July 25, 2014

Paul Krugman: California proves the GOP’s “extremist ideology … is nonsense”

Source: Salon

In his latest column for the New York Times, award-winning economist and best-selling author Paul Krugman argues that California’s recent success — and Kansas’ ongoing failure — is yet more proof that conservative anti-tax dogma “is nonsense.”

After citing Justice Brandeis’ famous claim that America’s states are laboratories for democracy, Krugman turns to compare and contrast California and Kansas, noting that while the former state has seen economic growth and a successful implementation of Obamacare, the latter has had a stagnant economy and a ballooning deficit.

Not incidentally, these states decided to take opposite approaches to economic policy, with California embracing “a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage” while Kansas “went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes on the affluent” only to see paltry growth and a darkening fiscal picture.

“If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers,” Krugman writes. “Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels.”

more: http://www.salon.com/2014/07/25/paul_krugman_california_proves_the_gops_extremist_ideology_is_nonsense/

July 23, 2014

Aliens Will Go To Hell

The Huffington Post | By Ed Mazz

Creationist Ken Ham, who recently debated Bill Nye the Science Guy over the origins of the universe, is calling for an end to the search for extraterrestrial life because aliens probably don't exist -- and if they do, they're going to Hell anyway.

"You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe," Ham wrote on his blog on Sunday. "This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation."

The post was driven in part by NASA experts saying that they expect to find evidence of alien life within the next 20 years.

"It's highly improbable in the limitless vastness of the universe that we humans stand alone," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said last week.

more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/22/ken-ham-aliens-go-to-hell_n_5608368.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

I'm not sure, but one of his beliefs is the opposite of the other. This just proves they only believe whatever BS they think up that day.

July 9, 2014

Men Wanted

Source: Truthdig

Hang a ‘Men Wanted’ Sign on This ‘Women’s Issue’



A pharmacist in Boston holds a generic emergency contraceptive, a type that will be exempt from some companies’ health plans because of their religious objections. AP/Elise Amendola


Set aside the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical determination that a for-profit corporation is a “person” with protected religious beliefs. The real shame is that last week’s ruling ignores the real people involved—women, yes, but also their male sex partners.

Contraception has long been regarded as a “women’s issue,” but the reality is that women, apart from addressing certain health needs, use contraception because they are in sexual relationships with men. The men in those relationships have—or should have—a big interest in women’s access to reliable and affordable birth control. But that’s often too little in evidence. This was especially so in the atmosphere surrounding the Hobby Lobby decision and its aftermath. The case stemmed from the family-owned corporation’s religious objection to providing full contraception coverage for its employees.

Look at crowd photos taken outside the Supreme Court when the case was argued last March and, again, when decision was announced June 30. Most of the men in the pictures are Hobby Lobby supporters, holding signs with anti-abortion and religious-freedom slogans or picturing fetuses. Men are harder to spot amid the “Birth Control Not My Boss’s Business” signs, among those who argued that Hobby Lobby should not be able to opt out of the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act because of the religious beliefs of the company’s owners.

Our highly stratified political system is partly to blame. Within hours of the court’s announcement, my email inbox was flooded with outraged messages from advocacy groups and politicians, slamming the decision and asking for donations to support individual candidates or campaigns to promote contraceptive access. But my husband, who is on many of the same email lists, didn’t get most of those pitches. I guess that as a man he’s not expected to care as much about this issue, so why bother to send him solicitations.

Read more: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hang_a_men_wanted_sign_on_this_womens_issue_20140709

July 8, 2014

For you DU...

Source: Huffpo

Acoustic Cover Of Avicii's 'Wake Me Up' Sam Meador

There is little doubt in our minds that you are familiar with Avicii's smash hit song "Wake Me Up" at this point. For that matter, you've probably heard it at least a few dozen, hundred or possibly even thousand times by now.

What you haven't heard, but need to immediately listen to, is an acoustic cover by Sam Meador on a percussive guitar in this video posted by Erthe and Axen Records.

