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

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US Doctors Warn: Impact Of Reading eBooks During Bed Time



I have to confess that I read my Kindle every night before going to sleep. I haven’t noticed the symptoms described, I understand the concepts advanced and can see why they could, indeed, affect people. If you also read with an e-reader at night you might assess yourself.

Dennis Engel - The Capital Wide

US doctors warned, excessive reading of eBooks at the time of sleeping damages your sleep and health. Harvard Medical School team members compared reading paper books via eBook’s which emits light and can also cause eye infections.

They found that reading from eBooks may cause many health factors like poor quality sleep and felt tired the next day morning. According to research, people should avoid reading during evening. There are many other dangers of light emits before bedtime which can badly effect your mind and make you lazy... Read more

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Women excised from public life, abused by IS



Further evidence that fundamentalist religiosity, of whatever denomination, is a mental illness. One of the principle characteristics of this disorder is dysfunctional sexuality, seen particularly in the suppression and sadistic treatment of women.

ZEINA KARAM - The Associated Press

BEIRUT — The gunmen came to the all-girls’ elementary school in the Iraqi city of Fallujah at midday with a special delivery: piles of long black robes with gloves and face veils, now required dress code for females in areas ruled by the Islamic State group.

“These are the winter version. Make sure every student gets one,” one of the men told a supervisor at the school earlier this month.

Extremists are working to excise women from public life across the territory controlled by the Islamic State group, stretching hundreds of kilometers (miles) from the outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo in the west to the edges of the Iraqi capital in the east... Read more

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How Détente Looks From Havana



When I was a young boy it happened that I was in Cuba the night Juan Batista, later overthrown by Castro, carried out the coup that made him head of state. Maybe that is why I have always had an interest in Cuba. Everything I had read or heard about the recent rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba was written from the U.S. point of view. Here is an excellent piece on what it all looks like from the other end. This is a trend reaching ...

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro - The New Yorker

In Cuba, December 17th marks El Día de San Lázaro. The day is reserved—both by Cuban Catholics and by the far more numerous adepts of Santería, the Yoruba-born faith of its historical African slaves—for the patron saint of healing and rebirth. Thousands of Cubans stream toward a little church in the village of Rincón, twenty miles from Havana, to honor a figure depicted, in little statues and on key chains, as a hunched old man wearing purple and toting a cane. Even in the early years of Fidel Castro’s revolution, when the Comandante’s secular Marxism made religion forbidden, this ritual persisted... Read more

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Oil price collapse stokes financial crises in producing countries



As oil prices have dropped I have been watching for shifts in geopolitical trends and in the economies of oil producing countries, particularly those whose economies are utterly dependent on the sale of crude. This essay gives a sense of the trend, and I think this shift is going to produce majors effects in 2015.

Ed Crooks - Financial Times (U.K.)

The most significant development in the world economy in 2014 was the collapse in the price of oil. (emphasis added)

The near-50 per cent drop in the price of internationally traded Brent crude from a high of more than $115 a barrel in June to less than $60 earlier this month has put extra money into consumers’ pockets and boosted fuel-intensive businesses such as airlines, while cutting oil companies’ revenues and stoking financial crises in oil-producing countries including Russia and Venezuela.

The roots of the price collapse lie in the US shale oil boom, which began when small and medium-sized producers worked out in 2009-10 how to apply to oil production the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that had already been highly successful for natural gas.

US oil production has soared, from about 5m barrels a day in 2008 to 9.1m b/d this month. For the first three years of the boom, the rise in US output was offset by other supplies coming off the world market, but in 2014, however, there were no more such interruptions.

Meanwhile, global demand growth slowed sharply, in part because of the slowdown in China. World oil consumption rose by 1m b/d in 2012 and 1.3m b/d in 2013, but is expected to have grown by just 600,000 b/d this year. Saudi Arabia and the other members of Opec compounded the price crash on November 27 by declining to cut production to stabilise the market.

The response from companies has been speedy. Oil producers such as ConocoPhillips and services companies such as Schlumberger have announced cuts in capital spending, employment, or both. BP said it was accelerating its existing cost-cutting programme.

