Stephan:
All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.
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Stephan: Social Progressives better wake up to what is going on in the Right's voter suppression campaign. These people -- ALEC which is trying to get rid of paid sick leave, see report above, is a major player here as well -- know their policies may not win in a fair fight so their solution is to destroy the proper functioning of American democracy. You may find this hard to believe, but there are significant portions of the conservative community that believe only land owners, preferably white male land owners, ought to have the franchise. If that is not o.k. with you, you better get involved with citizen actions to assure that all citizens of voting age, with certain small exceptions, retain the right to vote.
The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country’s archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.
The outrage generated by the revelations of 2000 soon spent itself or was channeled into other avenues, producing, as a sort of consolation prize, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, an underambitious and underfunded law mainly aimed at preventing partisan mischief in vote counting. The fundamental problem of accepting 50 different systems for election administration, complicated even more in states like Florida where local election officials control most decisions with minimal federal, state or judicial oversight, was barely touched by HAVA. As Judith Browne-Dianis, of the civil rights group the Advancement Project, told me: ‘The same cracks in the system have persisted.
Stephan: Here is my latest column in Huffington Post.
The sense of spiritual consciousness, connecting to something greater than oneself, is one of the most intoxicating realms a human can enter. Across the millennia, such experiences have shaped the lives of individuals and, upon occasion, whole cultures. The question for science is not to deny them, but to seek to understand the processes by which they occur and the domain into which they lead us. Central to these true stories is a special state of mindfulness, what the psychologist Charles Tart described in his classic 1972 Science paper as a state of consciousness.
Although these experiences, when they happen spontaneously, are often one-time events, almost every human culture on earth has developed practices, usually in a spiritual or religious context, for attaining this state. Similarly, all the martial arts have this component of mindful discipline, a practice of focusing intentioned awareness. Collectively, we have come to call these practices meditation.
Of all the things that you can do to know yourself, nothing will serve you as well as developing the practice of meditation. Although meditation is often associated with Asian cultures, it is not Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Satanic or any faith at all. It can be done in the name […]
Stephan: Here is what the Right would like to see for your future. This is a consistent, considered, policy that the Right has pursued for 30 years. It is a measure of the power of disinformation and 'values' politics that millions of middle class Americans vote for these people and against their own self-interest. Ultimately we get the leaders we deserve.
Recently, a string of cities and states have passed new ordinances that would require paid sick days for employees at certain employers. Just last week, Philadelphia’s city council passed a second version of a paid sick leave bill after the mayor vetoed the earlier one. Earlier this year, Seattle approved paid sick days legislation, while Connecticut became the first state with a state-wide requirement.
Now, the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch has published an expose of how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - a corporate front group that farms out legislation to almost a third of state legislators nationwide - is drafting legislation on behalf of its wealthy conglomerate funders to repeal these ordinances.
PR Watch obtained documents from ALEC’s 2011 Annual Meeting showing that one of the group’s committees - the Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee of the Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force - focused its entire meeting on the issue of paid sick leave. Task force members, who are legislators, were given copies of a bill that enables state legislatures to override municipal paid sick days laws. The same bill was used in Wisconsin to override Milwaukee’s paid sick days requirement.
PR Watch notes that ALEC’s […]
Stephan: The Illness Profit System continues to deteriorate leaving the middle class and poor of the United States with some of the worst health care in the developed world. You really don't get how awful American healthcare is, and the devastation its financial structure creates, until you travel abroad and see what goes on in other nations.
Via Sara Kliff, the Commonwealth Fund has released its annual national score card on the U.S. health system performance. The overall score for 2011 is 64 out of a possible 100, a three point loss from last year.
And the overall assessment, which isn’t pretty.
U.S. health system performance continues to fall far short of what is attainable, especially given the enormity of public and private resources devoted nationally to health. Across 42 performance indicators, the U.S. achieves a total score of 64 out of a possible 100, when comparing national rates with domestic and international benchmarks. Overall, the U.S. failed to improve relative to these benchmarks, which in many cases rose. Costs were up sharply, access to care deteriorated, health system efficiency remained low, disparities persisted, and health outcomes failed to keep pace with benchmarks. The Affordable Care Act targets many of the gaps identified by the Scorecard. […]
Of great concern, access to health care significantly eroded since 2006. As of 2010, more than 81 million working-age adults-44 percent of those ages 19 to 64-were uninsured during the year or underinsured, up from 61 million (35%) in 2003. Further, the U.S. failed to […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
