Saturday, January 9th, 2016
Adam Johnson , Associate Editor - Alternet
Stephan: A free press fulfilling its function of investigating government and reporting on its findings in an objective fact-based manner is a critical part of a successfully functioning democracy. Corporate media in the U.S. I am afraid no longer even bothers to pursue that function. Here is an excellent example of why I say this.
Of the five Republican debates and of the three Democratic debates, not one moderator has asked a question involving the words “poverty” or “poor.” While the subject has been touched upon by some of the Democratic candidates, namely Bernie Sanders and briefly Jim Webb, the topic has been entirely unmentioned by the moderators during the three Democratic debates. In the GOP debates, the candidates only bring up the topic as a way to swipe President Obama, which is fair enough but is not a discussion of poverty much less a good-faith attempt to mitigate it. By comparison, the Democratic debate moderators brought up “ISIS” or “Terrorism” 21 times total in all three debates.
A recent study in The Intercept found poverty’s non-status on television isn’t just limited to the debates. Cable news was over 20 times more likely to mention ISIS or terrorism than poverty during the heart of primary season in late 2014.
Bernie Sanders has brought up poverty in the debates about half a dozen times, calling childhood poverty “a national disgrace.” Hillary Clinton has not brought up the issue […]
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Saturday, January 9th, 2016
Valerie Tarico, MD, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned that the Christianity of my youth, benign, inclusive, and if not loving and least generally tolerant has disappeared having been replaced by an ugly avaricious, and hate-filled religion that uses the same imagery and many of the same words, but whose social affect is dangerous, self-righteous, and increasingly violent.
It and the Republican Party have also become so closely intertwined that it is hard to see where the one ends and the other begins.
This is not a good development for a democracy.
Corporate media won't touch this story,
Ammon Bundy speaks at a press conference in Oregon.
Islamists aren’t the only ones with instructions for terrorism in their holy book. Last fall, Dutch pranksters put a cover from a Quran over a Bible and then asked passersby to read aloud homophobic, violent, or sexist passages that violate modern moral sensibilities. The texts shocked people who had never immersed themselves in the Iron Age world of the Bible writers, a world in which daughters can be sold as sexual slaves and most of us deserve the death penalty—you included.
Defenders of Islam point to the atrocities in the Bible and Christian history and argue that Islam looks positively peaceful by contrast. After all, according to one count, the Quran has only 532 cruel or violent passages, while the Bible has 1321. Christians respond that the Bible is longer and so the cruel, violent passages make up a lesser percent of the whole. Besides, they say, the Quran contains more timeless prescriptions […]
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Friday, January 8th, 2016
Stephan: The corporate corruption of U.S. regulatory agencies beggars the imagination, and never more so than when it comes to neonicotinoid pesticides. In spite of that we have some, not a lot, but some, good news on this front. The EPA slowly, tentatively, is being forced to acknowledge that these poisons, outlawed years ago in Europe, are responsible for harming honeybees. It is going to take at least a year more for them to actually do anything involving regulation, but in this era I guess even this report must be seen as progress.
Dead bees Credit: Shutterstock
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Wednesday that a preliminary risk assessment of the pesticide imidacloprid shows that the chemical poses a threat to some pollinators, specifically honeybees.
Imidacloprid is one of four neonicotinoid pesticides that honey producers and environmentalists have long suspected to be linked to rapidly declining bee populations in North America and beyond, a phenomenon widely known as colony collapse disorder. The EPA is in the process of reviewing the class of chemicals to determine whether they pose an ecological threat to pollinators, starting with imidacloprid.
Neonictonoids are nicotine-like pesticides that attack the central nervous system of insects and are commonly used to protect seed stocks and kill unwanted foliage-eating bugs like aphids and beetles.
The EPA’s preliminary risk assessment of imidacloprid found that the pesticide “potentially poses risk to hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators,” according to a press statement. The agency found that residues of imidacloprid with a concentration of 25 parts per billion or higher on flowering plants […]
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Friday, January 8th, 2016
Amanda Yun, - World Scientific/Eureka Alert
Stephan: Here is the latest on the Homo Superior Trend, which is gathering speed. Homo Superior is coming and this new form of human will be, I predict, almost exclusively a child of wealth. The implications as to what this means have barely been discussed.
How should we handle the new CRISPR technology that can both advance science and medicine, but also be used to make designer babies? Scientist and author Paul Knoepfler tackles this and other difficult questions related to this revolutionary technology in his new book, GMO Sapiens: The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies, targeted at a broad, lay audience.
Bioengineering, genomics, synthetic biology, and stem cells are changing sci-fi into reality before our eyes. This book will capture your imagination with its clear, approachable writing style. It will draw you into the fascinating discussion of the life-changing science of human genetic modification.
CRISPR technology has been developed as a genetic modification tool in just the last three years, but it has had an oversized impact on science. Compared to past technologies to induce genetic modifications and make GMOs such as plants or animals, CRISPR is dramatically cheaper, faster, and more effective. This opens the door to making a much wider range of GMOs including, most controversially, people who are GMOs.
Most scientists are envisioning these efforts as focused on disease prevention, but others are in favor in enhancement to make “better” human beings. Dr Knoepfler terms these hypothetical designer babies and people as “GMO sapiens”. […]
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Friday, January 8th, 2016
Jon Erdman, - The Weather Channel
Stephan: Wow, 27 earthquakes in the last week alone. Oklahoma is experiencing as pure an example of social karma as I can remember. The voters voted for a government that encouraged fracking and now they must live with the result.
Oklahoma earthquake swarm
credit: weather channel
A pair of moderate earthquakes shook northwest Oklahoma late Wednesday night, part of the latest swarm of Sooner State temblors since Wednesday morning.
A 4.7-magnitude tremor was followed 30 seconds later by another 4.8-magnitude quake centered in a sparsely populated area about 20 miles northwest of Fairview, Oklahoma, about 97 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The quakes struck at depths of 2.1 and 3.7 miles below the surface.The twin earthquakes occurred at 10:27 p.m. CST Wednesday night and were felt from central Kansas to southern Oklahoma and the eastern Texas panhandle, including in Wichita, Kansas, and the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.
KWTV said some of its viewers reported damage in their homes. There were no reported injuries in either Majors or Woods Counties, near the epicenter of the twin quakes, according to newsok.com.
The 4.8-magnitude quake was the strongest in the Sooner State since the November 2011 swarm that included the state’s strongest on record, a 5.6-magnitude temblor in Prague on Nov. 6, 2011. […]
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