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 Crisis Conduct
By: Stephan A. Schwartz
I created Crisis Conduct to help you gain and maintain control of your life during times of great stress and challenges. Each step-by-step experiential CD is a unique technology based on worldwide university and laboratory research to alter your consciousness.
Combining literally hundreds of research studies with ancient and honored inner-pilgrimage traditions, these powerful transformative experiences become your life-time toolkit to navigate through challenging times, whenever you need them
Available Now!! Click here for details and ordering information.
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| Thursday, 24 May 2012 |
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Student Loan Bubble Putting Hundreds of Colleges at Risk
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| The alarm bells ring but few listen. |
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Business Insider |
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Very few topics have received as much attention as the student loan/debt bubble.
The size, scope, and impact of this problem is an enormous anchor weighing down our next generation and our nation's economy.
Make no mistake, this anchor is not only impacting thousands of students and families but is also having an equally burdensome impact on colleges and universities nationwide.
Embedded within a very recently released Bloomberg commentary is a study by Richard Kneedler, President Emeritus of Franklin & Marshall College. In light of the economic crisis that hit our shores and continues to envelop our nation, in early 2009 Kneedler released a very granular review of the economic condition of close to 700 private colleges and universities. For anybody with even a passing interest in this issue, Kneedler's work, is a MUST read. What do we learn?
1. Using this post-crash model (and may ... |
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Fireballs in the Arctic As Methane Seeps Uncovered
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| Another consequence of climate change but, of course, if you don't believe climate change exists then there is nothing to do about it. |
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Alyssa Danigelis - Discovery News |
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Cows are a red herring. The most dangerous potential source for methane release lies underneath thinning permafrost and glaciers in the Arctic. Ecologists have just mapped the seeps where methane is bubbling up, and they found more than 150,000 of them.
Methane is a seriously potent greenhouse gas. Compared to a single molecule of carbon dioxide, methane is 25 times stronger, according to Katey Walter Anthony, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who led the new mapping research. She and her colleagues just published their findings in Nature Geoscience (abstract).
You might know Walter Anthony from YouTube videos, where she and her students illustrate methane release by stabbing pockets frozen in an Alaskan lake and setting the gas on fire. That lake thaws every summer and then winter ice covers the gas bubbles, trapping them. Far thicker caps have been trapping methane year-round in ... |
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The Right to Record
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| This is a very big deal. Had this decision gone the other way, citizens would be precluded from recording the excesses of the increasingly over-reaching militarized police in this country. |
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The New York Times |
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The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department took an important stand last week, declaring that citizens have a First Amendment right to videotape the actions of police officers in public places and that seizure or destruction of such recordings violates constitutional rights.
The Justice Department made the statement in a federal lawsuit brought against the Baltimore Police Department by Christopher Sharp, who used his cellphone to take video of the police arresting and beating a friend at Pimlico on the day of the 2010 Preakness. The officers took Mr. Sharp’s cellphone while he was recording and wiped the phone clean of all videos before returning it to him.
The Courts of Appeals for the First and Seventh Circuits have wisely found that the Constitution protects the right to videotape police officers while they perform official duties. The video taken by another witness of the beating at Pimlico ... |
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Breakthrough Offers Promise of Improved GMO Testing
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| This is an important breakthrough in the GMO struggle. |
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COOKSON BEECHER - Food Safety News |
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Does this food contain genetically modified organisms?
That's what many consumers, including overseas trading partners, want to know about the food they're buying.
A prime example of that is the recent initiative in California, dubbed the "Right to Know" campaign, which calls for food manufacturers in the Golden State to identify genetically engineered ingredients on the labels of food products sold in that state.
GMO-sidebar.jpg
With almost as many as 1 million signatures gathered on the petition in time for the April 22 deadline, organizers predict that the measure will appear on the Nov. 6 ballot. (The state requires just over a half million valid signatures for an initiative to qualify to be on the ballot.)
On a global level, 40 countries, including all of Europe, Japan and China, require labeling of foods, or of certain foods, containing GMOs. The U.S. has ... |
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How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking -- and What That Means For Our Kids' Future
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| Fundamentalism requires unquestioning obedience to even the stupidest and most obvious nonsense -- the world is 6,000 years old -- a training which accords well with the goal of the Virtual Corporate States to have a society of consumers and workers too dumb to challenge the excesses VCSs inevitably produce because they have no goal but profit. This confluence of interests is one of the main reasons the ideological and theological Rights have blended to become one. |
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SARA ROBINSON - AlterNet (U.S.) |
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The Conservative War On Education continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn't college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history, anthropology or ancient Greek?)
Amid the din, there's a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing talking points, usually without realizing that they're even right wing. Or saying things like, "The education of our children is a non-partisan issue that should exist outside of any ideological debate."
