Stephan: Political Bribery, of course it isn't called that, has become so blatant in the United States that, as this report demonstrates, it is normal business practice. Nowhere is this clearer than with the Keystone XL pipeline. Noteworthy: It doesn't even rate as a blip on any version of television news. It's not that the information isn't out there, I found this on a research foundation's website, it's that they chose to ignore it. This is part of why we only rank 49th in the world in press freedom.
The other thing to note is how cheaply these people can be bought. Consider this, from the report: "The petroleum refining & marketing industry gave, on average, 10 times more money to Senators voting ‘YES’ ($37,325) on S. 1 compared to Senators voting 'NO' ($3,635)."
And remember the whole process of this vote cycle, giving to both "Yes" and "No" senators came to just $259,426. For the industry it's just a cost of doing business. We can roll these dice a number of times. If they can get past the veto threshold they will make 10s of billions of dollars. It's a pretty straightforward calculation.
Late last month, the Senate passed S.1 (62-36), which allows TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline without a presidential permit or additional environmental review. The House is expected to vote on the bill tomorrow, and the White House said President Obama would veto the legislation.
The oil and gas industry gave, on average, 10 times more money to Senators voting ‘YES’ ($236,544) on S. 1 compared to Senators voting ‘NO’ ($22,882).
The oil and gas industry gave, on average, 3.2 times more money to Democratic Senators voting ‘YES’ ($73,279) on S.1 compared to Democratic and Independent Senators voting ‘NO’ ($22,882).
Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND), the sponsor of the legislation, received $275,998 from the oil and gas industry.
Refining Industry Contributions
In particular, the petroleum refining & marketing industry stands to benefit from the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline. Some of the pipeline’s strongest supporters are the Gulf Coast refinery companies that have expanded their facilities and would benefit from Canadian oil that will flow through the pipeline.
The petroleum refining & marketing industry gave, on average, 10 times more money to Senators voting ‘YES’ ($37,325) on S. 1 compared to Senators voting ‘NO’ ($3,635).
Stephan: I think about the permanency of digital data a lot. I've even had dreams about it. In 1980 and, again in 1981, I ran an international nonlocal consciousness study in OMNI Magazine in both Japan and the U.S. There was no personal computer that could do this, so I went to the UCLA Biometrics Laboratory, and contracted with them to process the data. Everything was fine for several years, but when we went to them, because it was now possible to put the data on one of Mobius' Macintosh computers, the language in which it was written was no longer used, and the magnetic tapes on which it was stored were deteriorating, and the data was lost.
Only fragments of human knowledge come down to us. The early Christians burnt the Library in Alexandria thinking its knowledge pagan and useless, if not outright Satanic; it cut us off from a wealth of poetry, and drama, philosophy, and science. It takes commitment for knowledge to survive long. When I see an illustration from a book printed in 1490 I am always amazed that this piece of paper survived while trillions of pages since that time have not. You may remember the story I ran recently about the new technology for reading incinerated scrolls, which may introduce us to unknown classical literature. The possibility of the loss of vast swaths of digital information is not being properly addressed.
Credit: planet.osuosl.org
The man recognized by some as the “father of the Internet” warns that decades of digital documents could go poof, leading to a “forgotten generation” unless new forms of preservation are developed.
Google vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf said that the same digital technology that has made information from family photos to government files accessible around the globe could give in to “bit rot” as the hardware and software they rely on changes.
“When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, peoples’ tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” Cerf said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in California, according to The Guardian. “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away.”
“If there are photos you really care about, print them out,” Cerf told the […]
Stephan:
The beauty of science is that unlike revealed religious "truth" science is a worldview in flux. It changes as better data more accurately describes whatever is being studied. Only future research will confirm, or refute this latest development in physics. But it suggests that we need to reappraise spacetime in a fundamental way.
Citations: Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das. "Cosmology from quantum potential." Physics Letters B. Volume 741, 4 February 2015, Pages 276–279. DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2014.12.057. Also at: arXiv:1404.3093[gr-qc].
Saurya Das and Rajat K. Bhaduri, "Dark matter and dark energy from Bose-Einstein condensate", preprint: arXiv:1411.0753[gr-qc].
This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated with WMAP images on the left and with the representation of stars at the appropriate level of development. Credit: NASA
This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated with WMAP images on the left and with the representation of stars at the appropriate level of development. Credit: NASA
(Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. […]
Stephan: Five years ago I wrote a long essay about what I saw as the long term result of climate change in the Southwest, and was told by many who read it that it was alarmist, and that "things will never get to that point." Sadly, they will. Aiguo Dai, a University associate professor who did not take part in the study described in this report described the Southwestern drought this way: "This provides huge warning sign for society, for the governments to take action to slow down global warming. If they don't, its likely the Southwest could become unsuitable for agriculture or many other activities." Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, and other cities of the Southwest are doomed as they are currently configured.
The migration out of the drought states, will be augmented by the migration away from the coasts as large sections of cities such as, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Norfolk, most of southern Florida, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia become submerged. Millions of Americans will be on the move and, as that happens, the economic structure of the U.S. will experience an unparalleled crash.
Credit: abc.net
Large sections of the United States will endure “persistent droughts” in the coming decades that will be worse than anything experienced in the past 1,000 years.
Comparing the conditions to the Dust Bowl but lasting several decades, researchers writing in the journal Science Advances warned Thursday that the Southwest and Great Plains will be hit by these “mega-droughts” in the later part of the 21st century. Such events have been linked to the fall of civilizations, including the decline of the Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo Peoples, in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century.
“The story is a bit bleak,” said Jason E. Smerdon, a co-author and climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Even when selecting for the worst mega drought-dominated period, the 21st century projections make (those) mega droughts seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden.”
Stephan: Except in those societies like Finland, Norway, Denmark, that have made national wellness a social and governmental priority, press freedom is under varying degrees of attack, as this report describes.
I would particularly ask you to note where the U.S. places. One of the many lies we tell ourselves, and that the media and politicians parrot endlessly is how we lead the world with the freedom of our press. It is just that a lie. In fact we are 49th, three steps lower than we were in 2013, in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. Our media are increasingly unfree and dominated by corporate interests. Ask yourself: Why did Stephan have to go to the non-American press to find this story? Why isn't this a matter of national debate?
Credit: Tokyotimes.com
PARIS – Media freedom suffered a “drastic decline” worldwide last year in part because of extremist groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said in its annual evaluation released Thursday.
“There has been an overall deterioration linked to very different factors, with information wars, and action by non-state groups acting like news despots,” the head of the Paris-based group, Christophe Deloire, told AFP.
Pakistan and India stand at the 159tth and 136th position out of the 180 countries evaluated.
The Reporters Without Borders 2015 World Press Freedom Index stated that there was an eight percent increase in violations of freedom of information in 180 countries in 2014 compared to the 2013, according to its statistically weighted calculation.
All parties in conflicts raging in the Middle East and Ukraine were waging “a fearsome information war” where media personnel were directly targeted to be killed, captured or pressured to relay propaganda, it said.
The Islamic State group active in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram in northern Nigeria and […]
