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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CHRIS MOONEY, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is the latest in the Politics as Neuroscience trend. I have written about this at length because I believe this science describes for us an extremely important aspect of our politics. (See: From One to the Many: The Social Implications of Nonlocal Perception. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2814%2900037-8/fulltext)
From what I have read of the research this neurological differentiation is as significant and powerful as race.
You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.
Click here to read more about the science of why we don’t believe in science.Click here to read more from Mooney on the science of why people don’t believe in science.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics-upending the […]
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Stephan: Here is the latest in the Water is Destiny trend. Although the corporate media doesn't give this story any attention, since humans can only live on average three days without water, how water is controlled ought to be something everyone cares about.
The newly enacted Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act holds promise for life in a world shaped by climate change. However, privatization proponents are working hard to privatize ownership and control our water infrastructure.
Given the era we live in, it should come as no surprise that legislation as important – and as potentially lucrative – as the Water Resources Reform and Development Act (WRRDA) includes opportunities for privatization. Those parts of the new water law will be analyzed in the next part of this overview of WRRDA.
Before diving into that big drink of water, it is worth taking a comparative sip of an important but smaller piece of legislation within WRRDA – the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, or WIFIA. The version of WIFIA that was enacted is intended to take an experimental approach to financing water projects. For example, WIFIA creates a five-year pilot program that provides $350 million of low-cost loans and credit enhancements for ports, inland waterways and water supply and treatment infrastructure projects. It is obvious that $350 million is far too little to address our water infrastructure needs. The experiment is intended to use that $350 million as a sort of seed money that […]
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Stephan: With the media paying virtually no attention we are currently engaged in the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history, and it is creating a new financial aristocracy, many of whom are drones. The antipode of this trend is the decline and disappearance of the middle class. The implications of this social transformation are profound. But most people don't even know it is happening.
In a new Pew poll, more than three quarters of self-described conservatives believe ‘poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything.”
In reality, most of America’s poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.
The real non-workers are the wealthy who inherit their fortunes. And their ranks are growing.
In fact, we’re on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history.
The wealth is coming from those who over the last three decades earned huge amounts on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms, or as high-tech entrepreneurs.
It’s going to their children, who did nothing except be born into the right family.
The ‘self-made” man or woman, the symbol of American meritocracy, is disappearing. Six of today’s ten wealthiest Americans are heirs to prominent fortunes. Just six Walmart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined (up from 30 percent in 2007).
The U.S. Trust bank just released a poll of Americans with more than $3 million of investable assets.
Nearly three-quarters of those over age 69, and 61 per cent of boomers (between the ages of 50 and 68), were the first in their generation to accumulate significant wealth.
But the bank found inherited wealth far […]
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JEFF RITTERMAN, M.D., - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Monsanto is an evil corporation. Their profits are bought with a price of life itself. That's my definition of evil.
For years, scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery of a chronic kidney disease epidemic that has hit Central America, India and Sri Lanka. The disease occurs in poor peasant farmers who do hard physical work in hot climes. In each instance, the farmers have been exposed to herbicides and to heavy metals. The disease is known as CKDu, for Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown etiology. The “u” differentiates this illness from other chronic kidney diseases where the cause is known. Very few Western medical practitioners are even aware of CKDu, despite the terrible toll it has taken on poor farmers from El Salvador to South Asia.
Dr. Catharina Wesseling, the regional director for the Program on Work and Health (SALTRA) in Central America, which pioneered the initial studies of the region’s unsolved outbreak, put it this way, “Nephrologists and public health professionals from wealthy countries are mostly either unfamiliar with the problem or skeptical whether it even exists.”
Dr. Wesseling was being diplomatic. At a 2011 health summit in Mexico City, the United States beat back a proposal by Central American nations that would have listed CKDu as a top priority for the Americas.
David McQueen, a US delegate from the […]
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