Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
Stephan: As we prepare to get further involved in the middle east I thought it would be a good idea to examine what is really going on and why. This is the toxic legacy of the Bush-Cheney neocon foreign policy, and we are going to be dealing with it for generations. My personal view is that only moving out of carbon energy, thus rendering petroleum no longer essential, is going to break this evil trend.
Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Who is to blame for the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)? The group’s stunning military advances in Iraq and Syria have, together, built the most important safe haven for Islamic extremists since Taliban-held Afghanistan, and possibly ever. So it is important to understand where ISIS came from – and how it got so strong.
The truth, as usual, isn’t simple. No one person or group can be blamed for ISIS’s rise. The Iraqi and Syrian governments played a major role, but so did the United States, Iran, and Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia. This doesn’t just shed light on ISIS’s past and on the tangled web of responsibility for its rise. It also illuminates much larger problems: the unpredictability of proxy wars, the danger of unintended consequences, the ways in which conflict can favor extremists, and the scale of how difficult it will be to eliminate all of the factors that have led to ISIS.
This is the most obvious culprit. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a lame duck […]
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
JEFF SPROSS, - Climate Progress
Stephan: This is really an extraordinary report and very good news. I wish the same could be said of the United States though. It makes me very sad that my country is falling further and further behind technologically at the level where it really counts -- the level at which people live their daily lives. We have rotten cell phone service compared to the rest of the world, our internet speed is a disgrace, our illness profit system is an embarrassment, and we are massive polluters in the grip of an intractable carbon energy industry. Only voter participation is going to stop this, and about 40 per cent of Americans can't be bothered to vote, and those that do in many areas of the country choose to support corrupt venal morons.
Click through to see the important graphs.
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
Within a few decades, large-scale, centralized electricity generation from fossil fuels could be a thing of the past in Europe.
That’s the word from investment bank UBS, which just released a new report anticipating a three pronged assault from solar power, battery technology, and electric vehicles that will render obsolete traditional power generation by large utilities that rely on coal or natural gas.According to Renew Economy, which picked up the report, the tipping point will arrive around 2020. At that point, investing in a home solar system with a 20-year life span, plus some small-scale home battery technology and an electric car, will pay for itself in six to eight years for the average consumer in Germany, Italy, Spain, and much of the rest of Europe. Crucially, this math holds even without any government subsidies for solar power.
‘In other words,” the report says, ‘a German buyer should receive 12 years of electricity for free” for a system purchased in 2020.
UBS-solar-EV-payback
That would mean that after 2020, the economic incentives will align to encourage the […]
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
Stephan: From my perspective, as a Planckian who believes that consciousness is fundamental and space and time are an expression of consciousness, Nagel's observations seem quite correct to me.
Brain antomy, 19th century artwork. Artwork from the 1886 ninth edition of Moses and Geology (Samuel Kinns, London). This book was originally published in 1882.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s new book, ‘Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” restores the primal force of a great old philosophical word, ‘metaphysics.” He starts with a boldly discerning look at that strange creature, mankind, and comes to some remarkable speculations about who we are and what our place is in the universe. Incidentally (and seemingly unintentionally) he illuminates, along the way, some significant aspects of the cinema, and of art overall.
The book deals with science-specifically, Darwinian ideas regarding evolution and natural selection-and it’s filled with the quasi-scientific language and argumentation that characterizes much of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. This is unfortunate, because the ideas that Nagel unfolds ought to be discussed by non-specialists with an interest in the […]
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
Stephan: As far as the research can discern no one has ever died of overuse of marijuana. Meanwhile people die every day from overuse of prescription pain medications -- 46 people a day to be precise. Now we have actual data, not the usual nonsensical polemics of the Prohibitionists, comparing the use of marijuana and prescription opiates. I think it is verging on the criminal not to make marijuana available to those in chronic pain. As you can see in this report, those who have a vested interest in opiates and addiction don't agree.
A jar of medical marijuana is displayed at the California Heritage Market in Los Angeles. David McNew / REUTERS
America has a major problem with prescription pain medications like Vicodin and OxyContin. Overdose deaths from these pharmaceutical opioids have approximately tripled since 1991, and every day 46 people die of such overdoses in the United States.
However, in the 13 states that passed laws allowing for the use of medical marijuana between 1999 and 2010, 25 percent fewer people die from opioid overdoses annually.
‘The difference is quite striking,” said study co-author Colleen Barry, a health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The shift showed up quite quickly and become visible the year after medical marijuana was accepted in each state, she told Newsweek.
In the study, published today August 25 in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers hypothesize that in states where medical marijuana can be prescribed, patients may use pot to […]
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
JOCELYN KILEY, - Pew Research
Stephan: This is an important assessment of the political trends shaping the country. If this Pew Research is correct then one has to ask is the Libertarian Movement a confection created by greedy fund raisers, assisted by a shallow and credulous media?
The question of whether libertarianism is gaining public support has received increased attention, with talk of a Rand Paul run for president and a recent New York Times magazine story asking if the ‘Libertarian Moment” has finally arrived. But if it has, there are still many Americans who do not have a clear sense of what ‘libertarian” means, and our surveys find that, on many issues, the views among people who call themselves libertarian do not differ much from those of the overall public.
About one-in-ten Americans (11%) describe themselves as libertarian and know what the term means. Respondents were asked whether the term ‘libertarian” describes them well and – in a separate multiple-choice question – asked for the definition of ‘someone whose political views emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government”; 57% correctly answered the multiple-choice question, choosing ‘libertarian” from a list that included ‘progressive,” ‘authoritarian,” ‘Unitarian” and ‘communist.” On the self-description question 14% said they were libertarian. For the purpose of this analysis we focus on the 11% who both say they are libertarian and know the definition […]
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