Saturday, January 28th, 2012
TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, - The New York Times
Stephan: The consequence of imprisoning 2.3 million people in the largest gualag in the world, and giving them lengthy sentences, mostly for nonviolent drug crimes -- another toxic consequence of our psychotic social behavior about drugs -- is the system eventually becomes an enormous geriatric ward. This will be enormously costly to taxpayers, but also enormously profitable for the prison and illness profit systems that are now linked.
The number of Americans in prison older than 55 is growing at a faster rate than the group’s share of the population at large, and many prisons are unprepared to provide them with health care, which can cost as much as nine times more than for younger inmates, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Friday.
The complications in handling the swelling number of aging prisoners range from making allowances for those with Alzheimer’s or dementia and finding sufficient ground-floor cells for inmates in wheelchairs to ensuring that older prisoners are not exploited or robbed by younger inmates.
‘Age should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card, but when prisoners are so old and infirm that they are not a threat to public safety, they should be released under supervision,
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Saturday, January 28th, 2012
JEFFREY SMITH, - Institute for Responsible Technology
Stephan: I must have had 50 readers send me the viral report on identifying GMO foods that flashed across the internet a few days ago. It is bogus.
Let’s put a rumor to rest. No, the 5-digit PLU codes on produce do not tell you what is genetically modified or natural. This urban legend has circulated long enough, even on the best of websites. It’s time to take it down.
The 4-digit PLU codes on the sometimes-pain-in-the-neck labels glued to apples, for example, tell the checkout lady which is a small Fuji (4129) and which is a Honeycrisp (3283). She’ll know what to charge you and the inventory elves will know what’s what. If there’s a 5-digit code starting with 9, then it’s organic.
These numbers, organized by the Produce Marketing Association, have nothing to do with you. According to Kathy Means, Association Vice President of Public Relations and Government Affairs, this is an optional convention for retailers and their supplier and is not designed as a communication tool for customers. If you want to know which items are organic, look for the word Organic; and stop squinting at tiny codes.
GMO codes are hypothetical
Those that run PLU-universe figured that someday some retailer might want to distinguish between a GMO and a non-GMO for price or inventory purposes. So they created a convention of 5 digits starting with an 8, just […]
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Friday, January 27th, 2012
SABRINA TAVERNISE, - The New York Times
Stephan: It is not good for a democracy to have strong class tensions; it inherently destabilizes society, and degrades the sense we are all in it together. Yet the trend of rising class tensions is clearly getting worse. Conservatives don't like the discussion of this subject because it points out the extreme disparity between the 1% and the 99%, which they would prefer to go unremarked.
Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.
About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are ‘strong conflicts
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Friday, January 27th, 2012
JEFFREY M. SMITH, - Birth of a New Earth
Stephan: While I consider Obama still the only choice for a social progressive in the upcoming election -- each week the Theocratic Right seems to be nastier and more irrational than the week before -- I have no illusions that he is the optimal choice from a compassionate life-affirming perspective. His appointment of Michael Taylor illustrates the point. This report is too polemic, and I almost didn't use it, but could not find another that made the apposite points.
It seems increasingly clear that the fix is in for increased corporate control of the FDA.
Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating and Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods from Chelsea Green Publishing. Smith worked at a GMO detection laboratory, founded the Institute for Responsible Technology, and currently lives in Iowa-surrounded by genetically modified corn and soybeans. For more information, visit Chelsea Green.
Michael Taylor was just appointed senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. This is the same man that was in charge of FDA policy when GMO’s were allowed into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to determine their safety. He ‘had been Monsanto’s attorney before becoming policy chief at the FDA [and then] he became Monsanto’s Vice President and chief lobbyist. This month [he] became the senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. He is now America’s food safety czar. This is no joke.’
Here’s the back story.
When FDA scientists were asked to weigh in on what was to become the most radical and potentially dangerous change in our food supply — the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods — secret documents now reveal that the experts were very concerned. Memo after memo described toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and hard-to-detect allergens. They were adamant that the technology carried ‘serious health hazards,’ and required careful, long-term research, including human studies, before any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be safely released into the food supply.
But the biotech industry had rigged the game so that neither […]
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Friday, January 27th, 2012
RICH MORIN, - Pew Research Center
Stephan: This is the consequence of over a decade of insane wars. It is the effect that will haunt us for generations, affecting not just the men and women who suffer from exposure to the immediate events, but their greater families and, particularly, their children.
One out of every ten veterans alive today was seriously injured at some point while serving in the military, and three-quarters of those injuries occurred in combat. For many of these 2.2 million wounded warriors, the physical and emotional consequences of their wounds have endured long after they left the military, according to a Pew Research Center survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,853 veterans conducted from July 18 to Sept. 4, 2011.
Veterans who suffered major service-related injuries are more than twice as likely as their more fortunate comrades to say they had difficulties readjusting to civilian life. They are almost three times as likely as other veterans to report they have suffered from post-traumatic stress (PTS). And they are less likely in later life to be in overall good health or to hold full-time jobs.
Government Not Doing Enough
The survey also finds that injured veterans are the most likely to say that they are not getting enough assistance from the government.
Fully half (52%) of all veterans badly injured while serving say the government has not given them, as a veteran, ‘all the help you think it should.
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