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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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| Wednesday, 19 June 2013 |
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My Latest Investment: The Sun
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| Here is some very good news about the energy transition away from old carbon to nonpolluting sustainable energy. |
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DANIEL GROSS - The Daily Beast |
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It’s hard to get a 4.5 percent annual return on your money without taking too much risk. Banks pay less than 1 percent. Blue-chip stocks pay dividends at about2 percent. The U.S. government borrows for about 30 years at 3 percent.
Mosaic Investments
Mosaic
But I found one way to get a decent interest rate while also boosting my personal green credentials: I bought a very small piece of a solar electric power plant in New Jersey.
Solar power is growing by leaps and bounds. But it requires a large personal investment-i.e. spend $15,000, take advantage of tax credits and rebates to put a small system on your roof. And it only pays to put panels homes that have south-facing roofs and aren’t surrounded by trees. Or it requires a large corporate investment, like the giant retailers putting arrays on their giant roofs, or the huge farms ... |
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GMO and Monsanto Roundup: Glyphosate Weedkiller in our Food and Water?
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If you live in a typical suburban American neighborhood, or a rural area where industrial monoculture is practiced, your body is probably laced with Glyphosate. This poison is everywhere and tens of millions of dollars are spent to promote its use. One can only wonder whether a decade from now we will discover that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people have diseases arising from their exposure to Glyphosate, and it is too late to do anything about it.
Ironically, as I am writing this, on the television a Roundup commercial is playing. As far as I can ascertain if you use products containing this substance you are putting the health of yourself, your family, your pets, and the earth itself at risk.
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COLIN TODHUNTER - Global Research - Centre for Research and Globilization |
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'Historians may look back and write about how willing we are to sacrifice our children and jeopardize future generations with a massive experiment that is based on false promises and flawed science just to benefit the bottom line of a commercial enterprise.” So said Don Huber in referring to the use of glyphosate and genetically modified crops. Huber was speaking at Organic Connections conference in Regina, Canada, late 2012.
Huber is an emeritus professor in plant pathology at Purdue University in the US and has worked with the Department of Homeland Security to reduce the impact of plant disease outbreaks. His words are well worth bearing in mind given that a new study commissioned by Friends of the Earth Europe (FoE) and GM Freeze has found that people in 18 countries across Europe have been found to have traces of glyphosate in their urine (1).
Friends of the ... |
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Pesticides Slash Water Life by 42 Percent: Study
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| If you thought I was exaggerating in the previous story. Here's why I feel as I do. The data cannot be denied. This is yet another example of the sacrifice of the many to the financial benefit of the few. |
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Agence France-Presse (France) |
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Pesticides may kill off water insects and other small aquatic life by as much as 42 percent, according to an analysis of German, French and Australian rivers and streams published on Monday.
The study in US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to compare regional biodiversity in polluted versus less polluted water, said scientists at the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.
Freshwater invertebrates and aquatic insects were 42 percent less common in strongly contaminated areas in Europe compared to less polluted areas; and in Australia, a difference of 27 percent was found across regions.
The analysis included measurements of insecticides and fungicides, which are used often in agriculture and are typically well studied and heavily regulated.
However, the researchers said little examination has been done to gauge their effect on the streams and rivers they end up in after ... |
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Retired Federal Judge: Your Faith In Secret Surveillance Court Is Dramatically Misplaced
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| Here is a Federal judge's sense of the secret surveillance court that lies at the heart of the octopus surveillance apparat. Not a happy story. |
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NICOLE FLATOW - Think Progress |
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A retired federal judge warned Friday against blind faith in the secret court deciding the scope of U.S. government surveillance. During a panel discussion on constitutional privacy protection in the wake of a leaked Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision that revealed widespread NSA data collection, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner stood up in the audience to counter the statements of conservative law professor Nathan Sales that secret surveillance requests are subject to meaningful judicial review. She cautioned:
As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.