The fall in oil prices is expected to be a net positive for the world economy. However, while the gains are widely spread, the pain will be concentrated on oil producers, leading to consequences that could have wider impacts, such as the collapse in energy company junk bond prices.

Harold Hamm, chief executive and majority owner of Continental Resources, warned this week that the “law of unintended consequences” often kicked in when oil prices fell. There are already signs that the market is starting to self-correct. US shale companies are drilling less, meaning that their production growth will slow, and American drivers are rushing back to gas-guzzling cars. The longer oil stays at its present level, though, the more likely it is that those unintended consequences will emerge.

source page

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NSA Drops Christmas Eve Surprise



Just the way this data dump was done — 1:30 p.m. Christmas Eve — tells you how guilty the NSA knows they are. This is the latest in the data describing the American Surveillance State Trend, a component of the American Police State Trend. There is so much bogus, illegal, deceitful, lying crap in this release that there should be national outrage. There is not, of course, there is mostly silence from the politicians and the media.

Murtaza Hussain - The Intercept

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients. (emphasis added)

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,” is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage... Read more

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Can You Guess Which Country is Winning at Conservation?



Here is a small society that understands why wellness should be the first societal priority.
It is a very satisfying story of good choices.

Esha Chhabra - takepart

Bhutan’s prime minister has been busy test-driving cars in the mountainous country. Why? The Bhutanese are aiming to convert all government-owned vehicles and taxis to electric cars supplied by companies such as Nissan, Tesla, and Mahindra & Mahindra. Earlier this year, they cemented plans with Nissan to provide a few hundred Nissan Leafs to the Himalayan kingdom.

It’s a natural step for a country whose environmental policy has captured global attention. Bhutan’s progressive environmental standards are so impressive, they’re becoming discussion points at climate change and environmental events... Read more

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Pioneering Doctor Working to Reverse Alzheimers
Offers 36 Ways Help Avoid the Disease



With the notation that I question whether allopathic hormone replacement is the best choice, I think this is a very important health guidance that should be taken seriously. Print out the 18 steps recommended and put them in your bathroom. And check them off until they become habit.

Martha Ture - Alternet/Daily Kos

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects more than 5 million Americans; worldwide, it affects more than 30 million people. It is the sixth leading cause of death [3] in the United States, after heart disease, cancers, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke and accidents.

In a recently published paper [4], Dale Bredesen at the Buck Institute [5] showed that 9 of 10 patients participating in a program showed reversal of cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Six of the 10 study participants had had to leave work, or were struggling at their jobs, due to AD; after going through the program, all were able to return to work or to continue working at better performance levels... Read more

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Tidings of Comfort

Once again, Paul Krugman gets it right.

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Maybe I’m just projecting, but Christmas seemed unusually subdued this year. The malls seemed less crowded than usual, the people glummer. There was even less Muzak in the air. And, in a way, that’s not surprising: All year Americans have been bombarded with dire news reports portraying a world out of control and a clueless government with no idea what to do.

Yet if you look back at what actually happened over the past year, you see something completely different. Amid all the derision, a number of major government policies worked just fine — and the biggest successes involved the most derided policies. You’ll never hear this on Fox News, but 2014 was a year in which the federal government, in particular, showed that it can do some important things very well if it wants to... Read more

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The Countries Where It’s Best And Worst To Be A Woman



You have read many times in SR or the Explore essays that I believe one of the key meta-trends is gender equality. Here is an accurate report on how this is playing out across the world. Note that the U.S. is not one of the best countries for women. Not even in the top five. If you are an American woman is that o.k. with you?

Ben Schiller - Co.EXIST

Discrimination against women and girls isn’t just a moral issue: It also carries a high economic cost.

