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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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 Meditation for Modern Minds
By Stephan A. Schwartz
Amongst many other benefits, meditation teaches you focus. And the success of opening to the transcendental part of yourself is strongly affected by your ability to focus. Regular practice of meditation has also been scientifically proven to change your brain chemistry, lower blood pressure, make you sleep better, feel less stressed and much more. The difficulty for most people living in today’s modern world is that traditional meditation methods were developed in an age very different to today’s fast-paced rhythm. Meditation for Modern Minds was specifically designed with scientifically proven meditation techniques to help a person effectively and efficiently deal with issues of a modern life.
Available Now!! Click here for details and ordering information.
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Solutions in Your Kitchen (Stephan A. Schwartz) From Wake Up - A Documentary
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| Tuesday, 29 July 2014 |
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Brazil Farmers Say GMO Corn No Longer Resistant to Pests
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I just don't believe that corporations like Monsanto, as sophisticated as they are about genetics, did not see this coming. To me their business plan has been from the beginning to gain control of the world's food supply, and lock it in, by having to constantly issue new seeds, that will work when as is happening now, the old ones no longer work. They are building a compulsory government sanctioned addiction -- seeds.
($1 = 2.223 reals) |
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CAROLINE STAUFFER - Reuters/Business Insider |
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SAO PAULO -- Genetically modified corn seeds are no longer protecting Brazilian farmers from voracious tropical bugs, increasing costs as producers turn to pesticides, a farm group said on Monday.
Producers want four major manufacturers of so-called BT corn seeds to reimburse them for the cost of spraying up to three coats of pesticides this year, said Ricardo Tomczyk, president of Aprosoja farm lobby in Mato Grosso state.
"The caterpillars should die if they eat the corn, but since they didn't die this year producers had to spend on average 120 reais ($54) per hectare ... at a time that corn prices are terrible," he said.
Large-scale farming in the bug-ridden tropics has always been a challenge, and now Brazil's government is concerned that planting the same crops repeatedly with the same seed technologies has left the agricultural superpower vulnerable to pest outbreaks and dependent on toxic ... |
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Scientists Find Hints for the Immortality of the Soul
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Here is yet more validation of the consciousness is fundamental paradigm. Increasingly materialism looks like a scientific religion.
Source: Rolf Froboese: "The Secret Physics of Coincidence. Quantum phenomena and fate - Can quantum physics explain paranormal phenomena?" Publisher BoD, 2013, 112 pages, ISBN: 3848234459
Link to amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-Physics-Coincidence-paranormal/dp/3848234459/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389250632&sr=8-1&keywords=the+secret+physics+of+coincidence |
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DR. ROLF FROBÖSE - The Huffington Post |
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Some international physicists are convinced, that our spirit has a quantum state and that the dualism between the body and the soul is just as real to as the "wave-particle dualism" of the smallest particles.
Dr. James G. of San Francisco, a former coworker of the German Max-Planck Society in Frankfurt, reported the following incredible story. "I studied not only in the USA, but I also studied chemistry in London for a few semesters. When I came to England, the student housing was full, so I added my name to a waiting list. A short time later, I received the joyous news that a room had become available. Shortly after I had moved in, I awoke one night and in the twilight was able to see a young man with curly, black hair. I was terrified and told the alleged neighbor that he had the wrong room. He simply ... |
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The Bloodshed State: Doctors in Florida Cannot Legally Protect Children From Guns.
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| This is the level of madness we have reached in our intensifying societal gun psychosis. |
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MARK JOSEPH STERN - Slate |
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Earlier this year, a Lake Worth, Florida, resident left his loaded gun sitting out on a table by the front door while he dressed for work. He heard a loud noise and ran into the hallway, where he discovered his daughter lying in a pool of blood with a bullet hole through her head. She was 3 years old. After her death from the accidental, self-inflicted gunshot, a neighbor told reporters he was stunned, claiming: 'This kind of stuff doesn’t happen here.”
