Wednesday, May 13th, 2015
Josh Harkinson, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Here is the latest on the cell phone radiation trend. It is not good news.
Credit: PathDoc/Shutterstock
Are government officials doing enough to protect us from the potential long-term health effects of wearable devices and cellphones? Maybe not. A letter released today, signed by more than 190 scientists from 38 countries, calls on the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and national governments to develop stricter controls on these and other products that create electromagnetic fields (EMF).
“Based on peer-reviewed, published research, we have serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices,” reads the letter, whose signatories have collectively published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on the subject. “The various agencies setting safety standards have failed to impose sufficient guidelines to protect the general public, particularly children who are more vulnerable to the effects of EMF.”
For decades, some scientists have questioned the safety of EMF, but their concerns take on a heightened significance in the age of ubiquitous wifi routers, the Internet of Things, and the advent of wearable technologies like the Apple Watch and Fitbit devices, which remain in close contact with the […]
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Stephan: This is why I am worried about my country. I have written extensively about the founding of the United States particularly the roles of George Mason and Benjamin Franklin, who is probably the only Founder who could suddenly appear in the 21st century, and easily adapt. I have spent a long time listening to their voices, through their correspondence and other writings, produced at a time when the physical act of writing a letter and posting it, was a non-trivial event. Or reading contemporaneous accounts of these events, and these men.
There can be no question: they did not all hold the same views or have the same values in some areas. But none of them anticipated or wanted the country we have become. Quite the opposite. And this disconnect between the public image we project, which is their vision, and the reality of who we really are, is creating an existential crisis. This report is fact-based. These poll figures, and click through the many links to see the data on which the report is based, describe our state of fugue.
The red arrow on the left of the chart marks the U.S. position.
Americans’ pride in our country is legendary … or at least it used to be.
The World Values Survey – a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholars – finds that the percent of Americans who are “very proud” of the U.S. fell from 77% in 1999, to 71.1% in 2004, 62% in 2009 and only 56% today.
That puts Americans’ pride behind the national pride felt by the Yemenis, Mexicans, Libyans, Rwandans, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Moroccans, Kazakhstanis, Tunisians, Qataris … and 13 other countries:
Another recent poll finds that Mexicans are now happier than Americans.
Other recent polls find that Americans believe that 75% of all politicians are “corrupted” by campaign donations and lobbyists, and 70% percent of politicians use their political power to help their friends […]
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Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Op-ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: In its own modest way, as this essay by Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman explains, there is a wellness oriented trend in the financial world.
Paul Krugman
Nobel Laureate Economist and Op-Ed Columnist
Credit: Twitter.com
Last year the vampires of finance bought themselves a Congress. I know it’s not nice to call them that, but I have my reasons, which I’ll explain in a bit. For now, however, let’s just note that these days Wall Street, which used to split its support between the parties, overwhelmingly favors the G.O.P. And the Republicans who came to power this year are returning the favor by trying to kill Dodd-Frank, the financial reform enacted in 2010.
And why must Dodd-Frank die? Because it’s working.
This statement may surprise progressives who believe that nothing significant has been done to rein in runaway bankers. And it’s true both that reform fell well short of what we really should have done and that it hasn’t yielded obvious, measurable triumphs like the gains in insurance thanks to Obamacare.
But Wall Street hates reform for a reason, […]
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Katie Valentine, - Think Progress
Stephan: Beginning about a year SR began covering the project to build the first solar roadway — see the SR archives. This is the latest update, and it is very positive. Imagine a solar roadway interstate system. Electric cars could charge, at some modest fee, or perhaps even for free, using electricity generated by the roadway they were traveling. Gas stations would disappear, but not service stations. Cars and trucks would still require maintenance. We would just eliminate the carbon aspect of road travel, using non-petroleum lubricants, and electric vehicles. All biodegradeable or capable of being recycled. Being wellness oriented it would of course be cheaper, more efficient, and a much smaller footprint on the planet.
The first solar roadway.
Credit: Solaroad
In its first six months of existence, the world’s first solar road is performing even better than developers thought.
The road, which opened in the Netherlands in November of last year, has produced more than 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power a single household for one year, according to Al-Jazeera America.
“If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70kwh per square meter per year,” Sten de Wit, a spokesman for the project — dubbed SolaRoad — told Al Jazeera America. “We predicted [this] as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year.”
De Wit
said in a statement that he didn’t “expect a yield as high as this so quickly.”
The 230-foot stretch of road, which is embedded with solar cells that are protected by two layers of safety glass, is built for bike traffic, a use that reflects the road’s environmentally-friendly message and […]
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, - Agence France-Presse (France)/Telegraph (U.K.)
Stephan: I follow Iceland because like the Scandanavian countries it is one of the nations where the new wellness oriented policies are developing. This one is very dramatic and will change the world's economy as it is more widely adopted. I don't think it will happen in America because the banks have so many liegemen in the Congress, as Paul Krugman points out.
Icelandic Bank
Iceland’s government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank.
The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled “A better monetary system for Iceland”.
“The findings will be an important contribution to the upcoming discussion, here and elsewhere, on money creation and monetary policy,” Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson said.
The report, commissioned by the premier, is aimed at putting an end to a monetary system in place through a slew of financial crises, including the latest one in 2008.
According to a study by four central bankers, the country has had “over 20 instances of financial crises of different types” since 1875, with “six serious multiple financial crisis episodes occurring every 15 years on average”.
Mr Sigurjonsson said the problem each time arose from ballooning credit during a strong […]
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