From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

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Obama nominates openly gay man to lead Army


Eric Fanning delivers remarks during the 2013 Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Month Ceremony
at the Pentagon Auditorium on June 25, 2013 in Washington.


This hasn’t drawn much attention but it represents a very important data point on the equality trend.
Just a very big deal for the military.

Kristen Holmes - CNN

"Washington - President Barack Obama on Friday nominated Eric K. Fanning to be secretary of the Army, which could make him the first openly gay secretary of a U.S. military branch.

The U.S. Senate must confirm Fanning before he can lead the Army.

"Eric brings many years of proven experience and exceptional leadership to this new role," the President said in a statement. "I am grateful for his commitment to our men and women in uniform, and I am confident he will help lead America's Soldiers with distinction."

This historic move is one of many steps the Obama administration has taken to advance the rights of the LGBT community in the armed forces. In 2010, the President signed a law ending the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, and earlier this year, the President moved to allow those who identify as transgender to openly serve as well.

Fanning has served as acting under secretary of the Army since June, and before that, served as chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Fanning also served as under secretary of the Air Force and deputy undersecretary of the Navy.

In a statement, Carter called Fanning an "excellent choice" to lead the Army.

"Eric served as my first chief of staff at the Pentagon, and it has been a privilege over the course of my career to work alongside him and watch him develop into one of our country's most knowledgeable, dedicated, and experienced public servants," Carter said. "I know he will strengthen our Army, build on its best traditions, and prepare our ground forces to confront a new generation of challenges."

The American Military Partner Association, a support group for the families of LGBT service members, also praised Obama's decision.

"We are thrilled to see Eric Fanning nominated to lead the world's greatest Army," AMPA President Ashley Broadway-Mack said in a statement. "History continues to be written and equality marches forward with the nomination of an openly gay man to serve in this significantly important role. Fanning's expertise and knowledge within the defense community together with his sensitivity to issues faced by LGBT service members and their families is why we urge the Senate to move quickly to confirm his appointment.""

CNN's Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.
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Antibiotics Are Spreading Like Crazy—and a Lot of Them Are About to Stop Working



In addition to the depredations of GMO pesticides like Roundup, industrial chemical corporate agriculture and animal husbandry is creating yet another crisis as this story spells out. I have been doing stories on the rise of the superbugs and the gathering collapse of antibiotic medicine for a decade now. The trend just grows worse each year, particularly in the U.S. where corporations exercise nearly total control over the Congress and, through the Congress, an unregulated revolving door employment policy. If researchers are to be believed, and I think they should be because they have actual facts, unless we change policies along the lines described in this article, the day is not far off when even simple illnesses will no longer yield to antibiotics.

Gabrielle Canon - Mother Jones

In 1945, Sir Alexander Fleming won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of penicillin, which transformed modern medicine. Later that year, the bacteriologist issued a prescient warning: The miracle medicine could one day come with dangerous side effects. If antibiotics were overused, he told the New York Times, bacteria would develop resistance and spur a new generation of bugs impervious to the drugs' power.

In the last 60 years, Fleming's advice has gone largely unheeded. Antibiotic consumption continues to grow even as health officials around the world sound the alarm over rising numbers of resistant bacteria. Now, a new report from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP), a multidisciplinary research organization, paints a harrowing picture of where we stand in the arms race against antibiotic resistance. The main finding is grim: Antibiotic consumption rose by 30 percent between 2000 and 2010 and is expected to swell further as demand for drugs and mass-produced meat products grow around the world ...

Read the rest

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France + Russia Ban GMOs



Countries where Monsanto doesn’t have quite the stranglehold on government it has in the U.S. are increasingly turning away from GMO crops and the pesticides and insecticides they require. Here is the latest on Russia and France. I take this as very good news.

Lorraine Chow - Eco Watch

Russia and France have joined the growing list of European countries crusading against genetically modified (GMO) food and crops ... Read more

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Energy Storage “Revolutionizes” Solar Technology & Beats Natural Gas,
Says Abengoa (CT Exclusive Interview)



Here is an excellent essay on the state of solar energy. Once again I am struck by how quickly this is going.

Tina Casey - Clean Technica

Concentrating solar power technology has had its doubters, but throw in a big dose of energy storage and now you’re cooking with gas, so to speak. That’s our takeaway from a phone call we had last week with Fred Redell, Managing Director of global solar giant and concentrating solar specialist Abengoa ...

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What Megablazes Tell Us About the Fiery Future of Climate Change


California fires

Water is destiny, even when the immediate issue is fire. Climate change Is going to be very unpleasant.

