Abortion is not murder. A fetus is not considered a human life.
If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and
yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as
the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life. --
Exodus 21:22-23
The Bible places no value on fetuses or infants less than one month old.
And if it be from a month old even unto five
years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the female
thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver. -- Leviticus 27:6
Fetuses and infants less than one month old are not considered persons.
Number the children of Levi after the house of
their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them.
And Moses numbered them according to the word of the LORD. -- Numbers 3:15-16
God sometimes approves of killing fetuses.
And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? ... Now therefore kill every male
among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
-- Numbers 31:15-17
(Some of the non-virgin women must have been pregnant. They would have been killed along with their unborn
fetuses.)
Give them, O LORD: what
wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. -- Hosea 9:14
Yea, though they bring
forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb. -- Hosea 9:16
Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they
shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall
be ripped up. -- Hosea 13:16
God sometimes kills newborn babies to punish their parents.
Because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to
blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die. -- 2 Samuel 12:14
God sometimes causes abortions by cursing unfaithful wives.
The priest shall say unto the woman, The LORD make thee a curse and an oath among thy people,
when the LORD doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell. And this water that
causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and
thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen. ...
And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be
defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that
causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly
shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse
among her people. And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall
conceive seed. -- Numbers 5:21-21, 27-28
God's law sometimes requires the execution (by burning to death) of pregnant women.
Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child
by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt.
-- Genesis 38:24
The internet faces a choice: corporate monopoly or public control.
In the heady days of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, many trumpeted the emancipatory potential of the internet. They spoke of networks and hive minds, crowdsourced revolution and livestreamed liberation. But the internet, like everything else, is subject to market discipline and vulnerable to privatization — and with each new victory for the American telecommunications oligopoly, that digital optimism fades further from view.
Last week, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai announced that his agency will be repealing the hard-won net neutrality protections instituted in 2015 by the Obama administration. To understand what net neutrality is and why it matters for the Left, Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Victor Pickard, associate professor of communication at the University Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, whose research focuses on internet policy and the political economy of media.
CLEVELAND)—Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine today announced a lawsuit
against a purported children’s charity, its operators, and its
fundraiser for allegedly defrauding Ohio donors and misleading them
about how their money would be spent.
According to the lawsuit, Cops for Kids Inc. (also known as Ohio Cops
for Kids) collected over $4.2 million in donations from Ohio residents
between 2005 and 2015 but spent less than two percent of it on
charitable programming, instead paying the vast majority — over $3.34
million — to its for-profit solicitor, Telcom Enterprises, and an
additional $802,662 on salaries and overhead.
“Well-meaning Ohioans gave to Cops for Kids believing their dollars
would help Ohio children or support local law enforcement. Instead, an
overwhelming percentage of donations were kept by the group’s for-profit
fundraiser or the men who operated it,”
Attorney General DeWine said.
“We believe Cops for Kids is a sham operation that has defrauded Ohioans
out of millions of dollars while performing almost no legitimate
charitable work.”
The body of evidence supporting human-caused global warming is vast – too vast for climate denial blogs to attack it all. Instead they focus on what a new study
published in the journal Bioscience calls “keystone dominoes.” These
are individual pieces of evidence that capture peoples’ attention, like
polar bears. The authors write:
These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW [human-caused global
warming] in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes
that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each
representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock
over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may
assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by
association.”
Basically, if these bloggers can create the perception that the
science underlying polar bear or Arctic sea ice vulnerability to climate
change is incorrect, their readers will assume that all of climate
science is fatally flawed. And blogs can be relatively influential –
surveys have shown that blog readers trust them more than traditional
news and information sources.
Researchers have found an imbalance in the brain chemistry of young people addicted to smartphones and the internet, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 46 percent of Americans say they could not live without their smartphones. While this sentiment is clearly hyperbole, more and more people are becoming increasingly dependent on smartphones and other portable electronic devices for news, information, games, and even the occasional phone call.
Along with a growing concern that young people, in particular, may be spending too much time staring into their phones instead of interacting with others, come questions as to the immediate effects on the brain and the possible long-term consequences of such habits.
Hyung Suk Seo, M.D., professor of neuroradiology at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to gain unique insight into the brains of smartphone- and internet-addicted teenagers. MRS is a type of MRI that measures the brain's chemical composition.
