Wednesday, June 21st, 2017
BRIAN KAHN, - Salon/Climate Central
Stephan: Here is a consequence of climate change you may not have expected. I read this as an alert that the migration is about to begin out of the Southwest for lack of water and because of high temperatures for long stretches of the year. Living in Egypt and working in the desert doing an archaeological dig taught me that even the Bedouin quit working when it gets above 114°F. Already the streets of Phoenix are devoid of pedestrians in the summer because of the heat.
Credit: AP/Wilfredo Lee
An intense heat wave is crippling the West this week, sending the mercury above 120 degrees in places like Phoenix. In a sign of just how hot things are getting, some airlines have had to cancel flights because of the heat.
American Airlines said it cancelled 50 flights out of Phoenix Sky Harbor aboard Bombardier CRJ aircraft on Tuesday because the planes can’t operate above 118 degrees.
Heat waves are
intimately tied to climate change as rising background temperatures make them more intense and common. The latest batch of heat will cook an area from northern California to western Texas, a region home to some seven of the 10
fastest-warming cities in the country.
Temperature records have already fallen across California and heat will build throughout the week. Sacramento, San Jose, Palm Springs, Fresno and Death Valley all set daily highs on Monday. But the hottest temperatures aren’t even expected to arrive until Tuesday. They’ll last through Thursday, and forecast highs mean the region could set all-time records.
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Stephan: There is no other developed nation in the world that has child gun death figures like the United States. To the NRA it is just a cost of business. They and their followers want silencers, mentally ill people with the right to arm, and an armed hidden carry general society. We are a very sick country.
As a result 92 a day, 644 people a week, 33,000 a year die by gun fire in America every year. As this report lays out a horrifying number are children. Notice also that there is a strong correlation between whether a state is Red values, and the rate of child gun death.
Credit: Mother Jones
Few stories are more heartbreaking than those involving children who are injured or killed by gunshots. It isn’t hard to find them: In June alone, a 6-year-old accidentally shot and killed a 4-year-old in South Carolina, a father accidentally shot and killed his 9-year-old daughter in Indiana and an 8-year-old Mississippi boy was accidentally shot in the chest. His grandparents drove him to the hospital, but he died 45 minutes later. Sadly, the list of child gun deaths goes on.
Though we constantly see examples in the news, child gun injuries and deaths may be even more prevalent in the United States than we realized. A study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics showed that an average of 5,790 children in the United States receive emergency room treatment for gun-related injuries each year, and around 21 percent of those injuries are unintentional. The study also found that an average of 1,297 children die annually from gun-related injuries, making guns the third-leading […]
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Betsy Hartmann, - Alternet
Stephan: One of the manifestations of the Christofascist cult that has captured Christianity in the United States is a level of medieval thought unseen in any other developed Western Nation. Visitors, even religious visitors find the cult bizarre and off-putting. It has captured the minds of millions of Americans, and one consequence of that is an obsession with the Apocalypse. It has many profound and poorly understood implications for the country. Here is a good take on this trend.
The following is an excerpt from the new book The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness by Betsy Hartmann (Seven Stories Press, May 2017):
Credit: Creative Commons / Max Pixel
According to opinion polls, a staggering percentage of Americans accept that the world will end in a battle in Armageddon. In a 2010 Pew poll, 41 percent of respondents said they expected Jesus Christ to return to Earth by 2050. Two years later a Reuters poll found that over one-fifth of the American population believed the end of the world will happen in their lifetime, as compared to 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Belgium, and 8 percent in Great Britain. Another recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute reported that 49 percent of Americans think that natural disasters are a sign of “the end times.” (emphasis added)
In the months before the purported December 21, 2012 Mayan apocalypse, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) received so many inquiries from children and adults terrified that a […]
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Corey S. Powell, - NBC - MACH
Stephan: Based on what I have seen in experiments I have been arguing for 40 years that Max Planck was right. Consciousness is the fundamental. Also I have been predicting that the materialist paradigm was slowly being consumed by anomalies. And it is happening. Here is a report on what others are now beginning to say.
Credit: NASA
For centuries, modern science has been shrinking the gap between humans and the rest of the universe, from Isaac Newton showing that one set of laws applies equally to falling apples and orbiting moons to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff” — that the atoms of our bodies were literally forged in the nuclear furnaces of other stars.
Even in that context, Gregory Matloff’s ideas are shocking. The veteran physicist at New York City College of Technology recently published a paper arguing that humans may be like the rest of the universe in substance and in spirit. A “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space, he argues. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware.
The notion of a conscious universe sounds more like the stuff of late night TV than academic journals. Called by its formal academic name, though, “panpsychism” turns out to have prominent supporters in a variety […]
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Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Op-ed Colmnist - The New York Times
Stephan: I'll let Paul Krugman make the case, with which I agree
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, with fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill this month.
Credit Zach Gibson
Zombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip — although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place.
What are these zombies of which I speak? Among wonks, the term refers to policy ideas that should have been abandoned long ago in the face of evidence and experience, but just keep shambling along.
The right’s zombie-in-chief is the insistence that low taxes on the rich are the key to prosperity. This doctrine should have died when Bill Clinton’s tax hike failed to cause the predicted recession and was followed instead by an economic boom. It should have died again when George W. Bush’s tax cuts were followed by lackluster growth, then a crash. And it […]
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