Thursday, January 21st, 2016
FIONA MACDONALD , - Science Alert
Stephan: One of the unacknowledged -- until possibly, possibly only mind you -- consequences of poverty is its effects on the neuroantomy of the poor. Here is a report explaining what I mean.
One of the things that is happening to American society in the trend of rapidly increasing poverty is the many negative effects it is having on ordinary Americans. Our domestic and international social policies are destroying the country our parents and grandparents created.
The research has been
published in The American Journal of Psychiatry. 
It’s no secret that being born into a poor family can give you a rough start in life, but new research has shown that the amount of money parents have can actually change a child’s brain connectivity, and put them at greater risk of depression.
A team from Washington University St Louis analysed functional MRI scans of 105 children aged between 7 and 12, and found that key structures in the brain connect differently in poor children when compared to kids from a wealthy family. Importantly, those brain structures influence how children learn, and regulate their stress levels and emotions.
“
Our past research has shown that the brain’s anatomy can look different in poor children, with the size of the hippocampus and amygdala frequently altered in kids raised in poverty,”
said lead researcher Deanna Barch. “In this study, we found that the way those structures connect with the rest of the brain changes in ways we would consider to be less helpful in regulating emotion and stress.”
The study also found that kids who were poor in preschool were more likely […]
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Thursday, January 21st, 2016
Stephan: They are being sued in the Hague for "crimes against humanity" and the World Health Organization has said unequivocally that their leading product is "a human carcinogenic." Now here is some more good news about one of the most evil corporations in the world -- Monsanto.
Monsanto announced Wednesday that sales in the company’s agricultural productivity segment, which includes its probable carcinogen Roundup herbicide, fell 34 % to $820 million. Monsanto’s shares fell over 2% as a result.
The Biotech giant also said Wednesday that it now plans to cut a total of 3600 jobs, or about 16 % of its global work force, through fiscal 2018, and expects to record $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion in restructuring charges.
In October, Monsanto said that it would slash 2,600 jobs worldwide as part of a global restructuring effort to cut costs and boost savings, including consolidating some business and research centers and getting out of the sugar cane business, Reuters reported.
Monsanto has been struggling for investor confidence following the announcement in March 2015 that the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency had declared the world’s most widely used weedkiller – glyphosate – a “probable human carcinogen”.
Glyphosate is the base of Monsanto’s whole business model;
a) the glyphosate-based herbicide ‘Roundup’ is Monsanto’s leading product.
b) Roundup is the herbicide that the majority of Monsanto’s GM crops are designed to be grown with.
Monsanto
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Thursday, January 21st, 2016
Sarah Kaplan, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is a really horrifying story. More plastic in the ocean than fish. Have we come to that? Apparently we have.
Plastic litter washed up on a beach
There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.
It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say. And if it was bagged up and arranged across all of the world’s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.
But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.
If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish pound for pound in 2050, the nonprofit foundation said in a report Tuesday.
According to the report, worldwide use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the […]
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Thursday, January 21st, 2016
Pádraig Belton, - BBC News Online (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is an interesting little data point in the Neo-feudalism Trend. Becoming a butler appears as a well-paid prestige job in the Newly Feudal world. The other thing that stood out for me about this story was how much the non-Caucasian ultra-rich prefer British Whites as servants.
Downton Abbey’s runaway popularity may have given a boost to the butler profession
Credit: ITV
Downton Abbey may reference an era a century past. But Carson’s real-life butler descendants – armed with Blackberries as well as silver polish – are more stylish than ever.
About 350 to 400 butlers are trained each year in Britain, estimates Gary Williams, former head butler at the Ritz and now principal of the British Butler Institute. Of these, only about half stay in the UK, he says. The rest go overseas, particularly to increasingly middle-class China and to the oil-rich countries of the Gulf. High Tea
Sometimes the best things in life are free; when all you need is the Earth’s natural beauty and someone by your side to enjoy it with. To slow down, lean into the wind, run down hills and spend quality time with the people who matter the most. Maybe it’s time to let go and discover more to Britain with BA.
Butlering in […]
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Wednesday, January 20th, 2016
Stephan: We have now reached a point, as this OxFam report spells out, where just 62 people in the world have the same wealth as 3,600,000,000 people -- 50 per cent of humanity. Wealth inequity is the greatest it has ever been in human history, and the social implications we see around us every day. Except for Bernie Sanders, who speaks of it constantly, and some occasional comments from Hillary Clinton, a centa-millionaire herself, this disparity hardly rates a moment of media coverage in the upcoming election.
Credit: Shutterstock
The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes. Credit Suisse recently revealed that the richest 1% have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together.1 This occurred a year earlier than Oxfam’s much-publicized prediction ahead of last year’s World Economic Forum.
Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years. This is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century.
‘An Economy for the 1%’2 looks at how this has happened, and why, as well as setting out shocking new evidence of an inequality crisis that is out of control.
Oxfam has calculated that:
• In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010.
• The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% […]
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