Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry. The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”. “It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all”, said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. “It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration.” The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities. But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks. While it is not clear yet what actual protection the new rights will give in court to bugs, insects and ecosystems, the government is expected to establish a ministry of mother earth and to appoint an ombudsman. It is also committed to giving communities new legal powers to monitor and control polluting industries. Bolivia has long suffered from serious environmental problems from the mining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials. “Existing laws are not strong enough,” said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the biggest social movement, who helped draft the law. “It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels.” Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said Bolivia’s traditional indigenous respect for the Pachamama was vital to prevent climate change. “Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values,” he said. Little opposition is expected to the law being passed because President Evo Morales’s ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament. However, the government must tread a fine line between increased regulation of companies and giving way to the powerful social movements who have pressed for the law. Bolivia earns $500m (£305m) a year from mining companies which provides nearly one third of the country’s foreign currency. In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being. The draft of the new law states: “She
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In 1990, Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin, two psychologists at the University of California, Riverside, embarked on a research project within a research project, seeking answers to the question, “What makes for a long life?” Friedman and Martin used findings from a famous longitudinal study started in 1921 by Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist who followed the lives of 1,528 bright children. Terman’s principal interest was in his subjects’ long-term intellectual achievement. But Friedman and Martin mined the data for patterns among those who lived long, healthy lives — and those who didn’t. In their new book, The Longevity Project (Hudson Street Press, 2011), Friedman and Martin present some surprising findings. Divorce, it turns out, plays a significant role in longevity, particularly for children of divorce. KH: Speaking as the child of divorce, I have to say that one of the most disconcerting findings in The Longevity Project focused on divorce: On average, grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier than children from intact families. To what do you attribute that troubling finding? HF: As we found in many statistical analyses and case studies in The Longevity Project, certain unhealthy patterns developed, as individuals went step by step down unhealthier pathways of living. Nothing was inevitable, but the past clearly helped shape the future in recognizable ways. The children of divorce were much more likely to later get divorced themselves, which was an especially serious health risk factor for the men. KH: You mention this in the book. Why is divorce an especially serious health risk factor for men? LM: Individuals who had experienced the dissolution of their parents’ marriage were much more likely to later have their own marriages end in divorce — and this significantly increased their mortality risk. This pattern was particularly harmful for men, probably because of the very important role that women play as confidantes and social supports for their husbands. Indeed, The Longevity Project found that men who re-married after divorce lowered their mortality risk, and the longer they remained in their second marriage the better their prospects became. The divorced men’s problems were also partly due to bad habits set in motion by the stress of divorce, and partly due to the fact that men prone to divorce were often less dependable and conscientiousness individuals in the first place. On the other hand, re-marriage after divorce had little relation to women’s later health and longevity. In our book, there is a self-assessment of marital happiness that the reader can do, which uses many of the same questions Dr. Terman used more than a half century ago. Did this predict later health, decades later? We examined both the importance of the husband’s and the wife’s happiness in the marriage. As we now expected, given the reliance of the men on their wives, we found that the husband’s marital happiness is what really mattered to his later health — and to his wife’s. We summed it up: “A happy man means a healthy clan.” KH: What are some of the other factors that can hurt the longevity of children of divorce? HF: The children of divorce were also more likely to grow up to smoke and to drink heavily, with such women more than twice as likely to be heavy smokers. The boys of divorce were less likely to complete their education and accomplish as much in their careers. All of this helped account for the overall difference in longevity. Remember that these were all bright, promising children. By the way, it did not seem to be the case that difficult or troubled children were causing both the divorce and their later poor health; the children shouldn’t blame themselves. KH: This is all pretty grim. Is there any good news about children of divorce vis-a-vis longevity? LM: Yes. The very good news is that many of these children of divorce were able to find their way to healthy social relationships by young adulthood, and those who did so were then at no higher risk of earlier mortality than those children who didn’t face parental divorce. Because The Longevity Project allows us to examine the whole lifespan, we went back and traced how they did it. There were lots of healthy pathways but most important was a particular kind of resilience. The participants who had found a sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment by midlife were buffered against the ill effects of the childhood trauma of their parents’ divorce. This protective strength — this added health-relevant maturity — emerged in the presence of this childhood challenge. So, there really is something to say for becoming a stronger person by overcoming interpersonal hardship.
