Alex Emmons, - The Intercept
Stephan: In a society that has no social value but profit every institution eventually is corrupted. Here is a story of the disgusting and growing corruption of the media.
The Washington Post of 2016 is a pale echo of The Washington Post of the 1970s and Watergate, and the same is true of The Atlantic.
At the award-winning seafood restaurant in downtown Cleveland that The Atlantic rented out for the entire four-day Republican National Convention, GOP Rep. Bill Johnson turned to me and explained that solar panels are not a viable energy source because “the sun goes down.”
Johnson had just stepped off the stage where he was one of the two featured guests speaking at The Atlantic’s “cocktail caucus,” where restaurant staff served complimentary wine, cocktails, and “seafood towers” of shrimp, crab cakes, oysters, and mussels to delegates, guests, reporters and, of course, the people paying the bills.
The event was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.
Johnson, a climate denier and influential member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, spoke of a future when American scientists “solve these big problems” and “figure out how to harness the sun’s energy, and store it up, so that we can put it out over time.” His hypothetical invention, of course, is called a battery, and was […]
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Melissa Healy, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Here is some good news about how to prophylactically address dementia.
Computerized braining training can hold off cognitive decline and dementia, new research suggests.
Credit: Carlos Chavez / Los Angeles Times
If you’re intent on keeping dementia at bay, new research suggests you’ll need more than crossword puzzles, aerobic exercise and an active social life. In a study released Sunday, researchers found that older adults who did exercises to shore up the speed at which they processed visual information could cut by nearly half their likelihood of cognitive decline or dementia over a 10-year period.
The new clinical trial results, presented Sunday at the Alzheimer’s Assn.’s International Conference in Toronto, establish specialized brain training as a potentially powerful strategy to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease and other afflictions, including normal aging, that sap memory and reduce function.
With 76 million baby boomers reaching the age of maximum vulnerability to Alzheimer’s and with no effective treatments available to alter the disease’s progression, researchers are keen to […]
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Candida Moss, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Part of the mythology of modern Evangelical Christianity is the unshakeable conviction that Christianity was created by White people who looked pretty much like Americans. It is a no less potent myth than Creationism, and in my opinion it is the foundation for much of today's racism.
Here is an essay that lays out some relevant facts concerning Christianity's founding and first centuries. Jesus was not a tall Northern European man with a clean jawline and golden hair. The closest modern body type and face would be a Palestinian.
And that would be true of most of the other founders as well, unless they were Black.
Despite what one prominent Donald Trump supporter claims, the success of Christianity had very little to do with what many Trump supporters would see as white people.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention congressman Steve King suggested that white people had been responsible for humanity’s greatest achievements including, among other things, the spread of Christianity.
It came about during an appearance on MSNBC when a panelist commented on the lack of diversity at the convention. King argued: “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other sub-group of people contribute more to civilization?” When he was pushed about whether or not he meant Caucasians, King responded, “Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America, and any place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.”
There’s so much to dislike about these statements that […]
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James M Miller, Author of "The Priest" - The Sydney Morning Herald
Stephan: Australia much like the U.S. has an ongoing sexual molestation of children crisis involving Catholic clergy. As a country they have addressed it more aggressively than we in the U.S. and it has come to this in one of Australia's most prominent papers.
I agree with the argument in this report but I doubt there will be rapid change. Older priests demand celibacy of younger ones, just as older eunuchs in Turkey supported the continuing castration of boys. "If I had to suffer it so should you."
The requirement for celibacy has no basis in scripture; no aspect of Catholic faith is at stake in its abolition.
Credit: Scott Cramer
The scandal of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church will not be over until the lessons of this global tragedy are recognised and acted upon. From my own experience, I am convinced that to set things right the church (for which I retain respect) must abolish the requirement for priestly celibacy.
The good news is that this change can be made.
The requirement for celibacy has no basis in scripture; no aspect of Catholic faith is at stake in its abolition.
The requirement for celibacy has no basis in scripture; no aspect of Catholic faith is at stake in its abolition. Photo: Scott Cramer
The requirement for celibacy has no basis in scripture; no aspect of Catholic faith is at stake in its abolition. It is a matter of what is […]
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Michael Moore, Oscar and Emmy Award Director - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Michael Moore has written an essay with which I largely agree. I do not see the Ventura Effect, he details, in the same way, but his central thesis that Trump could win the election and the reasons he gives for this happening I agree are valid. I have just returned from two weeks in Italy speaking at two conferences and it has afforded me the opportunity to look at the U.S. from the outside. Listening to people from all classes, income, and educational levels has been very revealing for me, and I am continually reminded of Germany and the rise of Hitler. The analogy was made to me a number of times by Europeans.
I see both Trump and Sanders as expressions of the outrage the population of America feels about the rise of the oligarchy. Trump is a candidate of fear, racism, nativism, and anger. Sanders is his antipode. But the central problem, the leverage point the the Great Neo-feudalism Trend in which the real power transfers from the "elected" political states to the trans-national corporate states.
This is our last chance to stop this process. If Trump wins, and along with Moore I think this is very possible, America will go down a very dark path that will provoke global disorder augmented by the stress of climate change, which will not be recognized by the Republlicans until it is too late to do anything meaningful about it.
Michael Moore
Friends:
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”
Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.
I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because […]
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