Thursday, September 9th, 2010
JOHN BYRNE, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This was inevitable, and is one of the consequences of not passing a public option. I am not surprised to learn of these increases, and no one else should be either. The Illness Profit Industry is about.... wait for it... PROFIT. Delivering medical treatments is just the mechanism it uses to tap the public treasury, and open private pocketbooks. It relies on the humanitarian impulse of its workforce to provide the moral merkin to cloak its greed.
If you have an individual health insurance policy, you may be soon seeing yet higher rates — and if you believe the insurance companies, it’s in part because healthcare reform requires additional benefits.
‘Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators,’ Janet Adamy writes in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.
The proposed rate hikes, according to filings, fall mostly on small business and individual insurance policies. About nine percent of Americans have individual policies.
The bad news is that the one to nine percent is only part of the price hikes insurers are seeking.
‘Many carriers also are seeking additional rate increases that they say they need to cover rising medical costs,’ Adamy pens. ‘As a result, some consumers could face total premium increases of more than 20%.
The good news is that many of the hikes only apply to policies written after Oct. 1 — those who have existing policies could be grandfathered in. But if you seek to alter your existing plan, you could lose your price-restrained status.
How much will the hikes be?
[…]
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Thursday, September 9th, 2010
TIM CRANE, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is a really thoughtful essay by a very perceptive scholar. My only observation is that if Professor Crane had been more knowledgeable about nonlocality and consciousness research he would have seen that the empirical knowledge of spiritual traditions, and this area of science are converging on a common view, expressed in different languages
Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of two books, 'The Mechanical Mind
There is a story about Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture somewhere or other, defending his atheism. A furious woman stood up at the end of the lecture and asked: ‘And Lord Russell, what will you say when you stand in front of the throne of God on judgment day?
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Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
, - University of Utah/Newswise
Stephan: A first step in a new trend.
In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain.
‘We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot now speak,
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Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Stephan: There are so many things we could have done to make a connection with the 1.4 billion people who are Muslims. It didn't have to end up as blood, gore and waste. Education and pop culture are two obvious choices. Read this piece and think about it. Note how video violence is an American pop culture theme.
SOURCE: 'The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World
Libyans sing along to Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello
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Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
ADAM LIPTAK, - The New York Times
Stephan: I find this quite alarming. It is further evidence of the Great Schism that is shaping the country (and the world, actually), resulting from the presentiment of coming change. But it is very dangerous for a democracy to have this level of antipodal separation in every branch of our government.
WASHINGTON — Each year, 36 young lawyers obtain the most coveted credential in American law: a Supreme Court clerkship. Clerking for a justice is a glittering capstone on a résumé that almost always includes outstanding grades at a top law school, service on a law review and a prestigious clerkship with a federal appeals court judge.
Justice Clarence Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first trained with an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.
That unbroken ideological commitment is just the most extreme example of a recent and seldom examined form of political polarization on the Supreme Court. These days the more conservative justices are much more likely than were their predecessors to hire clerks who worked for judges appointed by Republicans. And the more liberal justices are more likely than in the past to hire from judges appointed by Democrats.
Each justice typically hires four clerks a year. Since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court in 2005, Justice Antonin Scalia has not hired any clerks who had worked for a judge appointed by a Democratic president, and Justice Samuel A. Alito […]
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