The study involved 19 young people (mean age 15.5, 9 males) diagnosed with internet or smartphone addiction and 19 gender- and age-matched healthy controls. Twelve of the addicted youth received nine weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, modified from a cognitive therapy program for gaming addiction, as part of the study.
Researchers used standardized internet and smartphone addiction tests to measure the severity of internet addiction. Questions focused on the extent to which internet and smartphone use affects daily routines, social life, productivity, sleeping patterns and feelings.
"The higher the score, the more severe the addiction," Dr. Seo said.
Dr. Seo reported that the addicted teenagers had significantly higher scores in depression, anxiety, insomnia severity and impulsivity.
The researchers performed MRS exams on the addicted youth prior to and following behavioral therapy and a single MRS study on the control patients to measure levels of gamma aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a neurotransmitter in the brain that inhibits or slows down brain signals, and glutamate-glutamine (Glx), a neurotransmitter that causes neurons to become more electrically excited. Previous studies have found GABA to be involved in vision and motor control and the regulation of various brain functions, including anxiety.
The results of the MRS revealed that, compared to the healthy controls, the ratio of GABA to Glx was significantly increased in the anterior cingulate cortex of smartphone- and internet-addicted youth prior to therapy.
Dr. Seo said the ratios of GABA to creatine and GABA to glutamate were significantly correlated to clinical scales of internet and smartphone addictions, depression and anxiety.
Having too much GABA can result in a number of side effects, including drowsiness and anxiety.
More study is needed to understand the clinical implications of the findings, but Dr. Seo believes that increased GABA in the anterior cingulate gyrus in internet and smartphone addiction may be related to the functional loss of integration and regulation of processing in the cognitive and emotional neural network.
The good news is GABA to Glx ratios in the addicted youth significantly decreased or normalized after cognitive behavioral therapy.
"The increased GABA levels and disrupted balance between GABA and glutamate in the anterior cingulate cortex may contribute to our understanding the pathophysiology of and treatment for addictions," Dr. Seo said.
Co-authors are Eun-Kee Jeong, Ph.D., Sungwon Choi, Yunna Kwon, Hae-Jeong Park, and InSeong Kim.
Note: Copies of RSNA 2017 news releases and electronic images will be available online at RSNA.org/press17 beginning Monday, Nov. 27.
RSNA is an association of over 54,000 radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and related scientists, promoting excellence in patient care and health care delivery through education, research and technologic innovation. The Society is based in Oak Brook, Ill. (RSNA.org)
Editor's note: The data in these releases may differ from those in the published abstract and those actually presented at the meeting, as researchers continue to update their data right up until the meeting.
For patient-friendly information on MRS, or MR spectroscopy, visit RadiologyInfo.org.
SOURCE Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
Related Links
An inter-state police force that serves a
polygamous fundamentalist Mormon community won’t be required to
disband—despite alleged discrimination against nonbelievers,
surveillance of dissidents, and facilitation of child abuse.
Instead,
officers in the Colorado City Marshal’s Office will be required to
attend annual training sessions to ensure they comply with federal laws
and don’t discriminate against the community’s non-religious minority.
The Marshal’s Office has been serving the adjoining towns of Hildale,
Utah and Colorado City, Arizona since 1985.
Together, the two towns make up Short Creek, a 7,500-person community that’s home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,
a polygamous offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints that splintered from the Mormon church when the latter renounced
plural marriage at the beginning of the 20th century.
The U.S. Department of Justice called for the
disbanding of the CCMO as part of a lengthy anti-discrimination lawsuit
against the twin towns that comprise Short Creek that began in 2012.
According to the complaint, the community’s powerful FLDS leaders denied non-members access to housing, police protection, and public services including water and electricity.
In
March 2016, a jury determined the community’s leadership had
discriminated against non-FLDS members and awarded $2.2 million in
damages to six Short Creek residents. The Justice Department then
demanded the federal government disband Short Creek’s police force,
which it claimed was enforcing the church’s discrimination against
non-members.
Prosecutors claimed the
Marshal’s Office was using its “state-granted law enforcement authority”
to “carry out the will and dictates” of Warren Jeffs,
the infamous FLDS leader who is currently serving a life sentence for
sexually abusing two young girls whom he called his “spiritual wives.”
In
October 2005, marshal Fred Barlow wrote a letter to Jeffs, a fugitive
at the time. “I want to fill the position that you would have me fill
and do the job the way you would like it done,” Barlow wrote. “We will
continue to do that directive unless you would like us to do something
different.”