There’s an obvious moral case for promoting gender equality around the world, but there’s also an economic one. Countries that give opportunities to girls and women tend to do better economically, while those that don’t do less well. Almost all the least well-off countries in the world rank poorly for gender equality, because, as a new report puts it, “discrimination against women and girls carries a high development cost" ... Read more

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Half of All Children Will Be Autistic by 2025,
Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT




I have been thinking about this story all day. If one out of two babies born in the U.S. will be autistic by 2025, if the present trend continues, what kind of world can that be? In 2013 the number of live births in the U.S. was 3,952,840. as described this would mean 1,976,420 autistic children. Within a generation the care of these millions would consume the nation. This is completely insane. Say the estimate is 50% off. It would still be 19,764,200 in 20 years. All of this damage in the service of profit. If Stephanie Seneff is correct this is should be the leading public debate. Ebola became an hysterical meme on the strength of less than five people being struck. Why, then, is this almost undiscussed? And every effort should be made to reconfirm her study. This dwarfs the Thalidomide baby catastrophe by orders of magnitude.

Alliance for Natural Health

Half of all children will be Autistic by 2025, Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT. Why? Evidence points to glyphosate toxicity from the overuse of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide on our food.

For over three decades, Stephanie Seneff, PhD, has researched biology and technology, over the years publishing over 170 scholarly peer-reviewed articles [1]. In recent years she has concentrated on the relationship between nutrition and health, tackling such topics as Alzheimer’s, autism, and cardiovascular diseases, as well as the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health... Read more

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Near death, explained



Here is an excellent survey piece on Near Death, and the survival of consciousness. Mario Beauregard is a well respected researcher in the consciousness research community, and he has brought together many of the major developments addressing the final transition. If you wish to pursue this topic the book I recommend is Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommell’s book, Consciousness Beyond Life.

I have not read it yet but, on the basis of past papers,
I expect Beauregard’s new book to be a winner as well. This essay was adapted from the book -

Mario Beauregard - Salon

This article was adapted from the new book "Brain Wars", from Harper One.

In 1991, Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds felt extremely dizzy, lost her ability to speak, and had difficulty moving her body. A CAT scan showed that she had a giant artery aneurysm—a grossly swollen blood vessel in the wall of her basilar artery, close to the brain stem. If it burst, which could happen at any moment, it would kill her. But the standard surgery to drain and repair it might kill her too... Read more

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Almost 7,000 UK properties to be sacrificed to rising seas



The U.K. is an island nation that is beginning to face the reality of sea rise and extreme weather. Here is an initial assessment of what the future holds for them. The same situation will obtain throughout coastal America, but few in government are talking about the impact yet.

Damian Carrington - The Guardian (U.K.)

Almost 7,000 homes and buildings will be sacrificed to the rising seas around England and Wales over the next century, according to an unpublished Environment Agency (EA) analysis seen by the Guardian. Over 800 of the properties will be lost to coastal erosion within the next 20 years.

The properties, worth well over £1bn, will be allowed to fall into the sea because the cost of protecting them would be far greater. But there is no compensation scheme for homeowners to enable them to move to a safer location... Read more

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Arctic Ocean releasing large volumes of methane




Methane is an even bigger problem than CO2 because it is more destructive to a healthy atmosphere. This is one of the consequences of climate change that doesn’t get much coverage.

Brett Smith - redOrbit

Researchers from Norway and Russia have found significant amount of the greenhouse gas methane is leaking from an area of the Arctic seabed off the northern coast of Siberia.

According to the team’s report in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the melting of permafrost on the seafloor of the Kara Sea is releasing previously-sequestered methane... Read more

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Resolving to lose weight this year?
Willpower isn’t your biggest obstacle.



More than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of adults 20 and older are considered to be overweight. Of that number more than one-third (35.7 percent) are considered to be obese. More than 1 in 20 (6.3 percent) have extreme obesity. For adults, overweight and obesity ranges are determined by using weight and height to calculate a number called the “body mass index” (BMI). BMI is used because, for most people, it correlates with their amount of body fat. For adults a BMI over 30 is considered obese. And this trend looks to continue for the next generation:

Percent of adolescents age 12-19 years who are obese: 18.4% (2009-2010)
Percent of children age 6-11 years who are obese: 18.0% (2009-2010)
Percent of children age 2-5 years who are obese: 12.1% (2009-2010)

We have become a nation of fat people and, as this report explains, once one is in the grip of obesity it is very difficult to extricate oneself.

