Saturday, August 15th, 2015
Tam Hunt, President, Community Renewable Solutions LLC - Noozhawk
Stephan: One of my conservative readers urged me to get the electric vehicle study done by Stephen Holland of the University of North Carolina - Greensboro, because it "proves that you are wrong about the benefits of electric cars." The whole thing is "a scheme by liberals to get government subsidies" he charged. I went looking in the Rightwing media world and discovered this is a widely held view so I got the study and read it. I thought it was profoundly flawed, as are most attempts by the Right to find scientific justification for their positions. I started to write my own essay on the subject and then came across this very sensible assessment.
Figure 4: Renewable electricity production in the United States.
Credit: EIA Electric Power Monthly graphic
A number of studies have come out in recent years questioning the conventional wisdom that electric vehicles are better for the environment than efficient traditional cars.
A recent study from a team that included Stephen Holland of the University of North Carolina Greensboro as first author makes a remarkable statement, that “electric vehicles, on average, generate greater environmental externalities than gasoline vehicles.” The study compares electric vehicles (EVs) with gasoline vehicles and finds EVs wanting.
I’ll examine this study in some detail here to show why EVs are, in fact, very good for the environment.
The key problem with the Holland paper is that it uses already outdated data and doesn’t in its main analysis consider the ongoing transformation of our grid, which changes the main results quite remarkably.
The culprit behind the Holland study’s findings is good old coal. But King Coal is […]
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Saturday, August 15th, 2015
William Boardman, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: Here, with some caveats that are explained in this report, is some excellent news: The American Psychological Association has overwhelmingly decided to no longer allow its members to be involved in torture. The dark cancer of the Bush Administration has been at least partially excised.
I urge you to click through and at least scan the actual reports cited. This is what our country was doing and, I suspect, is still doing. Exactly what the difference is between America torturing people, and ISIS torturing people is a moral distinction I am unable to make. But I am glad that most of American psychologists will not participate in the future. Some will, of course, when the money is right, but the general point has been made and most ethical psychologists will behave honorably.
It is worth noting that corporate media, particularly television outlets paid hardly any attention to this development. CNN and MSNBC, for instance, could not be bothered to interrupt their wall to wall coverage of Donald Trump. That I think tells us a lot.
American psychologists have voted overwhelmingly against helping their government torture people. In an even more radical step, the psychologists voted to obey international law, even in instances where US law tolerates war crimes or crimes against humanity.
That would be really good news if there weren’t a huge exception: the psychologists also voted that it would be all right for them to take part in “constitutional” interrogations by federal, state, and local law enforcement in the US. Given the ragged history of US law enforcement, this is a loophole that could at any moment become another noose.
Nevertheless, this action by the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest organization of professional psychologists in the US, represents a significant sea change in the professional ethics of American psychologists since their secret alliance with the Bush administration’s “dark side,” as Vice President Cheney characterized their crimes against humanity. This ethical change has taken almost a decade since Read the Full Article
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Saturday, August 15th, 2015
, - Globe and Mail (Canada)/Reuters
Stephan: This is the story of mice, and the idea that drugs will be developed from this research. But I see this story as a datapoint in the Homo Superior Trend. The lessons learned about genetically altering mice will inevitably find their way into the trend of creating Homo Superior.
It is my prediction that the Homo Sapiens/ Homo Superior relationship is going to become a massive issue in the last half of this century
Scientists have genetically modified mice to be super-intelligent and found they are also less anxious, a discovery that may help the search for treatments for disorders such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Researchers from Britain and Canada found that altering a single gene to block the phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B) enzyme, which is found in many organs including the brain, made mice cleverer and at the same time less fearful.
“Our work using mice has identified phosphodiesterase-4B as a promising target for potential new treatments,” said Steve Clapcote, a lecturer in pharmacology at Britain’s Leeds University, who led the study.
He said his team is now working on developing drugs that will specifically inhibit PDE4B. The drugs will be tested first in animals to see whether any of them might be suitable to go forward into clinical trials in humans.
In the experiments, published on Friday in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the scientists ran a series of behavioral tests on the PDE4B-inhibited mice and found they tended to learn faster, remember events longer and solve complex problems better than normal mice.
The “brainy” mice were better at […]
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Friday, August 14th, 2015
RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, - The New York Times
Stephan: After 15 years of research on the subject I am convinced that fundamentalism, of whatever ilk, is a mental illness manifesting in a religious context.
Whatever religion is proclaimed fundamentalists always present the same attitudes and behavioral characteristics:
1) A conviction of self-righteousness, inevitably grounded and justified by their unique understanding of some holy authority,
2) A non-fact based world view,
3) A sense of persecution,
4) Profound sexual dysfunction inevitably centered on an obsessive need to dominate, subjugate, and control that portion of the population having vaginas. Or, if an individual has a vagina their acquiescence to that domination and control.
One sees this over and over again, it presents with behaviors and attitudes as clear cut as other mental illnesses, and I think fundamentalism should be classified in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the standard classification of mental disorders used by health professionals.
The fact that almost no one in public life will talk about this makes it essentially socially and politically invisible.
A woman, who said she was raped by Islamic State militants, in a refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, and made a sex slave.
Credit: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious […]
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Friday, August 14th, 2015
David Ferguson, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I selected this story, I could have selected a hundred other stories similar to it, to show the same mental illness and sexual perversion pattern displayed in the previous ISIS report, only this time in a Christian fundamentalist context. This is not an isolated even by a couple of molester wackos, which is the way media usually plays it. Take the time to look at the fundamentalist Christian Quiverful movement, or polygamous Mormons.
Rob and Marie Johnson are accused of sexually abusing a teen girl
Credit: Port St. Lucie Police Department
A 21-year-old Indiana woman has accused a couple who she lived with in Port St. Lucie, FL of physically and sexually abusing her for five years and using scripture from the Christian Bible’s Old Testament to justify it.
WPTV News reported that the accuser says that she was sent to live with Rob and Marie Johnson after the death of her mother nine years ago. The then-13-year-old was sexually abused by Rob Johnson virtually from the day she arrived in the home.
Detective Daniel Herrington of the Port St. Lucie Police Department told WPTV that the woman first went to the police in Indiana where she lives now.
“She ended up hearing stories of other women who had come forward, hearing also the stories of women who did not come forward, to tell about their abuse,” […]
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