Thousands of people gathered in the rain Saturday on the soggy grounds of the Washington Monument to turn Earth Day into an homage to science. After four hours of speeches and musical performances, they marched down Constitution Avenue to the foot of Capitol Hill, chanting “Build labs, not walls!” and “Hey, Trump, have you heard, you can’t silence every nerd!”
The March for Science began as a notion batted around online on Reddit after the Women’s March on Washington, which was held Jan. 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. The idea snowballed after it was endorsed by numerous mainstream science organizations, which vowed that it would not be a partisan event. It eventually became a global phenomenon, held in more than 600 cities on six continents — and cheered on by scientists on a seventh, Antarctica.
Numerous elected Republicans, up to and including Donald Trump, have falsely accused the town hall resistance of being made up of paid protesters. But according to The Arizona Republic, it is the Republicans who are openly paying people to protest at Democratic town halls.
The accusation is an odd one coming from a person whose own Federal Elections Commission filings show that he, in fact, paid actors to attend his own campaign launch, but the hypocrisy runs even deeper than that. According to The Arizona Republic,
the Republican Party of Arizona sent an email soliciting attendance at a
town hall event for Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and offering to
reimburse attendees to the tune of $25:
The email noted that to attend the event required joining
the coffee club and paying $25. “If someone does have to pay, the Party
is willing to reimburse the expense,” the email stated. Kory Langhofer, attorney for the state Republican Party, said if
people are reimbursed the $25 entry fee, the party will “make sure it’s
fully disclosed and reported correctly. As long as the transaction is
disclosed and transparent, it’s perfectly acceptable,” he said.
Such reimbursements may well be “acceptable” as a matter of law, but
for a party that accuses others of paying for resistance, it is
hypocritical in the extreme.
Fortunately, even at the relatively cheap price of 25 bucks a head,
there is not enough money in the world to equal the resistance to Trump
that has grown from the grassroots, free of charge.
London (CNN)Crowds of people are marching Saturday in the United States and around the world
in support of science and evidence-based research in a protest fueled
by opposition to President Donald Trump's environmental and energy
policies.
Besides the main
march in Washington, organizers said more than 600 "satellite" marches
were due to take place globally in a protest timed to coincide with Earth Day.
The march, whose beginnings reflect the viral birth of the Women's March on Washington,
has been billed by its organizers as political but nonpartisan. The
event's website describes it as "the first step of a global movement to
defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies and
governments."
"I
think there has been a declining sense of what science means to
progress. I think we take so much for granted," said march honorary
co-chair Lydia Villa-Komaroff ahead of the event.
Supporters of science and research gather Saturday for the March for Science protest in Sydney.
Demonstrators in Australia kicked off the day of protest.
In
Sydney, marchers carried banners, many homemade, with slogans such as
"Science makes sense," "Science-based policy = stuff that works," and
"Climate change is real, clean coal is not." Another placard displayed
the message, "Governments: stop ignoring inconvenient science!"
Rebecca McElroy, an
astrophysics doctoral student at the University of Sydney, tweeted video
of a "mini march for science" around the dome of the Anglo-Australian
Telescope in New South Wales.
Demonstrators also turned out in New Zealand cities, including Wellington, Auckland, Dunedin and Christchurch.
New Zealand Green Party
co-leader James Shaw tweeted a popular chant from the marchers: "What do
we want? Evidence-based science! When do we want it? After peer
review!"
Marches were also held in Durban and Cape Town, South Africa, and in Tokyo.
WASHINGTON --Protesters from coast to coast called on President Trump over the weekend to release his tax returns.
He responded on Twitter, saying: “The election is over!... Now tax returns are brought up again?”
Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!
Mr. Trump says he can’t release them because he’s under audit. But tax experts say that shouldn’t matter.
“The only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, okay?” Mr. Trump said in January.
But in February, a CBS News poll found that 56 percent of
Americans think it’s necessary for him to release his tax returns.
Forty-three percent said it’s not.
He is the only president not to release them in more than 40 years.
Before
taking office, Mr. Trump often criticized President Obama for being too
secretive. In 2012, he tweeted: “He is the least transparent
President--ever--and he ran on transparency.”
Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records? He is the least transparent President--ever--and he ran on transparency.
But on Friday, the White House said its visitor logs will no longer be made public, a practice that President Obama started.
“Donald
Trump’s White House is less transparent than Barack Obama’s White
House,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and expert on government
ethics.
