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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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 Harmonic Healing
By Stephan A. Schwartz
From the earliest times we seem to have known intuitively that the directed mind and human spirit have the power to bring healing to oneself and others. All religions and spiritual paths honor the power of Therapeutic Intent. Now laboratory and clinical research in dozens of studies has confirmed this belief scientifically. The work has demonstrated that everyone has the power to heal. The Healing CD combines a respect for the ancient traditions as well as the insights of science to take you on an inner-voyage that will show you how to link to the greater whole and activate your power to heal.
Use Harmonic Healing once a week, or more often if needed, to heal yourself, and to send healing to others.
Click here for details and ordering information. |
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| Friday, 18 April 2014 |
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The Next America: Two Dramas in Slow Motion
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Here you see the research data supporting the demographic transition trend SR has been describing for almost 20 years. This is what is driving the Tea Party, and why the Republican Party, as constituted, is ultimately doomed.
Click through to see the very helpful animated graphic. |
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Paul Taylor - The Pew Research Group |
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Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion. America is in the midst of two right now. Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era. The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion.
The Pew Research Center tracks these transformations with public opinion surveys and demographic and economic analyses. Our new book, The Next America, draws on this research to paint a data-rich portrait of the many ways our nation is changing and the challenges we face in the decades ahead.
Let’s start with what demographers call an 'age pyramid.” Each bar represents a five year age cohort; with those ages 0-4 on the bottom and those ages ... |
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Scientists Unscramble Great Sperm-egg Secret, Opening New Avenues in Fertility, Contraception
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| We get ever closer to how corporeality comes to exist although this says nothing about how consciousness enters space time. |
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Agence France-Presse (France) |
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Scientists said they had made the long-sought discovery of how sperm latches onto an egg in the very first spark of reproduction, the outcome of a near decade-long hunt.
The find opens up avenues for new contraception or treating infertility, they said.
When a sperm meets an egg, they fuse to form a single-cell entity called a zygote, which divides to produce an embryo.
In 2005, Japanese researchers reported they had found a molecule jutting from the membrane of mammalian sperm that docks onto the surface of the egg.
They called it Izumo, after a Japanese marriage shrine.
That unleashed the search for the receptor on the surface of the egg, which has been elusive, until now.
Reporting in the journal Nature, researchers at Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute said the mechanism is contained in a protein on the egg’s membrane, under a thin ... |
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Industry Expert Says "StopRush" Movement Has Destroyed Limbaugh's Business For Good
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| Here is some good news illustrating how citizen action can bring about change. |
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Daily Kos |
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Speaking yesterday on the Ed Schultz radio show, industry insider Holland Cooke credited a persistent online activist movement with completely destroying right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh's business model by using the very free speech that El Rushbo claims gives him carte blanche to do what he does.
With the latest round of ratings just emerging, Cooke revealed that, in the largest markets, Limbaugh's stations are in terrible shape:
In fact, in New York--where Limbaugh moved to Clear Channel's WOR a few months back--there are four stations ahead of Limbaugh's that aren't even English language stations. He is also being beaten by a classical music station.
Cooke pins the blame for talk radio's struggles squarely on Limbaugh's shoulders and points to the right wing talk show host's 2012 attack on Sandra Fluke as the "shot heard round the world." Here are some excerpts ... |
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The 10 Most Obese States in America (And the Right-Wing Policies That Promote Poor Health)
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| It is finally being recognized -- SR readers won't find it news but most of the country will -- that Red value social policies produce increased unwellness. The question is: Will the voters in those states wake up to the fact that they are voting against their own self-interest. I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. People will vote for their own self-destruction, as we have seen over and over; it is sad but true. |
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ALEX HENDERSON - AlterNet (U.S.) |
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Obesity is a problem all over the country, but the problem is worse in some states than in others. A recent Gallup study presented state-by-state obesity stats [3]and while the research didn't get into politics, one need only scratch the surface to notice that many of the more obese states lean Republican. Of the 10 states Gallup cited as the most obese, eight went for Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election: Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma (the exceptions in that top 10 are Ohio and Delaware, both of which Obama won). And except for Montana-which came in at #1 for thinness-all of the 10 states Gallup cited as the least obese are states Obama carried (including Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Mexico, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, Colorado and New York).
