Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
Stephan: In terms of Europe where nations such a France, U.K. and Germany have huge unassimilated minorities the fact that the Muslim minority has a birth rate of 4.5 children per couple while the indigenous Europeans are below the sustainable threshold of 1.85 live births (or 2.1 by some calculation). Over time that means the percentage of the population that is not assimilated increases dramatically, while the percentage of native Europeans declines. In the U.S. where assimilation is far better this disparity still has consequences. It plays out as Caucasians become a smaller and smaller portion of the total population.
Across Europe, birth rates are falling and family sizes are shrinking. The total fertility rate is now less than two children per woman in every member nation in the European Union (see Figure 1). As a result, European populations are either growing very slowly or beginning to decrease.
At the same time, low fertility is accelerating the ageing of European populations. As a region, Europe in 2000 had the highest percentage of people age 65 or older — 15 percent. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, this percentage is expected to nearly double by 2050.[1]
These demographic trends portend difficult times ahead for European economies. For example, a shrinking workforce can reduce productivity. At the same time, the growing proportion of elderly individuals threatens the solvency of pension and social insurance systems. As household sizes decrease, the ability to care for the elderly diminishes. Meanwhile, elderly people face growing health care needs and costs. Taken together, these developments could pose significant barriers to achieving the European Union (EU) goals of full employment, economic growth, and social cohesion.
Concern […]
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
Sheryl Ubelacker, - CBC News (Canada)
Stephan: Even though I go to the gym, and walk with my wife, I am as guilty as anyone about sitting too long in front of computers, and I have been changing my patterns to deal with this new research. Maybe you should too.
Sitting on one’s butt for a major part of the day may be deadly in the long run — even with a regimen of daily exercise, researchers say.
In an analysis that pooled data from 41 international studies, Toronto researchers found the amount of time a person sits during the day is associated with a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and death, regardless of regular exercise.
“More than one half of an average person’s day is spent being sedentary — sitting, watching television or working at a computer,” said Dr. David Alter, a senior scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, who helmed the analysis.
“Our study finds that despite the health-enhancing benefits of physical activity, this alone may not be enough to reduce the risk for disease.”
The paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that prolonged sedentary behaviour was associated with a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of death from any cause; a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of heart disease, death from heart disease, cancer, death from cancer; and as much as a […]
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
Stephan:
You have heard me say this, but let me condense the proposition to make the argument clear. Fundamentalism, I think is a form of mental illness, couched in a religious context, arising from fear, and particularly the nonlocal consciousness presentiment of what is coming with climate change. People's amygdalas kick in and it is fight or the flight. Rational thought stops. Fear is easy to manipulate for people interested in power, which is why the economic Right favors and funds their fear filled minions. You see this clearly in this report, written by a former well-known Theocratic Rightist.
The characteristics of this syndrome are a sense of self-righteousness, a certitude that one is correct and chosen, yet with a carefully cultivated sense of persecution. There is also severe sexual dysfunction, and an obsession in men over controlling women's sexuality, and a fear of homosexuality.
The dogmas and cultural protocols may differ but, in whatever form it occurs -- Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu -- it is existentially the same, and is the source of most of the mass violence in the world today. This essay presents the Christian religious gestalt aspect of this syndrome very coherently.
Not many seemed to have noticed but I think it is worth remembering that terrorists used to be Communists, and they made no reference to religion at all.
Credit: Shutterstock
As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means.
The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular” America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist
Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “
Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“
– believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home […]
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Tuesday, January 20th, 2015
Larry Elliott and Ed Pilkington, Economics Editor and Chief Reporter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I have been covering the Wealth Inequity Trend for eight years, watching it become ever more grotesque. This year we have come to this: 80 people own the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people, down from 388 in 2010. That means that in our world of 7 billion people half the wealth the entire human race possesses could be represented by the diners in a restaurant -- upscale of course. There is something so strange and disproportionate about this that I think most people simply cannot comprehend it.
The Swiss ski resort of Davos, home to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
Credit: Christian Kober/Robert Hardi/REX
Billionaires and politicians gathering in Switzerland this week will come under pressure to tackle rising inequality after a study found that – on current trends – by next year, 1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99%.
Ahead of this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the ski resort of Davos, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam said it would use its high-profile role at the gathering to demand urgent action to narrow the gap between rich and poor.
The charity’s research, published on Monday, shows that the share of the world’s wealth owned by the best-off 1% has increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, while the least well-off 80% currently own just 5.5%.
Oxfam added that on current trends the richest 1% would own more than […]
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Tuesday, January 20th, 2015
PETER VAN BUREN, TOMDISPATCH.COM, - Salon.com
Stephan: Endless war is very profitable. It's unfortunate that so many people have their bodies blown into chunks of meat, and that Iraq is a failed state but, hey, American war contractors are just minting money over there and in Afghanistan. Here is a report on this morally bankrupt situation.
T-72 tanks in Iraq, major cash cows for the war contractors.
The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, aka ISIL), and then… well, something in Syria to be determined at a later date.
At the moment, Iraq War 3.0 simply drones on, part bombing campaign, part mission to train the collapsed army the U.S. military created for Iraq War 2.0, all amid a miasma of incoherent mainstream media coverage. American troops are tiptoeing closer to combat (assuming you don’t count defensive operations, getting mortared, and flying ground attack helicopters as “combat”), even as they act like archaeologists of America’s warring past, exploring the ruins of abandoned U.S. bases. Meanwhile, Shia militias are using the conflict for the […]
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Across Europe, birth rates are falling and family sizes are shrinking. The total fertility rate is now less than two children per woman in every member nation in the European Union (see Figure 1). As a result, European populations are either growing very slowly or beginning to decrease.