The hell it is. People who say stuff like this have no idea what they're talking about. The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives -- because every educational conversation must start with the fundamental philosophical question: What is an education for?
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| Wednesday, 23 May 2012 |
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Proposed Iowa Republican Party Platform Contains ‘Birther’ Language
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| The actions in Iowa and Arizona, where the Secretary of State is trying to keep Obama off the ballot, have the potential to create a Constitutional crisis. Imagine what would happen if a sitting President running for re-election was denied a presence on the ballot in several states. This sounds like, and is, the work of racist haters. But the fact that they have captured the Republican Party and are prepared to create this crisis is a measure of how off-the-rails our political system has become. We are beginning to look like some South American fascist state in the 60s. |
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ERIC W. DOLAN - The Raw Story |
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A section in the proposed platform of the Republican Party of Iowa requires candidates to prove they are a natural born citizen of the United States, according to Radio Iowa.
Don Racheter, chairman of the Iowa GOP’s 2012 platform committee, told Radio Iowa that the section was directly aimed at President Barack Obama.
'There are many Republicans who feel that Barack Obama is not a ‘natural born citizen’ because his father was not an American when he was born and, therefore, feel that according to the Constitution he’s not qualified to be president, should not have been allowed to be elected by the Electoral College or even nominated by the Democratic Party in 2008, so this is an election year,” Racheter said. 'It’s a shot at him.”
Obama has been dogged by questions about his eligibility to serve as President of the United States since 2008. Many ... |
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Damage from Chemical Exposure Passed Down for Generations
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| We are killing and maiming ourselves with no real sense of what we are doing. The toxins of today, it appears, will shape human health in generations yet unborn. |
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Planetsave/Washington State University |
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New research has shown that exposure to commonly used chemicals causes changes in rats that are passed down through multiple generations.
'We are now in the third human generation since the start of the chemical revolution, since humans have been exposed to these kinds of toxins,” says David Crews, co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Texas. 'This is the animal model of that.”
The researchers exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide. They then put the rats’ third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests. They found that the rats were more sensitive to stress, and more anxious, and they had greater levels of activity in stress-related regions of the brain, than the descendants of the unexposed rats.
The researchers had already, in a previous study, shown that vinclozolin can affect how genes are turned ... |
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Extended Daily Fasting Overrides Harmful Effects of a High-Fat Diet
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| This has a huge potential to change your health. Read it carefully and adjust your eating habits accordingly. |
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Science Daily |
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It turns out that when we eat may be as important as what we eat. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that regular eating times and extending the daily fasting period may override the adverse health effects of a high-fat diet and prevent obesity, diabetes and liver disease in mice.
In a paper published May 17 in Cell Metabolism, scientists from Salk's Regulatory Biology Laboratory reported that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The study sought to determine whether obesity and metabolic diseases result from a high-fat diet or from disruption of metabolic cycles.
"It's a dogma that a high-fat diet leads to obesity and that we should eat frequently when we are awake," says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Regulatory ... |
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The Changing Complexity of Congressional Speech
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When I first went to Washington in 1961 to go to work for National Geographic I had my first encounter with the Congress. I had previously met a few members known to my parents and thought them very pedestrian and unimpressive people. But to see a room full of preening egos, mediocre in almost every other way, in the hearings I was sent to cover was a revelation. Over the years they have just become less and less impressive, and stupider. On my last trip to Washington a few months ago I had occasion to have a conversation with a Representative from Alabama, who I thought too ignorant to be a clerk in a super market. Apparently they really are getting dumber and less educated. It is appalling.
I urge you to click through and look at the many charts that accompany this report. |
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LEE DRUTMAN and DAN DRINKARD - Sunlight Foundation |
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Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.
Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress, others will see as more effective communications. And lawmakers of both parties still speak above the heads of the average American, who reads at between an 8th and 9th grade level.
Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s 'I ... |
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Farmers, Scientists, and Advocates Concerned About Lack of Pesticide-Free Seeds
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| This is a measure of how the multinational Agr Corporations are gaining complete control over our food supply. The only way to eat safely today is to buy locally grown organic produce from reliable producers, and/or to grow your own. |
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eNews Park Forest |
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WASHINGTON, DC -- American farmers are growing increasingly more frustrated with the lack of commercially available seeds that have not been pretreated with pesticides. Farmers across the Midwest have called on federal officials this week to provide greater access to seeds without pesticide treatments. The request comes as scientists and beekeepers highlight the nearly pervasive use of neonicotinoids as seed treatments on corn as a critical factor in recent bee die-offs, including colony collapse disorder (CCD). Beekeepers from Minnesota to Ohio to Canada report large losses after their hives forage near treated cornfields. Scientists from Purdue University and a multi-year series of studies from Italy point to toxic dust, or neonicotinoid-contaminated powder from recently planted corn fields as key pesticide exposure pathways for bees. The request comes on the heels of a report aired by NBC Nightly News this week entitled 'Bee Deaths Linked to Pesticides”, as well as ... |
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| Tuesday, 22 May 2012 |
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The Vagina Battles and National Wellness
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| Citation: Schwartz S. The Vagina Battles and National Wellness. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. 8:3:154-157, May 2012 |
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STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist - Explore - The Journal of Science and Healing |
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As I write this, I am witnessing something I would not have thought possible. The central discussion of the Republican primaries is not jobs, or war, or foreign affairs, or even the economy. It is contraception. Can it be possible that in the second decade of the 21st century we are debating once again whether contraception should be legal and available to all women? We can and we are.
