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Plague of Corruption – Judy Mikovits, Kent Heckenlively & Robert Jr. F. Kennedy

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Plague of Corruption

Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science

Judy Mikovits, Kent Heckenlively & Robert Jr. F. Kennedy

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $17.99

Publish Date: April 14, 2020

Publisher: Skyhorse

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


“Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits are the new dynamic duo fighting corruption in science.” —Ben Garrison, America’s #1 political satirist Dr. Judy Mikovits is a modern-day Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher shaking up the old boys’ club of science with her groundbreaking discoveries. And like many women who have trespassed into the world of men, she uncovered decades-old secrets that many would prefer to stay buried. From her doctoral thesis, which changed the treatment of HIV-AIDS, saving the lives of millions, including basketball great Magic Johnson, to her spectacular discovery of a new family of human retroviruses, and her latest research which points to a new golden age of health, Dr. Mikovits has always been on the leading edge of science. With the brilliant wit one might expect if Erin Brockovich had a doctorate in molecular biology, Dr. Mikovits has seen the best and worst of science. When she was part of the research community that turned HIV-AIDS from a fatal disease into a manageable one, she saw science at its best. But when her investigations questioned whether the use of animal tissue in medical research were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases, such as autism and chronic fatigue syndrome, she saw science at its worst. If her suspicions are correct, we are looking at a complete realignment of scientific practices, including how we study and treat human disease. Recounting her nearly four decades in science, including her collaboration of more than thirty-five years with Dr. Frank Ruscetti, one of the founders of the field of human retrovirology, this is a behind the scenes look at the issues and egos which will determine the future health of humanity.

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Plague of Corruption – Judy Mikovits, Kent Heckenlively & Robert Jr. F. Kennedy

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Plague of Corruption – Kent Heckenlively, Judy Mikovits & Robert Jr. F. Kennedy

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Plague of Corruption

Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science

Kent Heckenlively, Judy Mikovits & Robert Jr. F. Kennedy

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $17.99

Publish Date: April 14, 2020

Publisher: Skyhorse

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


“Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits are the new dynamic duo fighting corruption in science.” —Ben Garrison, America’s #1 political satirist Dr. Judy Mikovits is a modern-day Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher shaking up the old boys’ club of science with her groundbreaking discoveries. And like many women who have trespassed into the world of men, she uncovered decades-old secrets that many would prefer to stay buried. From her doctoral thesis, which changed the treatment of HIV-AIDS, saving the lives of millions, including basketball great Magic Johnson, to her spectacular discovery of a new family of human retroviruses, and her latest research which points to a new golden age of health, Dr. Mikovits has always been on the leading edge of science. With the brilliant wit one might expect if Erin Brockovich had a doctorate in molecular biology, Dr. Mikovits has seen the best and worst of science. When she was part of the research community that turned HIV-AIDS from a fatal disease into a manageable one, she saw science at its best. But when her investigations questioned whether the use of animal tissue in medical research were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases, such as autism and chronic fatigue syndrome, she saw science at its worst. If her suspicions are correct, we are looking at a complete realignment of scientific practices, including how we study and treat human disease. Recounting her nearly four decades in science, including her collaboration of more than thirty-five years with Dr. Frank Ruscetti, one of the founders of the field of human retrovirology, this is a behind the scenes look at the issues and egos which will determine the future health of humanity.

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Plague of Corruption – Kent Heckenlively, Judy Mikovits & Robert Jr. F. Kennedy

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This Explains Everything – John Brockman

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This Explains Everything

150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

John Brockman

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: January 22, 2013

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything will revolutionize your understanding of the world. What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"—The Guardian), posed to the world's most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work. Jared Diamond on biological electricity • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on positive stress • Steven Pinker on the deep genetic roots of human conflict • Richard Dawkins on pattern recognition • Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on simplicity • Lisa Randall on the Higgs mechanism • BRIAN Eno on the limits of intuition • Richard Thaler on the power of commitment • V. S. Ramachandran on the "neural code" of consciousness • Nobel Prize winner ERIC KANDEL on the power of psychotherapy • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "Lord Acton's Dictum" • Lawrence M. Krauss on the unification of electricity and magnetism • plus contributions by Martin J. Rees • Kevin Kelly • Clay Shirky • Daniel C. Dennett • Sherry Turkle • Philip Zimbardo • Lee Smolin • Rebecca Newberger Goldstein • Seth Lloyd • Stewart Brand • George Dyson • Matt Ridley

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This Explains Everything – John Brockman

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Nature’s Allies – Larry Nielsen