But this kind of stuff does happen in Florida-far more often than you’d think. In 2013 alone, at least 17 children in the state were killed by guns, and myriad more were wounded. These tragedies are part of a spiraling, nationwide epidemic of gun violence toward children, which includes a horrifyingly high number of absolutely preventable accidental shootings. A responsible state would pass and enforce gun safety ... |
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Break Up the States! The Case for the United Statelets of America
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Here is the latest on the Great Schism Trend. The growing values divide that is taking place; the virtually complete collapse of the Congress; the perceived bias of a corrupted Supreme Court; different responses to climate change; transition out of the carbon era; and decentralization of energy, are melding together into a meta-trend: a growing drive to restructure government. This essay makes some good points about the increasingly bizarre malapportionment of the Senate.
But the main reason I am running it is because these sorts of essays and reports are cropping up more and more. It's like a building wave. |
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MICHAEL LIND - Salon |
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A ballot initiative that would support breaking California into six smaller and more coherent states is being backed by Timothy Draper, a tech investor. It’s a great idea. But why stop with California? Breaking up all of the too-large states would increase both the accountability and efficiency of the U.S. government.
America’s state governments are too big to be democratic and too small to be efficient. Given an adequate tax base, public services like public schools and hospitals, utilities and first responders are best carried out by cities and counties. Most infrastructure is either local or regional or national. Civil rights, including workers’ rights, should be handled at the federal level, to eliminate local pockets of tyranny and exploitation. Social insurance systems are most efficient and equitable when they are purely national, like Social Security and Medicare, and inefficient and inequitable when ... |
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Satanists Want to Use Hobby Lobby Decision to Exempt Women From Anti-abortion Laws
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| Like Justice Scalia's comments on marriage equality this may turn out to be a wonderful unintended consequence of the Hobby Lobby decision. If the Satanists can do it, so can the Quakers, or the Methodists, or atheists. These unintended consequences arise because the decisions of the conservative majority are shoddily reasoned and biased. |
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SCOTT KAUFMAN - The Raw Story |
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In a statement, the Satanic Temple said that it will use the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision to exempt its believers from state-mandated informed consent laws that require women considering abortions to read pro-life material.
Informed consent or 'right to know” laws state that women seeking elective abortions be provided with information about alternatives to the procedure, often couched in language that attempts to personify the fetus. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 35 states currently have informed consent laws, and of those, 33 require that the woman be told the gestational age of the fetus.
In some states, that information consists of pro-life propaganda that links abortion to a higher incidence of breast and ovarian cancers, or discusses 'post-abortion syndrome,” a mental condition not recognized by any major medical or psychiatric organization.
Because the Satanic Temple bases its belief 'regarding personal health…on the best scientific understanding ... |
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| Monday, 28 July 2014 |
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Editor's Note - Good News About Alternative Energy
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I live on an island 55 miles long not far from a village of a little over 1,000 people. The South end of the island has about 26,000 people scattered across an area roughly 25 miles by eight miles, so population density is low. I go into these details to make a point illustrated by three stories of communities about the size of mine. Three communities that decided to rethink the entire issue of their electrical power system -- two have succeeded, and one is on the verge. My community could do this and, if you live in a situation somewhat similar to these three, so could yours. Increasingly I have come to think that the big problem for small communities is not technology, or even money, but the ability to think in new ways and to develop the political will to make that new paradigm a reality.
-- Stephan |
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India Village Claims a First – 100% Solar, Storage Micro-grid
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| This is an impoverished villaged in India. Their power needs are small by Western standards, but no less significant for the village. |
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EMMA FITZPATRICK - REneweconomy(Australia) |
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A small Indian village in the northeast of the country, with the help of Greenpeace, is now meeting all of its own energy requirements with solar, after 30 years of apparent neglect from the government.
Dharnai village in the state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, now sources its power from a solar micro-grid. Bihar currently has at least 19,000 other villages, or 82 per cent of the population, which do not receive reliable power from the traditional grid-based system and still lack access to electricity.
The 100-kilowatt (kW) system in Dharnai powers the 450 homes of the 2,400 residents, 50 commercial operations, two schools, a training centre and a health care facility. A battery backup ensures power around the clock.
