Thursday, September 29th, 2011
KATHY MELLOTT, - The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, PA)
Stephan: An update on the food crisis trend. Note that it comes from a small city paper. I have discovered to really follow this trend one has to look at the small newspapers. Big Media doesn't cover the story regularly. If you go shopping for your family you don't even have to read about it, you can just look at your checkout receipt.
Ronlyn came up from her extraordinary garden the other day with a three and a half pound red cabbage -- organically grown of course. Later she went down to our community non-profit grocery, The Goose, where she saw the same thing on offer at $4.99 a pound. Think about that for a minute: $17.46 for a head of cabbage!
Ask any farmer and they will tell you the key ingredients to a good crop are sunshine and rain.
Problem is, the growing season of 2011 brought too much of both Â-
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Thursday, September 29th, 2011
N.C. AIZENMAN, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The Illness Profit System, and its allies in the rest of the corporate world, gears up for its next assault on your pocketbook. This is never going to end until we have a single payer, non-government employee, private practice health care system which makes national health it first priority, and profit second. The failure of the Obama program is that he lacked the political leadership to make this change clear to Americans. Fifty million of whom are without health insurance, and the number is growing as the economy goes down, and premiums go up.
Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance continued to escalate this year even as the share of workers getting less generous coverage reached a new high, according to survey data released Tuesday.
In 2011, for the first time, half of workers at small firms with individual policies faced annual deductibles of $1,000 or more. In 2006, that figure was 16 percent. At large firms, the share has grown from 6 percent to 22 percent over the same five years.
At the same time, the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that premiums for family plans rose 9 percent in 2011, after several years of slower annual growth. A similar recent survey by the consulting firm Mercer found that yearly premium increases have been hovering around the 6 percent mark and will grow by slightly less in 2012.
Both sources point to the same fundamental long-term shift: Faced with continually climbing premiums, a record share of employers have moved to plans that require workers to pay more out of pocket.
‘Without any real national discussion or debate, there’s a quiet revolution going on in what we call health insurance in this country,’ said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser foundation, which conducted the annual survey of […]
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Thursday, September 29th, 2011
JOHN SULLIVAN, - Columbia Journalism Review
Stephan: This is an excellent assessment of a very disturbing trend, the rise of the sensoid, and the decline of real journalism. The effect on the country can be seen every day. The signal-to-noise ratio is now so bad that you can listen to hours of television and collect at best a handful of facts.
Thanks to Henry Reed, PhD.
The Gulf oil spill was 2010’s biggest story, so when David Barstow walked into a Houston hotel for last December’s hearings on the disaster, he wasn’t surprised to see that the conference room was packed. Calling the hearing to order, Coast Guard Captain Hung Nguyen cautioned the throng, ‘We will continue to allow full media coverage as long as it does not interfere with the rights of the parties to a fair hearing and does not unduly distract from the solem-nity, decorum, and dignity of the proceedings.
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Thursday, September 29th, 2011
JAMES WEST, - Midas Letter
Stephan: Jobless is not just an American problem, it is a global issue, with global implications. There are a small group of families who, as the medieval Japanese used to say, 'live above the clouds,' while the rest of the world grubs in the dirt of daily life. I now see this as a growing trend of social revolution. When added to climate change and the food and water crises, one has a mix almost guaranteed to produce social upheaval.
The world’s major economies are heading for a ‘massive jobs shortfall
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Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
COURTNEY HUTCHISON, ABC News Medical Unit - ABC News
Stephan: All of this is proceeding without any real public conversation about the ethics of this line of research. Potentially, it could do great good, but it could also become very creepy.
In the technological journey towards artificial intelligence, Israeli researchers have made the next giant leap: the RoboRat.
Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his fellow scientists have built a rodent-sized artificial cerebellum that when implanted onto the skull of a rat with brain damage, allows him to function normally again.
The cyborg cerebellum consists of a computer chip that is electrically wired into the rat’s brain with electrodes. Since the cerebellum is normally responsible for coordinating movement, this chip was programmed to take in sensory information from the body, interpret it, and communicate messages back out to the brain stem and in turn, the rest of the body.
To test the computer chip brain, scientists conditioned a rat to blink whenever it heard a tone. When the researchers disabled the rat’s cerebellum, however, the rat could no longer coordinate this behavior. Once the artificial cerebellum was hooked up, the rat went back to blinking at the sound of the beep.
‘It’s proof of concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it in a way similar to the biological network, and return it to the brain,
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