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| Monday, 08 February 2010 |
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Exclusive: Author Of Single-payer Health Care Measure Expects It On Ballot By 2014 |
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Here in one state one can see the dynamics that have kept us, as a nation, from universal health care. As this report notes, "based on data provided by the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP), the study found that senators opposing the bill received an average of $43,633 from the insurance industry since 2006 -- 97 percent higher than the $22,185 garnered by its supporters." And I want you to notice how cheap it is to buy a Congress person. You have to know how to do it, and have the right connections, but the money itself is trivial. These people sell us out daily for pottage. |
| SAHIL KAPUR - The Raw Story |
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With national health reform in peril, California has taken matters into its own hands. Its Democratic-led Senate last Thursday approved the creation of a single-payer insurance system. Authored by Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), the bill passed in a largely party-line vote of 22-14. The legislation would replace private health insurance in the state with a Medicare-type program that covers all residents. Leno told Raw Story in an interview that "it really doesn't matter" if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger follows through with his veto threat because Californians will place the measure on the ballot. "In California, the voters get the final say," Leno said, suggesting the ballot initiative "could be as early as 2012, if not 2014." He said that even if Schwarzenegger signs the legislation into law, insurance companies would probably fight to overturn it in a ballot measure opposing single-payer. The state senator said ... |
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Richard Shelby Senate Hold Puts Spotlight On Defense Contractor Ties |
| You can take the measure of the corruption that pervades our political system in this single story. No one would ever mistake Senator Shelby for a man of either high intelligence or integrity. But his crassness in this situation should be a cautionary tale as to the level to which the American Congress has sunk. |
| SAM STEIN - Huffington Post |
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Sen. Richard Shelby's (R-Ala.) decision to place a "blanket hold" on all presidential nominations until a pair of billion-dollar earmarks for his home state are fast-tracked has reignited the debate over the parliamentary tactics being deployed by the Republican Party. It also has thrust into the spotlight the clout that major defense contractors often wield on the political process. On Thursday evening, news broke that the Alabama Republican has taken the extraordinary measure of holding up at least 70 "nominations on the Senate calendar" -- essentially threatening to filibuster the confirmation processes if they came to a vote. The move has spurred a series of recriminations from Democratic officials who see it as yet another instance of over-the-top obstructionism of the president's agenda. It also has turned inquisitive eyes towards Shelby himself. The Senator confirmed that he launched the hold, in part, because he is upset with ... |
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Easy = True |
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As a culture we have an increasing disinclination to think about hard things. This reality about ourselves has some frightening consequences. Perhaps it explains how we can spend weeks, discussing endlessly Michael Jackson's death and funeral, but cannot spare the time to think about the fact that one out five children in the U.S. suffer hunger on a regular basis. But there are some bright lights in this darkness, and increasingly they are manifestations of localism. Here on Whidbey Island, where I live, a group of women in the community, in the absence of a decent Federal or State safety net, have banded together to prepare lunches each day for the children who come to school without breakfast, or the kids who live in the woods. That's right, bands of teenagers who live in the woods. I am increasingly persuaded that if we are to maintain a humane quality of life it will have to come from local initiatives. Every level above that has been bought and is controlled by corporate special interests What is going on in your community? Thanks to Rick Ingrasci, MD. |
| DRAKE BENNETT - The Boston Globe |
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Imagine that your stockbroker - or the friend who's always giving you stock tips - called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce. This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant. One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called 'cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it's a rather intuitive idea. But ... |
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Possible Cancer Cure Found In Blushwood Shrub |
| PETER MICHAEL - Couriermail (Australia) |
