EMILY SWANSON, - Associated Press
Stephan: This is the profile of a dying democracy. The system doesn't work when everyone thinks it is rigged.
WASHINGTON, DC — Few Americans have much confidence in the U.S. political system, the government in general, or in either political party.
Most say they’re interested in the 2016 presidential election, but they also feel frustrated, helpless and even angry with the way the election is going, a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows.
Democrats and Republicans alike feel down in the dumps about the election and about the political system in general.
Some things to know about Americans’ opinions on their government and the political system from the AP-NORC poll:
LITTLE CONFIDENCE IN GOVERNMENT
Few Americans have a lot of confidence in any of the branches of the government. Just 4 percent say they have a great deal of confidence in Congress, while 48 percent say they have only some and 46 percent have hardly any.
The other branches of government fare a little better, but still don’t inspire much confidence. Fifteen percent say they have a lot of confidence in the executive branch, 50 percent have some and 33 percent have hardly any. And 24 percent have a great deal of confidence in the Supreme Court, 58 percent have some confidence and […]
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MICHELLE INNIS, - The New York Times
Stephan: The alarms just keep ringing.
Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef
SYDNEY, Australia — Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in the past three months has killed as much as half of the coral in the north but left large parts of the southern reaches with only minor damage, scientists in Australia said on Sunday.
The current bleaching is the third to strike the roughly 1,400-mile-long reef in 18 years and the most extreme scientists have recorded.
“In the north, the mortality rates are off the scale,” said Prof. Terry Hughes, the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. “There, the coral mortality rates are approaching 50 percent, and the impact of the bleaching is still unfolding.”
But from Cairns, in tropical north Queensland, southward down the east coast of the state, about 95 percent of the coral has survived, Professor Hughes said. Mildly bleached coral should regain its color […]
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Amanda Gefter, - Quanta Magazine
Stephan: As I have published here I see consciousness as fundamental and causal. This is the antipode to materialism itself a failing paradigm. The physicalist view of the world is slowing failing because it cannot explain the phenomena observed. Neuroscientist Donald Hoffman is I think one of the most interesting researchers making the transition to consciousness as causal through his own discipline, and he explains his thinking in this interview.
This is the paradigm crisis, just as predicted by Thomas Kuhn, generally recognized as the most important philosopher and historian of science in the 20th century. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn first defines a paradigm, and then shows how paradigms go into crisis when they fail to encompass anomalistic data before Phoenix life another paradigm emerges.
Professor Donald Hoffman
As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.
Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion […]
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Emily Chung, - CBC News (Canada)
Stephan: We are killing off the bees, and the birds, and the butterflies, and our rabid psychotic greed, and our totally wrong view of our place on the planet, blinds us to what we are doing. Here is the latest on the birds; it is a shameful sad story. Take your children out to see the birds, they might not have the chance when they are your age.
A billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970, and a third of bird species across the continent are threatened with extinction, a new report says.
The first State of North America’s Birds report finds that of 1,154 bird species that live in and migrate among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, 432 are of “high concern” due to low or declining populations, shrinking ranges and threats such as human-caused habitat loss, invasive predators and climate change.
Steven Price, president of Bird Studies Canada, a member of the North American Bird Initiative behind the report, says that since 1970, “the estimate is we’ve lost at least a billion birds from North America…. The trend lines are continuing down. They have to be turned around or will fall below a threshold where they can be recovered.”
Most threatened, with more than half […]
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Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: I have known a number of scientists and physicians who have worked for the pharmaceutical industry. They are generally decent people trying to make life easier for others. I have also known several upper management people in the same industry. Scumbags to a person interested in nothing but profit. That contradiction, I think, lies at the heart of what is wrong with this industry. Here is the ghastly story of OxyContin
The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications.
Patients would no longer have to wake up in the middle of the night to take their pills, Purdue told doctors. One OxyContin tablet in the morning and one before bed would provide “smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night.”
1996
OxyContin Press Release
When Purdue unveiled OxyContin in 1996, it touted 12-hour duration.
On the strength of that promise, OxyContin became America’s bestselling painkiller, and Purdue reaped $31 billion in revenue.
But OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.
The problem offers new insight into why so many people have become addicted to OxyContin, one of the most abused pharmaceuticals in U.S. history.
The Times investigation, based on thousands of pages of confidential Purdue documents and other records, found that:
