Knvul Sheikh, - Scientific American
Stephan: There are going to be so many unanticipated consequences to climate change. Here's an example of what I mean. You may have already seen this trend playing out.
17 Year cicada
Swarms of cicadas are unexpectedly crawling out from under trees from North Carolina to New Jersey. The red-eyed insects are almost impossible to miss; they fly around lazily, plunking into backyard barbeques and crashing into cars. They litter the ground with their crunchy husks as they molt. Most noticeably, they chirp en masse for their mates, producing a relentless, shrill buzz that is recognized as a song of summer. And within a month they are gone.
Different populations, or broods, of “periodical” cicadas emerge in distinct geographical regions during specific years, after spending a 13- or 17-year span growing underground. (Some “annual” species just emerge yearly.) Scientists were expecting to see Brood VI bugs in South Carolina and Georgia, which happened, but they got a surprise when Brood X cicadas also started appearing in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Ohio and Indiana last week—four years earlier than anticipated.
Experts suspect a warming climate, with more warm weeks a year during which the underground nymphs can grow, could be triggering some […]
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Nesrine Malik, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I am not an economist; but I use the research of economists. My measures are social outcome data, of which economics is a part. My criteria are wellbeing. It frees me from politics except as an anthropological or psychophysical factor. Also from religion, which I see as quite distinct from seeking to open to nonlocal consciousness, which traditionally is thought of as spiritual. Which I see as essential to understanding the Biosphere.
From this perspective has come my concept of the Theorem of Wellbeing. That is: policies which foster wellbeing, are more compassionate and life-affirming, more efficient, more productive, easier to implement, more pleasant to live under, more enduring and cheaper. I have always thought BREXIT was a bad idea because it increased the probability that it would end up unifying Ireland, and staying with the EU, and separating Scotland which will also stay with the EU, as well as producing a general debasement of wellbeing, ultimately particularly in the England that remained. The veritable antipode; the negative proof.
Here's the latest take on what is happening with BREXIT.
The Bank of England. ‘Britain is officially the worst performer among the G7 so far this year, held back by high inflation that is putting consumers under pressure.’
Credit: Hannah Mckay/Reuters
This week Britain slumped to the bottom of the GDP growth rate league table of advanced economies. Along with Italy, Britain is officially the worst performer among the G7 so far this year, held back by high inflation that is putting consumers under pressure. The cause of that high inflation is primarily the knock-on effect of the weaker pound, which dropped by 20% immediately after the Brexit referendum result last year.
Just because the world didn’t change on 24 June 2016 doesn’t mean that it was never going to change. The time-lag between cause and effect is a cornerstone of economic behaviour. This basic dynamic takes into consideration the notion, observable over decades of analysis, […]
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Bradley Eli, M.Div., Ma.Th., Staff Writer - Church Militant
Stephan: The Church Militant is a rightwing anti-homosexual, anti-woman website. But in this instance they report accurate data. From which they draw the wrong conclusions in my view, but the data itself is important. There is a cohort of homosexual men who find the priesthood attractive. Some seek out young boys, often of the age when they themselves had a first imprinting sexual experience, and larger group who seek out contemporaries, just as there are heterosexual priests who molest girls or, more likely who enter into discreet sexual liaisons with female contemporaries. There has always been, and will always be a sexual problem in a celibate Roman Catholic Church. The major difference between past and present, in my opinion is that media now exists and covers it. Celibacy works as an individual choice, but not as a requisite for institutional membership.
WASHINGTON — A new report by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) confirms that the clerical sex abuse scandal is a crisis not of pedophilia but of homosexuality.
The USCCB annual report on clerical sex abuse, released Thursday, confirms earlier findings that the priest sex abuse crisis is a homosexual problem. According to the report, “Eighty-one percent of the victims were male,” and when the age of the victim was determined, only “one in ten were under age ten.” The report further confirmed that these findings were “similar to those reported for year 2015.”
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice reported similar findings. After the sex abuse crisis exploded in the media in 2002 following the Boston Globe exposé, the USCCB created a National Review Board and tasked the John Jay College to conduct an investigation into clerical sex abuse. The College’s 2004 report revealed that 80 percent of the victims were male, and almost 90 percent were post-pubescent. A report issued in 2011 affirmed these facts, finding 81 percent of sex abuse victims were […]
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Dan Grazier & Pierre Sprey , Jack Shanahan Fellow at the Project On Government Oversight and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's "Whiz Kid" - Project on Government Oversight
Stephan: The military industrial complex, in my view is completely out of the control, as the F-35, the Zumwalt class destroyer, and now the carrier Gerald Ford all demonstrate. We don't to spend more money, we need to spend less and spend it more carefully.
President Trump speaking on the nuclear carrier USS Gerald Ford.
President Trump used the Navy’s next generation aircraft carrier, the CVN-78 USS Gerald R. Ford, as a backdrop to unveil his vision for the next defense budget in March 2017. The moment was meant to symbolize his commitment to rebuilding the military, but it also positioned the President in front of a monument to the Navy’s and defense industry’s ability to justify spending billions in taxypayer dollars on unproven technologies that often deliver worse performance at a higher cost. The Ford program also provides yet another example of the dangers of the Navy’s and industry’s end-running the rigorous combat testing that is essential to ensuring our fighting men and women go to war with equipment that works.
The Navy had expected to have the ship delivered in 2014 at a cost of $10.5 billion. But the inevitable problems resulting from the concurrency the Navy built into developing the Ford’s new and risky technologies, more than a dozen in all, […]
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Stephan: The older I get the more I recognize the role food, and exposure to tiny amounts of chemicals and toxins have in mediating our lives for good or ill. Here is the latest on tea.
More information: Weronica E. Ek et al. Tea and coffee consumption in relation to DNA methylation in four European cohorts,
Human Molecular Genetics (2017).
DOI: 10.1093/hmg/ddx194
Epigenetic changes are chemical modifications that turn our genes off or on. In a new study from Uppsala University, researchers show that tea consumption in women leads to epigenetic changes in genes that are known to interact with cancer and estrogen metabolism. The results are published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics.
It is well known that our environment and lifestyle factors, such as food choices, smoking and exposure to chemicals, can lead to epigenetic changes. In the current study, researchers from Uppsala University in collaboration with research groups around Europe, investigated if coffee and tea consumption may lead to epigenetic changes. Previous studies have suggested that both coffee and tea play an important role in modulating disease-risk in humans by suppressing tumour progression, decreasing inflammation and influencing estrogen metabolism, mechanisms that may be mediated by epigenetic changes.
The results show that there are epigenetic changes in women consuming tea, but not in men. Interestingly, many of these epigenetic changes were found in genes involved in cancer and estrogen metabolism. “Previous studies have shown […]
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