Okay, why are you still reading? Click play to take in this incredible performance! Trust us, your ears will thank you for it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/07/avicii-wake-me-up-acoustic-sam-meador_n_5564559.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment&ir=Entertainment

July 1, 2014

There Are No More Honest Conservatives, So Stop Looking For One

Source: The Nation

The mainstream and liberal press’s quixotic search for a ‘good’ conservative merely reinforces the soft bigotry of low expectations.



Last November I received a friendly request from an editor at a political publication. A liberal himself, surrounded by liberal colleagues, he wanted to make sure that the journalists he was hiring were not drawn exclusively from the left. He wondered if I might help him out with a list of “conservative reporters, writers and commentators” whom I admired most. “Who on the right does the best job of covering politics or the economy or anything else, for that matter, in a thoughtful, fair and accurate way?”

Maybe if I had a time machine and could travel back to the 1970s or 1980s, I could name names. Now, though, I can’t think of a single one.

Sure, the right in previous decades was jam-packed with the same sorts of haters, hustlers, hacks and conspiratorial lunatics that are familiar to us now. But there were lively exceptions. George Nash, a still-active independent historian, celebrated The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America in a classic book published in 1976, when that tradition was very much still alive and kicking. James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, may have been an intellectual architect of the South’s “massive resistance” against integration in the 1950s, but he also wrote columns that were literary, politically independent and often wise. Kevin Phillips was an idiosyncratic conservative then who wrote brilliantly prescient articles with the same critical acumen and empirical ruthlessness he demonstrates nowadays as an idiosyncratic liberal. He published a piece in Harper’s in 1973 predicting that the Republican Party would “cement its coalition by creating a new managerial and communications establishment that merchandises the values that Middle Americans hold dear” and that “the liberal establishment of the Sixties will begin to wither.” A liberal columnist responded by calling Phillips’s argument “the most ludicrous political analysis of our time.” Knee-jerk inanities like that were one of the reasons it was so important to read conservatives back in 1973.

George Will, National Review’s Washington editor, won his Washington Post column that same year as part of a wave of contributors that evinced the success of an organized and underhanded campaign in the Nixon White House to scare mainstream (“liberal”) publications into hiring conservatives. From that privileged perch, however, he proved positively scathing as a principled critic of a White House that, during 1972, both believed “virtually every possible Democratic candidate was a garish sham who would destroy the country” but that they “couldn’t trust the American people to choose that way in a fair fight.” Thus they ended up destroying themselves via Watergate—and that there’s solid thinking.

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/180049/there-are-no-more-honest-conservatives-so-stop-looking-one

July 1, 2014

What You Need to Know About the Coming Jellyfish Apocalypse

Source: Mother Jones


Millions of golden jellyfish (Mastigias papua etpisonii) swim inside an isolated marine lake in Palau.
Ethan Daniels/Shutterstock

More than 50 million Americans swim in the oceans every year (there are actual government surveys of such things). So if your summer plans involves stripping down and bathing in the sun and salt water of your dreams, read on, intrepid beach-goer. There's something gooey and stingy that's loving warm waters every bit as much as you are (maybe even more), turning those dreams...to nightmares: jellyfish.

Are there more jellyfish now than ever before?

In some places, yes. One recent University of British Columbia study concluded that "jellyfish populations appear to be increasing in the majority of the world's coastal ecosystems and seas," and blamed human activity for these blooms. The areas most affected are the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, says Lucas Brotz, a PhD student and jellyfish expert at University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center, and co-author of the report.

Last October, a swarm of jellyfish plugged cooling pipes for one of the world's largest nuclear reactors.

The influx of jellyfish can cause big problems. In October last year, a gelatinous swarm plugged cooling pipes for one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, on the Baltic coast in Sweden, shutting it down. A swarm hobbled a coal-fired power plant near Hadera on the Israeli coast in 2011. Millions of bulging, translucent creatures descended on popular Mediterranean beaches in April 2013, freaking out the tourists. Jellyfish expert Lisa-ann Gershwin writes in her 2013 book Stung! that jellyfish caused the collapse of the $350 million Black Sea fishing industry in the 1990s. In 2007, a plague wiped out a salmon farm off Northern Ireland.

Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/06/watch-out-summer-swimmers-here-come-jellyfish