This is no coincidence: Republicans promote policies that tend to entrench poverty, ... |
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| Thursday, 17 April 2014 |
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Scientists Envision a Future World Free of People With Paralysis
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| This is where the next generation of medicine is headed. This is good news. |
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The Japan Times (Japan) |
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PARIS – Imagine a future with no sporting events for paralyzed people, a future in which there is no need, as all the would-be competitors have been cured.
This scenario, laughable just a few decades ago, is no longer far-fetched, experts say. Bit by bit, important progress is being made in understanding and tackling aspects of paralysis.
Some believe the time is fast approaching when the major secondary problems arising from paralysis - bowel, bladder and sexual dysfunction, breathing complications, declining muscle tone and low bone density - will be treatable, probably through a combination of drugs, cell replacement, physical training and electronic aids.
Encouraging signs are also emerging in the quest for the ultimate goal: restoring function to paralyzed limbs.
'This is an enormously complicated, but we do believe solvable, problem,” said Susan Howley, vice president of research at the New Jersey-based Christopher and Dana ... |
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Scientists Detect A Particle That Could Be A New Form Of Matter
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| Here is the latest on an emerging new view of the universe. |
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BRIAN KOBERLEIN - Universe Today |
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Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have spotted a long sought-after exotic particle that's the strongest evidence yet for a new form of matter called a tetraquark. Here's what the discovery could mean to astrophysics.
You may have heard that CERN announced the discovery of a strange particle known as Z(4430). A paper summarizing the results has been published on the physics arxiv, which is a repository for preprint (not yet peer reviewed) physics papers.
The new particle is about four times more massive than a proton, has a negative charge, and appears to be a theoretical particle known as a tetraquark. The results are still young, but if this discovery holds up it could have implications for our understanding of neutron stars.
Scientists Detect A Particle That Could Be A New Form Of Matter
The building blocks of matter are made of leptons (such ... |
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American Democracy No Longer Works
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| This is the truth that the mainstream corporate media will not address. Only citizen action is going to reverse this decline into oligarchy and, frankly, I'm not sure the American people have it in them any longer to rise up against the destruction of our democracy. We'll know from the 2014 elections. |
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THE THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM - Truthout |
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Washington politicians don't give a damn about you or me. They only answer to billionaires and giant corporations. Thanks to forty years of Supreme Court decisions, American politics is no longer about the "will of We The People" - it's only about the money.
As a result, we longer have a functioning democracy in America.
Years of corporate-friendly Supreme Court decisions, like the decision in Citizens United, have rigged and corrupted American politics so badly that average hard-working Americans have little to no influence in Washington.
Instead, our "elected officials" are only answering to the wishes of the wealthy elite and private interest groups.
A study published in Perspectives on Politics by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University finds that when the wealthy elite or powerful interest groups want a policy passed or not passed, Washington listens.
But, when We ... |
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Charges: Minister Raped 'Maidens' in Minnesota Camp for Years
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| After reading yesterday's story a reader in Minnesota sent me this, it is the latest in the Sexual Dysfunction Trend. Yet another Theocratic Right sex scandal involving clergy and young girls. The scandals seem to be coming one a week now, and one would think there will be a general call among the fundamentalist Christian community for self-examination given the frequency of these scandals. But that is not happening, of course. The level of hypocrisy these events represent is breath-taking. |
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PAM LOUWAGIE, JENNA ROSS and PAUL WALSH - Star-Tribune |
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FINLAYSON, MINNESOTA -- Lindsay Tornambe was just 13 years old when she was chosen to be 'sacrificed to God,” she remembers.
That announcement in July 2000 came from a minister who led an insular faith community that included her family in central Minnesota. As Tornambe sat in the congregation with her parents, she remembers the minister calling out a list of 10 girls for a position of honor. He would later call them 'maidens.”
Soon, her parents dutifully dropped her off at his isolated camp, where what she now calls a nightmare of sexual abuse went on for about nine years.
