not sure.
Perhaps in part that’s because 54% consider the federal government today a threat to individual liberty rather than a protector. Just 22% see the government as a protector of individual rights, and that’s down from 30% last November. Slightly more (24%) are now undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
As recently as December 2012, voters were evenly divided on this question: 45% said the federal government was a protector of individual rights, while 46% described it as a threat to those rights.
Two-out-of-three voters (67%) view the federal government today as a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests. Just 17% disagree, while 15% are undecided.
Only 19% now trust the federal government to do the right thing most or nearly all the time, down from 24% in June of last year. Eighty percent (80%) disagree, with 44% who trust the government to do the right thing only some of the time and 36% who say it rarely or never does the right thing.
Seventy-one percent (71%) […]
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KEITH JOHNSON, - Foreign Policy
Stephan: Here is some real home truth about climate change and what is going on. This is worth your close attention.
The latest report from the United Nations climate change body, released Tuesday, makes clear the good, the bad, and the ugly about one of the world’s most intractable problems.
As things stand today, the world will be hard pressed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and avoid the worst effects of global warming during the rest of the century. That’s the ugly.
In the twenty-odd years since global warming leapt on the international stage at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janiero global greenhouse-gas emissions have not only kept growing, they’re growing at an ever-faster clip. That’s the bad.
Now, the world’s hopes for limiting temperature increases and minimizing catastrophes such as rising sea levels and devastating droughts depend to a large extent on what steps developing economies take to fundamentally change the way they use energy. And that, curiously enough, could be the good.
On Tuesday, the final, full draft report from Working Group III of the International Panel on Climate Change came out. (U.N. officials had released tidied up, trimmed down summaries of that latest consensus among climate scientists over the weekend.) The report’s purpose is not to dive into all the contentious and sometimes controversial science behind climate change, but rather to lay […]
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, - The Physics arXiv Blog
Stephan: This report on the latest developments concerning consciousness research in physics is a wonderful illustration of a trend: the cutting edge of physicalist research is confronting consciousness. It is now one step away. Note two things: 1) the acknowledgement that the model is incomplete, missing a link, and a paradox: "why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly larger than 37 bits of integrated information that can be stored in the human brain."
Answering the paradox I predict will take physics into the nonlocal domain, and the matrix of information that is the all there is.
The German school of physics, referenced in is this report was made up of Planck, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein and others; the Olympiad of 20th century physics. All of them along with Jung, and Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, were strongly influenced by Adolf Bastian, a 19th century German polymath who posited the theory of Elementargedanke - literally 'elementary thoughts of humankind." It was an early attempt to recognize and try to study the nonlocal informational matrix, from which Jung developed the concept of the Collective Unconscious.
SOURCE: Ref:arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219: Consciousness as a State of Matter
There’s a quiet revolution underway in theoretical physics. For as long as the discipline has existed, physicists have been reluctant to discuss consciousness, considering it a topic for quacks and charlatans. Indeed, the mere mention of the “c’ word could ruin careers.
That’s finally beginning to change thanks to a fundamentally new way of thinking about consciousness that is spreading like wildfire through the theoretical physics community. And while the problem of consciousness is far from being solved, it is finally being formulated mathematically as a set of problems that researchers can understand, explore and discuss.
Today, Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart.
Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. ‘I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as […]
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