Saturday, September 20th, 2014
, - Reuters/The Raw Story
Stephan: Twenty five per cent of Americans are open to secession and the break up of the United States. To this add that better than 3 out of 4 Americans are unhappy. And that 64 per cent can't even name the three branches of government. This is a country in crisis.
A conservative Tea Party Express protest of big government and Obamacare in Dallas. Taken September 04, 2009 in Dallas, TX. (Ken Durden / Shutterstock.com)
The failed Scottish vote to pull out from the United Kingdom stirred secessionist hopes for some in the United States, where almost a quarter of people are open to their states leaving the union, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Some 23.9 percent of Americans polled from Aug. 23 through Sept. 16 said they strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away, while 53.3 percent of the 8,952 respondents strongly opposed or tended to oppose the notion.
The urge to sever ties with Washington cuts across party lines and regions, though Republicans and residents of rural Western states are generally warmer to the idea than Democrats and Northeasterners, according to the poll.
Anger with President Barack Obama’s handling of issues ranging from healthcare reform to the […]
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Saturday, September 20th, 2014
EMILY ATKIN, - Think Progress
Stephan: Further evidence, if such were needed, that there exists a direct link between Fracking and earthquakes. Do you think that will stop Fracking?
Click though to see the data chart.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ED ANDRIESKI
A team of scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have found evidence ‘directly linking” the uptick in Colorado and New Mexico earthquakes since 2001 to wastewater injection, a process widely used in the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and conventional drilling.
In a study to be published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Tuesday, the scientists presented ‘several lines of evidence [that] suggest the earthquakes in the area are directly related to the disposal of wastewater” deep underground, according to a BSSA press release. Fracking and conventional natural gas companies routinely dispose of large amounts of wastewater underground after drilling. During fracking, the water is mixed with chemicals and sand, to ‘fracture” underground shale rock formations and make gas easier to extract.
The USGS research is just the latest in a string of studies that have suggested the disposed water is migrating along dormant fault lines, changing their state of stress, and causing them to fail.
For their research, the four California-based USGS scientists […]
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Saturday, September 20th, 2014
Stephan: This is a really tragic story. The problem is what modern chemistry thought was the solution. I would recommend you immediately stop eating "diet" anything, if you have not already done so. Read labels. It is in all sorts of things one would not imagine.
Diet Coke is one of science’s great miracles. Ordinary Coca-Cola relies on lashings of sugar to achieve its trademark sickly sweetness-15.9 grams per can, or about a third of the total daily intake recommended for women by Britain’s National Health Service. A can of Diet Coke, by contrast, contains no sugar at all. It owes its sweetness to aspartame and acesulfame-K, a pair of chemicals that are far sweeter than ordinary sugar, but which provide the body with no energy at all.
That magic combination of sweetness without calories has made artificial sweeteners among the most widely used food additives in a world that is struggling to keep its waistline in check. But people generally dislike the idea of ‘chemicals” in their food, and sweeteners have attracted their share of scare stories. The idea that they cause cancer has proved especially hard to shift, despite no evidence to suggest it is true. A lesser-known (though more respectable) worry is that consuming them might-ironically, and in defiance of common sense-be associated with obesity.
A paper just published in Nature bolsters that view. It […]
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Saturday, September 20th, 2014
AKI PERITZ , TARA MALLER , - Foreign Policy
Stephan: It appears, based on the evidence, that patriarchal fundamentalist religious societies are crippled, and always in the same way: the sexuality of women. It is a kind of existential issue that almost all societies suffer from to some degree, but in the Islamic world it has reached such a degree that it is like America's gun psychosis. And, as this essay lays out, it is becoming a major issue. Only a sexuality dysfunctional man would condone rape as a tactic and weapon.
The compassionate and life-affirming move, which I think will also prove to be the most successful option, would be for the U.S. to champion women very proactively, not just polemically. To think creatively about how these women could be helped. Clearly the model we have been using isn't working.
Islamic societies are as unproductive as they are in large measure because 50 per cent of the nation's neurons can't get on the board -- all the women -- and it takes about 7 per cent of the other half -- all the men -- to maintain that structure of suppression, as well as a cultural consensus. It doesn't leave much to move the national ball down court. And you can see it in the granting of patents: The entire Islamic world does not generate as many patents in a decade as Japan does in a year -- 54170 in 2013. Kuwait, from 1977 to 2013, 283 patents. Saudi Arabia, same time period, 855.
Of the many terrifying stories emerging from Islamic State-occupied Iraq and Syria, the violence directed toward women is perhaps the most difficult to contemplate.
The Islamic State’s (IS) fighters are committing horrific sexual violence on a seemingly industrial scale: For example, the United Nations last month estimated that IS has forced some 1,500 women, teenage girls, and boys into sexual slavery. Amnesty International released a blistering document noting that IS abducts whole families in northern Iraq for sexual assault and worse. Even in the first few days following the fall of Mosul in June, women’s rights activists reported multiple incidents of IS fighters going door to door, kidnapping and raping Mosul’s women.
IS claims to be a religious organization, dedicated to re-establishing the caliphate and enforcing codes of modesty and behavior from the time of Muhammad and his followers. But this is rape, not religious conservatism. IS may dress up its sexual violence in religious justifications, saying its victims violated Islamic law, or were infidels, but their leaders are not fools. This is just another form of warfare.
Why isn’t this […]
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Friday, September 19th, 2014
REID WILSON, - The Washington Post
Stephan: What is one to think about a country and a time in which 64 per cent of the population cannot identify the three major branches of government? Not the individuals, just the basic system. Nearly two out of three. This may be the most depressing statistic I have ever published.
Wednesday marked national Constitution Day, the 227th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. But only 36 percent of Americans can actually name the three branches of government the Constitution created.
That’s according to a new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it shows a huge percentage of Americans might need to take a civics refresher course.
Only 38 percent of Americans knew the Republican Party controls the U.S. House of Representatives, while 17 percent think Democrats are still in charge. The number of people who knew Republicans were in charge has dropped 17 percent since the last time Annenberg asked, back in 2011, right after Republicans reclaimed control.
An identical number, 38 percent, knows Democrats run the Senate, while 20 percent believe Republicans control the upper chamber. Only 27 percent knew it takes a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto.
Annenberg released the survey in partnership with the Civics Renewal Network, a group of 25 nonpartisan organizations including the Library of Congress, the Newseum and the National Archives that offers free civics education […]
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