CHRISTINA SARICH, - Nation of Change
Stephan: The contempt the morons of Congress show for the people who elected them I find one of the more bizarre aspects of 21st century American. Ninety percent of the population may want to do something, but the Congress, owned as it is by corporations and the uber-rich pays not the least attention.
Now here’s a pot calling a kettle black. Congress members declared outright and out loud that they believe Americans are too stupid to read GMO labels were they to be mandatory. This was an important “conclusion’ made at the close of a meeting of the House Agriculture Committee this past week.
It wasn’t just a few folks who think Americans aren’t bright enough to read a label. Members of the subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture, as well as their four experts said that the efforts of biotech to supply GMO crops to the world were successful, and that American people over-react to food which has been called “unhealthy.’
If this doesn’t get you steaming mad enough to write some letters to your Congress members with some very fierce vocabulary words that few of them likely understand – like “carcinogenic proclivity’, or “plurality of diseases and environmental damage’, or try this one on for size, “unconstitutionality of poisoning masses of the proletariat’ – then I don’t know what will.
Apparently those who want GMO labeling are alarmists, fear-mongering halfwits, and people who thrive on greed and fear. Sounds to me like some of the largest pesticide and seed making companies in […]
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JANET ALLON, - Reader Supported News/Alternet
Stephan: I am not a big fan of Obamacare; I thought we should have gone to a single payer system with national wellness as its first priority. It would have saved hundreds of billions of dollars and given us a real healthcare system, instead of an illness profit system. However, America is too much in the throes of vampire capitalism for that so we got Obamacare. It is hardly perfect but it is certainly an improvement. Yet the media hardly covers its successes. Paul Krugman explains why.
n immense policy success is slipping under the radar.
Paul Krugman proposes an interesting theory in today’s column about why the success of Obamacare is a story that is mostly being ignored by the media, and therefore kept from the American public. In fact, he suspects the mainstream news media does not even know how successful the Affordable Care Act is proving to be. Not that there is any excuse for that ignorance. How do they manage to stay so ignorant? Krugman thinks it may be because many of the people who work in media-especially the pundit class-are well enough off that they don’t need Obamacare, and these media elites seldom cover poor people or even talk to them much.
So, no excuses really. Why has the media been able to get away with getting the health reform story so wrong?
“Think relentless negativity without accountability,” Krugman writes:
The Affordable Care Act has faced nonstop attacks from partisans and right-wing media, with mainstream news also tending to harp on the act’s troubles. Many of the attacks have involved predictions of disaster, none of which have come true. But absence of disaster doesn’t make a compelling headline, and the people who […]
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Saturday, July 19th, 2014
CJ WERLEMAN, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This is what concerns me, much more than any Muslim terrorism: A period of Facism. This is why I think the Theocratic Right is so dangerous. It makes my socially progressive friends very uncomfortable to talk about this. It is such a downer, "and I want to focus on the positive." To which I would agree in terms of where to focus. But not seeking out and understanding the context in which that focus is being expressed is a form of willful ignorance. My friend Larry Dossey, the Executive Editor of Explore, where my SR column appears, gave me the gift of a new word the other day -- Agnotology. It means the study of ignorance and the purposes it serves in society.
By any standard that seems rational we are already a soft police state, and yet we don't talk about it. Why is that do you think? The unholy alliance between the corporations and the government has produced a level of surveillance the Stazi could only dream about. Even Orwell's imagination did not go this far. We are also creating a permanent aristocracy, in which a few families and individuals simply buy the government they want for their corporations. Corporations are the modern expression of power, and the Supreme Court's Rightist wing has just given them all the privileges of being human.
America is on the precipice of a fascist uprising. While liberals have consistently leveled the f-word against opponents on the right, much the same way conservatives have appropriated socialist or Marxist against those on the political left, there is now data showing that proto-fascist movements are on the rise.
The kindling for the fire of fascism has already been lit. While the Republican Party holds at least one branch of the federal government, America will never be able to deal intelligently and earnestly with the economic policies that have destroyed the working class and all but decimated the middle class. A GOP congress guarantees that Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage, reform the tax code and repair our crumbling infrastructure will be thwarted, all in the name of protecting the rich from paying their fair share.
Long-term unemployment promises to be the norm, as well stagnant and poverty-level wages, foreclosures, crippling personal debt and bankruptcies, the evaporation of savings and retirement funds, the outsourcing of jobs, the continued dilapidation of our schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and airports, and the regulations that safeguard our food, water, and clean air. All this comes courtesy of obscene profits, bonuses, taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and […]
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Saturday, July 19th, 2014
DANIEL STRAUSS, Reporter - TPM
Stephan: Part of the Great Schism Trend is the rise of a level of racism once thought to have disappeared in the U.S.. Actually I find racism amongst certain groups in some parts of the country as bad today, although expressed a little differently, than during the Civil Rights era, and I remember that very viscerally.
But it isn't just racism that is being described by this poll. Increasingly I see a longing to break up the United States and I think that while the general Federal form may linger some form of separation is inevitable. For one thing I think within the next 20 years, as climate change stresses everything, the Blue value states are simply going to tire of subsidizing the dysfunctional Theocratic Rightist states. I can already see the first stages of this trend.
A new Public Policy Polling survey found that 37 percent of Republicans who voted in the Mississippi primary runoff election between incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) and state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) said they would back the Confederate side if there was another Civil War.
The poll, obtained by TPM, is full of goodies for poll geeks. Of those polled, including Democrats and Republicans, 50 percent said they would support the United States while 29 percent said they would support the Confederate States of America.
Broken down by party affiliation, 82 percent of Democrats said they would support the United States while just 9 percent said they would support the Confederate States of America. Among Republicans, 37 percent said they would support the Confederate States of America while 41 percent said they would support the United States. Another 21 percent of Republicans said they weren’t sure while 9 percent of Democrats said they weren’t sure.
PPP’s poll was conducted among 501 Republican primary voters from July 10 to 13. All those surveyed said they voted in the Republican primary runoff for U.S. Senate. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
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Saturday, July 19th, 2014
KELLY DICKERSON, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: No one really knows what happens when the poles flip, and it isn't going to happen tomorrow, but you can bet that such a shift holds implications, and will produce effects, no one can predict.
Earth’s magnetic field, which protects the planet from huge blasts of deadly solar radiation, has been weakening over the past six months, according to data collected by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite array called Swarm.
The biggest weak spots in the magnetic field – which extends 370,000 miles (600,000 kilometers) above the planet’s surface – have sprung up over the Western Hemisphere, while the field has strengthened over areas like the southern Indian Ocean, according to the magnetometers onboard the Swarm satellites – three separate satellites floating in tandem.
The scientists who conducted the study are still unsure why the magnetic field is weakening, but one likely reason is that Earth’s magnetic poles are getting ready to flip, said Rune Floberghagen, the ESA’s Swarm mission manager. In fact, the data suggest magnetic north is moving toward Siberia.
“Such a flip is not instantaneous, but would take many hundred if not a few thousand years,” Floberghagen told Live Science. “They have happened many times in the past.”[50 Amazing Facts About Planet Earth]
Scientists already know that magnetic north shifts. Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field […]
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