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Cancer patients are offering themselves as human guinea pigs as researchers investigate a possible cure for cancer found in north Queensland rainforests. Scientists have identified a compound in the fruit of the native blushwood shrub that appears to "liquefy and destroy cancer with no side-effects", according to latest research. Found deep in the remnants of a 130 million-year-old rainforest, the fruit extract may yet hold the secret antidote to Australia's No.1 killer disease. Victoria Gordon, of EcoBiotics, an Atherton Tableland-based company, said they hoped to go to human clinical trials later this year. Dr Gordon said a single dose injection of the extract, known as EBC-46, had been effective in 50 critically ill dogs and about a dozen cats and horses. "This is proving to be something exceptional," she said. "The tumour literally liquefies. "There is a rapid knock-down of the tumour, it ... |
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| Sunday, 07 February 2010 |
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Arab States May Become Solar Energy Exporters |
| This should be seen as good news. The Green Transition will, if they can muster the organization and workforce, make the Saudis and other desert Islamic states rich again, but regionally. Jordan for the first time should be able to power itself, and Egypt should prosper as never before. The obvious solution for the region is to let Israeli technology and management, and Muslim land and workforce combine to create bountiful regional power. Also this is the only solution to the water crisis already gripping this part of the world, and destined to grow much worse. There is no option but desalination, unless rivers suddenly spring up in the middle eastern deserts. |
| NADIM KAWACH - Emirates Business (United Arab Emirates) |
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Massive renewable energy projects undertaken by the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries could turn them into solar energy exporters along with their large hydrocarbon exports, according to a veteran Arab energy analyst. "After oil, Arab countries could start exporting solar energy," said Nicolas Sarkis, Director of the Paris-based Arab Petroleum Research Centre (APRC), which acts as an adviser to the 10-nation Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. "The development of solar energy is rapidly becoming a priority of energy policies pursued by most countries in the Middle East and North Africa, whether oil and natural gas producers or not," Sarkis wrote in the APRC's monthly magazine, Arab Petroleum and Gas. He said that in non-oil Arab countries, the growing interest being shown in solar power and other renewable energy sources is dictated not only by the deterioration in their energy deficits and the insufficiency of their ... |
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Who Owns Your DNA? |
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Here is a very useful take on a genetic trend SR has been following for some time. While the polemicists haggle, like Orcs in the market, things that matter are going on under the radar of their noise. Sharon Begley is Newsweek's science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. Thanks to Janis Reed. |
| SHARON BEGLEY - Newsweek |
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Ever since the first human gene was patented in 1982, there's been a near-universal "What??!!" when people hear that it's legal for someone to own the rights to our DNA. Blame the Constitution, which empowers Congress to give inventors "the exclusive right" to their discoveries;" the patent office, which interprets "discoveries" as including genes; and the courts, which have said similar patents "promote the progress of science," as the Framers wrote. So far, all that has trumped complaints that patents on human genes (of which some 40,000, covering about one fifth of the genome, have been issued) "halt research, prevent medical testing, and keep vital information from you and your doctor," as novelist Michael Crichton wrote in 2007. But maybe not for much longer. In the first lawsuit of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation of Cardozo School of Law argued last week ... |
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Despite The Sceptics, Climate Change Must Remain A Priority |
| I was going to write an essay on this topic, but this essay does it very well. |
| The Observer (U.K.) |
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In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman. It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science. That is why recent controversies around misreported evidence and exclusion of dissent at the University of East Anglia and the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change are so important. The worst allegations relate to the suppression of information " deleting emails, ignoring inconvenient data " in order to make aspects of the case for climate change tidier. The cover-up is the most toxic part in any scandal. The broad outline of the scientific case is unchanged, but confidence in the processes that got there is badly shaken. This is a big problem for advocates of political ... |
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Anthem Blue Cross Raises Premiums |
| The rape of the middle class continues unabated since the illness profit industry's Congressional retainers have protected its flanks. |
| VICTORIA COLLIVER, Staff Writer - San Francisco Chronicle |
