Wednesday, February 24th, 2016
Stephan: Making college campuses places where students can carry concealed guns inevitably led to this. I would have to think carefully about accepting a post teaching on a Texas campus given my data based views, and I suspect the same will occur to others. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on Texas public universities -- all the private schools opted out? Over time I predict it will degrade them.
Credit: Shutterstock
“Be careful discussing sensitive topics,” professors at the University of Houston were warned in a faculty meeting about the new “campus carry” gun policy.
An unofficial forum of professors suggested that teachers may want to “drop certain topics from your curriculum,” and “not ‘go there’ if you sense anger,” the Houston Chronicle reports. (emphasis added)
A new Texas law will allow people to carry concealed handguns on university campuses.
Jeffrey Villines, a Ph.D. student in the university’s English department, shared a photo of what he said is a slide from a “recent campus carry dialogue at UH, in response to faculty concerns about dangers from armed students.”
Reflecting on the presentation, Villines says “teachers cannot forbid firearms in class, or even ask who is carrying one.” He claims the school would be “fined $10k for violations.” (emphasis added)
A spokesperson at the University of Houston stressed in a message to Salon that this slide was not created by the university’s Campus Carry Workgroup and “is not official policy.” The spokesperson also indicated that the university’s […]
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016
Stephan: Here is some important news about Fluoride. If you live in a city where fluoride is added to the water, and there are many in the U.S. that do so, I suggest the investment in a good quality water filter would be a good move.
Here is the actual abstract from the paper reported on:
Lancet Neurol. 2014 Mar; 13 (3):330-8. doi: 10.1016/S1474-4422(13)70278-3. Epub 2014 Feb 17.
Neurobehavioural effects of developmental toxicity.
Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants-manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy. Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity. To coordinate these efforts and to accelerate translation of science into prevention, we propose the urgent formation of a new international clearinghouse.
The movement to remove industrial sodium fluoride from the world’s water supply has been growing in recent years, with evidence coming out against the additive from several sources.
Now, a report from the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, has officially classified fluoride as a neurotoxin — in the same category as arsenic, lead and mercury. (emphasis added)
The news was broken by author Stefan Smyle, who cited a report published in The Lancet Neurology, Volume 13, Issue 3, in the March 2014 edition, by authors Dr. Phillippe Grandjean and Philip J. Landrigan, MD. The report, which was officially released in 2014 and published in the journal, can be viewed by clicking here.
Fluoride Classified Along with Mercury, Lead and Others
As noted in the summary of the report, a systematic review identified five different similar industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene.
The summary goes on to state that six additional developmental neurotoxicants have also now been identified: manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. The authors added that even more of […]
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016
Stephan: The Earth's great meta-systems are planetary not local. That has powerful implications as this report spells out.
Credit: Jim Urquhart/Reuters
Rainfall samples show increased levels of mercury are showing up in the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest but continuing to drop along the East Coast, according to a new study. The culprit is consistent with emissions from coal-burning power plants in Asia. (emphasis added)
Scientists from University of California Santa Cruz and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign analyzed data from a network of monitoring sites in the US and Canada that collected rainwater samples to test them for mercury, sulfate, nitrate and others pollutants going back to 1997. When researchers looked at 71 sites in the Midwest, Rocky Mountain and West Coast regions over the period of 2007 and 2013, they found many sites showed increased mercury concentrations, as much as 2 percent rise per year.
“It’s a surprising result,” David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study, told Scientific American. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may […]
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016
John Upton, - Scientific American
Stephan: You'd hardly know sea rise was happening if you listen to the media and the politicians. But in the world of science I see paper after paper on this subject, and the tone is increasingly urgent that remediation must begin or disaster is inevitable. Here is an example of what I mean.
The oceans have heaved up and down as world temperatures have waxed and waned, but as new research tracking the past 2,800 years shows, never during that time did the seas rise as sharply or as suddenly as has been the case during the last century. (emphasis added)
The new study, the culmination of a decade of work by three teams of farflung scientists, has charted what they called an “acceleration” in sea level rise that’s triggering and worsening flooding in coastlines around the world.
The findings also warn of much worse to come.
The scientists reported in a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have greater than 95 percent certainty that at least half of more than 5 inches of sea level rise they detected during the 20th century was directly caused by global warming.
“During the past millennia, sea level has never risen nearly as fast as during the last century,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a physics professor at Potsdam University in Germany, one of 10 authors of the paper. “That was to be […]
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016
Portia Crowe, - Business Insider
Stephan: One of the aspects defining the rise of the virtual corporate states, and the growth of the Neo-Feudal Trend is that it is increasingly difficult to know who actually owns the company making the product you are buying. He is an example of what I mean.
Credit: www.geconsumerandindustrial.com
Here’s a story you’ll be hearing about a lot this year.
Chinese companies have been buying up foreign businesses, including American ones, at a record rate, and it’s freaking lawmakers out.
There is General Electric’s sale of its appliance business to Qingdao-based Haier, Zoomlion’s bid for the heavy-lifting-equipment maker Terex Corp., and ChemChina’s record-breaking deal for the Swiss seeds and pesticides group Syngenta, valued at $48 billion.
Most recently, a unit of the Chinese conglomerate HNA Group said it would buy the technology distributor Ingram Micro for $6 billion.
And the most contentious deal so far might be the Chinese-led investor group Chongqing Casin Enterprise’s bid for the Chicago Stock Exchange.
A deal spree
To date, there have been 102 Chinese outbound mergers-and-acquisitions deals announced this year, amounting to $81.6 billion in value, according to Dealogic. That’s up from 72 deals worth $11 billion in the same period last year.
And they’re not expected to let up anytime soon. Slow economic growth in China and cheap prices abroad due to the stock market’s recent sell-off suggest the opposite.
“With the slowdown of the economy, […]
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