Thursday, February 11th, 2016
ADAM LIPTAK and CORAL DAVENPORT, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is bad environmental news about coal brought to you by the same five men who created Citizens United. We have a court in which four of the Justices are blatant Republican ideologues -- the only major party in the entire developed world that does not believe climate change is real. Every environmentalist with whom I have corresponded about this is stunned. There is apparently no precedent for such a ruling. As this article notes, "the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court."
Credit: www.midwestind.com
WASHINGTON — In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The brief order was not the last word on the case, which is most likely to return to the Supreme Court after an appeals court considers an expedited challenge from 29 states and dozens of corporations and industry groups.
But the Supreme Court’s willingness to issue a stay while the case proceeds was an early hint that the program could face a skeptical reception from the justices.
The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request […]
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Thursday, February 11th, 2016
Meera Srinivasan, IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow 2015-16 - The Wire
Stephan: The are a number of topics on which Noam Chomsky and I do not agree. But I think he is on target in this essay, and I think it is a subject that ought to be a matter of great concern to those who care about American democracy.
Credit: quotesgram.com
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The United States is a very fundamentalist, religious country – one of the most extreme in the world, says Noam Chomsky, arguably that country’s best-known political dissident of our times.
“And that’s been true since its origins,” he says, explaining this apparently ultra-religious facet of the US and its impact on electoral politics in an interview to The Wire.
There are not too many countries in the world where two-thirds of the population awaits The Second Coming, Chomsky said, adding that half of them think it is going to be in their lifetimes. “And maybe a third of the population believes the world was created 10,000 years ago, exactly the way it is now. Things like that are pretty weird, but that is true in the United States and has been for a long time.”
However, the religious fundamentalists have become a political force more recently, notes Chomsky, tying the country’s “religious-fundamentalist” side to what we see in the run up to the US presidential elections, particularly the mobilisation of the religious right […]
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Thursday, February 11th, 2016
Michael Sainato, - The Hill
Stephan: Pulitzer Prize winning investigative economist and reporter David Cay Johnston spells it out, and I agree with every word he says, "Corporate socialism is where we socialize losses and privatize gains. Companies that have failed in the marketplace stick the taxpayers with their losses, but when they make money they get to keep it, and secondly, huge amounts of capital are given to companies by taxpayers,"
David Cay Johnston said in a phone interview. " This is the core of America's democracy crisis.
Credit: edushyster.com
The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the Democratic nomination has pushed the issue of wealth inequality to the forefront of mainstream politics. Once a tenet isolated to the fringes of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the expanding gap between the rich and poor in America is now being acknowledged by both Republicans and Democrats.
Conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt was recently asked in a New York Times interview about the Republican Party’s unwillingness to increase taxes on the wealthy. He responded, “I don’t think it’s very good for the society to have billionaires. It creates envy. And envy destroys republics.” Hewitt added, “You don’t need 10 billion dollars. Nobody does. The country does.”
This growing animosity toward the greed of the immensely wealthy is not merely symptomatic of a popular presidential candidates’ rhetoric, but indicative of the harrowing economic inequalities existing in American society and politics. The 62 richest people in the world have as […]
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Thursday, February 11th, 2016
Joseph Mangano and Janette D. Sherman, - counterpunch
Stephan: Civilian or military nuclear power is, and always has been, a death technology. Here is a medical crisis you have probably never heard about, but which could affect you.
Is it possible for an epidemic to be invisible?
Since 1991 the annual number of newly documented cases of thyroid cancer in the United States has skyrocketed from 12,400 to 62,450. It’s now the seventh most common type of cancer.
Relatively little attention is paid to the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland that wraps around the throat. Many don’t even know what the gland does. But this small organ (and the hormone it produces) is crucial to physical and mental development, especially early in life.
Cancer of the thyroid also gets little attention, perhaps because it is treatable, with long-term survival rates more than 90 percent. Still, the obvious question is what is causing this epidemic, and what can be done to address it?
Recently, there has been a debate in medical journals, with several authors claiming that the increase in thyroid cancer is the result of doctors doing a better job of detecting the disease at an earlier stage. A team of Italian researchers who published a paper last January split the difference, citing increased rates and better diagnosis. But as rates of all stages of thyroid […]
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Wednesday, February 10th, 2016
JANETTE HILLIS-JAFFE, - Prevent Disease
Stephan: Here is a new perspective on Alzheimers. Clearly the rate of AD is increasing, why has not been established. But as I read the literature it does seem to me that lifestyle choices play a larger than realized role.
Many scientists have believed that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is passed through the family line and is genetic due to the possession of a particular set of genes, however research is showing the incidence is more correlated to excitotoxins and heavy metals which play a critical role in the development of several neurological disorders, especially in North America.
Not Genetic
If AD was purely genetic, we would expect four natural consequences to be true:
- Global spatial distribution would be random and uniform;
- There would not be an earlier and rapidly increasing onset of the disease;
- Migration would not alter the incidence of this disease; and
- Changes in lifestyle would have no impact on someone with the disease.
Human genes do not change quickly, they remain constant over long periods of time which means that if AD was genetic we would not expect to see fast increasing incidences of the disease in younger people.
However, the opposite is true, we are seeing the rates of AD increasing faster than the population is aging (almost to epidemic proportions), particularly in the USA, Canada, England, Norway and Australia. We […]
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