This includes 70 kW for electricity generation and 30 kW for 10 solar-powered water-pumping systems with three horsepower each. The system was built within three ... |
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Bavarian Village Reaps Renewable Energy
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| This is the latest on a story I first published in SR on 20 December 2011 (see the SR archives). This village and its surrounding area is much more like a typical American rural community -- like mine, for instance. This German community has gone from being consumers of energy coming from outside their area, to an energy source, and the sale of its excess energy is financing all manner of community improvements. Now, after three years, they are even freeing themselves from carbon energy to run vehicles, as this report describes. This could be the future if we have the political will to make it so. |
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GUY CHAZAN - Financial Times (U.K.) |
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The villagers of Wildpoldsried are celebrating a bumper harvest this year – not of wheat, or flax, a traditional crop in this part of southern Bavaria, but energy.
The village of 2,500 inhabitants has so many solar panels, wind turbines and biomass digesters that it generates three times the energy it consumes. The surplus is sold into Germany’s electricity grid, creating a big revenue stream for the locals.
The people of Wildpoldsried are 'prosumers” – both producers and consumers of energy. It is a class that is growing fast in this part of the world, as Germany steams ahead with its Energiewende – its hugely ambitious switch away from polluting fossil fuels to renewable energy.
But the stunning success of places such as Wildpoldsried has created a dilemma for Germany’s electricity system. All that surplus energy can undermine the stability of the grid.
That is why ... |
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Australia’s First Zero Net Energy Town Could Be In NSW
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| Here is the story of an Australian community that is trying to do what was done in Germany and India (note the references). Why aren't we reading about American communities replicating this path? |
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GILES PARKINSON - CleanTechnica |
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A consortium of energy groups look to create 'mini electricity” system relying on local renewable energy production and storage.
wildpold
Wildpoldsried
The search has begun for a suitable town to become Australia’s first 'zero net energy town” – where electricity is generated locally from renewable sources, and stored and distributed on a localised mini grid.
The concept of zero net energy towns (ZNET) – where local communities generator enough of their electricity needs – and sometimes much more – is becoming common in Europe and elsewhere.
The Bavarian town of Wildpoldsried is often cited as a model of what can be achieved. It produces 460% of its own energy needs from a mixture of bio-gas, wood, solar, wind and hydro generation. A village in India achieved something similar this week.
Now, a consortium of green energy, community, and academic groups, with the support of local ... |
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In U.S., Most Do Not See Global Warming as Serious Threat
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Maybe one reason America has been slow to deal with carbon energy is that most Americans don't really see climate change as a big deal likely to affect them. Why don't they? Because the Murdoch operation, one of the largest communications empires in the world, some of the richest people in the world, and their political whores have, for at least a decade, been engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign. Billions of dollars have been spent to see that the public is confused, and their profits protected. I consider this a crime against humanity. If we put a Black kid away for life for a bag of pot, what should be the punishment of a cabal that has put humanity, and all the other beings of Earth at potentially fatal risk?
Click through to see the several charts and graphs. |
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JEFFREY M. JONES - The Gallup Organization |
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PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Americans continue to believe that the effects of global warming are happening or will begin to happen during their lifetimes. At the same time, many fewer, currently 36%, believe global warming will pose a serious threat to their way of life during their lifetimes.
Trend: Expectations for Global Warming During Lifetime
The results are based on Gallup's annual Environment poll, conducted March 6-9. Only about half of those who expect global warming to occur during their lifetimes, 51%, believe it will pose a serious threat to their way of life. This explains the gap between Americans' perceptions that global warming is occurring and that it will be a threat.
Although the gap between the perceived occurrence and perceived threat of global warming remains wide, it is narrower than in the past. The percentage of Americans who believe global warming's effects will ... |
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| Sunday, 27 July 2014 |
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University of Colorado Boulder Scientists Link 10,800-Foot-Deep Fracking Wastewater Well to More than 200 Earthquakes
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| Although the Congress and the Obama Administration think Fracking is just the thing, the evidence for the wrongness of this policy just keeps piling up. One learns in school that the purpose of the government is to be responsive to its people, and provide for their safety and wellbeing. But that of course we know is just a fantasy of academics. Your house has been brought down by an earthquake? Terribly sorry, the government says, but our corporate masters' profits are too important for us to stop them. |
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BRANDON BAKER - Ecowatch/Nation of Change |
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When the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission ordered NGL Water Solutions to stop fracking wastewater injection operations a month ago, a team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers began conducting its own investigation.