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Nature’s Allies

Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World

Larry Nielsen

Genre: Nature

Price: $27.99

Publish Date: February 2, 2017

Publisher: Island Press

Seller: INscribe Digital


It's easy to feel powerless in the face of big environmental challenges—but we need inspiration more than ever. With political leaders who deny climate change, species that are fighting for their very survival, and the planet's last places of wilderness growing smaller and smaller, what can a single person do? In Nature's Allies , Larry Nielsen uses the stories of conservation pioneers to show that through passion and perseverance, we can each be a positive force for change. In eight engaging and diverse biographies—John Muir, Ding Darling,Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Chico Mendes,Billy Frank Jr., Wangari Maathai, and Gro Harlem Brundtland—we meet individuals who have little in common except that they all made a lasting mark on our world. Some famous and some little known to readers, they spoke out to protect wilderness, wildlife, fisheries, rainforests, and wetlands. They fought for social justice and exposed polluting practices. They marched, wrote books, testified before Congress, performed acts of civil disobedience, and, in one case, were martyred for their defense of nature. Nature's Allies pays tribute to them all as it rallies a new generation of conservationists to follow in their footsteps. These vivid biographies are essential reading for anyone who wants to fight for the environmagainst today's political opposition. Nature's Allies will inspire students, conservationists, and nature lovers to speak up for nature and show the power of one person to make a difference.

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Nature’s Allies – Larry Nielsen

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Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth – Adam Frank

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Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth
Adam Frank

Genre: Astronomy

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: June 12, 2018

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Astrophysicist and NPR commentator on what the latest research on the existence and trajectories of alien civilizations may teach us about our own. Light of the Stars tells the story of humanity’s coming of age as we awaken to the possibilities of life on other worlds and their sudden relevance to our fate on Earth. Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civilization can only hope to survive climate change if we recognize what science has recently discovered: that we are just one of ten billion trillion planets in the Universe, and it’s highly likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations. What’s more, each of those civilizations must have faced the same challenge of civilization-driven climate change. Written with great clarity and conviction, Light of the Stars builds on the inspiring work of pioneering scientists such as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, whose work at the dawn of the space age began building the new science of astrobiology; Jack James, the Texas-born engineer who drove NASA’s first planetary missions to success; Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian geochemist who first envisioned the Earth’s biosphere; and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who invented Gaia theory. Frank recounts the perilous journey NASA undertook across millions of miles of deep space to get its probes to Venus and Mars, yielding our first view of the cosmic laws of planets and climate that changed our understanding of our place in the universe. Thrilling science at the grandest of scales, Light of the Stars explores what may be the largest question of all: What can the likely presence of life on other worlds tell us about our own fate?

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Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth – Adam Frank

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First You Build a Cloud – K. C. Cole

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First You Build a Cloud

And Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life

K. C. Cole

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: July 18, 2012

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


This clearly written and compelling look at physics and physicists offers “thousands of new ways to see our daily world more richly” (Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach ).   For many of us, physics has always been a thing of mystery and complexity. K. C. Cole, an award-winning science writer, specializes in making its wonders accessible to the everyday reader.   This book uses lively prose, metaphors, and anecdotes to allow us to comprehend the nuances of physics: gravity and light, color and shape, quarks and quasars, particles and stars, force and strength. It also shows us how the physical world is so deeply intertwined with the ways we think about culture, poetry, and philosophy, and explores the workings of such legendary scientific minds as Richard Feynman, Victor Weisskopf, brothers Frank Oppenheimer and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Philip Morrison, Vera Kistiakowsky, and Stephen Jay Gould.   “An exemplary science writer . . . For readers without scientific background, Cole gracefully introduces relativity, quantum theory, optics, astrophysics, and other significant disciplines, never getting bogged down in unnecessary explanation. Thus, you may not learn all about thermodynamics from reading her chapter on it, but you will learn enough to think seriously about the entropy in your own life. Cole sprinkles her text with comments from famous scientists—‘Space is blue, and birds fly in it,’ said Heisenberg, and Faraday said, ‘Nothing is too wonderful to be true’—that are not only delightful in themselves but perfectly suited to her own text. No review of Cole’s book could be too wonderful to be true.” — Booklist 

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First You Build a Cloud – K. C. Cole

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This Idea Is Brilliant – John Brockman

