There’s an old saying: ‘If you want to hide the treasure, put it in plain sight. Then nobody will see it.’ We see what we can see, and what we can see is determined largely by our beliefs. If we believe that treasures are always hidden away in secret places, our belief can deceive us. Sometimes the treasure is actually staring us in the face. History is studded with examples of blindness toward the obvious. As ethnologist and filmmaker Lawrence Blair describes, the natives of Patagonia could not see Magellan’s ships when they arrived at the tip of South America in 1520. To the aborigines, the shore party appeared out of thin air on the beach. The shamans eventually discerned a faint image of the tall ships anchored offshore. After they pointed out the images and everyone concentrated on the concept of giant sailing ships for a while, the galleons materialized. Philosopher Michael Polanyi reports a similar incident when Darwin’s ship, Beagle, anchored off Patagonia in 1831. The natives could see the tiny rowboats, but could not detect the mother ship. Their belief system had a place for small craft, but not for large vessels. Selective blindness […]
Single-payer national health insurance is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private. Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 45.7 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered. The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars. Single-payer financing is the only way to recapture this wasted money. The potential savings on paperwork, more than $350 […]
China and the US, the biggest sources of the greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet, have stood in the way of an international climate treaty for almost as long as there have been efforts to craft one. The US never ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol partly because the pact didn’t compel China and other developing economies to lower emissions. Now, the two countries may be moving toward agreement on how to rein in the 40 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide pollution that comes from their cars, factories and power plants. Chinese and US officials on July 28 pledged to cooperate on clean-energy technology. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded the memorandum of understanding for giving direction to ongoing negotiations between the two countries ahead of a meeting of 192 nations in December in Copenhagen that’s supposed to produce a successor to the Kyoto pact. ‘There is a good chance at the end of the day that we’re going to be able to find an accommodation with China,’ says Todd Stern, the State Department’s special envoy for climate change. Bilateral discussions are making progress, Stern says, while cautioning that there have been no ‘breakthroughs.’ […]
One of the nation’s most widely-used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results. Records that tracked the amount of the weed-killer atrazine in about 150 watersheds from 2003 through 2008 were obtained by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund under the Freedom of Information Act. An analysis found that yearly average levels of atrazine in drinking water violated the federal standard at least ten times in communities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, all states where farmers rely heavily on the herbicide. In addition, more than 40 water systems in those states showed spikes in atrazine levels that normally would have triggered automatic notification of customers. In none of those cases were residents alerted. In interviews, EPA officials did not dispute the data but said they do not consider atrazine a health hazard and said they did not believe the agency or state authorities had failed to properly inform the public. ‘We have concluded that atrazine does not cause adverse effects to humans or the environment,’ said Steve Bradbury, deputy office director of […]
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent. They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality. But economists say - and data is beginning to show - that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon. For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs - as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending. The relative struggles of the rich may elicit little sympathy from less well-off families […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