NGL, formerly known as High Sierra Water Services, was given permission to resume its activities at a 10,800-foot-deep well a few weeks later, but the CU findings suggest that shouldn’t have happened. Anne Sheehan and her team found that the well is linked to more than 200 earthquakes, the geophysics professor in the CU Department of Geological Sciences told Boulder County Business Report.
She said the group found 'quite a few” earthquakes with epicenters within two miles of the well.
Two earthquakes-with magnitudes of 3.4 and 2.6-took place within mere miles of the well. Shemin Ge and Matthew Weingarten, also of CU, also found that activity within fracking wastewater injection wells likely caused ... |
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The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less
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| I got three emails today from readers telling me how their lives, or the lives of people close to them, are being devastated by declining financial security. We have endless money for war and foreign adventures but the needs of the actual people of the country don't seem terribly important. |
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ANNA BERNASEK - The New York Times |
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Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution - the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.
The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this ... |
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Wealth Inequality Ensures Oligarchy, And These Kids Will Ruin America
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| The once upwardly mobile essentially egalitarian United States has become an oligarchy with a privileged financial aristocracy who own the government, and are not subject to the same laws as the mass of the country. In its own way this is as destructive a trend as climate change. |
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Ring of Fire |
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A dangerous trend is growing in the United States. In it, individuals are accumulating massive amounts of wealth having done nothing to earn it beyond being born. That’s a practice that will prove to have disastrous consequences for the United States.
We talk a lot about income inequality, but what’s really dangerous is wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is often a reward for simply having been born to someone who achieved great income in their lives. And it doesn’t go away with time, people that inherit their wealth only tend to become wealthier.
This gives them an unparalleled power in the economy and, thanks to decisions like Citizens United, the loudest voices in politics.
Here are some facts that help back that premise up:
1) In the past 50 years, the top one percent have increased their wealth to own nearly 40 percent ... |
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Walmart's Ice Cream Sandwiches Don't Melt In The Sun
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Here is the latest in the corruption of the American food system. This is really quite chilling, and yet another reason not to shop at Walmart.
Click through to see the pictures, and try it yourself. |
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JANIE CAMPBELL - The Huffington Post |
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Last we checked, ice cream is supposed to melt if it isn't kept chilled.
But Walmart's store-brand ice cream sandwiches don't even melt in the sun, according to a report from WCPO Cincinnati.
The discovery was made by a local mom, Christie Watson, who noticed that a Great Value ice cream sandwich her son left out on their patio table hadn't fully melted -- even though it had been sitting out for 12 hours on an 80-degree day. Watson left a second ice cream sandwich out overnight with the same results, WCPO reports.
"What am I feeding to my children?" she asked, appalled.
walmart ice cream sandwich
'Ice cream melts based on the ingredients, including cream," Walmart spokeswoman Danit Marquardt said in an email. "Ice cream with more cream will generally melt at a slower rate, which is the case with our Great Value ice ... |
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In West Virginia Congressional Race, Both Candidates Think Climate Change Is ‘Not Our Problem’
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| Since we are going to have an election in a few months time I have been looking closely at the candidates. The Republican Party this year particularly seems to be specializing in promoting morons. But in Red value states the Democrats are often not much better. This is what is on offer from both parties in West Virginia: two men who are both incompetent to stand for office. Yet one of them is going to represent West Virginia's 2nd District. This is a very pronounced trend and one of the symptoms telling us our democratic republic is failing. You'd do better to vote for your dog. At least your dog understands loyalty, service to others, integrity, and well-being. |
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EMILY ATKIN - Think Progress |
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There are two major-party candidates in the running for West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District seat in the U.S. House, and both of them think the issue of climate change is best left for other countries to deal with, according to multiple news reports from a candidate forum Thursday.
At the forum, both Democrat Nick Casey and Republican Alex Mooney would not say whether they accept that humans are contributing to global warming. But either way, both candidates also said that it wasn’t for them to decide.
'It’s not our problem,” Casey reportedly said, adding that it was an international issue. 'These other people think we’ve got a global problem, let’s see them step up.”
According to the Associated Press, Mooney echoed Casey, saying 'there’s no EPA in China” to ensure the country is limiting its greenhouse gas emissions. On the contrary, China has a Ministry of Environmental ... |
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