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SR Needs Your Support
I have been doing SR every day since 1991, except for very infrequent breaks when it was impossible to get on line. That’s 23 years. In all that time except for a few much appreciated contributions, I have borne all the costs. Now SR needs some support to go forward. So I am asking each of you -- some of you have been subscribers for two decades -- to make a contribution. I would suggest $25 or more if you can do it, less if $25 is too much for your budget. It will help me keep SR going and I thank you in advance.
I want to thank those of you who have already made a contribution. I very much appreciate it and it will help to keep SR up and running. I see this sort of tangible support as a vote telling me SR is valued and that I should continue
-- Stephan
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 Opening to the Infinite: Science,
Shamanism and the Hidden Self Workshop
Weekend of April 4-6 at Esalen, Big Sur, CA
Led by Stephan A. Schwartz
Explore the part of your consciousness not limited by space and time. There is no way to understand the nonlocal, what traditionally has been called the spiritual, as an abstraction. It has to be experienced to be fully comprehended. This workshop teaches you protocols to do that, using paths grounded in science and also found in both shamanic and spiritual traditions: remote viewing, therapeutic intention/healing, and psycho-physical self regulation. Stephan Schwartz walks you through doing them, so that you can have the actual experience.
The workshop systematically covers techniques for accessing the nonlocal, and then follows with an experience of what has just been discussed. You will do several remote viewings, experiencing consciousness outside of space time— experiences that can be objectively validated. Then there will be an intuitive diagnosis, and feedback given as to accuracy. Stephan also shows how the individual experience expressed collectively shapes culture, and how individuals and small groups can and have changed history. You will leave empowered to do the same. The workshop closes with remote viewing your own future.
Click here to register and for more information. |
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| Saturday, 08 March 2014 |
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The U.S. Economy's Big Baby Problem
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None of the advanced nations has a replacement fertility rate -- roughly 2.1 births per fertile woman. The U.S. once did, but that was because of immigration. Immigration has now dropped and we are part of the pack. This has enormous long term economic and social consequences, but it is a subject almost never mentioned in the American media. Here is a rare story that makes at least a few of the salient points.
Click through to see the very useful graphs and charts that accompany this story. |
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DEREK THOMPSON - The Atlantic |
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Last September, the U.S. government announced that our birthrate fell to "another record low" in 2012, following a long, steady slide since the Baby Boom after World War II.
It goes without saying that, morally speaking, there's nothing wrong with this. It's natural, in a way. All over the world, birthrates tend to fall along with economic development, for numerous reasons including (a) the move away from a labor-intensive small-farm economy and (b) women's ascendance in the workforce, which uses time that used to be devoted to child-rearing. Families in richer countries tend to have fewer kids. In places like Japan and Western Europe, national populations are actually peaking.
The thing about an increasingly childless economy is that it has major implications for consumption. Just look at this new data from a Gallup survey released today on the average daily spending of families. Even after you control ... |
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Predictable Backlash: Pentagon Now Fears Drones Being Used Against US
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It is the nature of implemented war technologies that they create arms races that always have unintended consequences. The use of drones is the latest example. It is just a matter of time until American officials start being killed by drones, probably beginning when they are out of the country. Technologies of violence feed on themselves. Consider the epidemic of gun violence that is killing 10s of thousands of Americans every year.
All of this violent death, of course, is immensely profitable for the few. |
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JP SOTTILE - BuzzFlash |
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The defense industry dreams of genies.
That’s because it is really hard to get the genie back into bottle after you let it loose.
Really, the only option after releasing a genie is to invent new, expensive ways to combat it. And that’s been the story of America’s persistent gift to posterity-the 'nuclear genie.”
Just ask the people who refuse to return to the site of America’s most notorious above-ground nuclear test-the bombing of Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. That hydrogen bomb, codenamed 'Shrimp,” remains the largest bomb ever tested by the United States. It’s also known as a 'thermonuclear weapon” because it uses high temperatures to trigger four cascading stages, each magnifying the power of the explosion. It was an 'advance” on the run-of-the-mill atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was a response to the Soviet Union’s emerging atomic weapon program, which ... |
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Millennials in Adulthood
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The United States, led by the Theocratic Right, has a demonstrated track record of being indifferent to its young. Surprise. Our young, as a result, don't care much for our social institutions or religion. This trend is going to have enormous implications for the American future.
One upside. This is why the Theocratic Right, made up mostly of older angry white people -- the average age of a Fox News viewer is 68 -- is doomed.
