Sunday, December 28th, 2014
Stephan: Here is a small society that understands why wellness should be the first societal priority. It is a very satisfying story of good choices.
Bhutan
Credit: Bhutanfound.org
Bhutan’s prime minister has been busy test-driving cars in the mountainous country. Why? The Bhutanese are aiming to convert all government-owned vehicles and taxis to electric cars supplied by companies such as Nissan, Tesla, and Mahindra & Mahindra. Earlier this year, they cemented plans with Nissan to provide a few hundred Nissan Leafs to the Himalayan kingdom.
It’s a natural step for a country whose environmental policy has captured global attention. Bhutan’s progressive environmental standards are so impressive, they’re becoming discussion points at climate change and environmental events.
National Geographic celebrated Bhutan last month, a country it first featured in the magazine 100 years ago. Back then, British government officer and civil engineer John Claude White wrote about the country in the April 1914 edition of National Geographic, which the magazine said “lifted the veil on a mysterious land hidden in the world’s highest mountains.” That mysterious land has become less exotic over the years; the Bhutanese royal family opened its doors to visitors in 1974 and introduced television to its people in 1999. […]
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Saturday, December 27th, 2014
Murtaza Hussain, - The Intercept
Stephan: Just the way this data dump was done -- 1:30 p.m. Christmas Eve -- tells you how guilty the NSA knows they are. This is the latest in the data describing the American Surveillance State Trend, a component of the American Police State Trend. There is so much bogus, illegal, deceitful, lying crap in this release that there should be national outrage. There is not, of course, there is mostly silence from the politicians and the media.
NSA computers
The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients. (emphasis added)
While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,” is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.
The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone […]
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Saturday, December 27th, 2014
Ed Crooks, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: As oil prices have dropped I have been watching for shifts in geopolitical trends and in the economies of oil producing countries, particularly those whose economies are utterly dependent on the sale of crude. This essay gives a sense of the trend, and I think this shift is going to produce majors effects in 2015.
Credit: Google
The most significant development in the world economy in 2014 was the collapse in the price of oil. (emphasis added)
The near-50 per cent drop in the price of internationally traded Brent crude from a high of more than $115 a barrel in June to less than $60 earlier this month has put extra money into consumers’ pockets and boosted fuel-intensive businesses such as airlines, while cutting oil companies’ revenues and stoking financial crises in oil-producing countries including Russia and Venezuela.
The roots of the price collapse lie in the US shale oil boom, which began when small and medium-sized producers worked out in 2009-10 how to apply to oil production the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that had already been highly successful for natural gas.
US oil production has soared, from about 5m barrels a day in 2008 to 9.1m b/d this month. For the first three years of the boom, the rise in US output was offset by other […]
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Saturday, December 27th, 2014
Chris Mooney, - The Washington Post
Stephan: I think the linkage of solar generation and electric cars is a trend which will play an enormous role in the coming years in changing societies around the world. It obviates the need for petroleum as a fuel, and makes obsolete the largest profit making infrastructure the world has ever seen -- the fossil fuel industries. I consider this serious good news as we enter a new year.
A man charges his Model S vehicle at a supercharger station at the Tesla Motors Inc. Gallery and Service Center in Paramus, New Jersey, U.S., on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014.
Credit: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg
The suburbs have had it rough in the last few years. The 2008-2009 economic collapse led to waves of foreclosures in suburbia, as home prices plummeted. More recently, census data suggest that Americans are actually shifting back closer to city centers, often giving up on the dream of a big home in suburbs (much less the far-flung “exurbs”).
It doesn’t help that suburbia has long been the poster child for unsustainable living. You have to drive farther to work, so you use a lot of gas. Meanwhile, while having a bigger home may be a plus, that home is also costlier to heat and cool. It […]
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Saturday, December 27th, 2014
Stephan: Here is the latest on the shabby lies and unethical behavior of the anti-choice Theocratic Right movement. It also illustrates how a few individuals with vast wealth can distort the social wellbeing of the entire country. These people have no shame, and their self-righteousness in their eyes justifies anything.
Credit: ExposingFakeClinics Tumblr
A pair of billionaire brothers is quietly funding the assault on abortion rights in the United States, and, no, it’s not the Kochs! (Though they also give lots of money to groups and politicians that oppose reproductive freedom.) Dan and Farris Wilks made billions in masonry and fracking, and are now funneling tens of millions into antiabortion organizations and crisis pregnancy centers.
As Joan Shipps at Inside Philanthropy pointed out on Tuesday, Farris Wilks gave Media Revolution Ministries, which is also called Online for Life, $2.2 million in recent years. To put that kind of cash infusion into perspective, the group’s entire budget is $2.4 million. Focus on the Family received a cool $1.4. Heartbeat International, a network of crisis pregnancy centers, got nearly $200,000.
For a refresher on what crisis pregnancy centers actually do, here are a few testimonials from women who have mistakenly gone to these centers seeking reproductive health services (via ExposingFakeClinics, a Tumblr collecting the stories of women who have been lied to by anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers):
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