Funny-peculiar (not funny-ha-ha) how often we humans get what we most fear.
Well, it's official, not that there was much doubt: A majority of the nation's voters are freewheeling into full-blown psychosis, handing off a fixing of the Senate to those who broke it in the first place, to those who moved heaven and earth to sit on their hands and do precisely nothing for years on end, save work on their skills with barricades, stalls, quashes, and stone-walling.
The pieces of our political system, the Senate-sized ones, be assured, will be pummeled and smashed into finer and finer bits -- the political version of road-gang prisoners making small rocks out of the big ones.
Alex Baer: Popping My Cork in Celebration
US election: Big win for conservative big money
Establishment Republican money finally got what it paid for — an electoral wave.
After two cycles during which conservative megadonors’ record spending was plagued by flawed candidates and internecine squabbling, their side’s big money operatives got to do some gloating on election night.
Conservatives tweaked their playbook to spend bigger and earlier to crush tea party insurgents and define Democratic candidates. And Republicans won most of the Senate races in which they prosecuted that plan — including Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
The Climate-Change Solution No One Will Talk About
The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment.
The solution? Well, that's a little trickier to talk about.
Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment.
"And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," he said.
Jehovah's Witnesses ordered to pay $13.5m to victim of sexual abuse
A Californian judge has ordered the Jehovah’s Witnesses to pay $13.5m to a man who was sexually abused in the 1980s by a church leader, the attorney for the victim said on Friday.
Church elders had assigned a man to work with Jose Lopez on Bible studies, even though they knew he had admitted to molesting another boy in 1982, because they felt he was “repentant”, Lopez’s attorney, Irwin Zalkin, said.
Suicide surpassed war as the military's leading cause of death
War was the leading cause of death in the military nearly every year between 2004 and 2011 until suicides became the top means of dying for troops in 2012 and 2013, according to a bar chart published this week in a monthly Pentagon medical statistical analysis journal.
For those last two years, suicide outranked war, cancer, heart disease, homicide, transportation accidents and other causes as the leading killer, accounting for about three in 10 military deaths each of those two years.
Ozone hole remains size of North America, Nasa data shows
The Antarctic ozone hole, which was expected to reduce in size swiftly when manmade chlorine emissions were outlawed 27 years ago, is stubbornly remaining the size of North America, new data from Nasa suggests.
The hole in the thin layer of gas, which helps shield life on Earth from potentially harmful ultraviolet solar radiation that can cause skin cancers, grows and contracts throughout the year but reached its maximum extent on 9 September when monitors at the south pole showed it to cover 24.1m square km (9.3m sq miles). This is about 9% below the record maximum in 2000 but almost the same as in 2010, 2012 and 2013.
Republican ISIL fear-mongering amplifies extremists' message, experts say
In one frame of the video, a masked fighter for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) brandishes a knife, with a beheaded American journalist just beyond view. In another, the Mosque of the Prophet Jonah disappears into a cloud of dust. A crowd of masked gunmen hold Kalashnikovs aloft. Dramatic music plays in the background.
But this isn’t a recruitment video for ISIL. It’s a campaign ad for Allen Weh, who is running against Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., in the Nov. 4 midterm elections.
Alex Baer: Armageddon Out of Here
Money makes decisions Sanity never would. Fear, too. This adage applies to an awful lot of things, most of them pretty awful -- like politics and Ebola. These are awful and also awe-filled, but not in a good way. The critical difference between politics and Ebola? It's possible to somewhat survive devastating, ignorant decisions by the country in politics, even Bush-league decisions. Ebola, on the other hand, starts at death, and goes downhill from there.
Both are bad systems, way out of control. Both operate in a wide range, anywhere from figuratively to literally lethal. Both score lower than body lice in approval ratings. Both clog up your TVs and radios. Plus, there are more similarities at fighting the two than you might first think.
Pro Publica: The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster
n 2012, two massive storms pounded the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks.
Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job. They were wrong.
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