Click through to see the accompanying charts. |
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Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends |
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The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 331, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry- and optimistic about the future.
They are also America’s most racially diverse generation. In all of these dimensions, they are different from today’s older generations. And in many, they are also different from older adults back when they were the age Millennials are now.
Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.
At the ... |
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Inheriting Stress
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| There is a reason Bible stories have survived for millennia. Not because they are the inerrant dictated word of God, but because they tell us truths about cultures that develop from generations of direct observation. One of these is: We reap what we sow. Because we do not make national wellness a priority, and place profit above all other considerations, we are a deeply unhappy country with tens of millions of over-stressed individuals. As this report makes clear we are seeing social karma in action as a result. |
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INNA GAISLER-SALOMON - The New York Times |
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We intuitively understand, and scientific studies confirm, that if a woman experiences stress during her pregnancy, it can affect the health of her baby. But what about stress that a woman experiences before getting pregnant - perhaps long before?
It may seem unlikely that the effects of such stress could be directly transmitted to the child. After all, stress experienced before pregnancy is not part of a mother’s DNA, nor does it overlap with the nine months of fetal development.
Nonetheless, it is undeniable that stress experienced during a person’s lifetime is often correlated with stress-related problems in that person’s offspring - and even in the offspring’s offspring. Perhaps the best-studied example is that of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Research shows that survivors’ children have greater-than-average chances of having stress-related psychiatric illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder, even without being exposed to higher levels of stress ... |
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MIT’s Liquid Metal Stores Solar Power Until After Sundown
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| Here is some very good news; a potential game changer. As this technology comes on line the transition from the carbon era to the green era will be greatly speeded up. |
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CHRISTOPHER MARTIN - Bloomberg Sustainability |
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A 40-foot trailer loaded with 25 tons of liquid metals may be the solution to the renewable-energy industry’s biggest challenge: making sure electricity is available whenever it’s needed.
A Boston-area startup founded by MIT researchers is working to turn this new concept into a commercially viable product, liquid-metal batteries that will store power for less than $500 a kilowatt-hour. That’s less than a third the cost of some current battery technologies.
The technology promises an alternative to the massive pumped-water systems that make up 95 percent of U.S. energy-storage capacity. At that price, developers will be able to build wind and solar projects that can deliver power to the grid anytime, making renewable energy as reliable as natural gas and coal without the greenhouse-gas emissions.
'If we can get liquid-metal batteries down to $500 a kilowatt-hour, we’ll change the world,” Donald Sadoway, chief scientific adviser at Cambridge, ... |
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| Friday, 07 March 2014 |
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Why Is American Internet So Slow?
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| One of America's central myths is that we lead the world technologically. Anyone who travels out of the country knows how bogus this is and how, in so many ways -- roads, bridges, airports, healthcare, education, childcare, life-expectancy, happiness, high speed trains and, yes, internet -- Americans live a second world quality of life. This is an excellent assessment of the internet situation and it explains why it has happened. Once again monopolistic corporate interests that control the government have blocked the well-being of the many in order to maintain the profit for the few. |
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JOHN AZIZ, Business and Economics Correspondent - The Week |
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ccording to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the U.S. ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay.
Its upload speeds are even worse. Globally, the U.S. ranks 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy.
So how did America fall behind? How did the country that literally invented the internet - and the home to world-leading tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Cisco - fall behind so many others in download speeds?
Susan Crawford argues that "huge telecommunication companies" such as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have "divided up ... |
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The Dawning of the Age of Genomic Medicine, Finally
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| Here is the latest on the Homo Superior Trend. Very exciting, but fraught with ethical implications. It isn't the science but the way our society distributes access to it that, to me, is the important issue. |
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JULIE STEENHUYSEN - KDAL/Reuters |
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LA JOLLA, California -- When President Bill Clinton announced in 2000 that Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute had succeeded in mapping the human genome, he solemnly declared that the discovery would "revolutionize" the treatment of virtually all human disease.
The expectation was that this single reference map of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA -- the human genetic code -- would quickly unlock the secrets of Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer and other scourges of human health.
As it turns out, Clinton's forecast was not unlike President George Bush's "mission accomplished" speech in the early days of the Iraq war, said Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Translational Science Institute, which is running a meeting On the Future of Genomic Medicine here March 6-7.