“We do not know how much money the president owes and to whom he owes it,” she said.
Kathleen Clark
CBS News
During
the daily White House briefing on Monday, CBS News asked White House
press secretary Sean Spicer about views on transparency.
“There
are now ethics experts on both sides of the aisle who say this is the
least transparent administration in decades. How do you respond?” CBS
News asked.
“Well, I think that we’ve taken several steps to allow people’s access to this White House,” Spicer replied.
“We
bring people in, we release participant lists, we give press the
opportunity to come into the room, so I would respectfully disagree with
that,” he said.
The Trump White House is even secretive about golf.
Mr. Trump has visited golf courses 19 times as president, but in most
of those cases the White House has refused to confirm or deny that he
was actually golfing.
Exoplanet LHS 1140b is believed to be about 40% larger than Earth and
lies 39 light years away in the constellation of Cetus, orbiting a red
dwarf star
An artist’s impression of exoplanet LHS 1140b, described by Jason
Dittmann at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as the most
exciting he had seen in 10 years.
Photograph: ESO/spaceengine.org
A rocky planet that orbits a red dwarf star has been revealed as the
latest contender for the best place to hunt for life beyond the solar
system.
The newfound world was spotted as it crossed the face of its parent
star and cast an almost imperceptible shadow that was detected by the MEarth-South observatory in the Chilean desert.
The planet lies 39 light years away and is believed to lurk in the
habitable zone – where liquid water could support life as we know it –
around a star named LHS 1140 in the constellation of Cetus, the sea
monster.
Jason Dittmann at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
said the new exoplanet, known as LHS 1140b, was the most exciting he had
seen in 10 years. “We could hardly hope for a better target to perform
one of the biggest quests in science: searching for evidence of life
beyond Earth,” he said. Continue Reading
The
pamphlet war between the 'conservative' Edmund Burke and the 'radical'
Thomas Paine remains with us in unexpected ways, shows Yuval Levin in
The Great Debate
Edmund Burke (left) and Thomas Paine, caricatured by Gillray and Cruickshank respectively Basic Books, pp.304, £18.99
What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional
answer is that these ideas derive from the French National Assembly
after 1789, in which supporters of the King sat on one side and those of
the revolution on the other. Yuval Levin in The Great Debate,
however, argues not for seating but for ideas: that left and right enter
the Anglo-American political bloodstream via the climactic public clash
in the 1790s between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, the prime movers in
a pamphlet war that convulsed opinion and engaged readers on two
continents.
If this is right, then the touchstone of modern political debate in Britain and America is not capitalism v. socialism, or religious fundamentalism v. cosmopolitan secularism, but an earlier and deeper disagreement over the nature of the modern liberal political order itself.
To none was the shock greater than to Thomas Paine, who had made his name as the author of the revolutionary tract Common Sense in 1776. Now he saw that Burke’s book demanded a rapid and equally trenchant public response. The result was The Rights of Man.
There followed dozens of further pamphlets, as opinion divided over the
issue, while the revolution in France descended — as Burke had
predicted — into anarchy, terror and war.
Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine, described as a
‘one-man Republican brains trust’, sets the scene well. On the one hand
we have Burke, the ‘philosopher in action’. Here is a man who combines
deep learning and reflection with a mastery of the facts at hand, is
always conscious of the limitations of individual human reason and sees
society as a priceless providential inheritance, which each generation
must maintain and enhance for posterity. On the other hand there is
Paine, whose hatred of authority in any form is so great that it extends
even to acknowledging previous thinkers (‘I scarcely ever quote; the
reason is, I always think’). He is a man who rejects the claims of
tradition and convention and seeks to reconstitute government and
society itself according to abstract reason.
Creed star Michael B. Jordan and Oscar-nominated Michael Shannon have been set to star in Fahrenheit 451, the HBO
Films adaptation that has been in development at the premium network.
The latest movie version of Ray Bradbury’s iconic sci-fi novel is being
directed by Shannon’s 99 Homes helmer Ramin Bahrani, who co-wrote the script with his 99 Homes co-scribe Amir Naderi and is executive producing.
Two oil rigs sit just outside of Theodore Roosevelt
National Park near Watford City, North Dakota. There aren’t currently
any oil wells inside the park, but the new administration’s lax stance
on drilling in national parks might soon change this.Ken Cedeno/Corbis via Getty Images
It’s no secret that oil and gas companies are on the
hunt for new places to drill. But the quest for more fossil fuels could
heat up in places you might not expect: our national parks.