Tim Dickinson - Rolling Stone

In May this year, the nearly unthinkable happened in the Pacific Northwest: The rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula, one of the wettest places on the continent, caught fire. By August, an inferno was stirring in the forests east of the Cascades. A wind-whipped blaze near the mountain town of Twisp, Washington — a "hell storm," to quote a local sheriff — claimed the lives of three Forest Service fire scouts. That blaze soon exploded into the worst wildfire in state history, charring more than 300,000 acres and destroying dozens of homes ... Read more

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U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies



I suggest you read this story at two levels. The first is the obvious one about what American military command decided to do. To any student of Afghanistan this sexual exploitation of boys would have been known. As would the fact that this behavior has been going on for centuries. The military defaults to pragmatic. Not surprising actually, just realpolitik.

The other level is that this is yet another data point attesting to the sexual dysfunctionality common to the adherents of all fundamentalist religions. I could do a story almost every day about Christian pastors, youth leaders, and the like and their abuse of children. There is an ongoing scandal about ultra-orthodox Jews. I think Fundamentalism is a culturally augmented mental illness with a neurophysiological basis couched in religious terms.

The child abuse discussed here is the result of the other symptom that defines this dysfunctionality: a need to sexually dominate and control females of all ages, and restrict access to their vaginas. And where that religious belief becomes dominate there is nearly complete gender segregation. This leads inevitably to men having sex with boys, and a high degree of anal sex in heterosexual marriage.

JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN - The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records ... Read the rest

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Ocean’s wildlife populations down by half


The report shows steep declines in coral reefs, mangroves
and seagrasses that support marine food webs and
provide valuable services to people.
Credit: vilainecrevette / Fotolia


Perhaps because we can’t see into the ocean the collapse of the world fisheries, which SR has been reporting on for a decade, just doesn’t seem to register on people’s consciousness. Have you heard any Presidential candidate say a word about this? No, of course you haven’t. But the impact of this ecological collapse is going to change our lives negatively in many ways.

The report is available for download at Living Blue Planet Report 2015


Science Daily/World Wildlife Fund

A new WWF report reveals an alarming decline in marine biodiversity over the last few decades. According to WWF's Living Blue Planet Report, populations of marine vertebrates have declined by 49% between 1970 and 2012, with some fish species declining by almost 75% ... More here

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What if the Richest Person in Every Country Gave All Their Money to the Poor?

What struck me about this story, and the reason I am running it, is not the point the article makes but the fact that while the amount to each recipient might vary from country to country, and might not change their life, in each instance the richest person had enough wealth to spread it across all the poor of their country. That’s an example of wealth inequity.

Wei Lu - Bloomberg Business/BenchMark

We took a spattering of 42 countries with radically different demographics and economies, then compared the wealthiest individuals to the percentage of the populations living in poverty. By the way, only in Chile, the Netherlands, France and Australia is the richest person a woman.

The index shows how the net worth of each country's wealthiest person compares to the livelihood of his fellow countrymen by calculating the lump sum in dollars each person living in poverty would get if the assets of the richest citizen were liquidated and redistributed. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the CIA World Factbook were our reference points ... Video report here

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Water is Destiny

Stephan A. Schwartz - Explore



Most of us think very little about water knowing mostly that it comes in two types: salt and fresh. For instance few people seem to realize that water covers over 70% of the earth’s surface and 97% of it is salt. Two per cent is frozen into glaciers and icecaps, although much of that is rapidly melting. Only 1% is liquid and drinkable, and half of that comes from below the earth’s surface. Somewhere in our memory we may remember high school science where we learned water has two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, and is written H2O ...

Read the rest

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Here’s how much of the world would need to
be covered in solar panels to power Earth



I got to thinking today: If the entire world were powered by solar how big an area would that require? Of course it wouldn’t be just solar, but assume for the thought experiment it was just solar. I went looking for a responsible answer and I think this is it.

Our future depends in large part on how and how quickly we make this transition.
Do anything you can to make that happen.

Rebecca Harrington - Tech Insider

Solar energy is a seriously underrated resource.

More power from the sun hits the Earth in a single hour than humanity uses in an entire year, yet solar only provided 0.39% of the energy used in the US last year ... More here

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Was the California drought geoengineered to pass future ‘climate change’ legislation?



I make it a point to read Right Wing media, finding it very instructive. Here you can see the Red values side of the Great Schism Trend manifested in its extreme. The Theocratic Right that drives the Republican Party espouses a world view based on these beliefs. Once one comprehends this then the crazy statements made by Republican Presidential candidates make sense. It is a paranoid parallel world grounded in fear, driven by anger and a sense of persecution and we need to understand this schism if we are to accurately assess what is going on in politics in the United States.

State of the Nation

For anyone who has closely tracked the evolution of California’s ever-worsening drought, it has been apparent — from the very beginning — that something is very wrong with this mostly manmade catastrophe.