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Anthem Blue Cross customers got a shock this week when the health insurer informed thousands of individual policyholders that their premium rates will jump as much as 39 percent on March 1. "There aren't any other parts of our society where people have no regard for inflation rate and increase their prices this much. I can't imagine anything in the world that's going up 39 percent," said Josh Libresco, 54, of San Rafael, as he grappled with the news that his family premium will go from $858 per month to $1,192 - and that's with a $5,000 deductible. Anthem, which has reportedly sent letters this week to those who buy their coverage individually and are not covered by a group policy, said rising health care costs led to the increase. The company, based in Woodland Hills (Los Angles County), declined to say how many customers received the ... |
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| Saturday, 06 February 2010 |
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When the Patient Can't Afford the Care |
| PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. - The New York Times |
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During my training, I took care of a man in his 50s with a devastating surgical complication: His abdominal incision had split open a week after an emergency operation. Even after we had taken him back to the operating room, sewn the deepest layer of his abdominal wall closed and treated the infection that had caused his wound to fall apart in the first place, he still had a three-inch long crevice along the middle of his belly. Until the edges contracted and the gaping expanse filled in on its own, he and his wife would have to pack damp gauze into the wound every day to keep it clean and help it heal. But on a visit a few weeks after his discharge from the hospital, I noticed that the gauze had been packed more loosely and changed less frequently than we had instructed. What should have been ... |
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Unemployment Rate in U.S. Falls to 9.7%; Factory Payrolls Grow |
| Some good news. |
| TIMOTHY R. HOMAN - Bloomberg |
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The unemployment rate in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped to 9.7 percent in January and manufacturers added to payrolls for the first time in three years, which may provide a spark to revive the rest of the labor market. More than half a million Americans found work, a Labor Department report showed yesterday in Washington, helping push the jobless rate to the lowest since August. A separate survey of employers showed payrolls declined by 20,000 as construction companies and state and local governments cut back. Cisco Systems Inc. is among companies that plan to add staff as businesses update equipment and global growth picks up. The economy may be slow to overcome the 8.4 million jobs lost over the last two years, explaining why President Barack Obama has made employment a top priority and the Federal Reserve has pledged to keep interest rates low. 'It's a slow process, ... |
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U.S. Has Highest Cumulative Wind Power Capacity, China Has Most New Capacity |
| TIFFANY HSU - Los Angeles Times |
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Though the U.S. still has highest total capacity for wind power globally, China took the top spot for new installations in 2009 with 13 gigawatts, according to data released this week. Worldwide, wind power capacity grew 31%, up 37.5 gigawatts to 157.9 gigawatts in 2009, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. A third of the increase came from China, which doubled its capacity from 12.1 gigawatts to 25.1 gigawatts. 'China is hard on our heels," said Denise Bode, chief executive of the American Wind Energy Assn. in a statement. But the U.S. is still leading in total capacity, installing nearly 10 gigawatts. That increases its total ability to product wind power by 39%, to 35 gigawatts. Busting past early expectations that the country's wind development could plunge up to 50%, federal funds from the Recovery Act helped boost the business. Globally, the market for ... |
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Smaller, Distributed Solar Projects Are Gaining Momentum |
| If all goes well the decentralized distributed power movement will develop so quickly that it will carry the day. |
| MEGAN TRACY - ecogeek.org |
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While the BLM is facing a virtual clog of large, desert-based solar project proposals, smaller, distributed solar projects are popping up at an impressive rate. In just the past few weeks, 1,300 MW worth of these projects have been announced or approved, which could equal about the same energy output of a big nuclear power plant. The larger, more ambitious solar power plans have many environmental and land-use hurdles to clear, while these smaller plans, set to occupy commercial and residential rooftops, areas near electrical substations and urban areas, don't have the same obstacles in their way. Also, the smaller projects are cheaper, meaning more utilities can afford to implement them as they're scrambling to meet renewable energy mandates. Arno Harris, the CEO of Recurrent Energy, a company that has signed a contract with Southern California Edison for 50 MW of small-scale solar, summed it up ... |
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