With President Donald Trump’s executive order on energy,
federal agencies are now reviewing all rules that inhibit domestic
energy production. And that includes regulations around drilling in
national parks that, if overturned, could give oil and gas companies
easier access to leases on federal lands they’ve long coveted.
"This opportunity is unique, maybe once in a lifetime,"
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute lobby group,
told Reuters.
It could also put some of America’s most pristine and ecologically
sensitive areas at risk of oil spills, ground contamination, and
explosions.
Science and the law are not natural partners. Science seeks to
advance our understanding of the natural world. The law is tasked with
ensuring public safety and making sure justice is properly served. Over
time, science became another tool available to the legal system to
pursue those goals.
During recent years, though, problems with some aspects of forensic
science have come to light. Examples include false convictions based on faulty fire-scene and burn-pattern analysis and on bite-mark analysis, incorrect fingerprint identification and instances of misconduct in forensic labs.
Recognizing these shortcomings has led to various efforts to propel
forensic science forward, helping us recognize which parts of it are
scientifically valid, which parts aren’t, and where more research must
be done.
Ivanka
Trump recently assumed an official role in her father's administration.
She moved into a West Wing office and obtained a security clearance in
late March.
About
53% of respondents said the first daughter playing a significant role
in the White House is not appropriate, compared with 36% who said it was
appropriate and 10% who did not have an opinion.
Ivanka
Trump walks with her husband, White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner,
toward Marine One while departing with her father President Donald
Trump on February 17, 2017 in Washington, DC.
Kushner,
her husband, also has a broad portfolio within the West Wing, where he
has an influential purview over a range of foreign and domestic policy
issues. He is heading up the Office of American Innovation, a new White
House office aimed at reforming the federal government through
private-sector solutions.
About
53% said his role was not appropriate, compared to 32% of respondents
who said it was appropriate and 15% who did not know.
Are Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner personally profiting from their official roles in the White House? According to the Associated Press, Ivanka Trump secured three new exclusive trademarks in China the very same day she and her father, President Trump, had dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The China trademarks give her company the exclusive rights to sell Ivanka-branded jewelry, bags and spa services in China. The New York Times reports Japan also approved new trademarks for Ivanka for branded shoes, handbags and clothing in February, and she has trademark applications pending in at least 10 other countries. Ivanka no longer manages her $50 million company, but she continues to own it. Ivanka also serves in the Trump administration as an adviser to the president. So does her husband, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. For more, we speak with
Vicky Ward, New York Times best-selling author, investigative journalist and contributor to Esquire and Huffington Post Highline magazine.
Infowars
founder Alex Jones speaks at a rally in support of Donald Trump near
the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016. (Lucas
Jackson/Reuters)
Infowars founder Alex Jones is a
narcissist, according to expert testimony Wednesday in a child custody
case in Austin. He is also a terrible client.
The two are possibly related.
Psychologist
Alissa Sherry, the case manager for Jones's divorce from his wife,
Kelly, testified that Jones has been diagnosed with narcissistic
personality disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines
as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their
own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for
others.”
Jonathan Tilove, covering the case for the Austin
American-Statesman, tweeted Jones's reaction to the public revelation of
his diagnosis.
A
“deep need for admiration” could explain why Jones has spent the week
undermining his lawyers' best efforts to convince a jury that he is not
as wacky in real life as he appears on his syndicated radio show.
“He's playing a character,” attorney Randall Wilhite said at a pretrial hearing. “He is a performance artist.”
In court on Tuesday, another attorney, David Minton, described Jones's work as “satire” and “sarcasm.”
The “performance artist” argument seems like a smart one, since outbursts like this probably
don't help the good dad image. But the idea that Jones is just “playing
a character” could cost him the admiration of an audience that thinks
he is the real deal.
That is a price Jones seems unwilling to pay, so he is basically arguing against his own legal team.
Conservatives
seem to have a thing for fast food. The founder of what would
eventually become the country’s largest private prison corporation,
CoreCivic (formerly CCA), once declared,
“You just sell [private prisons] like you were selling cars or real
estate or hamburgers.” More recently, the Foundation for Excellence in
Education, an organization founded by Jeb Bush that has lobbied for its corporate funders, including the world’s largest education corporation, Pearson, wrote that public schools should be thought of as fast food restaurants.
