Thursday, June 12th, 2014
JEFFREY STRAIN, - SavingAdvice.com
Stephan: Over many years I have found fasting very useful. This may explain why.
Would you be willing to go without food for a few days to keep your immune system in tip-top shape? That is exactly what may happen if you’re willing to fast twice a year according to a new University of Southern California study featured in the June 5 edition of Cell Stem Cell. The study is the first to find that someone, through natural intervention by the person, can help trigger stem cells to regenerate. In other words, it appears fasting can help your immune system recycle itself to become stronger than it had been before you began to fast.
The fasting works in the following way. By not eating for two to four days in a row, the body significantly lowers the number of white blood cells. Those cells that die off tend to be those which are weak or have damage. When a person begins to eat again, new stem cells are created which end up being much healthier than the ones that died off. In other words, by fasting, a person can regenerate a completely new and healthy immune system.
The study could have huge implications for a variety of groups, especially in the area of healthier aging. As […]
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Thursday, June 12th, 2014
ERIC LACH, - Talking Points Memo
Stephan: Having listened to pundits from every political group all day, my sense is that most of the beltway commentators have it wrong. I think Eric Cantor lost because he was an unpleasant man who projected a persona of arrogant superiority, traveled around in his district like a nabob, and that did not sit well with a deeply conservative district in which many people were having a hard time and felt no one was listening to them. So they threw him out.
That said it seemed to me the real question ought to be who is Dave Brat and what does he believe? It appears he is an example of a Rightist academic funded and working for the Corporatist Theocratic Right. We are beginning to see these kinds of academics sprouting up all over the country as the uber-rich realize that one way to protect themselves is to fund university programs that teach youth to value priorities that advance the funder's interest.
Dave Brat, who stunned Washington, D.C. by upsetting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a primary Tuesday, is a college professor. At Randolph-Macon College, a small Virginia liberal arts school, Brat chairs the economics and business department.
But he does more than that.
Brat is also the director of the school’s BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program, a bank-branded program intended to give “free-market principles” — and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism in particular — a leg up in the classroom.
The program was started by the Branch Banking and Trust Company (BB&T), a North Carolina-based financial services company which currently boasts $184.7 billion in assets. The ideas behind the program were laid out in 2012 in an essay written by former BB&T CEO John Allison.
“About twelve years ago we re-examined our charitable giving and realized that our contributions to universities were not typically being used in our shareholders’ best interest,” Allison wrote in the essay, which was published online by The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. “At the same time, we were studying the question of why the United States had moved from the land of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ to the ‘redistributive state.’ We […]
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Thursday, June 12th, 2014
JEFFREY TOOBIN, - The New Yorker
Stephan: This is an essay I hope you will bear in mind when you go to vote in November. It tells the story of another unintended consequence arising from the decisions of a Supreme Court which is either out of touch with reality, or corrupt, or both. This is also why I think nothing truly meaningful is going to be done by way of climate change remediation, and why it will be up to localities to save themselves.
Remember when climate change could be a bipartisan issue? Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi did an advertisement together, boasting of their partnership on the challenge it posed. John McCain also believed that man-made climate change was an urgent problem. Now it’s virtually impossible to find any leading Republicans, including potential Presidential candidates, who will agree, without equivocation, on all of these points: that temperatures are rising, that human beings caused it, and that the nation and the world must take action to address it.
Republicans are unified in denial, and one good reason this is so is the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. That decision revolutionized the law of campaign finance; what is less well recognized is that it transformed the climate-change debate, too. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United, in 2010-the Justices were divided 5-4-began the Super PAC era in American politics. At the time, the decision was most remarked upon for its assertion that corporations possessed a right to freedom of speech, under the First Amendment, much as individuals do. In fact, this part of the case was neither new nor particularly controversial. (Courts have granted corporations, like newspapers, First Amendment records for decades.) […]
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2014
LYNDSEY LAYTON, - The Washington Post
Stephan: No one is paying any attention to this, but this is a big deal. It is going to change and degrade the American university system. Tenure is important both for continuity, and to protect faculty from big money special interest pressures. You can't really understand it until you live it.
A Los Angeles judge Tuesday struck down teacher tenure and other California laws that offer job security to educators, a decision that is expected to trigger widespread challenges of teacher job protections nationwide.
Plaintiffs in the case argued that California children who are poor receive an inferior education because they are saddled with the weakest teachers, who are entrenched in their jobs and are difficult to fire. Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu sided with the plaintiffs against some of the most powerful labor unions in the country, striking down California’s teacher employment laws because he determined that they violate students’ civil rights.
A California judge ruled that the state’s teacher tenure rules violate the civil rights of students, as the worst teachers end up in the highest-poverty schools, creating unequal conditions. Read it.
Calling it a landmark decision, lawyers for the plaintiffs said that California was just the start of a planned effort to knock down tenure in a state-by-state campaign across the country. Those who have opposed tenure – from both the right and the left – have long said that the protection is an impediment to stronger U.S. education because it keeps bad teachers in the nation’s classrooms. Tuesday’s decision could […]
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2014
JANE MAYER, - The New Yorker
Stephan: The rise of the new aristocracy of the uber-rich can plainly be seen in this report. This is what we have come to because this new elite recognized that public institutions are harder to control. So they bought a government that would cut back on supporting those institutions. Here is the effect on public broadcasting by the likes of the Koch brothers.
ast fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called ‘Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. ‘Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of ‘the one per cent.” As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan-740 Park Avenue-portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx.
Among the wealthiest residents of 740 Park is David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, who, with his brother Charles, owns Koch Industries, a huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate. The Koch brothers are known for their strongly conservative politics and for their efforts to finance a network of advocacy groups whose goal is to move the country to the right. David Koch is a major philanthropist, contributing to cultural […]
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