The purpose of this exposé is to reveal the evidence, some scientific and some anecdotal, which indicates that this historic and unprecedented drought has been literally engineered from start to finish. Just like LA’s Hollywood studios have produced so many disaster epics, the Government-Corporate Complex has quite purposefully staged this catastrophic drought throughout the statewide ‘set’ of California.

Again, the thesis of this essay is that both the U.S. Federal Government and select Military-Industrial Complex corporations have conspired to create the California drought. While that may sound like a conspiracy theory to some, the growing body of evidence points directly to Government-Corporate Complex* complicity ... Read the rest

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The Coddling of the American Mind


Mr. Jefferson's University of Virginia "Lawn."

Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University of Virginia, where I went to school said: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” Two centuries later something very different is happening in American education. It starts in pre-school and goes on all the way through university. We coddle students, we avoid controversies that are not easily reduced to bumper stickers, we discourage original thought if it makes people uncomfortable. This excellent essay discusses what this means at the university level. It’s pathetic, and it is going to produce a generation of intellectual wimps, who lack the capacity for clarity and disciplined fact-based thought.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt - The Atlantic

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense ... Read the rest

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The Boy Scouts Are No Longer Welcome at This Anti-Gay Jamboree



Did you wonder what happened in the Christian Rightist communities when the Boy Scouts
decided to be tolerant and inclusive? Well here’s the answer to that question.

Stephanie Mencimer - Mother Jones

Poor Boy Scouts. Earlier this year, their leadership made a fairly dramatic change in policy to allow gay people to become troop leaders, following on the heels of last year's decision to stop kicking out gay Scouts. The move to end discrimination has cost the organization some members and donations from religious groups that were outraged about the change. But it's also suffered smaller, pettier indignities—like its banishment from this weekend's Values Voter Summit, the premier political conference for evangelical Christians.

The DC summit, organized by the conservative Family Research Council Action, is headlined by no fewer than seven GOP presidential candidates. For many years, the Boy Scouts have had a place of honor at the event, presenting the American flag as the color guard. This year, though, the Scouts are nowhere to be found. In their place are boys from Trail Life USA, the outdoor adventure and character development group created last year as a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts. Joining them were American Heritage Girls, the religious alternative to the Girl Scouts ... Read the rest

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The Final Collapse of Bush’s Nation-Building: Kunduz Falls to Taliban


Taliban insurgents fighting to take Kunduz, as the Afghanistan army collapsed. Note that the insurgents are fighting from an American Humvee they previously captured.

Hundreds of billions of public dollars have been spent on the Afghanistan War and what do we have to show for it? Opium production is up and the army we supposedly trained is more Potemkin village then fighting force. Here is the story of the loss of Kunduz. (Just as I am finishing this, I have heard on CNN that most of the city has been retaken by the government, although how secure their control is cannot be established.)

Thank you George Bush, Dick Cheney and the Neocons, you managed to transform the most beloved country in the world into a hated ineffective giant by your bullying and bumbling.

Juan Cole - Truthdig

On Monday, the Taliban swept into the provincial capital of Kunduz, taking it in half a day from a large and well-equipped Afghan National Army force. Tuesday’s riposte had only mixed success, with the ANA saying it had taken back the (no-empty) prison. An attempt to take back the airport failed, and when the Taliban captured an ANA tank, the US Air Force had to intervene to take it out lest it be used to drive an ANA rout ... Video/story here

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The Power of False Narrative



This is a brilliant and, in my view, a highly accurate assessment of the Orwellian Narrative Trend, the creation of a worldview that is almost completely detached from the facts. It is made possible because the collusion of government and media is now so well-established that it is seen as normal.

This is why it is so very difficult to get accurate substantive information about almost anything that matters. This explains why Bernie Sanders is not covered by cable news operations, and Donald Trump coverage, plus a little Hillary Clinton degradation is wall to wall. We don’t have news in the United States anymore about the major issues. We have narratives.

Robert Parry - Reader Supported News/Consortium News

In this age of pervasive media, the primary method of social control is through the creation of narratives delivered to the public through newspapers, TV, radio, computers, cell phones and any other gadget that can convey information. This reality has given rise to an obsession among the power elite to control as much of this messaging as possible ... Read the rest

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California Sees a 76 Percent Decline in Cancer Risks, Thanks to Cleaner Air

Here is some terrific news. Governor Jerry Brown may be the best governor in the U.S. Long experience has made him an expert at the craft of governance, and he has a generally wellness oriented view. And the data cannot be denied. This is another reason to hasten the transition out of the carbon era. Suggest to your governor and legislature that they do the same.

Melissa C. Lott - Scientific American

California have led to a dramatic drop in cancer risks since 1990.

