Stephan: Here is what has happened as a result of the Republican push to pass "Stand Your Ground" Laws at the state level. This is the latest data we have on the American obsessive gun psychosis. More death by firearms. With people wandering around armed with weapons, and poorly written "Stand Your Ground" laws we are becoming an increasingly dangerous country, and that is a factual statement as this report makes clear.
Mark McCloskey, center left, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri who first garnered attention in June 2020 after pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside his house in a gated community in St. Louis, poses with supporters of Kyle Rittenhouse and his wife Patricia McCloskey in front of the Kenosha County Courthouse while the jury deliberates the Rittenhouse trial on November 16, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Credit: Nathan Howard/Getty
So-called “stand your ground” laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws “should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths.”
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws.
Published Monday in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal, the study compares homicide trends in roughly two dozen states that enacted stand-your-ground (SYG) laws between 2000 and 2016 with patterns from 18 states that didn’t have such laws during the […]
Stephan: Here is an article supporting my argument that scientific research shows a matrix of consciousness in which all consciousness and that is much more than just human consciousness or even terrestrial consciousness is interconnected and interdependent. This is part of the emerging paradigm which sees consciousness as causal and fundamental, just as Max Planck, Einstein and others, including myself, have proposed.
Credit: Thenextweb.com
What if we could zoom out past our own myopic point of view and see the planet Earth and all of its inhabitants as one giant global intelligence?
That’s the question a trio of researchers recently tackled in a paper titled “Intelligence as a planetary scale process.”
AKA: the “By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet” theory, as we like to call it here at Neural.
This one’s a bit of a doozy. The paper itself is intriguing, but my first instinct was to call it ironically boring and painfully optimistic.
Here’s a snippet from the abstract:
We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon.
Stephan: Bioacoustics, is a term you may never have heard before, but it represents a particularly exciting new research field. It is very early days but it is already clear that the matrix of life is far more complex than most, even in science realize.
The ground beneath us is teeming with life. Now researchers are discovering that it’s also full of noise produced by the many life forms that spend time underground, from bacteria to insects to moles, mice and rabbits. Credit: Myriam Wares
The first time that Marcus Maeder stuck a noise sensor into the ground, it was on a whim. A sound artist and acoustic ecologist, he was sitting in a mountain meadow and pushed a special microphone he’d built into the soil. “I was just curious,” says Maeder, who is working on a dissertation on the sounds of biodiversity at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich.
He certainly wasn’t prepared for the clamor of sounds that started to flood his headset. “They were very strange. There was thrumming and chirring and scraping. You need a whole new vocabulary to describe it.” Maeder was eavesdropping, he realized, on creatures that live in the soil.
Stephan: This is a Christian minister talking about what is happening to his religion in the United States. You will notice that it mirrors my own thinking about this pseudo-Christian political cult.
President Donald Trump joins Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, Louise Gorsuch, and others in prayer in the Green Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., following the President’s announcement of Judge Gorsuch as his nominee to the Supreme Court, Tuesday January 31, 2017. Credit: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
During my time as a boy attending an evangelical church and then later, when I attended an evangelical seminary, it was hard not to notice an underlying misogyny that seemed consistently present. As a man, I would be the head of the household. I was like Christ to my future wife. In fact, I once heard a sermon by prominent evangelical minister Tony Evans where he declared that wives must refer to their husbands as “Lord.” In my church youth groups, we were separated by sex and the boys had bizarre discussions on the type of men we should become. There was a strong emphasis on being what they considered to be manly and tough, whereas young girls, of course, were encouraged to be nurturing, […]
Stephan: It is very important to the White supremacy christofascist MAGAt movement that Americans NOT know the truth about the U.S.'s history. Why? Because if you know the truth you know that the Republican shtick is nothing but a web of lies, fear, hate, and fantasies. That's why they are so aggressively trying to limit what children, even college students can be taught in school. This is what is behind the whole Critical Race Theory fear campaign the Republicans have mounted.
Credit: Tunart/Getty
There is a dangerous censoriousness pulsing through American society. In small towns and big cities alike, would-be commissars are fighting, in the name of a distinct minority of Americans, to stifle open discussion and impose their views on the community at large. Dissenters, when they speak out, are hounded, ostracized and sometimes even forced from their jobs.
Defenders of this push for censorship say they are simply working to protect the nation’s children from prejudice, psychological distress and inappropriate material. “To say there were slaves is one thing, but to talk in detail about how slaves were treated, and with photos, is another,” said Tina Descovich, a leader of Moms for Liberty, a conservative group that seeks to enshrine “parental rights” into law. Descovich was speaking to The Washington Post in defense of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who is spearheading an effort to censor educators who teach, or even raise, certain politically incorrect issues in their classrooms.