But
providing public goods and services is nothing like selling hamburgers.
In a democracy, human beings should control the public schools,
infrastructure, and social services in their communities. Fast food
customers vote individually with their wallets, which means they really
have very little say. Does anyone really want a handful of corporations,
the likes of McDonalds and Burger King, teaching children and locking
people up in prison?
This point is especially true of public education, and is driven home by a report
In the Public Interest released last week authored by Gordon Lafer, an
associate professor at the University of Oregon. Lafer found that
taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charter school
buildings in California, yet the state has little to show for it. In the
past 15 years, charter schools, which are privately operated, have
received $2.5 billion in tax dollars or taxpayer subsidized financing to
lease, build, or buy facilities. Yet much of this investment has gone
to schools built in neighborhoods that don’t need them and schools that
perform worse—according to charter industry standards—than nearby
traditional public schools. Taxpayers have provided California’s
underperforming charter schools—an astounding three-quarters of all the
state’s charter schools!—with an estimated $750 million in direct
funding.
A new book by economist Peter Temin finds that the U.S. is no longer
one country, but dividing into two separate economic and political
worlds
You’ve probably heard the news that the celebrated post-WW II
beating heart of America known as the middle class has gone from
“burdened,” to “squeezed” to “dying.” But you might have heard less
about what exactly is emerging in its place.
In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,
Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, draws a portrait
of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear:
America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly
different resources, expectations, and fates.
Two roads diverged
In one of these countries live members of what Temin calls the “FTE
sector” (named for finance, technology, and electronics, the industries
which largely support its growth). These are the 20 percent of Americans
who enjoy college educations, have good jobs, and sleep soundly knowing
that they have not only enough money to meet life’s challenges, but
also social networks to bolster their success. They grow up with parents
who read books to them, tutors to help with homework, and plenty of
stimulating things to do and places to go. They travel in planes and
drive new cars. The citizens of this country see economic growth all
around them and exciting possibilities for the future. They make plans,
influence policies, and count themselves as lucky to be Americans.
The FTE citizens rarely visit the country where the other 80 percent
of Americans live: the low-wage sector. Here, the world of possibility
is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and
anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many of
them are getting sicker and dying younger than they used to. They get
around by crumbling public transport and cars they have trouble paying
for. Family life is uncertain here; people often don’t partner for the
long-term even when they have children. If they go to college, they
finance it by going heavily into debt. They are not thinking about the
future; they are focused on surviving the present. The world in which
they reside is very different from the one they were taught to believe
in. While members of the first country act, these people are acted upon.
The two sectors, notes Temin, have entirely distinct financial
systems, residential situations, and educational opportunities. Quite
different things happen when they get sick, or when they interact with
the law. They move independently of each other. Only one path exists by
which the citizens of the low-wage country can enter the affluent one,
and that path is fraught with obstacles. Most have no way out.
The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have
an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We
have entered a phase of regression, and one of the
easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges
look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands
or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a
famous economic model created to understand developing nations to
describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The
model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only
person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the
first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.
The result is profoundly disturbing.
In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration - check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
In the developing countries Lewis studied, people try to move from
the low-wage sector to the affluent sector by transplanting from rural
areas to the city to get a job. Occasionally it works; often it doesn’t.
Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which
is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period
of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more
costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase
student debt burdens.
Getting a good education, Temin observes, isn’t just about a college
degree. It has to begin in early childhood, and you need parents who can
afford to spend time and resources all along the long journey. If you
aspire to college and your family can’t make transfers of money to you
on the way, well, good luck to you. Even with a diploma, you will likely
find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives.
Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of
America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for
accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find
jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying
professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white
people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long
history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making
greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to
crucial healthcare.
Averages 41% job approval during his first quarter
Historical first-quarter average is 61%
Bill Clinton had previous low first-quarter average of 55%
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Donald Trump averaged 41% job approval during his
first quarter as president, 14 percentage points lower than any other
president in Gallup's polling history. Bill Clinton had the previous low
mark of 55%. The average first-quarter rating among post-World War II
presidents elected to their first term is 61%, with John Kennedy's 74%
the highest.
The results are based on Gallup Daily tracking from Jan. 20 through April 19. During this time, Trump's approval rating
ranged from a low of 35% -- in the days after Republicans' failed
attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act -- to a high of 46% shortly
after his inauguration.
Gallup's latest estimate of the president's job approval rating, based on April 17-19 interviewing, is 43%.