Two reasons: One … The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed ... |
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ALEC Tours Tar Sands, Works with Industry Groups to Block Low-Carbon Fuel Standards
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| The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which worked so hard at voter suppression, and climate change denial, has now extended it brief into stopping attempts to make carbon fuels less polluting. That's right: They are working to assure that high polluting fuels are protected. When I read about this extension of the Republican Party I always wonder, How do these people live with themselves? They remind me of the villains in the The Game of Thrones. Utterly immoral. And the people who fund them, even worse. |
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NICK SURGEY - Nation of Change |
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) recently adopted a 'model” bill from an oil-industry lobby group, that would limit the ability of states to negotiate regional 'low-carbon fuel standards” (LCFS), a mechanism designed to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. If agreed by states, LCFS could have a significant impact on the sale of fuels derived from Canadian tar sands in the United States, regardless of any decision the Obama administration makes over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
ALEC’s interest in the tar sands is increasingly active. It organized a tour of the Alberta tar sands for its members in October 2012, and as previously reported by CMD, at least seven states introduced resolutions in 2013 calling for the approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas. The resolutions contained language from an ALEC 'model” bill and from a set of talking points by TransCanada, ... |
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| Tuesday, 18 June 2013 |
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Everything Americans Think They Know About Drugs Is Wrong: A Scientist Explodes the Myths
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| Finally some actual facts about drugs and drug use. This report is, I hope, the first of many making it clear that the War on Drugs is basically a racist jihad against the poor and disadvantaged used to support an entire bureaucracy of police, judges, prosecutors, prisons, prison guards, and everyone else who can figure an angle to get their snout in the public tax money trough under this umbrella. All these people are making a living off the pain and suffering of millions, mostly people of color. Worse this war is responsible, in the same way the alcohol prohibition created the modern Mafia, for creating the Drug cartels. The entire effort is a study in dysfunction, greed, racism, and stupidity, and it has been going on now for decades with no appreciable effect on reducing drug availability. |
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KRISTEN GWYNNE - AlterNet (U.S.) |
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What many Americans, including many scientists, think they know about drugs is turning out to be totally wrong. For decades, drug war propaganda has brainwashed Americans into blaming drugs for problems ranging from crime to economic deprivation. In his new book High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, Carl Hart blows apart the most common myths about drugs and their impact on society, drawing in part on his personal experience growing up in an impoverished Miami neighborhood. Hart has used marijuana and cocaine, carried guns, sold drugs, and participated in other petty crime, like shoplifting. A combination of what he calls choice and chance brought him to the Air Force and college, and finally made him the first black, tenured professor of sciences at Columbia University.
Intertwined with his story about the struggles of families and communities stressed by lack ... |
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U.S. Producing 'Abysmally Low' Number of Primary Care Doctors
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I have written over and over about this trend that is getting worse as each year goes by. (See my essay, Where Can I Find a Family Doctor? An Unintended Consequence of Health Reform, http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2810%2900097-2/fulltext.
The illness profit system model that passes, with such pathetic results, for healthcare in this country is slowly destroying primary care in the U.S., as this report makes clear. The implications are obvious. |
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United Press International |
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WASHINGTON -- Despite a shortage of U.S. primary care doctors, less than 25 percent of new doctors go into this field, and fewer still work in rural areas, researchers say.
Lead study author Dr. Candice Chen, an assistant research professor of the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, said the study also found only 4.8 percent of the new primary care physicians set up shop in rural areas.
"If residency programs do not ramp up the training of these physicians the shortage in primary care, especially in remote areas, will get worse," Chen said in a statement. "The study's findings raise questions about whether federally funded graduate medical education institutions are meeting the nation's need for more primary care physicians."
Chen and colleagues studied the career paths of 8,977 physicians who had graduated from 759 medical residency sites from 2006-08. Three to five ... |
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What Sweden Can Tell Us About Obamacare
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Here is what a properly functioning healthcare system committed to creating national wellness not profit looks like. This assessment is based on the data of social outcomes, not the profit above all ideology that informs all American healthcare policies.
We could have such a system, if the political will to create it existed. |
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ROBERT H. FRANK, Economics Professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University - The New York Times |
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Last month, for the 37th time, the House of Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare, with many Republicans saying that its call for greater government involvement in the health care system spells doom. Yet most other industrial countries have health care systems with far more government involvement than we are ever likely to see under Obamacare. What does their experience tell us about Republican fears?
While in Sweden this month as a visiting scholar, I’ve asked several Swedish health economists to share their thoughts about that question. They have spent their lives under a system in which most health care providers work directly for the government. Like economists in most other countries, they tend to be skeptical of large bureaucracies. So if extensive government involvement in health care is indeed a recipe for doom, they should have clear evidence of that by now.
Yet none of them voiced the ... |
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Study: Same-sex Marriage has no Effect on Opposite-sex Marriage Rates
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| Here we have some actual data concerning marriage equality. And the truth is revealed: This is an issue in which it is clear that the arguments of those opposed to marriage equality are without any actual substance. The anti-position is entirely the creation of the Theocratic Right, based on the Right's sexual dysfunction, and obsession with controlling what other people do with their genitals. |
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ERIC W. DOLAN - The Raw Story |
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Supporters of same-sex marriage have long argued that their foes were irrational because allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed had no impact on straight couples. Thanks to research published June 11 in the Public Library of Science, supporters of same-sex marriage now have empirical proof to back up that claim.
'[A] deleterious effect on rates of state rates of opposite sex marriage has been argued to be a motivating factor for both the withholding and the elimination of existing rights of same sex couples to marry by policy makers - including presiding justices of current litigation over same sex couples rights to legally marry,” Alexis Dinno and Chelsea Whitney of Portland State University wrote in their study.
Conservatives have argued that same-sex marriage detracts from the rights of 'traditionally” married couples. Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, for instance, said in April that same-sex marriage discourages marriage ... |
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| Monday, 17 June 2013 |
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Food Stamps Under Threat: House GOP Wants to Cut $20.5B From SNAP
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I cannot properly express how despicable I find this story. There are literally dozens of stories like this one that I find, or are sent to me, each day. I could fill every SR edition with several. They are all about Republicans trying to screw in some way, the poor, women, the elderly, the disadvantaged, the children.