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This Idea Is Brilliant

Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know

John Brockman

Genre: Essays

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 16, 2018

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Seller: HarperCollins


Brilliant but overlooked ideas you must know, as revealed by today’s most innovative minds  What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? That is the question John Brockman, publisher of the acclaimed science salon Edge.org (“The world’s smartest website”—The Guardian), presented to 205 of the world’s most influential thinkers from across the intellectual spectrum—award-winning physicists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, novelists, artists, and more. From the origins of the universe to the order of everyday life, This Idea Is Brilliant takes readers on a tour of the bold, exciting, and underappreciated scientific concepts that will enrich every mind.  Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel JARED DIAMOND on the lost brilliance of common sense * Oxford evolutionary biologist RICHARD DAWKINS on how The Genetic Book of the Dead could reconstruct ecological history * philosopher REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN on how to extend our grasp of reality beyond what we can see and touch * author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics CARLO ROVELLI on the interconnected fabric of information * Booker Prize–winning novelist IAN McEWAN on the Navier-Stokes equations, which govern everything from weather prediction to aircraft design and blood flow * cosmologist LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS on the hidden blessings of uncertainty * psychologist STEVEN PINKER on the fight against entropy * Nobel Prize–winning economist RICHARD THALER on the visionary power of the “premortem” * Grammy Award–winning musician BRIAN ENO on confirmation bias in the Internet age * advertising guru RORY SUTHERLAND on the world-changing power of sex appeal * Harvard physicist LISA RANDALL on the power of the obvious * Wired founding editor KEVIN KELLY on how to optimize your chances at success * Nobel Prize winner FRANK WILCZEK on the creative potential of complementarity * Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter JOHN MARKOFF on the synthetic metamaterials that soon will transform industry and technology * euroscientist SAM HARRIS on the lost art of intellectual honesty *Berkeley psychologist ALISON GOPNIK on the role of life history in the human story, and many others.

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This Idea Is Brilliant – John Brockman

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The Daily News Slams Sean Spicer’s Holocaust Remarks with Scathing Cover

Mother Jones

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White House press secretary Sean Spicer ignited a firestorm of controversy Tuesday, when he compared Adolf Hitler to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, and incorrectly claimed Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” The false assertion, which was used to defend President Donald Trump’s military strike on a Syrian air base last week, quickly drew the ire of Democrats and prominent Jewish groups, including the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect.

On Wednesday, the Daily News dedicated its front page to condemning Spicer for the remarks. The New York paper also featured a scathing editorial demanding he resign from his post over the latest gaffe:

Spicer apologized for the remarks, and said that he did not wish to become a “distraction” to Trump’s agenda.

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The Daily News Slams Sean Spicer’s Holocaust Remarks with Scathing Cover

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Conflict Minerals Are About to Get a Reprieve

Mother Jones

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the most war-torn places on earth. Much of the money to keep the war going comes from mining operations in the eastern part of the country that are are effectively controlled not by the distant central government, but by militias and warlords that enslave workers and smuggle ore out through the DRC’s eastern border. In an effort to cut off their source of funding, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill includes a provision that discourages companies from buying the so-called 3TG metals (tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold) from conflict areas. So how has that worked out?

That depends on who you ask, of course. But a surprising number of neutral and lefty sources think the policy has been a failure. For example, here is Lauren Wolfe of Women Under Siege:

Barnard College political science professor Séverine Autesserre has…estimated that only 8 percent of the country’s ongoing conflict has anything to do with natural resources. Moreover, in the September 2014 letter, the signatories noted that “armed groups are not dependent on mineral revenue for their existence.” Many groups can easily turn from minerals to palm oil, charcoal, timber, or cannabis to make money — not to mention extortion, illegal taxes, and other means.

….When Dodd-Frank passed, Congolese President Joseph Kabila put a ban on all mining and mineral exports in North and South Kivu and Maniema provinces. Though the ban was officially lifted in 2011…its ripple effects have persisted: Many artisanal mines have remained closed, and countless livelihoods have been destroyed, according to academics and activists. Laura Seay estimated in 2012 that between five and 12 million Congolese had been “inadvertently and directly negatively affected” by the loss of employment created by the ban and its aftershocks.

Here is the conclusion of a study by Dominic Parker and Bryan Vadheim:

Using geo-referenced data, we find the legislation increased looting of civilians, and shifted militia battles towards unregulated gold mining territories. These findings are a cautionary tale about the possible unintended consequences of imposing boycotts, trade embargoes, and resource certification schemes on war-torn regions.

The GAO says that most Western companies have no way of telling whether the minerals they buy come from conflict zones:

Ben Radly, one of the researchers behind We Will Win Peace, a documentary about the brutal warfare in the eastern DRC, says he has learned to be cautious about well-meaning movements:

There are three shortcomings to the “conflict minerals” campaign that came out of this work. It misrepresents the causal drivers of rape and conflict in the eastern DRC. It assumes the dependence of armed groups on mineral revenue for their survival. It underestimates the importance of artisanal mining to employment, local economies and therefore, ironically, security.

