Thursday, November 29th, 2018
Jayne O'Donnell, - 11 Alive (NBC)
Stephan: I have already written extensively about the opioid pandemic (see SR archive). Now comes this data on the rise of alcoholism to the point of death, particularly amongst women. I think the evidence here is telling us about the growing malaise and depression arising from the collapse of American democracy and fairness, and the extreme wealth inequity that plagues the country.
Credit: Daily Mail
The last time lawyer Erika Byrd talked her way out of an alcohol rehab center, her father took her to lunch.
“Dad, I know what alcohol has done to me,” she told him that day in January 2011. “I know what it has made me do to you and mom. But that wasn’t me.”
By the time she died three months later, Byrd had blocked her parents’ calls because they kept having her involuntarily committed. They once had a magistrate judge hold a hearing at her hospital bed. He ordered herto undergo a month of in-patient treatment.
Byrd, who died in April 2011 at the age of 42, is among the rising number of people in the United States who have been killed by alcohol in the last decade.
It’s an increase that has been obscured by the opioid epidemic. But alcohol kills more people each year than overdoses – through cancer, liver cirrhosis, pancreatitis and suicide, among other ways.
From 2007 to 2017, the number of deaths attributable to alcohol increased 35 percent, according to […]
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Thursday, November 29th, 2018
Keith Kahn-Harris, - Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is an excellent take on the psychology of White Supremacy. As the just completed Senate election in Mississippi of Cindy Hyde-Smith makes clear, there are entire areas of the country defined by this moral degeneracy. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is this same racist moral degeneracy across generations that has left Mississippi, in the second decade of the 21st century, as little more than a third world country.
Mississippi Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Confederate regalia
The concept of “white supremacy” is having a moment right now, and understandably so. White resentment, entitlement and bigotry never went away, but it is closer to the political mainstream now than it has been for decades.
The rhetoric of the likes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Steve Bannon and other figures in the ascendant populist right might not openly embrace “white power”, but there is no doubt that open white racists have been emboldened by them. Trump may have not wanted Richard Spencer (who coined the term “alt right”) to gleefully exclaim: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory” just after the 2016 US election, but he was not particularly bothered by it either.
Online and offline, there is a rich and growing milieu of radical racist thinkers and activists. Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, was immersed in it and active on the Gab social network, stirring up hate towards Jews who […]
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Thursday, November 29th, 2018
Stephan: When I read this article, I got up and pulled off my library shelf a scholarly text from university and read the section on Neanderthals. Virtually every statement in it is now obviously incorrect. It is quite astonishing really to realize that what one was taught in college as the latest and best thinking on a subject is now shown to be nothing more than well-intentioned nonsense. Here is the latest on our ancient cousins.
A sculpture of what a Neanderthal man might have looked like on display at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.
Credit: Getty /Canopy
When scientists first recognized Neanderthals as a species slightly different than our own, the species was demonized. The first Neanderthal skeleton, reconstructed in 1911, was nicknamed the “Old Man of La Chapelle” and described as a wretched creature: hunched over, brutish, dim-witted, and primitive.
In the years since, archeologists have concluded from other Neanderthal remains that their bodies were riddled with trauma, particularly in terms of fractures or injuries on the head and neck. That led researchers to believe that Neanderthals were quite violent, or lived more brutal lives, even compared to their contemporary Homo sapiens counterparts. “The only sample which closely matches the Neanderthals” in terms of injuries, a 1995 paper concluded, were rodeo athletes (you know, the ones who ride bulls).
But there’s a new paper out in Nature from researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany containing evidence that dispels the notion that Neanderthals […]
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Wednesday, November 28th, 2018
Brooke Jarvis, Contributing Writer - The New York Times Magazine
Stephan: The melting ice. The acidification of the ocean, and the breakdown of seafloor. Add to that the bee catastrophe; and why stop at bees, the decline of insects around the world. The values we hold and the things we do are, as this essay states so well, destroying our world in a way that will transform human civilization.
Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.
Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.
It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn’t eating any bugs.
For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car’s windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn’t see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn’t recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had […]
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Wednesday, November 28th, 2018
Kerry Eleveld, - Alternet
Stephan: Unless you are very wealthy if you voted for Trump you voted for the degradation of the quality of your life. The data just keeps piling up.
A farmer’s barn in Somerset, Ohio, shows support for Trump. While the majority of rural Americans supported the Republican candidate, it might be to the detriment of the agriculture system.
Credit: Christine Ruddy/Shutterstock
The rate of bankruptcies among farms is rising steeply in the upper Midwest due to falling revenues from corn, soybeans, milk and other products.
Over the last 12 months ending in June, 84 farms have declared bankruptcy in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, more than doubling the number of bankruptcies over the same stretch in 2013/2014, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Additionally, the outlook moving forward doesn’t look good. Some farm exports actually spiked in the second quarter in the race to beat the implementation of China’s retaliatory tariffs. Soybean sales, for instance, have now “slowed to a crawl,” according the Star Tribune. Given the price drops on the products since June, Minneapolis Fed analyst Ron Wirtz tells the AP, “The trajectory of the current trends suggest […]
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