When climate scientists look at Antarctica,
they see a ticking time bomb. If the ice sheet melts, it will raise sea
levels by tens of feet, flooding coastal cities around the globe.
For now, the southern continent is relatively stable, but it’s
starting to look more like Greenland, where rising temperatures are
melting the island from the inside out.
For decades, Greenland primarily melted around the edges. Giant blocks of ice would break free from the coast and vanish into the ocean.
Recently, however, Greenland has started melting from the middle. Pools
of water are forming atop the ice sheet in the warmer months and then
draining out to sea.
Scientists have now discovered the same thing is happening in Antarctica. Two new studies published in the journal Nature catalogue the melting and explain what it could mean for sea-level rise.
In the first study,
researchers examined decades of photos from satellites and military
aircraft. They documented hundreds of meltwater channels around the
perimeter of the continent. They traced some streams deep into
Antarctica’s frozen interior and discovered ponds of meltwater more than
4,000 feet above sea level, where no one expected to find liquid H2O.
In some places, the terrain had contributed to the melting. Blue ice
and dark mountains absorb more sunlight than the white snow. These
features gathered the extra heat needed to thaw Antarctic ice.
Exposed rock and blue ice absorb sunlight, accelerating melting.
“Even
though people kind of knew there were melt ponds around, they really
didn’t know that water could move long distances across the surface,”
said Jonathan Kingslake, a glaciologist at Columbia University and lead
author of the study. He said that streams “take water away from the
surface of the ice sheet and actually export it all the way into the
ocean… And we didn’t really realize this happened at all.”
Meltwater channels tend to grow in warmer months and refreeze in the
winter. But scientists worry that rising temperatures spur continual
melting, accelerating sea-level rise.
Ice shelves along the edge of the continent are holding back massive,
terrestrial glaciers. As the shelves break up, they allow glaciers to
slip into the ocean. Meltwater may, in some instances, lubricate the
underside of the glacier, hastening its passage to the sea. Meltwater
can also burrow into the ice shelf, cleaving apart large chunks of ice.
This is what’s happening to the Larsen C Ice Shelf, which is expected to break off the continent soon.
Sarah Palin posted pictures of the dinner party to Facebook
By Mythili Sampathkumar
New York
Donald Trump meets with Sarah Palin, Kid Rock, and Ted Nugent in the White House for dinner Via SarahPalin on Facebook Donald Trump might not have realised that when he invited Sarah Palin to a White House dinner, she would bring along a man who had publicly called for the death of his predecessor.
The former governor of Alaska and 2008 running mate of presidential
candidate Senator John McCain decided to bring as her guest the rock
musician Ted Nugent.
Best known for the song "Cat Scratch Fever," Nugent said in 2012 that
Barack Obama should "suck on my machine gun". He added: "Hey Hillary
[Clinton], you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you
worthless b****."
Mr Nugent also called Mr Obama a “sub-human mongrel”.
Ms Palin also invited Kid Rock,
another musician who supported Mr Trump during the 2016 campaign
and said that the country should “let the business guy run the country
like a business.”
The former governor herself called Mr Trump the "golden wrecking
ball" as a compliment during a 2016 Republican campaign rally, and
lambasted the media for not reporting more on Ms Clinton's health.
Of course, Twitter took immediate notice a picture from the dinner
posted to social media by Mr Nugent's wife. The White House has yet to
issue any kind of statement on the dinner party.
CNN political commentator Keith Boykin quoted Mr Trump's campaign promise.
Image caption Rihanna was one celebrity accused of secretly endorsing a product on Instagram
Celebrities
and "influencers" in the US have been warned to clearly identify when
they are promoting products on Instagram in return for payment.
The
consumer regulator sent letters to more than 90 individuals and
marketing firms, though it has not revealed who was put on notice.
It is the first time the regulator has intervened on the issue.
An advocacy group which petitioned for the move said Instagram had become "a Wild West of disguised advertising".
The Federal Trade Commission targeted a sample of posts that either referenced a brand or directly endorsed products.
Its
rules say that anyone endorsing a brand must "clearly and
conspicuously" declare connections to it, for example if products have
been given free, if a payment has been made for the endorsement or if
there is a business or family relationship.
The rules apply to marketing agencies involved in such deals as well as the endorsers themselves.
Chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are a group
of pesticides that are a big money-maker for Dow Chemical, with the
company selling approximately 5 million pounds of chlorpyrifos in the
U.S. each year, according to the Associated Press.