Pine County authorities announced Tuesday that the minister, 52-year-old Victor A. Barnard, is now facing 59 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving his chosen maidens.
Barnard ruled 'like a rock star” over the camp and sexually exploited girls and young women at his whim ... |
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| Wednesday, 16 April 2014 |
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California’s Net Zero Energy Building To Reshape US Construction Industry
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| Once again California is leading the nation. This time in green building technologies and standards. I think this is very good news. |
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CARL STERNER - CleanTechnica |
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California’s recent revisions to Title 24 put in place ambitious performance goals: all residential buildings must be Zero Net Energy (ZNE) by 2020, and all commercial buildings must follow suit by 2030. The code also applies to retrofit projects that pass certain thresholds. (A ZNE building produces as much energy on-site as it consumes on an annual basis.) These changes promise to reshape the construction industry in significant ways - and not just in California. Here’s how.
Drive adoption of building energy codes. Already all but seven US states have commercial building energy codes in place, and many are continually updating to the most recent (and increasingly stringent) standards. The codes are also becoming increasingly performance-based - for instance, the latest version of the IECC includes an additional performance-based pathway that’s already popular in many states. California’s Title 24 raises the bar - and simultaneously ... |
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Scientists Discover How to Generate Solar Power in the Dark
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| More good news, this time about solar. |
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TODD WOODY - The Atlantic |
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The next big thing in solar energy could be microscopic.
Scientists at MIT and Harvard University have devised a way to store solar energy in molecules that can then be tapped to heat homes, water or used for cooking.
The best part: The molecules can store the heat forever and be endlessly re-used while emitting absolutely no greenhouse gases. Scientists remain a way’s off in building this perpetual heat machine but they have succeeded in the laboratory at demonstrating the viability of the phenomenon called photoswitching.
'Some molecules, known as photoswitches, can assume either of two different shapes, as if they had a hinge in the middle,” MIT researchers said in statement about the paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry. 'Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other, which is then stable for long periods of ... |
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Restoring Coastal Ecosystems Creates More Jobs Than Offshore Oil Development
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| More good news, if we have the sense to take it seriously. |
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KATIE VALENTINE - Nation of Change |
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Restoring coastal ecosystems can provide significant economic benefits and even create 'pathways out of poverty” for low-income Americans, according to a new report.
The report, published Wednesday by the Center for American Progress and Oxfam America, looked at three coastal restoration projects on different coasts in the U.S. and found that, for every $1 invested in coastal restoration projects, $15 in net economic benefits was created. These benefits include improved fish stocks, due to the fact that 75 percent of the U.S.’s most important commercial fish species rely on coastal environments at some point in their life cycle, with many young fish and crustaceans using habitats such as oyster reefs as nurseries.
Coastal restoration also provides increased protection from storm surges, improved coastal recreation opportunities, health benefits from increased levels of filter feeders such as oysters, and last of all, jobs: for every $1 million invested in coastal ... |
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Lawsuit Reveals Teen Was Groomed as Personal Sex Slave in the Duggar Family’s Movement
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Long time SR readers may remember the several stories I have done on the Quiverfull Movement, and the Theocratic Right Taliban-like view of women that is so influential with many Christian fundamentalists.
I don't know what it but fundamentalism, the exploitation of women, and sexual dysfunctionality but research shows they are linked behaviors.
Click through to see the video. |
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TRAVIS GETTYS - The Raw Story |
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A leading advocate of the patriarchal Quiverfull movement groomed a teenage girl as his 'personal sex object” and then used the purity culture to shame her into silence, according to a lawsuit filed by his victim.
Douglas Phillips resigned last year from Vision Forum and Vision Forum Ministries over what he described at the time as an extramarital affair.
But the lawsuit, reported by Right Wing Watch, revealed more details about this relationship and the ways that women are treated in the Quiverfull movement – which has been popularized by the prolific Duggar family and their TLC reality show, 19 Kids and Counting.
Attorneys claim Phillips, a close friend to the Duggar family and an associate of actor Kirk Cameron, 'methodically groomed” Lourdes Torres since she was 15 years old and led her to believe they would be married.
Phillips told the girl this was possible ... |
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