Thursday, June 26th, 2014
ELIAS ISQUITH, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: This is a datapoint on what is becoming the dominate trend in U.S. politics. What is not generally recognized is that for neurological reasons as well as culture, there is about 30 per cent of the country so driven by fear and anger (See: From One to the Many: The Social Implications of Nonlocal Perception. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2814%2900037-8/fulltext) that they will not be reconciled. This is a true schism forming.
In Mississippi on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a runoff election to determine who would be the state Republican Party’s nominee for Senate in the extremely conservative state. Despite the fact that the two men were more or less indistinguishable on issue positions, the race was remarkably contentious and largely defined by dueling allegations of impropriety and fraud. Indeed, while non-conservatives may consider the differences between the so-called establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP to be slight, the primary battle that reached its culmination last night is clear evidence that Republicans themselves strongly disagree.
On that front, if nowhere else, Mississippi GOPers have themselves an unlikely companion: University of Washington associate professor Christopher Parker, who is the author of 2013′s ‘Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” and is a firm believer that the divisions within the GOP are significant and likely to endure. Hoping to gain a keener insight into the Tea Party mind, Salon recently called Parker to discuss his research, his recent Brookings Institution paper on the Tea Party and why he doesn’t think the kind of bickering and dysfunction we saw in Mississippi […]
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Thursday, June 26th, 2014
Christopher S. Parker, - Brookings Institute
Stephan: This is a pretty good assessment of the Tea Party, except for the lack of understanding of the neurological aspects. It was written before the Mississippi election.
Click through to download the entire paper.
In the midst of the Congressional primaries taking place across America this summer, the Tea Party’s history continues to be written. Tea Party membership and funding have continued to grow over the last year, yet the media has proclaimed the Tea Party dead no less than 18 times. In this paper, Christopher S. Parker asks whether the Tea Party is an ‘astroturf” or ‘grassroots” political movement. Parker argues for the latter, demonstrating that the Tea Party has real staying power in the current political climate.
Parker uses the motivations of the Tea Party to assess how they will evolve during upcoming midterms and the 2016 general election. He argues that some Tea Party conservatives are neither ignorant nor ideological, but instead fearful: anxious that traditional American values are being replaced by more socially liberal ideals. To test whether Tea Party conservatives are acting ideologically or fearfully, he asks a series of survey questions to both establishment conservatives and Tea Party conservatives and finds the following:
Six percent of establishment conservatives believe Obama poses an existential threat as compared to 71 percent of Tea Party conservatives.
38 percent of establishment conservatives are rooting for Obama […]
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Thursday, June 26th, 2014
ROBERT BARNES, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Everyone has covered this which, itself, is interesting. Still I wanted it to be part of the SR archive. This is good news, a modest inhibition of the surveillance state. I think the Justices are going to be more restrictive of surveillance, because it has dawned on them -- from some bad experiences -- that they are as vulnerable as anyone else. And they have no interest whatever in seeing their private lives made public.
The Supreme Court unequivocally ruled Wednesday that privacy rights are not sacrificed to 21st century technology, saying unanimously that police generally must obtain a warrant before searching the cellphone of someone they arrest.
While the specific protection may not affect the average American, the court made a bold statement that the same concern about government prying that animated the nation’s birth applies to the abundance of digital information about an individual in the modern world.
Modern cellphones ‘hold for many Americans the privacies of life,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a court united behind the opinion’s expansive language. ‘The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
Roberts said that in most cases when police seize a cellphone from a suspect, the answer is simple: ‘Get a warrant.”
In a strong defense of digital age privacy, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police may not generally search the cellphones of people they arrest without first getting search warrants. (  / AP)
The ruling has no impact on National Security Agency data collection programs revealed over the past year or law […]
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2014
Center for Food Safety, - Center for Food Safety/Reader Supported News
Stephan: This is the antipode to the previous article. Any scientist who understands evolutionary process would not only understand but predict the failure of toxins. This seems patently obvious to me. No toxin kills every lifeform to which it is targeted. And the ones that survive mutate until the toxin is rendered harmless -- exactly what is happening here. How could anyone not understand that? Particularly since the same thing is happening with antibiotics, so the point is made double down.
And yet in some state governments, particularly Red value states, militant denial and studied non-awareness leads to some variation of this situation in Texas. It is a notable example of willful ignorance, and self -destruction.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is requesting comments on a petition filed by the Texas Department of Agriculture to permit emergency use of the hazardous herbicide propazine to kill herbicide resistant weeds infesting Texas cotton. Calling the resistant weeds an emergency, Texas requested to use hundreds of thousands of pounds of the toxic chemical on up to three million acres of cotton.
‘This request clearly demonstrates that that herbicide-resistant crops-by generating an epidemic of resistant weeds-lead directly to increased use of hazardous chemicals,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst at Center for Food Safety. ‘EPA should reject this request.”
Propazine is a possible human carcinogen and a ‘restricted use pesticide”-the EPA’s category for particularly hazardous agricultural chemicals. The EPA has found that propazine, like atrazine, is an endocrine disruptor (disrupts the hormonal system) and that when fed to pregnant rats, it causes birth defects in their young. Propazine is persistent, requiring years to break down, and is detected in both ground and surface waters. The European Union has banned propazine due to its toxicity.
Granting the emergency request to use propazine to kill glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth-also known as pigweed-would lead to a 10-fold increase in the use of the toxic herbicide, […]
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2014
Stephan: You may have seen this already. I have been holding it for several days waiting to see how the medical research community reacts. It seems solid so you might take this into consideration in your own health program.
Medical News Today recently reported on a study from the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine, which suggests a link between vitamin D deficiency and premature death. Now, new research published in the BMJ links vitamin D deficiency to increased risk of death from all causes – including cardiovascular disease and cancer – and it may even play a part in cancer prognosis.
Vitamin D is essential to our bodies. It helps regulate the absorption of calcium and phosphorus in our bones, strengthens the immune system and helps cell communication.
The main source of vitamin D is from the sun, and some foods – such as fatty fish (tuna, mackerel), cheese and fortified cereals – contain the vitamin. Vitamin D supplements can also boost levels in the body.
Vitamin D deficiency can be caused by low exposure to sunlight, low consumption of dietary vitamin D over a period of time, problems with kidney or digestive tract function and obesity.
Low levels of the vitamin have been associated with numerous health problems, such as increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD), higher risk of cognitive impairment in later life, increased risk of asthma among children and cancer.
But the researchers of this latest study […]
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