MICHAEL E. SCHATMAN, PHD, - Medscape
Stephan: Here is the latest move by the illness profit system. A new way to turn your illnesses into profit. And yet one hears virtually nothing about this. I was talking recently with someone who lives in Europe and she asked me why Americans have become such a docile population, and why they put up with the illness profit system, when the rest of the advanced world takes healthcare as a right one is entitled to independent of financial status. I confessed I had no answer to that question.
Thanks to David Goodman.
Pain Medicine and Profession
The quality of pain care in the United States has deteriorated over the past decade, to the extent that the state of the science(s) has been described as a ‘crisis.'[1-3] Many in the pain care community believe that the primary reason for this retrogression has been pain medicine’s devolution from a ‘profession’ to a mere ‘business.’
This brief article examines aspects of this unfortunate transformation, discusses ethical implications, and describes some of the efforts that are being made to help restore the field to its noble roots as a means of enhancing quality of care, thereby reducing unnecessary suffering.
The profession of medicine has its roots in the belief that healers ‘profess,’, ie, publicly proclaim, their altruism and willingness to subordinate their own self-interests in order to help, heal, or relieve pain, suffering, and disability.[4] Much has been written in regard to the need for such a virtue ethics approach to pain medicine.[2,5-8] Tragically, however, progressively more physicians are becoming inordinately concerned with their own needs rather than with the well-being of their patients.[9,10] Lebovits[11] will address this issue more thoroughly in a forthcoming article in a special ethics series in Pain Medicine. However, a concrete example of […]
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Stephan: This is the collective view of the corporate barons. There are several things that caught my attention: they want to get rid of even the feeble regulatory oversight we presently have; and and they speak of the Fukishima crisis almost as if it were an act of nature, not the corporate cockup it so obviously is. As was the Gulf, and both for the same reason: profit overrode safety consideration, and stifled technological innovation. Note also the CEOs aren't planning on hiring many people. The virtual corporate states are not geographically anchored anymore. Profit is the only issue, and it is trans-national. If 5000 non-Americans cost a third of 5,000 Americans, even if it means devastating entire communities, they unhesitatingly move the plant to the cheaper workers. Under the profit priority paradigm to do otherwise would be a failure of competency. Only when we put the earth and all living beings first, will we construct a viable way through the perfect storm of transition that is coming.
Thanks to Steve Hovland.
Chief Executive’s CEO Confidence Index, the nation’s leading gauge of CEOs’ outlook on business conditions, tumbled to 6.02 out of a possible 10 in March. This is a 5.8% drop from the previous month, setting a new low for 2011. Though the Index is still higher than at any point from 2008 through 2010, this most recent dip shows the fragility of the ongoing economic recovery.
Recent international events have had a substantial impact both on how CEOs view the current business climate and on their optimism over the coming year. Of the CEOs surveyed, 66% rate their expectations for overall business conditions as ‘good’ or better, down from 70% a month earlier. Respondents rated current overall business conditions at 5.14, down 7.2% from February.
Uncertainty was apparently the driving factor for the decrease in optimism for business conditions. The Japanese earthquake and its radioactive aftermath, in combination with political unrest in the Middle East, have caused many CEOs to be apprehensive.
‘We are very concerned about the ‘invisible’ tax increase we are expecting as a result of increasing oil prices,
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Stephan: Here is some more good news; it's a story from a several months ago, but I missed it, and the trend it represents is growing, although still somewhat problematic. This is the antipode to Monsanto's approach to agriculture.
Thanks to Brando Crespi.
In the summer of 2002, scientist and entrepreneur Danny Day sent a lab assistant to retrieve some charcoal from behind Day’s lab in Blakely, Georgia. At the time, he was researching how to turn peanut shells into hydrogen for the U.S. Department of Energy. He regularly used charcoal to preheat the reactor. When his assistant returned, he came bearing strange news: Plants had taken root in the bed of charcoal-weeds, grass, turnips as big as baseballs, enough to fill four garbage bags.
How had turnips sprouted from a pile of charcoal? Day wondered.
Charcoal is easy to make. Take biomass like wood, leaves and grass clippings, and burn it in an oxygen-free setting until all that remains is a bit of ash and a bunch of carbon. Typically, the carbon is released into the atmosphere when charcoal is burned. But if you buried the charcoal instead, the carbon would remain safely captured. And if charcoal helps turnips grow as big as baseballs, there might be a very good reason to bury it.
Such was Day’s thinking as he rushed behind his lab with a sample bag, a -microscope and a digital camera. In the eight years since that moment, ‘biochar
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, - University of Missouri-Columbia
Stephan: Here is yet another development in the solar technology trend. When one sees this kind of research one has to wonder what could be accomplished in making the Green Transition if war level money were being funneled in this direction.
Placing profit above all else causes us so much pain.
Thanks to Damien Broderick, PhD.
Efficiency is a problem with today’s solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years.
Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the MU Chemical Engineering Department, says energy generated using traditional photovoltaic (PV) methods of solar collection is inefficient and neglects much of the available solar electromagnetic (sunlight) spectrum. The device his team has developed – essentially a thin, moldable sheet of small antennas called nantenna – can harvest the heat from industrial processes and convert it into usable electricity. Their ambition is to extend this concept to a direct solar facing nantenna device capable of collecting solar irradiation in the near infrared and optical regions of the solar spectrum.
Working with his former team at the Idaho National Laboratory and Garrett Moddel, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Pinhero and his team have now developed a way to extract electricity from the collected heat and sunlight using special high-speed electrical circuitry. This team also partners with Dennis Slafer of MicroContinuum, Inc., […]
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JAY WALLJASPER, - AlterNet
Stephan: Here is a lovely bit of good news. I can also report that throughout Cascadia, the bio-region from above Vancouver to San Francisco, there is an emerging movement focused on creating thriving and resilient communities. Cascadia has citizen movements that are committed to getting through the perfect storm of transition we face in the most life-affirming way, whatever the rest of the country does. This report, is more polemic than I would like, but it gives a good sense of the flavor of our public conversation out here.
Jay Walljasper is editor of OnTheCommons.org, a news and culture website devoted to recognizing the importance of the commons -- those things that belong to all of us -- in modern life.
Everyone who cares about vibrant, vital cities loves Portland.
Oregon’s largest city manages to excel at almost every measure of urban livability from streetcars to bike commuters to microbreweries.
In fact, Portland gets so much positive press that our jealousy of the place can sometimes overpower our love. That explains the humorously jaundiced look at the city on the TV series Portlandia, where it is lampooned as a vegan Shangri-La where no one really has a job.
Here in Minneapolis, we’ve grown accustomed to chanting ‘We’re number two!
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