Dow Chemical, however, has a small problem on its hands, and it’s not
the fact that the pesticide was “originally derived from a nerve gas
developed by Nazi Germany,” per the AP, though that’s certainly not
great for marketing materials. In this case, it’s the fact that studies
by federal scientists have found that chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and
malathion are harmful to almost 1,800 “critically threatened or
endangered species.” Historically, groups like the Environmental
Protection Agency would want to avoid killing frogs, fish, birds,
mammals, and plants, which is why the regulator and two others that it
works with to enforce the Endangered Species Act are reportedly “close
to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where
the highly toxic pesticides can be used,” the AP reports.
Luckily for Dow, the E.P.A. is now run by climate-change skeptic and general enemy of living things Scott Pruitt,
who last month said he would reverse “an Obama-era effort to bar the
use of Dow's chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed
studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the
development of children's brains.” Plus, Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris is good buddies with President Donald Trump.
So, you can see how the company, which the AP reports also spent $13.6
million on lobbying last year, might feel like it is in the clear.
You were going
to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s
ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but
everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at
the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of
the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for
free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library
that wanted one.
At the terminal you were going to be able to
search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you
found. You’d be able to highlight passages and make annotations and
share them; for the first time, you’d be able to pinpoint an idea
somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody
straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available,
searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.
It
was to be the realization of a long-held dream. “The universal library
has been talked about for millennia,” Richard Ovenden, the head of
Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, has said. “It was possible to think in the
Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published
knowledge in a single room or a single institution.” In the spring of
2011, it seemed we’d amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a
desk. “This
is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of
education, research, and intellectual life,” one eager observer wrote
at the time.
On March 22 of that year, however, the legal
agreement that would have unlocked a century’s worth of books and
peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was
rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by
the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
When
the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an “international
catastrophe.” When the most significant humanities project of our time
was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who’d
had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed,
at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.
The host’s ouster serves as an object lesson about what happens when morality and money come to a head.
Here are some of the things Bill
O’Reilly has done, allegedly, to the women he has worked with throughout
his two decades at the Fox News Channel:
approaching an African American woman whose desk was near his, referring to her as “hot chocolate,” and grunting like a “wild boar”
offering
multiple unwanted sexual advances and lewd comments to a woman producer
on his show, phoning her “when it sounded as if he was masturbating”
and describing “various sexual fantasies”
suggesting
that she “buy a vibrator,” “engage in phone sex or a threesome with
him,” and listen to “the details of his alleged sexual encounters with a
cabana masseuse, airline stewardesses, and Thai sex-show workers”
threatening to make any woman who dared to complain about his behavior “pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born”
Here are some of the things that happened to O’Reilly in
reaction to these allegations, some of which have long been public, over
that time: ... not very much. The accusations may have been reported
in the media, and progressives may have had some laughs at O’Reilly’s
expense because of them (Google “Bill O’Reilly loofah”), but there
O’Reilly remained, the star of the Fox News Channel, pugnacious and
indestructible. And he stayed on his perch in large part because from
there O’Reilly was able to make massive amounts of money—for himself,
and for the company that had elevated him. From 2014 through 2016, according to one report, The O’Reilly Factor generated more than $446 million in advertising revenues. But even Bill O’Reilly, it turns out, is subject to the forces of gravity. The host, it was announced Wednesday afternoon, is out at Fox. And this is ostensibly because of the recent revelation of yet more allegations of sexual harassment against him. As 21st Century Fox put it in a terse press release,
“After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the Company
and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning
to the Fox News Channel.”
It’s notable that the company felt no
need to elaborate on the “the allegations” in question; at this point,
the conglomerate (and, ostensibly, the collective of crisis PR
strategists who wrote this telling sentence on its behalf) seem to have
figured, people understand roughly what those accusations have entailed.
While Don Imus was fired for a racist comment, and Dan Rather was fired for an isolated journalistic indiscretion, and Brian Williams was suspended
for exaggerating the truth … O’Reilly, the company’s statement on the
matter suggests, was let go because of a pattern of behavior that is
offensive not merely to the people who were its most direct targets, but
to our broader ideals of decency, and respectfulness, and empathy.
An artist’s impression of exoplanet LHS 1140b, described by Jason
Dittmann at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as the most
exciting he had seen in 10 years.
Photograph: ESO/spaceengine.org 