Continue reading …If you think the narrowly averted government shutdown over a few billion dollars was bad, wait until you see the multi- trillion -dollar brawls coming in the next few weeks, reports the Wall Street Journal . First up, the government is about to hit its legally imposed $14.294 trillion debt…
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According to Breitbart TV: “Dana Loesch, Big J’lism: Earlier tonight I appeared on “In the Arena” with Eliot Spitzer. Neither Spitzer or Rep. Jackie Speier were fully forthcoming in the facts about federal funding for abortions. I also wish that the times Rep. Speier repeatedly interrupted me were shown as well in the original take, finally prompting my response in the video below, but content must… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : P/Oed Patriot Discovery Date : 10/04/2011 01:48 Number of articles : 3
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Mark Levin decides to give his 2 cents on the “budget deal” that was reached late Friday. Hat Tip The Blaze . Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : P/Oed Patriot Discovery Date : 09/04/2011 23:21 Number of articles : 4
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Remains of Alfred Adler, a member of Freud’s inner circle credited with defining the inferiority complex, found in Edinburgh crematorium The long-lost remains of Alfred Adler, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, have been rediscovered in a crematorium in Edinburgh nearly 74 years after he died suddenly on a lecture tour. Adler, a core figure with Sigmund Freud in the group that founded the psychoanalytic movement before the pair split in 1911, collapsed after a suspected heart attack in May 1937 while he was in Aberdeen for a three-week-long series of lectures and seminars at the university. The Viennese doctor, credited with developing the theory of the inferiority complex, was cremated alone, and his widow and surviving children lost track of his ashes. For the following 70 years their location remained a mystery to his family, his followers and Adlerian scholars. Later this month, however, his ashes will be returned to Vienna for a civic ceremony following a remarkable discovery by the honorary Austrian consul to Scotland, John Clifford. Asked to trace Adler’s remains by the institute he founded in Vienna, Clifford traced the casket to a crematorium only a few hundred metres behind the consulate in Edinburgh. They had been stored there in a quiet, wood-panelled gallery rarely visited by the public, alongside dozens of other caskets and urns. His US-based granddaughter, Margot Adler, said his family thought Adler’s remains were lost. “The first story I had heard was that the remains had disappeared … They thought they were supposed to be in Aberdeen. “The next story I heard was that I got some letters or an article about three Viennese Adlerian students going on a search … and then I heard about John’s discovery.” Margot, the daughter of Adler’s only son, Kurt, said it was customary within the family to be cremated. In 1937, Scotland’s only crematorium was at Warriston in Edinburgh, so after a funeral attended by Aberdeen university’s most senior academics, his body was sent south. It appears the family heard nothing more. Europe was on the brink of war, and Adler’s wife, Raissa, had been living in the United States since 1932. They believed he died partly from stress, she said. Then 67, he had just learned that his oldest and favourite daughter, Valentina, a committed communist, had been sent to a Soviet gulag in one of Stalin’s purges. Many of the family were socialists, and the Adlers were friends of Leon Trotsky and his wife. Margot Alder found references to Valentina’s disappearance in her own family papers, in a letter from Albert Einstein asking about her aunt. “Our family wasn’t the kind of family which cared about remains. I don’t think anyone gave it much thought. Remember this happened in 1937 and then the war came. I think during the war, that was the last thing on anybody’s mind,” she said. She believes her father would have been delighted that Adler’s ashes were being returned to Vienna. Adler was made a freeman of Vienna in 1930, before fascism took hold. “Vienna was essentially Adler’s home, his birth home and there was the triangle, you know, Adler, Jung and Freud, and all had that sense of coming out of that place, so there’s something rather fitting about him going back there. I
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Tourism officials complain over £1m advertising campaign, but biggest Channel Island remains defiant Tourism officials on the Isles of Scilly are to lodge a complaint over a claim made by Jersey’s tourism office in a £1m TV advertising campaign that the largest of the Channel Islands is “the warmest place in the British Isles”. Met Office temperature records for Scilly obtained by the Guardian also appear to undermine Jersey’s claim. The Met Office officially recognises Scilly as the warmest place in the UK. A Met Office spokesman said that Jersey – 50 miles further south – does not fall under its auspices because “it is not part of the UK”, although “it had no reason to doubt” Jersey’s claims to be warmer. The small print on Jersey’s advert says it bases its claim on “minimum temperatures supplied by the Jersey Meteorological Department “. Tony Pallot, Jersey’s principal meteorological officer, said Jersey’s “mean minimum” for 1971-2000 – the period used by the Met Office to calculate all its mean temperatures – was 8.9C (32F). However, Met Office data for Scilly seen by the Guardian says the “mean minimum” for St Mary’s, Scilly’s largest island, was 9.4C over the period. On other measures such as hours of