According to a new study published in the journal “Environmental Science and Technology,” California saw a significant drop in seven major toxic air pollutants between 1990 and 2012. All told, this cleaner air has led to a 76% decrease in Californian’s associated risk of developing cancer due to exposure to seven major air pollutants ... More here

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Are US mass shootings an ‘unsolvable’ problem, as some conservatives say?



The Christian Science Monitor is an old school paper that still has journalistic integrity. Like the Guardian in the U.K. it is owned and overseen by a nonprofit organization. In keeping with that tradition this is the best exegetic essay on guns I have read. It raises a point that will be very familiar to SR readers: The issue is not guns but culture.

The United States is experiencing a domestic terrorist crisis, and we have not been willing until now to talk about it in those terms. The people who do mass killings, are overwhelmingly White, conservative young males, who are overwhelmingly Christian. Young men with mental health, self-esteem, and authority issues.

The solution to this problem is not to be found in the punitive. Instead, the eliminating of mass kills will follow creating a wellness oriented life experience for our young. It is important to control guns, but it is more important to do what it takes to see society does not produce these walking wounded. Other countries can do it, in fact almost all of them do. Why can’t we?

Patrik Jonsson - The Christian Science Monitor

Atlanta — Conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt told CNN anchor Don Lemon on Friday night that mass shootings, such as the one that struck a small community college in Roseburg, Ore., on Thursday, are essentially “unsolvable” because few mass shooters would have been stopped by new regulations.

A similar point was also raised Friday by former Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush, a presidential aspirant, who told a crowd in response to the shootings that “stuff happens … and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do” ... Read the rest

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Big U.S. firms hold $2.1 trillion overseas to avoid taxes: study


An Apple logo hangs above the entrance to the Apple store
on 5th Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City,
July 21, 2015.Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar

When I write or speak and make the point that the great geopolitical transition of our age is the rise of the Virtual Corporate States, and note that one of the hallmarks of this new age is the corporate indifference to national borders and nation states, people ask me how does that play out in the real world. Here’s an example.

David Alexander and Eric Beech - Reuters

The 500 largest American companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes and would collectively owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes if they repatriated the funds, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study, by two left-leaning non-profit groups, found that nearly three-quarters of the firms on the Fortune 500 list of biggest American companies by gross revenue operate tax haven subsidiaries in countries like Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands ... Video report here

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Researcher: Children’s cancer linked to Fukushima radiation



The last time I ran something on Fukishima several people wrote to tell me I was being alarmist, that in fact there was no evidence that Fukushima had had much impact on health, except for the evacuation trauma. Well, that’s not quite accurate.

YURI KAGEYAMA - The Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — A new study says children living near the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a rate 20 to 50 times that of children elsewhere, a difference the authors contend undermines the government's position that more cases have been discovered in the area only because of stringent monitoring.

Most of the 370,000 children in Fukushima prefecture (state) have been given ultrasound checkups since the March 2011 meltdowns at the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The most recent statistics, released in August, show that thyroid cancer is suspected or confirmed in 137 of those children, a number that rose by 25 from a year earlier. Elsewhere, the disease occurs in only about one or two of every million children per year by some estimates ... Read the rest

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Adventures in the Science of the Superorganism


One in eight adults who think they were born alone are carrying around,
like a change purse, some residue of a sibling they never knew existed.
Credit: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine


This is a fascinating report, opening up a whole new way of looking at ourselves and our genetics.

My problem with genetic engineering particularly in say agriculture is that experience has shown our comprehension of the complex of processes set in motion by genetic engineering is still very crude. Like pharmaceuticals there are always unintended usually negative unanticipated consequences. Good sense would suggest that one commercialize such technologies only with the greatest care, and we have not done that as the results make clear.

As the report describes, we are still learning what each of us, as individuals actually are.

David Wallace-Wells - Science of Us/New York Magazine

It is not only possible, it has in fact happened that a woman who vaginally conceived a child, then vaginally delivered her, had Protective Services threaten to take the child when a maternity test showed she was not, in fact, the mother. Nor was she the mother of her second child, genetically. Or her third, whom she was still carrying throughout the dispute with her estranged boyfriend — the man who, those same tests proved, was definitively the father. Only later did Lydia Fairchild discover that the true mother of all three of her children was her twin — if twin is really the word for one human embryo more or less swallowed by another before birth. The eggs that produced those babies had been with Fairchild her whole life, but genetically they belonged to an unborn sister, unknown to her and even her parents, living on in small parts inside her — a phenomenon that poetic scientists have called “parasitic” or “vanishing” twins. These days, they tend to prefer “chimerism,” after the mythic beast assembled, like Frankenstein’s monster, from multiple animals. But, man, isn’t that even creepier?

Read the rest