Tuesday, September 17th, 2019
Stephan: The correlation between fundamentalist religion, of whatever variety, and sexual obsession, male dominance, and sexual dysfunction is so strong that here is a question: Are sexually dysfunctional people drawn to these religions, or do these religions by their social pressures and worldview produce sexually dysfunctional men and women, men particularly? Or is it both dynamics? Here is the fundamentalist Jewish manifestation of this. I personally think it is a form of mental illness masquerading as religion.
Orthodox Jewish garments
Credit: Sarah Teller
In 1973, when Barry Singer was a fifteen-year-old student at New York’s Yeshiva University High School for Boys, the vice principal, Rabbi George Finkelstein, stopped him in a stairwell. Claiming he wanted to check his tzitzit—the strings attached to Singer’s prayer shawl—Finkelstein, Singer says, pushed the boy over the third-floor banister, in full view of his classmates, and reached down his pants. “If he’s not wearing tzitzit,” Finkelstein told the surrounding children, “he’s going over the stairs!”
“He played it as a joke, but I was completely at his mercy,” Singer recalled. For the rest of his time at Yeshiva, Singer would often wear his tzitzit on the outside of his shirt—though this was regarded as rebellious—for fear that Finkelstein might find an excuse to assault him again.
Jay Goldberg, who attended Yeshiva from 1980 to 1984, says that he endured years of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse from Finkelstein. The rabbi, he said, forced him and others to wrestle with him while he became sexually aroused, and demanded that they […]
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Monday, September 16th, 2019
Olivia Rosane, - EcoWatch
Stephan: Exactly as I predicted. And next year the number will be greater, and the year after greater yet, until there are 760 million of us on the move, driven by climate change.
The number comes from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which has been using data from governments, UN humanitarian agencies and news accounts to publish annual reports since 2003. Their mid-year figures for 2019, published Thursday, marked the highest number of disaster displacements the organization has ever recorded by this point in the year. The number was nearly double the number displaced by conflict and violence during the same period this year, The Independent pointed out.
“In today’s changing climate, mass displacement triggered by extreme weather events is becoming the norm,” the report […]
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Monday, September 16th, 2019
Stephan: In order to maintain a sustainable civilization as the climate changes we will have to give up the Abrahamic Dominionist view which makes profit our only social priority. Instead, we will have to see ourselves as a part of the matrix of consciousness recognizing that all consciousnesses are interconnected and interdependent .
This will create new technologies, and here is an example, an early data point on what will become a powerful trend.
The interior of the Eastgate Center, a retail and office building in Harare, Zimbabwe, modeled after a termite mound.
Credit: Mick Pearce
Faced with record-breaking temperatures, sweltering heat waves, and soaring AC costs, engineers and architects are finding creative ways to maintain livable temperatures indoors while using less energy. Their muse: plants, animals, and insects.
We’ve got a lot to learn from the natural world. After all, humans are far from the only species that has shown resilience in the face of extreme heat. Creatures ranging from Australia’s night parrot, a desert-dweller evolved to be nocturnal, to the Dorcas Gazelle, which conserves water by not peeing, have survived in intensely warm environments for millions of years. Why not take a page out of their book?
Perhaps the most famous example of nature-inspired architecture comes from Mick Pearce, a Zimbabwean architect whose designs model termite mounds. Termites might not be the most majestic creatures, but they build impressively tall skyscrapers — towers of dirt that can top 30 feet. (If humans built a tower the […]
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Monday, September 16th, 2019
Eric Boehlert , - Daily Kos
Stephan: I see Trump, the Republican Senate, and the rightwing media stoking the hate, fear, and racism of their base At this point I think we have about a 20 percent of devolving in some parts of the country into social violence. Here's another assessment of this trend.
Fox News talking heads and other conservative pundits warn that guys like this will rise up if Democrats succeed in reforming gun laws.
Credit: AFP/Getty
That’s one way to try halt public debate in this country: by threatening mass violence and a bloody people’s revolt in the streets. That’s what conservative media voices, including those on Fox News, have done in recent days. Specifically, the reckless rhetoric has revolved around proposed new gun laws in the wake of America’s latest string of mass shootings. Those are laws that would likely only be enacted if Democrats won the Senate and the White House in 2020.
If you take “people’s guns away from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence,” The View’s Meghan McCain announced. “What you are calling for is civil war,” warned Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. “What you are calling for is an incitement to violence.” And that was just a sampling of the right-wing media hysteria last week.
These kinds of alerts about looming political violence if the opposition party […]
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Monday, September 16th, 2019
Stephan: Here is what is beginning to look like very good news concerning Alzheimers.
Dr. Chang Yi Wang and her daughter Mei Mei Hu
Alzheimer’s is one of the most horrible diseases because it robs a person of their personality and memory, and it eventually leads to them losing the battle with the disease.
There are currently over 5.8 million people in the U.S. living with it, and it is the sixth-largest life-taker in the country.
The disease devastates many families, and it is estimated that Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia will cost the U.S. $290 billion dollars this year alone.
Even though there have been over 200 attempts to find a cure for the disease, all of them have been unsuccessful, and the clinical trial termination rate is 98%.
Alzheimer’s disease is caused by plaque deposits that develop in the brain and they become toxic to brain cells, and one of the biggest problems to finding a cure for it is that it’s currently impossible to clear out the deposits from the brain tissue. Since scientists are aware of this, they have turned their attention to prevention and […]
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