SCOTT KAUFMAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: 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.
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 of the world, regardless of the religious or political beliefs of others,” it claims that state-mandated information with no basis in scientific fact violates its ‘religious” beliefs.
Spokesperson Lucien Greaves said that the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision bolsters their case. ‘While we feel we have a strong case for an exemption regardless of the Hobby […]
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CAROLINE STAUFFER, - Reuters/Business Insider
Stephan: 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)
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 chemicals.
Experts in the United States have also warned about corn production prospects because of a growing bug resistance to genetically modified corn. Researchers in Iowa found significant damage from rootworms in corn fields last year.
In Brazil, the main corn culprit is Spodoptera frugiperda, also known as the corn leafworm or southern grassworm.
Seed companies say they warned […]
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MARK JOSEPH STERN, - Slate
Stephan: This is the level of madness we have reached in our intensifying societal gun psychosis.
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 laws to keep firearms away from children. But Florida did the opposite: The state passed a law gagging doctors from asking patients about guns, effectively preventing doctors from sharing safety tips to keep those guns out of children’s hands.
The gag law, nicknamed the Docs vs. Glocks law by its detractors, was passed […]
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DR. ROLF FROBÖSE, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: 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
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 cried and looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
When I turned on the light, the apparition had disappeared. Since I was one hundred percent sure it had not been a dream, I told the housemaster about the strange encounter the next morning. I gave her a detailed description of the […]
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Stephan: 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.
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 they are clumsily divided among the federal government and the states, like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Obamacare.
So what are state governments particularly good at? Nothing, really. They interfere in local government, cripple the federal government, shake down lobbyists and waste taxpayer money.
Few if any state borders correspond to the boundaries […]
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