Helen Leahe - The Washington Post

With a new year comes the annual resolutions to lose extra pounds. If you’ve taken that pledge, I wish you good luck! But chances are you will be one of the 92 percent who fail to reach their new year’s goals. Society tends to blame this failure on a lack of willpower – people don’t lose weight simply because they’re too lazy. But the truth is far more complicated. The only consistently successful weight-loss method for morbidly obese people (those with a body mass index over 40) has been bariatric surgery. Without surgery, morbid obesity is extremely difficult to cure – fewer than 5 percent ever overcome it on their own... Read more

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Researchers at Harvard Reveal 10 Toxins that are Causing ADHD, Autism



A few days ago I ran a study by an MIT scientist about glyphosates, and their role in autism. I noted at the time that the paper, which made the dramatic prediction that by 2025 50 per cent of live births would be children afflicted with autism, would require additional replicating studies to establish the linkage definitively. I should have said explicitly that, of course, the multi-billion chemical industries whose profits are tied to the use of glyphosates were doing everything in their power, using every compromised scientist on their payrolls or grants lists, to create doubt. Several readers wrote to tell me that the study had been attacked and was flawed. Of course it was attacked. Whether it was flawed only time will reveal.

I also should have been stronger in my main point, to whit: toxins and chemicals in our homes, businesses, malls, hospitals, food, and farms are wreaking havoc on our physical and mental well-being.

Here is another study making this point. And here is the takeaway: No one is going to protect us. The government regulatory agencies are corrupted and compromised. So it is up to us as individuals, as families, and as communities to do the job. It will require diligence, self-education, and determination, but if you and your family are to lead healthy lives there is no other option. In addition to glyphosates this Harvard study lists 10 other toxins you should eliminate from your life and the lives of your family.

Hilda Gadea - Harvard School of Public Health

At the rate that neurodevelopmental disorders have been increasing in diagnosis, a bystander might assume they were contagious. Dr. Phillipe Grandjean, researcher at Harvard School of Public Health, and Dr. Landrigan, of New York’s Mount Sanai, report that “disorders of neurobehavioural development affect 10–15% of all births.” (emphasis added)

Of course marketing by drug companies and increased levels of stressed parenting play a role, but a study published recently in the Lancet Neurology correlates these developmental pathologies with chemicals that are found in our homes, our water, food, and air supply. These chemicals are not just carcinogens that lead to cancer in adult humans, these chemicals also lead to neurological changes in children that drastically change their lives. The researchers say that the neurotoxicants “contribute to a “silent pandemic” of neurobehavioral deficits that is eroding intelligence, disrupting behaviors, and damaging societies.” (emphasis added)

Read more

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Culture war in the deep blue sea: Science’s contentious
quest to understand whales and dolphins



I have been asked to give a talk at a conference being put on 25-28 January by Saybrook University. The topic they have asked me to address is: interspecies communications. In thinking about what to say I have been sensitized to the extreme species-centrism that afflicts society in general, and science particularly. The idea that other beings on this planet are sentient beings seems self-evident to me, but causes many in science and religion extreme discomfort. Part of it is the dominant physicalist paradigm that argues consciousness is the result of physiological processes in the brain, dead brain no consciousness, and beings with “lesser” brains must, it follows in this this world view, lack consciousness. With plants this prejudice is even stronger. Physicalist deny the reality that we live in a matrix of life, and that consciousness is fundamental and spacetime its manifestation.

Excerpted from “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins” by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell. Copyright © 2014 by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell. Reprinted by arrangement with University Of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell - Salon