You can get the flavor from the words of Rick Santorum: 'One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in country.” And also, 'Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's this not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”1
'Counter to how things are ... |
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Climate Scientists Say They Have Solved Riddle of Rising Sea
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Here is good science guiding us as it should. The question is: what are we going to do about it? The demand for water in places where in nature's pattern it would not be is going to continue to deplete the underground aquifers, thus increasing sea level rise. It is a sublime irony, and should teach us a major lesson.
Once again it is demonstrated that all of Gaia's systems are interconnected and interdependent. Living in a manner that recognizes and cooperates with this, as we will have to ultimately is going to require us to change our perspective on how a culture should work. That's why national wellness has to be our first priority -- wellness extends from individual to Earth. We know how to do this. There are example nations thriving today. We must muster the will to bring this election to the most life-affirming outcome.
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The Raw Story/Agence France-Presse |
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PARIS -- Massive extraction of groundwater can resolve a puzzle over a rise in sea levels in past decades, scientists in Japan said on Sunday.
Global sea levels rose by an average of 1.8 millimetres (0.07 inches) per year from 1961-2003, according to data from tide gauges.
But the big question is how much of this can be pinned to global warming.
In its landmark 2007 report, the UN’s Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ascribed 1.1mm (0.04 inches) per year to thermal expansion of the oceans - water expands when it is heated - and to meltwater from glaciers, icecaps and the Greenland and Antarctica icecaps.
That left 0.7mm (0.03 inches) per year unaccounted for, a mystery that left many scientists wondering if the data were correct or if there were some source that had eluded everyone.
In a study published in the ... |
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Nanomedicine: Quantum Dots Appear Safe in Pioneering Study on Primates
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This emerging technology has both great promise and a great shadow. Either way it is coming; it is up to us to decide how it will be used -- to heal or to monitor and surveil. The toxicity question is also unclear as this report describes. The growing trend is to manipulate life forms at the most foundational level possible.
In addition to its specifics this report also illustrates the growing dichotomy in healthcare. A very high end of dazzling sophistication; and, a great base of individuals who have little or no healthcare at all.
SOURCE: Nature Nanotechnology search and more info website
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Physorg.com |
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A pioneering study to gauge the toxicity of quantum dots in primates has found the tiny crystals to be safe over a one-year period, a hopeful outcome for doctors and scientists seeking new ways to battle diseases like cancer through nanomedicine.
The research, which will appear on May 20 in Nature Nanotechnology online, is likely the first to test the safety of quantum dots in primates.
In the study, scientists found that four rhesus monkeys injected with cadmium-selenide quantum dots remained in normal health over 90 days. Blood and biochemical markers stayed in typical ranges, and major organs developed no abnormalities. The animals didn't lose weight.
Two monkeys observed for an additional year also showed no signs of illness.
Quantum dots are tiny luminescent crystals that glow brightly in different colors. Medical researchers are eyeing the crystals for use in image-guided surgery, light-activated therapies and sensitive ... |
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North Carolina Pastor: Pen in 'All the Lesbians and Queers'
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This should have called forth a national outcry of disapprobation. That it did not reveals something very telling about our national beingness. Saying this from a pulpit was a deliberate act which the speaker knew was being recorded. It was a public, intentioned, act by an angry middle-aged White Theocratic Rightist. This is an perverted obsession and, I think, ought to be identified as such. These men and women, but mostly men, are so terribly insecure in their own sexuality that they have become obsessed with what other people are doing with their genitals, or even what kind they have. Don't you find it a little creepy?
Click through to see the actual video of these statements. |
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ANNIE-ROSE STRASSER - Think Progress |
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North Carolina Pastor Charles Worley shared with his congregation this weekend how he thinks the country should deal with the scourge of gay men and lesbians: Lock them into a pen with an electrified fence, drop food down to them, and because they can’t reproduce, they will die out.
The Pastor’s leper colony-esque proposal came in response to the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, which he said 'anybody with any sense” would be against. Worley explained that the idea of two men kissing makes him 'pukin’ sick,” so he developed a proposal to 'get rid of all the lesbians and queers”:
WORLEY: I figured a way out - a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers. But I couldn’t get it passed through Congress. Build a great big large fence, 150 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. ... |
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