Monday, August 15th, 2016
Fay Wells, Vice President for Strategy - The Washington Post
Stephan: As I read this piece I was taken back to the 60s when I locked myself out of my apartment in Georgetown, DC, and how the police came were deferential and helped me get back in.
If you don't think there is a difference between living in America as a White person and a Black person you're not paying attention.
Fay Wells Credit: Kyle Monk/Washington Post
On Sept. 6, I locked myself out of my apartment in Santa Monica, Calif. I was in a rush to get to my weekly soccer game, so I decided to go enjoy the game and deal with the lock afterward.
A few hours and a visit from a locksmith later, I was inside my apartment and slipping off my shoes when I heard a man’s voice and what sounded like a small dog whimpering outside, near my front window. I imagined a loiterer and opened the door to move him along. I was surprised to see a large dog halfway up the staircase to my door. I stepped back inside, closed the door and locked it.
I heard barking. I approached my front window and loudly asked what was going on. Peering through my blinds, I saw a gun. A man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointing it at me. I stepped back and heard: “Come outside with your hands up.” I thought: This man has […]
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Sunday, August 14th, 2016
David Sarasohn, - New Republic
Stephan: We stand at a point on the road of human history where those cultures that are best educated, and that live in a wellness oriented society will be best prepared to deal with what is coming. In contrast the Republican Party is doing everything in its power from the Rightwing media echo chamber, to public universities, and school, to produce fear, indoctrination, and ignorance.
I have made this point many times in SR, and here is yet a further demonstration that, on the basis of social outcome data, it is clear that Republican governance is detrimental and inferior -- if the point of the drill is individual and social wellbeing. If the only thing that matters is power and profit for the few, well that's another matter.
When Ronald Reagan launched his bid for governor of California in 1966, igniting the conservative revolution that would reinvent the Republican Party, he promised “to clean up the mess at Berkeley.” He blamed the campus unrest on “a small minority of hippies, radicals and filthy speech advocates” whose leaders should “be taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off campus—permanently.” After taking office, Reagan promptly fired University of California President Clark Kerr and axed the university system’s budget.
Half a century later, surveying the national public-university funding scene in 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education bemoaned “the list of budgetary showdowns playing out between Republican governors and higher education.” While higher education’s state funding problems over the past decades have bipartisan causes, the targeting of these institutions’ budgets lately is much more common in states with GOP leadership—and may worsen yet.
Writing at Salon last year, Sean McElwee and Robbie Hiltonsmith analyzed a Grapevine study from Illinois State University and found “when Republicans take over governor’s mansions they reduce spending on higher education by $0.23 per $1,000 in personal income (a measure of the state’s total tax base). […]
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Sunday, August 14th, 2016
Brittany Patterson and David Peterson, with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, Writer - ClimateWire and Researcher - Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station - Scientific American/Climate Wire
Stephan: Ronlyn and I are witnessing the change in the forests where we live in the Pacific Northwest. Just another aspect of what climate change is doing to the world we are used to.
Douglas Fir Forest
Credit: Marshal Hedin/ Flickr
Just as the planet is being taxed from record-breaking temperatures, new research finds iconic Douglas firs across the West are water- and heat-stressed.
Similar to the humans who find themselves sluggish during a heat wave, when water is scarce, Douglas firs also put the brakes on growing — a choice that could have ramifications for forest carbon stocks and the global carbon cycle.
“If trees are being less productive, if they are not growing as well, they are taking in less CO2 from the atmosphere,” said Christina Restaino, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Tree stress can lead to the point where trees die, and when we lose tree species on the landscape, there’s always the question of what is going to grow back in its place.”
Restaino led research that examined data from more than 2,000 tree cores from 122 locations across the Western United States. The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, […]
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Sunday, August 14th, 2016
dominique mosbergen, Reporter - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Rising temperatures means a lot more than that you get to wear lighter clothes. Just as trees are being stressed by these changes so is the ocean, and we ourselves. And it is only going to get worse, until we decide to work with the Earth's great meta-systems, instead of trying to dominate them. It will never happen under Republican governance, which is why this November's election is so important.
Bleached Leather Corals, Sinularia sp., Buyat Bay, North Sulawesi, Indonesia
Rising ocean temperatures may be making us ill and it’s only getting worse.
Warmth-loving marine bacteria are growing in abundance and posing an increased risk to human health as waters heat up, according to a study published this week.
Vibrio bacteria causes an estimated 80,000 illnesses and 100 deaths in the U.S. every year. Typically found in warm and salty coastal waters or river estuaries, the bacteria are usually picked up through the consumption of raw or undercooked seafood, like oysters, or cuts in the skin when swimming.
There’s been an unprecedented number of Vibrio cases in the U.S. and northern Europe in recent years, said the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The primary reason for this spike is climate change-fueled temperature increases in parts of the Atlantic Ocean, the researchers concluded.
“We were able to demonstrate that there was an increase in the numbers of Vibrios, probably a […]
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Sunday, August 14th, 2016
Tara MacIsaac, - Epoch Times
Stephan: To me one of the most interesting things about Near Death experiences is the lengths to which materialists who believe that consciousness is entirely physiologically based will go to misrepresent and distort the research. It is obvious to anyone who actually reads the studies that there is a nonlocal, non-physiologically based, aspect of consciousness. Here is some the latest research.
Citation: Batthyany A. “Complex Visual Imagery and Cognition During Near-Death Experiences,” can be found in Volume 34, No. 2,
of the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
If the mind is just a function of the brain, it stands to reason that the worse the brain is injured, the worse the mind would function. While this is what much of current brain research is finding, a body of evidence exists suggesting otherwise: under extreme circumstances, such as close to death, the mind may function well—or even better than usual—when the brain is impaired.
This suggests the mind may function independently of the brain.
One of the researchers who has been studying such cases is Dr. Alexander Batthyany, a professor of theoretical psychology and the philosophy of psychology in Liechtenstein and at the cognitive science department at the University of Vienna.
In his most recent study, published this month in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, Batthyany and his colleagues reviewed thousands of accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) to determine the quality of vision and cognition.
He reported: “The more severe the physiological crisis, the more likely NDEers are to report having experienced clear and complex cognitive and sensory functioning.”
Part of Batthyany’s goal was to replicate earlier studies, few as they are, that […]
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