Fourteen per cent of my readership are self-described conservatives. You tell me that through the polls, and the comments, both on the site and in personal emails. And I know this will upset a lot of you, and I am sorry about that. But I care about data and social outcomes, not partisan politics, and whether policies serve wellness, or something else.
The Republicans in Congress, particularly in the House, are not interested in governing. The last five years have made that abundantly clear. They seem to think politics is all theater, jockeying for position or media attention. Governing hardly seems to enter into their thinking. |
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ELEANOR CLIFT - The Daily Beast |
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It’s a big number and it gets people’s attention when they hear it: 47 million Americans receive food stamps in what is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The program has expanded significantly under President Obama, who boosted benefits and allowed states to waive some work rules under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Still, the spiraling need for food assistance even as the unemployment rate has come down is tied to the weak economy and jobs that are so marginal that millions of working people earn so little they still qualify for SNAP.
Food Stamps Challenge
This week, thirty members of Congress embarked on the 'SNAP challenge,” eating on a SNAP budget for a few days or a week. 'That’s $4.50 a day.” Above, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter took on a week long food stamp challenge, April 2012. (Matt Rourke/AP)
For decades, since ... |
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Facebook Got 10,000 Requests for Data From NSA in Just Six Months (and Microsoft Received 7,000 Orders)
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| Information revealing the truth about the level of surveillance just continues to pour out. We are beginning to get a sense of the scale of it. I find it notable that I get most of these stories from non-U.S. media. And if you have been following the stories I have been publishing in SR, and understand what is behind this, it gets really quite freaky. |
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The Mail (U.K.) |
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Facebook and Microsoft were able to reveal limited information on Friday night about the government orders they have received to turn over user data to security agencies.
Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said in a statement that they had between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all government entities, from local to federal, in the last six months of 2012.
The orders involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users on a broad range of surveillance topics, from missing children to terrorism.
Microsoft said they had between 6,000 and 7,000 orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts, but downplayed how much they had revealed.
Looking on? Facebook received government data requests that involved the accounts of 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users
Data: Microsoft said they had between 6,000 and 7,000 government orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts, but downplayed how much they revealed.
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Sundays With The Christianists: American History Textbooks That Wonder Why God Let Pagans Get Here First
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| This is part of both the Great Schism Trend, and the Willful Ignorance Trend. This is the Theocratic Right in action. |
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Wonkette |
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Greetings, Wonkademics! So glad you could roll up for our magical history tour! This week, we continue our look at two textbooks for homeschoolers and Christian schools, the 8th-grade text from A Beka Book, America: Land I Love, and Bob Jones University Press’s backpack-burster for 11th/12th graders, United States History for Christian Schools. This time around, we’ll look at how these books approach the story of how a just and merciful God brought civilization and smallpox to the original inhabitants of North America.
As we noted last week, Land I Love is the more aggressive of the two books when it comes to telling students that history is an account of how things turned out exactly like God planned. In a brief section on 'America Before Columbus,” we’re reminded that the best history text is the Bible:
Over four thousand years ago, after the ... |
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Study Explores Atmospheric Impact of Declining Arctic Sea Ice
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| Here is the latest on the polar ice. This one the North Pole. |
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BEN NORMAN - Science News Room |
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There is growing recognition that reductions in Arctic sea ice levels will influence patterns of atmospheric circulation both within and beyond the Arctic. New research in the International Journal of Climatology explores the impact of 2007 ice conditions, the second lowest Arctic sea ice extent in the satellite era, on atmospheric circulation and surface temperatures.
Two 30-year simulations, one using the sea ice levels of 2007 and another using sea ice levels at the end of the 20th century, were used to access the impact of ice free seas. The results showed a significant response to the anomalous open water of 2007.
The results confirm that the atmospheric response to declining sea ice could have implications far beyond the Arctic such as a decrease in the pole to equator temperature gradient, given the increased temperatures associated with the increase in open water, leading to a weaker jet stream ... |
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Warm Ocean Causing Most Antarctic Ice Shelf Mass Loss
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This is the definitive South Pole report.
Click through to see the images that accompany this report.
Imagery related to this release can be found online at: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20130613.html . |
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WHITNEY CLAVIN, J.D. HARRINGTON and MARIA-JOSE VINAS GARCIA - NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory & Goddard Space Center |
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PASADENA, Calif. -- Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves are responsible for most of the continent's ice shelf mass loss, a new study by NASA and university researchers has found.
Scientists have studied the rates of basal melt, or the melting of the ice shelves from underneath, of individual ice shelves, the floating extensions of glaciers that empty into the sea. But this is the first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves. The study found basal melt accounted for 55 percent of all Antarctic ice shelf mass loss from 2003 to 2008, an amount much higher than previously thought.
Antarctica holds about 60 percent of the planet's fresh water locked into its massive ice sheet. Ice shelves buttress the glaciers behind them, modulating the speed at which these rivers of ice flow into the ocean. Determining how ice shelves melt will help scientists ... |
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