The idea that culture is important for nonhumans, including whales, has a history of controversy. In the 1930s–40s, biology was given a strong theo­retical basis in the form of evolution through natural selection—natural selection as first suggested by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and then formalized with genes as the units of selection in the modern syn­thesis. The modern synthesis was not particularly about behavior, but be­havioral theorists in and around the 1970s realized it could be applied to behavior as well as morphological, physiological, or anatomical features. This new field was called behavioral ecology or, largely in the United States, sociobiology. Advocated comprehensively in E. O. Wilson’s book “Sociobiol­ogy” and summarized eloquently by Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene,” be­havioral ecology made a fine job of explaining why animals do what they do. Its application to human behavior was, and is, controversial. For the study of nonhuman behavior, however, behavioral ecology became a hugely successful scientific paradigm. From the 1980s onward, scientific papers describing the behavior of animals invariably started and ended with how the research was situated within the theory of behavioral ecology. We, and most of our scientific colleagues, found the theory very appealing and felt it well explained the behavior of animals. In the field of animal be­havior, behavioral ecology became “normal science,” in the terminology of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. Suggesting that culture could be a major driver of the behavior of nonhumans challenges this paradigm— making it “revolutionary science,” according to Kuhn—and, as with other challenges, was resisted. However, in contrast to the opposition facing most other scientific revolutions, the attacks are not coming from the stalwarts of “normal science.” Since the inception of their theory, behavioral ecolo­gists and sociobiologists have largely accepted the possibility that culture might have an important role in determining behavior, along with genes... More here

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too much of anything is bound to be bad for you ...

Scientific team sounds the alarm on sugar as a source of disease



This denouement in the Sugar Trend has been coming for a while, the research papers just kept piling up. The Western diet, particularly its American version, between the toxins and the sugar is literally killing us. Read this, and adjust your diet accordingly. This research suggests your life depends upon it.

Barbara Saddick - Medical Press/Chicago Tribune

Is sugar making us sick? A team of scientists at the University of California in San Francisco believes so, and they’re doing something about it. They launched an initiative to bring information on food and drink and added sugar to the public by reviewing more than 8,000 scientific papers that show a strong link between the consumption of added sugar and chronic diseases. (emphasis added)

More here

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13 species we might have to say goodbye to in 2015



This is the latest on the Sixth Extinction. Will we wake up in time?
I am no longer sure.

Hyacinth Mascarenhas - The Raw Story

British broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough once asked: “Are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?”

This year marked the 100th anniversary of the death of the last passenger pigeon, Martha, who managed to survive only 14 years in captivity after her species became extinct in the wild. More recently, Angalifu, a 44-year-old northern white rhinoceros, died at the San Diego Zoo, leaving just five other white rhinos worldwide, all in captivity. Chances are our grandchildren will never get to see this remarkable creature...
More here

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Why do we cling to beliefs when they’re threatened by facts ?



In From One to the Many: The Social Implications of Nonlocal Perception I began exploring what I have come to think of as the psychophysiology of politics and faith. Here is a good essay on another aspect of this trend. The effect of this branch of research is going to be as powerful as money, because it tells the money what to buy.

Cathleen O'Grady - arstechnica.com

People hold beliefs for a complex variety of reasons. Some of these beliefs may be based on facts, but others may be based on ideas that can never be proved or disproven. For example, people who are against the death penalty might base their belief partly on evidence that the death penalty does not reduce violent crime (which could later be shown to be false), and partly on the notion that the death penalty violates a fundamental human right to life. The latter is an unfalsifiable belief, because it can’t be changed purely by facts.

According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, unfalsifiability is an important component of both religious and political beliefs. It allows people to hold their beliefs with more conviction, but it also alows them to become more polarized in those beliefs...
Read more

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Joseph Stiglitz: Economics Has to Come to Terms
With Wealth and Income Inequality



Here is a very wise assessment of the economy by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz. Like Paul Krugman he actually see what the relevant, as opposed to fashionable, issues are, and addresses them. He also make some very nuanced comments here that are worth your attention about Thomas Piketty’s analysis.

Lynn Parramore - truthout

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has been writing about America’s economically divided society since the 1960s. His recent book, The Price of Inequality, argues that this division is holding the country back, a topic he has also explored in research supported by the Institute. On December 4th, he chaired the eighth Institute for New Economic Thinking Seminar Series at Columbia University, in which he presented a paper, “New Theoretical Perspectives on the Distribution of Income and Wealth Among Individuals.” In the interview that follows, Stiglitz explores the themes of this paper, the work of Thomas Piketty, and the need for the field of economics to come to terms with the growing gulf between haves and have-nots... Read more