Thirteen years after Clinton's forecast, even Venter acknowledges that mapping the human genome has had little clinical ... |
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Obama Knew CIA Secretly Monitored Intelligence Committee, Senator Claims
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| As Rachel Maddow noted the other night when she reported an earlier story on this subject, it constitutes a direct assault by the Executive on the Legislative branch and attacks the foundation of our democracy. President Obama has a very compromised track record on privacy and, I believe, will be viewed as the President who created the surveillance state, to our great peril. |
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SPENCER ACKERMAN - The Guardian (U.K.) |
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A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an 'unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.
The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama, seeking to enlist the president’s help in declassifying a 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into torture carried out by CIA interrogators after 9/11, threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.
McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.
BTF MPU
Udall, ... |
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Global Super Rich eye Office Blocks Over Mansions as Wealth Hits $20 Trillion
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| This report gives some excellent insights into the world of the uber-rich. Note that most of this action is coming from the Asian and Middle Eastern rich. |
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Yahoo News |
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LONDON -- The world's super rich are turning from luxury mansions to hotels and office blocks, as they hunt for bigger property deals to preserve their growing fortunes which hit a combined $20 trillion in 2013, data showed on Wednesday.
The move into commercial property comes as wealth levels rebound after the financial crisis and home values in London and Monaco soar, prompting the rich to look for riskier investments that offer higher returns than gold or bonds.
Wealthy individuals spent $11.2 billion on hotels, offices, warehouses and shops globally in 2013, up from $7 billion in 2012 and three times the amount spent in 2008 after the crash, data compiled for Reuters by research group Real Capital Analytics (RCA) showed.
Such high net worth investors, most of whom come from Asia or the Middle East and made their fortunes in manufacturing among other sectors, often already ... |
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How Hobby Lobby Supporters Talk About 'Religious Liberty”: 5 Outrageous Quotes That Show It’s all About sex
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| Here, in their own brief, you can see what is really behind the Theocratic Right's war on women. It is all about controlling their sexuality. |
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KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor - Salon |
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Hobby Lobby executives and other conservative opponents of the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act have argued that the legal challenge before the Supreme Court right now is about 'religious liberty” - not controlling women’s access to healthcare or their personal lives.
That veneer falls away pretty quickly when you read the court briefs filed in support of Hobby Lobby, which are almost uniformly about controlling women’s sexuality and the apparent horrors of decoupling sex from reproduction.
It should probably be noted that virtually everything these groups claim about birth control (including calling it an 'abortifacient”) is wrong. For actual information about birth control, please see here.
Here are five excerpts (emphasis added):
Beverly Lahaye Institute
Relying entirely on the 2011 IOM Report, the Government asserts that by increasing access to contraceptives, the Mandate will promote public health by decreasing ... |
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| Thursday, 06 March 2014 |
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Obamacare Effects Account for Most of Income, Spending Increases
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| It must have caused the Wall Street Journal great discomfort to publish this piece given their rancorous position on Obamacare. As bad as Obamacare is and, to people like me, it is still just an extension of the Illness Profit System, it is a measure of how broken American healthcare is that something as marginal as this still produces major positive effects. |
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Jeffrey Sparshott - The Wall Street Journal |
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The Affordable Care Act, President Barack Barack Obama’s signature health law, is already boosting household income and spending.
The Commerce Department reported Monday that consumer spending rose a better-than-expected 0.4% and personal incomes climbed 0.3% in January. The new health-care law accounted for a big chunk of the increase on both fronts.
On the incomes side, the law’s expanded coverage boosted Medicaid benefits by an estimated $19.2 billion, according to Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The ACA also offered several refundable tax credits, including health insurance premium subsidies, which added up to $14.7 billion.
Taken together, the Obamacare provisions are responsible for about three-quarters of January’s overall rise in Americans’ incomes.
Of course, what the government gives, the government can take away. Case in point: The late-December expiration of a federal program that provided extended aid to unemployed Americans reduced benefit payments $16.7 billion.
Excluding ... |
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Psychiatry Now Admits It's Been Wrong in Big Ways - But Can It Change?
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| It is long past time to pull back the curtain on the truth about the unholy relationship between psychiatry and Big Pharma. Here's a start. |
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BRUCE E LEVINE - Truthout |
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When I interviewed investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in 2010 after the publication of his book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he was not exactly a beloved figure within the psychiatry establishment. Whitaker had documented evidence that standard drug treatments were making many patients worse over the long term, and he detailed the lack of science behind these treatments.