….The relationship between advocacy organizations headquartered in Western cities and their marketed constituency of marginalized and disadvantaged African groups is…tenuous. One of the most striking elements during the making of the film was the difficulty of finding Congolese groups in rural and peri-urban areas who knew about and supported the “conflict minerals” campaign. This suggests a lack of engagement with the people who stand to be most directly affected by campaign outcomes.

There are, of course, lots of advocates who continue to favor the ban on conflict minerals. They say that one of biggest militias in the conflict area has been put out of business by the ban, and that more progress can be made by strengthening the hold of the central government in the eastern DRC and tightening the programs designed to trace the source of minerals. For the most part, though, their evidence of success tends to be very anecdotal.

Beyond all this, there’s another reason it’s difficult to know for sure what the ban is and isn’t responsible for. The UN has been spending a billion dollars a year on peacekeeping operations in the conflict area for over a decade, and it’s all but impossible to know how much of the recent success—if success there’s been—is due to the Dodd-Frank ban and how much is due to the UN.

Bottom line: it’s not easy to know whether the conflict mineral ban—which Europe joined in 2015—has been successful. The whole issue is also highly politicized, since large corporations that buy 3TG minerals have fought against the ban since the start.

Why bring this up now? Because a leaked memo suggests that President Trump plans to sign a memorandum suspending the conflict mineral ban for two years. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. However, I sure wish I had more confidence that it wasn’t just a bit of payback to companies like Intel, which have lobbied for a long time to get the ban rescinded. Trump is hoping that these companies will play ball with his continued PR campaign to take credit for every new factory built in America—as Intel did today—and this sure seems like the kind of reward that will help keep his gong show going.

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Conflict Minerals Are About to Get a Reprieve

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Republicans Just Found a New Way to Harass Scientists

Mother Jones

The congressional subcommittee investigating allegations of fetal tissue sale for profit recommended holding a company that procures tissue for medical research in contempt of Congress.

House Democrats staged a walkout to protest the vote for contempt proceedings after being overruled by Republican members of the Select Investigative Panel. “We refuse to sanction or endorse this exercise by continuing to participate,” said ranking member Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL).

The small Northern California biotech firm, StemExpress, prepares human tissue and cells for biomedical researchers across the world. It specializes in isolating stem cells from donor tissue in order to expand a sample’s lifespan for research, which is important because otherwise, perfectly usable cells can be lost in transit to a lab.

Although StemExpress and CEO Cate Dyer have submitted information to comply the Select Investigative Panel, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in her opening remarks this morning that the submission was unsatisfactory because it did not include personnel information or detailed accounting records, only summaries. Blackburn said that Dyer’s attorney responded to additional requests for information in April by saying that if the panel wanted more detailed records, it would have to issue another subpoena.

“A subpoena is not a suggestion, it is a lawful order, and a subpoena is to be complied with,” Blackburn said.

Until a year ago, the company partnered with Planned Parenthood, which provided fetal tissue for research that comprises less than 1 percent of the company’s business. Following the release last year of surreptitiously recorded videos that purported to show the sale of fetal tissue for profit, StemExpress has been the target of hundreds of threats. StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer has received personal threats, including a $10,000 bounty on her head.

In the wake of the video’s release, a congressional subcommittee launched an investigation into whether Planned Parenthood and StemExpress violated a federal statue that bans the sale of fetal tissue for profit. In February, Blackburn sent two letters to the Obama administration that requested further investigation. Those letters were not properly redacted, and the identities of several researchers and Planned Parenthood staffers were made public in attachments that came with the letters and were posted on the Select Investigative Panel’s website.

Also in February, the committee issued a subpoena to StemExpress seeking accounting and personnel records. The next month, it issued a subpoena to StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer. Dyer’s attorney, Frank Radoslovich, told STAT that Dyer has complied with the subpoena and turned over more than 1,700 pages worth of the requested information, but she is also balancing a need to protect her staff’s anonymity in the wake of violent threats.

“We have a real, legitimate interest in protecting the privacy of our employees,” Radoslovich told STAT. “We have a panel of zealots that have already proven that they will disclose or mischaracterize documents, or just flat-out make up things and attribute it to us. We can’t be put in a position to further endanger employees.”

Top Democrats are condemning the actions of the Republicans on the committee. Energy and Commerce ranking member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) wrote a letter to full committee chairman Fred Upton accusing the panel of abusing its power, claiming it does not have the authority to hold anyone in congressional contempt without the full support of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Ranking member Jan Schakowsky also decried the committee’s actions, calling it a sustained “witch hunt.”

“The McCarthyesque threat that StemExpress ‘name names’ of all employees or face congressional contempt is disgraceful,” she said in a statement. “We will fight this continued abuse of congressional authority every step of the way.”

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Republicans Just Found a New Way to Harass Scientists

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