sunshine and maximum mean temperatures, Jersey performs marginally better. The council of the Isles of Scilly is also contesting the use of the term “Britain” in Jersey’s advert, arguing that the Bailiwick of Jersey is a British crown dependency but not part of the UK. It also argues that, geographically, Jersey is not part of the British Isles archipelago. Julian Pearce, the council’s economic development officer, said: “We shall be writing to Jersey to remind them of both our geographical position and our ranking as the warmest place in the UK.” He also said he was investigating whether the council had grounds to make a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Jennifer Ellenger of Jersey Tourism said: “We stand 100% behind our advert and we have the data to prove we are the warmest place. We are politically part of the British Isles, even if not strictly geographically.” She confirmed the advert’s claim is based on the mean minimum temperature, but also on two further measures – average hours of sunshine per year and “mean annual” temperature. She added that another aim is to suggest the people of Jersey are the warmest in the British Isles, too. Ordnance Survey , the national mapping agency for “Great Britain” – namely, England, Scotland and Wales – said it defines the “British Isles” as being “all the main and offshore islands of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands”. Malcolm Bell, head of tourism at VisitCornwall , which works closely with Council of the Isles of Scilly to attract 4.5 million tourists to the far south-west of England each year – 100,000 ofwhom visit Scilly – said he would be writing to Jersey Tourism in support of Scilly. He said: “When I first saw the advert I just laughed. It seems a bit desperate to base an advert on warmth alone when people who are only interested in that would just go to somewhere such as Dubai instead. “But the advert’s claim is also a bit cheeky. People want honesty in advertising. “Jersey might just about be technically correct in what they say, but it is bordering on unethical to stretch the truth like this when promoting your destination. We are in economically challenging times and we want to fight fairly for every customer.” Jersey, which received 685,000 visitors in 2010, has been challenged before over its tourism campaigns. In 1990, the ASA upheld a complaint against Jersey after it failed to substantiate a claim that it had more sunshine that anywhere else in the British Isles. In 1993, the ASA criticised Jersey for making exaggerated claims after it ran a newspaper campaign boasting that “our sandy beaches are always spotless and all of our golden beaches are scrubbed and rinsed twice by clear blue water”. The ASA noted that “on seven recent occasions large quantities of untreated sewage had poured onto bathing beaches”. Last year, Jersey Tourism accused the Met Office and the BBC of discrimination because it felt the Channel Islands were routinely left out of national weather forecasts. As a result, it said it was missing out on millions of pounds worth of revenue from prospective visitors. “Many people don’t have any idea just how lovely the weather is a short hop away from the mainland – meaning we lose out on valuable income,” David de Carteret, director of Jersey Tourism, said then. It was this grievance, says Jersey Tourism, that led it to base this year’s campaign around the “warmest place in the British Isles” slogan. Scilly v Jersey Number of islands Scilly: 145 (five inhabited) Jersey: 1 Population Scilly: 2,100 Jersey: 91,626 VAT Scilly: 20% Jersey: 0% Economy Scilly: tourism, daffodil farming Jersey: banking, tourism, Jersey Royal potatoes, Jersey cattle History Scilly: site of hundreds of shipwrecks, including five German U-boats during second world war Jersey: occupied by the Nazis from 1940-45 Sport Scilly: smallest football league in the world with just two teams, Woolpack Wanderers and Garrison Gunners Jersey: fields its own team at the Commonwealth Games TV highlights Scilly: An Island Parish Jersey: Bergerac Famous visitors Scilly: former prime minister Harold Wilson regularly holidayed on Scilly and is buried at St Mary’s Old Church Jersey: Alan Whicker lives on the island Languages Scilly: English, Cornish Jersey: English, French and Jèrriais Local food and drink Scilly: pasty; “scuppered” ale Jersey: “bean crock” with cabbage bread; cider Channel Islands Weather Leo Hickman guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Ezra Klein: By Celebrating Spending Cuts, Democrats Have Opened the Door to More Austerity Measures
April 10, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media I have to say that I’m in agreement with Ezra Klein here. After the budget deal was reached with Republicans and the President and Harry Reid came out praising the deal as some great bipartisan achievement, I felt the same way he did when he talked to Lawrence O’Donnell about it last night. All they did is validate the Republican’s agenda for more spending cuts at a time when our economy cannot afford it. And they just made it a lot harder to push back against any future austerity measures the Republicans demand when they start debating Paul Ryan’s horrible budget proposal. And as I said in my earlier post with Chris Hayes and Howard Fineman’s reaction to the budget deal, I do not understand how President Obama or the Democrats believe that alienating their base helps them win the next election. And by his base, I’m not talking about myself or liberal bloggers. I’m talking about the working class and the poor in America who voted for him in the last election, and who are going to have to live with these cuts and the job losses they’re going to cause. They look like they’re buying into the