Thursday, August 6th, 2015
Laura Zuckerman , - Reuters/Village Voice
Stephan: Here is a third example of the new shift in consciousness concerning "Big Game" wild animal hunting. We have gone from glamorizing such people to making those who practice such hunting pariahs.
Sabrina Corgatelli poses with the carcass of a giraffe.
Credit: Sabrina Corgatelli/Facebook
A big-game trophy collector from Idaho has ignited a firestorm of criticism from animal-rights activists for flaunting online images of herself posed with the carcasses of a giraffe and other wildlife she killed during a recent guided hunt in South Africa.
Sabrina Corgatelli, an accountant for Idaho State University, appeared on NBC’s “Today” show on Monday to defend trophy hunting amid mounting international outrage over last month’s killing of Cecil, Zimbabwe’s most famous lion, by an American dentist.
“Everybody thinks we’re cold-hearted killers and it’s not that,” Corgatelli said in the nationally televised interview. “There is a connection to the animal, and just because we hunt them doesn’t mean we don’t have a respect for them. Giraffes are very dangerous animals. They could hurt you seriously, very quickly.”
Corgatelli first drew attention from a series of photos circulated via her Facebook account that showed her standing proudly with various animals she bagged in South Africa, […]
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Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
Stephan: Norway and Iceland are the most fascinating countries in the world for me, particularly Norway. Each, in its own way has put its people first, and sought increased wellness as a society. This
It isn't just the specifics of this novel energy storage system that I find significant. It is that they think this way as a country, are already well into the transition out of carbon, and want to share and help others. Contrast this with the Republican attacks on Obama's carbon energy proposals. We are declining as a country and cannot seem to stop, because we simply will not talk about the real issues. There is only one successful solution to this and that is to create a society that makes wellness its first priority. The social outcome comparison between Norway and the U.S. makes the case as to which is the more successful, healthier, better educated, universally insured, cheaper, and more efficient model
Norway is a hydropower hoarder.
Its 937 hydroelectric-generating plants provide the country with 96 percent of its electricity—making it the world’s sixth-largest hydropower producer.
Now, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology are figuring out how to spread the water power wealth to other nations by turning Norway into the “green battery pack” of Europe.
The idea is to find an effective way to store the increasing amount of power generated from Europe’s growing solar arrays and wind farms. Right now, countries such as Denmark are often left with excess power during windy days, so they push the surplus generated power into neighboring countries’ grids.
On days with little wind or sun, even those countries have to fire up coal and natural gas power plants to meet electricity demand. But with a tweak of the existing hydropower system, Kaspar Vereide, a hydraulic environmental engineering doctoral student at NTNU, believes he could turn Norway’s hydroelectric system into an electric storage facility.
In other words, a big, big battery.
Excess power from neighboring nations’ solar and wind farms would pump water uphill from lower reservoirs to higher ones in Norway, storing the water to generate electricity later. When countries […]
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Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
Paul Rosenberg , - Alternet
Stephan: This is the thinking of the Theocratic Right. These are people trying very straightforwardly to create a theocratic state, as this article rather too snarkily but thoroughly describes. That where you want to live? If not you better get involved. They're very involved.
Credit: Shutterstock
As an unprecedented shift in public opinion brought about the legalization of gay marriage, a vigorous counter-current has been intensifying under the banner of “religious freedom”—an incredibly slippery term.
Perhaps the most radical definition of such freedom comes out of the relatively obscure tradition of Christian Reconstructionism, the subject of a new book by religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstructionism. As Ingersoll explains, Reconstructionists basically reject the entire framework of secular political thought in which individual rights have meaning, so “freedom” as most Americans understand the term is not the issue at all. Indeed, they argue that such “freedom” is actually slavery—slavery to sin, that is.
Reconstructionists aim to establish a theocracy, though most would no doubt bristle at that description. They do not want to “take over the government” so much as they want to dismantle it. But the end result would be a social order based on biblical law—including all those Old Testament goodies like stoning gay people to death, while at the […]
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Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
Jennifer C. Berkshire, - Salon
Stephan: Here is the sorry saga of the Charter model of education, as it has played out in New Orleans. Charter schools remind me of B.F. Skinner's Materialist Behaviorism model, and his Box. It all makes perfect sense until you realize that both are models concerned with the intellect, but with no consideration of human consciousness and, therefore, simplistic and absurd.
Students wait in line at ReNEW SciTech Academy, a charter school in New Orleans, Thursday, Aug. 14, 2014. Nine years after Hurricane Katrina, charter schools are the new reality of public education in New Orleans. The vast majority of public school students will be attending a charter school established by a state-run school district created in the wake of the storm.
Credit: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Here is all you need to know about the New Orleans schools before Hurricane Katrina hit, 10 years ago this summer: They were awful. The schools were awful, the school board was awful, the central office was awful—all of them were awful. At a recent conference […]
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Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
Andrew Breiner, - Think Progress
Stephan: Kansas is also fascinating but for rather sad reasons. It is a state being governed on corporate theocratic rightist principles. It is, just as Justice Brandeis, said the "state as a laboratory." Kansas once the very stable conservative society of Senator Bob Dole, has become the fantasy world of Governor Sam Brownback. It has been accompanied by a precipitous decline. This report on education is the latest on just one aspect.
Credit: Andrew Breiner
Kansas embarked on an experiment with radical right-wing policies since Governor Sam Brownback (R) was elected in 2010, and it failed miserably. The centerpiece of the project, led by Governor Sam Brownback, was huge tax cuts, largely for wealthy individuals and businesses, based on the Republican orthodoxy that tax cuts create jobs.
Now, a teacher shortage appears to be the latest consequence of Kansas’ abject failure to manage its economy. It’s not hard to see why teachers don’t want to work in Kansas.
While the tax cut experiment didn’t create jobs, it did destroy the Kansas budget, and one major consequence of that has been massive funding cuts for Kansas schools. Several districts ended the school year early for lack of funds. Education funding levels are so low, and unequal across school districts, that judges have ruled them unconstitutional and the case is currently pending at the state Supreme Court.
Kansas’ teacher pay is among the lowest in the nation. The Kansas legislature has removed teachers’ […]
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