– Recently, the Supreme Court expanded the impact that corporations can have on American elections. Now, more than ever, and more than before, big money can buy the political decisions it wants and needs to enhance its profits.
– In honor of this new relationship, we have here an updated photo of our Supreme Court Justices:
True Colors
– Research thanks to Van who knows a twisted thing when he see it.
Here are two beautiful graphs I picked up over at The Seitch Blog.
The health care debate in the U.S. is a really twisted business. And most folks in the U.S. have very little idea just how twisted it all is. They are still being told and still believing that the U.S. health care system is the best in the world.
The power of stupidity and propaganda never fail to amaze me when they are combined.
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Chart #1 is here: ➡
Chart #2 is here: ➡
Original post over at The Sietch is here: ➡
So, go ask the folks that make any of the zillion chemicals released into the environment over the last 100 years if they think there’s any chance that their particular chemicals might, in some way, harm people or the environment. Go ahead and ask – you know what they’re going to say.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair
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Children exposed in the womb to chemicals in cosmetics and fragrances are more likely to develop behavioral problems commonly found in children with attention deficit disorders, according to a study of New York City school-age children published Thursday.
Scientists at Mount Sinai School of Medicine reported that mothers who had high levels of phthalates during their pregnancies were more likely to have children with poorer scores in the areas of attention, aggression and conduct.
Children were 2.5 times more likely to have attention problems that were “clinically significant” if their mothers were among those highest exposed to phthalates, the study found. The types of behavior that increased are found in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and other so-called disruptive behavior disorders.
“More phthalates equaled more behavioral problems,” Stephanie Engel, a Mount Sinai associate professor of preventive medicine and lead author of the study, said in an interview Thursday. “For every increase of exposure, we saw an increase in frequency and severity of the symptoms.”
More… ➡
I’ve written about this sort of thing before here, here, here and here. And it gets sadder to write about it each time.
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Only 350 wild tigers remain in Asia’s Mekong River region, according to a new report from the conservation nonprofit WWF, which says the loss is being driven by trade in tiger parts.
If you are a regular reader of this Blog, then you will know that a central point I am often ‘on’ about concerns the Biological Imperatives – which I believe are the deep root and cause of much of why humanity seems so maladapted to long term survival on this planet.
I’ve just finished reading The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom – a brilliant book which I highly recommend. Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as you might expect from the book’s title weaves its way deeply throughout the novel’s plot.
Bit one bit of Schopenhauer’s thought that I noted with particular interest is illustrated in the following quotes:
It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. next, Darwin showed us that were not central in the chain of life but like other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house — that much of our behavior is governed by forces outside of our consciousness. there is no doubt that Freud’s unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud’s birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forces and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.
and
…Schopenhauer two centuries ago understood the underlying reality; the sheer awesome power of the sex drive. It’s the most fundamental force within us — the will to love, to reproduce — and it can’t be stilled.
Schopenhauer may have been the first to name and describe I call the Biological Imperatives.
Of course, it wasn’t until much more recently, with the advent of Evolutionary Psychology, that we can begin to connect his observations into the greater cloth of hard science vis-a-vis what E. O. Wilson called Consilience in his book of the same name.
After the West won the Cold War, democracy flourished in the world as never before. No more. The tide of political and human freedom hasn’t merely slowed but in recent years has turned in the other direction. Seeing that the U.S. midwifed the post-1989 world, these trends are of more than passing interest.
Democracy’s troubles are summed up in “Freedom in the World 2010,” the yearly report card published today by Freedom House. We’re in a “freedom recession,” the advocacy group says. For the fourth consecutive year, more countries saw declines in political and civic rights than advances, the longest such period of deterioration in the 40 year history of this widely cited report.
More… ➡
Very little doubt, except among the denialists and those who don’t understand science, that we are seriously losing ground with the climate.
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Jan. 21, 2010
2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 1998 and 2007 — as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.
“There’s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year’s ranking, but usually that misses the point,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS. “There’s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated.”
More… ➡
– Research thanks to John K.
“With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.”
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
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To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored.
It is a global problem, with no obvious villains and no one-step solutions, whose worst effects seem as if they’ll befall somebody else at some other time. In short, if someone set out to draw up a problem that people would not care about, one expert on human behavior said, it would look exactly like climate change.
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