Whitaker's sincerity about seeking better treatment options, his command of the facts, and his lack of anti-drug dogma compelled all but the most dogmatic psychiatrists to take him seriously.
For Anatomy of an Epidemic, Whitaker won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award for best investigative journalism. This and other acclaim made it difficult for establishment psychiatry to ignore him, so he was invited to speak at many of their bastions, including a Harvard Medical School Grand ... |
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BP Fails to Get Out of Compensating oil Spill Victims An Appeals Court Shut Down the Company's Efforts to Avoid Pay
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| Here is some good news about the Gulf crisis of four years ago. Despite everything their lawyers could do to get them off the hook BP is still going to have to settle up with the people of the Gulf. That's good news. |
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LINDSAY ABRAMS, Assistant Editor - Salon |
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The shoreline of Bay Jimmy, which was heavily impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is seen in an area that has tar mats and oozing crude oil on the marsh platform, in Plaquemines Parish, La., Friday, Sept. 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This article has been corrected since it first published.
Sorry, BP: You’re still going to have to pay damages for the Gulf oil spill. A divided New Orleans appeals court ruled late Monday that the oil giant has to stick to the terms of its $9.2 billion settlement with the spill’s victims.
The decision reverses an earlier ruling in BP’s favor, and now requires the company to compensate even those businesses that can’t directly trace their damages to the spill. From Reuters:
U.S. District Judge Barbier had ruled that BP would have to live with its earlier interpretation of a ... |
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How Hyper-Religious Political Stunts by Republicans Keep Voters Captive to Corporate Ideology
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| This is an excellent essay on how the Corporate Rightists manipulate the low information, ignorant masses of the Red value states. It is a really sad story. |
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CJ WERLEMAN - AlterNet (U.S.) |
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Last week, a bill to make way for the display of Ten Commandments in public buildings, such as courthouses and schools, passed out of an Alabama Senate committee, sending it to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week.
If you want to know why nine out of the 10 poorest states are located in the hyper-religious South, look no further than this calculated right-wing political play, which is designed for one purpose: to ensure Southern and Sunbelt voters continue to vote against their own self-economic interests.
If passed by the state Senate and signed by the governor, the state would put a constitutional amendment on the next ballot to let Alabama voters decide the issue. The theocratic authors and the Republican Party sponsors of this bill are fully cognizant of the fact that the bill is unconstitutional, and thus it will, inevitably, be struck ... |
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West Virginia Is the Most Miserable State in the Country
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As you read this report, keep in my what you learned from the preceding story.
Click through to see the charts, which will appall you. |
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CHRIS CILLIZZA - The Washington Post |
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Living in West Virginia stinks.
That's according the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index released late last month that seeks to test "Americans’ perceptions on topics such as physical and emotional health, healthy behaviors, work environment, social and community factors, financial security, and access to necessities such as food, shelter and health care to create a composite well-being rank for each state." West Virginia ranked dead last in such categories (there are 55 of them) as "life evaluation", "emotional health", "physical health" and "healthy behaviors." Interestingly, it ranked 14th in "work environment."
The bottom of the (state) barrel is unchanged from 2012 with West Virginia (50th), Kentucky (49th) and Mississippi (48th) bringing up the rear. The top of the chart has a new number one with North Dakota -- and its booming oil economy -- jumping all the way from 19th in 2012 to first in 2013. South Dakota moves ... |
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Mississippians Most Obese, Montanans Least Obese
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Here is yet another manifestation of what happens to a society which makes social policy on the basis of religious belief as opposed to actual factual data. Living in a Red value state is dangerous to your health, and yet the voters in those states continue year after year to vote on the further degradation of their culture. It is an amazing social phenomenon.
Click through to see the many charts and graphs that accompany this survey report. |
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JENNA LEVY - The Gallup Organization |
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Mississippi had the highest obesity rate in the U.S. in 2013, at 35.4%, while Montana has the lowest rate, at 19.6%. The obesity rate has generally increased across the U.S. each year since 2008.
Ten States With Highest Obesity Rates Ten States With Lowest Obesity Rates
From 2010 through 2012, West Virginia maintained the highest obesity rate nationwide while Colorado had the lowest. Five states -- Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Kentucky -- have been listed among the 10 states with the highest obesity rates in the nation since 2008. Colorado, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California have routinely been states with lower levels of obesity -- all four have made the list of the 10 states with the lowest obesity rates in the nation each year since 2008.
Explore complete state data >
The national obesity rate, as computed by respondents' self-reported height and ... |
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