beltway Villagers’ narrative and their constant drumbeat about how looking “like an adult” and “everyone getting along” is the most important thing, as though anyone who’s just struggling to get by cares about any of that crap. They care if the policies you enact are helpful or harmful to their pocketbooks. They care about getting Americans back to work and outsourcing jobs. They care that we still have a middle class left in this country and that they’re kids might have an opportunity to do better than they have economically as they make their way through life. What they don’t care about is whether the two parties we’ve got running this country looked like they were getting along while they voted to approve horrid measures that are going to make their lives worse. I understand just as Ezra does that the President and Reid didn’t have any choice but to negotiate with the Republicans to keep from shutting down the government and they were going to have to agree to things that a lot of us weren’t going to like. But don’t go out there and make a deal for some crap sandwich where you didn’t fight harder publicly for the people you’re supposed to be representing and then tell the rest of us how good it’s supposed to taste. I don’t know if the rest of the public that doesn’t follow all of this the same way I do is going to react the same way I did to the President’s speech or what just got agreed to this week during this negotiation on the budget, but as Ezra pointed out in his piece at The Washington Post, this isn’t 1995 and if the economy doesn’t get better, Obama is not going to be remembered as a successful president. Here’s more from Klein’s post and there’s more there, so go read the whole thing, but his column pretty well just reiterates what he said in the video above with his initial reaction to this with Lawrence O’Donnell — 2011 is not 1995 : The substance of this deal is bad. But the way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse. The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals. In the end, the real negotiation was not between the Republicans and the Democrats, or even the Republicans and the White House. It was between John Boehner and the conservative wing of his party. And once that became clear, it turned out that Boehner’s original offer wasn’t even in the middle. It was slightly center-left. But you would’ve never known it from President Obama’s encomium to the agreement. Obama bragged about “making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Harry Reid joined him, repeatedly calling the cuts “historic.” It fell to Boehner to give a clipped, businesslike statement on the deal. If you were just tuning in, you might’ve thought Boehner had been arguing for moderation, while both Obama and Reid sought to cut deeper. You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery. So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later. Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own. Clinton’s speeches were persuasive because the labor market did a lot of his talking for him. But when unemployment is stuck at eight percent, there’s no such thing as a great communicator. And here’s more from Krugman who agrees with Klein — Celebrating Defeat .
Continue reading …A divided Poland marks 1st anniversary of plane crash that killed president
April 10, 2011 No Comment
WARSAW, Poland – Poland on Sunday relived the deep pain that engulfed the nation a year ago with a day of prayers and other ceremonies marking the anniversary of the plane crash in Russia that killed President Lech Kaczynski and many other prominent civilian and military leaders. But deep political and social divisions that have simmered since the crash were also on display, with protesters voicing anger at the Polish government and at Russia for an investigation they believe is marred, as well as other grievances. Church bells rang out across Poland to mark the exact time a year ago that the plane crashed,…
Continue reading …Samsung to release two Bada 2.0 handsets with NFC in Q4, software update in July?
April 10, 2011 No Comment
Some of you Samsungers are probably anticipating the snazzy Wave 578 due out in May or June outside the US, but the sad news is it won’t be shipped with the upcoming Bada 2.0 OS. Fret not, though, as Russian blog Bada World claims to have obtained some juicy details that’ll cheer up Bada fanatics. The above slide — apparently sourced from a Samsung France conference from a few days ago — lists a pair of new but unnamed handsets that’ll pack the new software, along with 7.2Mbps HSDPA, Bluetooth 3.0, and the seemingly trendsetting NFC . The difference between these two phones? One of them appears to be the flagship Bada 2.0 model, which expects a September launch with a 3.65-inch HVGA display, a 5 megapixel main camera, plus a VGA secondary camera. The second device will follow a month later, sporting a smaller 3.14-inch QVGA screen and just a 3 megapixel imager. In related news, TNW India reports that Bada 2.0 will be “first experienced in India” around July, though no hardware is mentioned here. This could imply that existing Bada users in India — where Samsung’s R&D develops 30 percent of Bada applications — may be one of the first to obtain the 2.0 update, and it shouldn’t be long before the rest of the world get their share of this piping hot pie. Anyhow, be rest assured that we’ll keep our eyes peeled open for more Bada 2.0 news — it’ll be interesting to see where Samsung’s next big push will take us. Samsung to release two Bada 2.0 handsets with NFC in Q4, software update in July? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Apr 2011 12:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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