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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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| Saturday, 26 May 2012 |
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Editor's Note
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Ronlyn and I decided to take our first break since November, and to hike the Olympic Peninsula of Western Washington, staying at the old lodges from an earlier time that dot the area. It is a wonderful trip which I highly recommend, with one caveat -- It is almost impossible to get online here. No cell coverage, no internet in any general sense. I did not anticipate this, and continue to be surprised that there are large parts of the U.S. where the internet is almost unavailable. Thus, no SR yesterday, and today's edition is coming at an odd time.
I am doing it while sitting on a strip of concrete around a Quinault Native American tribal store where I had heard one could get online if one stayed close to the building's Eastern wall. It is working sort of, but is about to rain.
-- Stephan |
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Is Texas Waging War on History?
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| In Texas the forces of willful ignorance are well-entrenched and this is what they have wrought. We are debasing our children's education in the service of Theocratic Rightist delusions and fantasies. Meanwhile the rest of the industrialized world is producing educated thinking individuals. We just keep telling ourselves how wonderful we are hoping that this will take the place of real substance. |
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KATHERINE STEWART - AlterNet (U.S.) |
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Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education from 2007 to 2009, is a 'young earth” creationist. He believes the earth is 6,000 years old, that human beings walked with dinosaurs, and that Noah’s Ark had a unique, multi-level construction that allowed it to house every species of animal, including the dinosaurs.
He has a right to his beliefs, but it’s his views on history that are problematic. McLeroy is part of a large and powerful movement determined to impose a thoroughly distorted, ultra-partisan, Christian nationalist version of US history on America’s public school students. And he has scored stunning successes.
If you want to see a scary movie about this movement, consider taking in Scott Thurman’s finely-crafted documentary Revisionaries, currently making the festival circuit, which records the antics of McLeroy and a hard right majority on the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) as they ... |
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Number of the Week: Half of U.S. Lives in Household Getting Benefits
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| This a very sad statement of our current state. I disagree with the conservative slant of this piece, although its facts are correct. What this report does not say, however, is that a great number of these households are affluent, although still beneficiaries of government benefits. In fact, a sizeable percentage of affluent households receive one or more such benefits. (It is starting to rain and I am outside so haven't time to look up the exact percentages.) |
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PHIL IZZO - The Wall Street Journal |
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49.1%: Percent of the population that lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011.
Cutting government spending is no easy task, and it’s made more complicated by recent Census Bureau data showing that nearly half of the people in the U.S. live in a household that receives at least one government benefit, and many likely received more than one.
The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008.
The increase in recent years is likely due in large part to the lingering effects of the recession. As of early 2011, 15% of people lived in a household that received food stamps, 26% had someone enrolled in Medicaid and 2% had a member receiving unemployment ... |
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Nearly a Quarter of Teens Diabetic or Prediabetic, Report Says
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| This is the latest update on an increasingly distressing trend. We are literally maiming our young in the service of profit for the few. The only way out of this that I can see is eating locally grown organic food, or food you raise yourself, eating nothing that is processed. Your children's health hangs in the balance. |
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JANICE D'ARCY - The Washington Post |
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Now, yet more evidence that children’s health is in dire need of attention: A new study released today shows that almost a quarter of teens have diabetes or prediabetes.
Almost a quarter.
That’s up from 9 percent a decade ago, according to a study in the June 2012 issue of Pediatrics, published online today.
The findings come from a report that looked more broadly at the risk factors teens have for cardiovascular disease. 'Prevalence of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors Among U.S. Adolescents, 1999-2008” examined data from nearly 3,400 adolescents age 12 to 19 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The authors, affiliated with The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, set out to examine why American teens have become more susceptible to cardiovascular disease - the leading cause of death among U.S. adults.
They found little significant change in the last decade for ... |
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Calcium Pills 'Double Heart Attack Risk'
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| If you are like me and your physician has suggested you take calcium, you should take this report in an have a conversation with them. That's what I plan to do. This is a large study with pretty clear conclusions, even though they contradict conventional wisdom. |
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STEPHEN ADAMS, Medical Correspondent - The Telegraph (U.K.) |
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Calcium supplements taken by millions of people every day can double the risk of heart attacks, according to a study, while researchers say they do little to protect bones against fractures.
Recommended by government advisors as a safe way to help fight osteoporosis, they are taken by up to 5m people in Britain.
But researchers say a new study adds to mounting evidence that the supplements are "not safe or particularly effective"
The latest study, which followed 24,000 middle-aged and elderly Germans for 11 years, found taking calcium pills roughly doubled the risk of having a heart attack.
Writing today in the journal Heart, German and Swiss academics find that heart attack risk "might be substantially increased by taking calcium supplements".
They conclude the pills "should be taken with caution" because they raise the annual risk of a heart attack from about one in 700 ... |
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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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