BRAD PLUMER, - The Washington Post
Stephan: A very interesting profile of the U.S., that contains a number of surprises.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a fascinating new report out that compares consumer budgets in the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan. There’s a huge amount of variation: Americans appear to spend more than their peers on housing, transportation, and health care – and we spend far less on clothes, food, and booze.
At this point, it shouldn’t come as a shock that American consumers devote a far bigger fraction of their budgets to health care than their peers abroad. That’s partly because Canada, Japan, and Britain all have more comprehensive taxpayer-financed nationalized health systems that curtail out-of-pocket expenses. (Though, as Catherine Rampell points out, when you add up both taxes and out-of-pocket expenses, the United States is still paying significantly more for health care than other countries.)
Also noteworthy is the fact that Americans spend a much bigger chunks of their budgets on housing, and far less on food. As the BLS report’s detailed breakdown here shows, Americans spend more money eating out than their peers, but they spend a significantly smaller portion of their budgets on cooking at home than Canada, Britain, or Japan. Here’s an old article by Derek Thompson looking at why food in the United States […]
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ELIZABETH WEIL, - The New York Times
Stephan: Yet another self-inflicted wound. I get so tired of seeing these negative trends become more and more powerful. I know there are thousands upon thousands of people working in small projects to make things better. And they do, locally. But the overall trends continue to be negative, and many of them focus on what we are doing to our own bodies, and the bodies of our children. And it isn't just women, and girls. Males have been experiencing decreasing libido, and lower sperm counts.
One day last year when her daughter, Ainsley, was 9, Tracee Sioux pulled her out of her elementary school in Fort Collins, Colo., and drove her an hour south, to Longmont, in hopes of finding a satisfying reason that Ainsley began growing pubic hair at age 6. Ainsley was the tallest child in her third-grade class. She had a thick, enviable blond-streaked ponytail and big feet, like a puppy’s. The curves of her Levi’s matched her mother’s.
‘How was your day?
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PETER BEAUMONT, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It should be clear by now to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear that we need to exit the era of old energy. Whether it is Fukushima or the Gulf when these systems are operating correctly they are potentially incredibly toxic and, when they go bad, the damage is catastrophic, and lasts long past the media's attention span. Notice that this report is in a British paper.
A new study of dolphins living close to the site of North America’s worst ever oil spill – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals.
The report, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], found that many of the 32 dolphins studied were underweight, anaemic and suffering from lung and liver disease, while nearly half had low levels of a hormone that helps the mammals deal with stress as well as regulating their metabolism and immune systems.
More than 200m gallons of crude oil flowed from the well after a series of explosions on 20 April 2010, which killed 11 workers. The spill contaminated the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline in what President Barack Obama called America’s worst environmental disaster.
The research follows the publication of several scientific studies into insect populations on the nearby Gulf coastline and into the health of deepwater coral populations, which all suggest that the environmental impact of the five-month long spill may have been far worse than previously appreciated.
Another study confirmed that zooplankton – the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the ocean food chain – had also been contaminated with oil. Indeed, […]
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MICHELLE CHEN, - Firedoglake
Stephan: Years ago I worked for a week as a farm laborer, to try and understand what that work was really about. It almost killed me. I cannot convey the pain I experienced in my body from hours of being bent over, out in the sun, with constant performance pressure. My hands were cut in a hundred places. It was one of the most awful experiences in my life. I could not believe people did this as a living, and was amazed at the good cheer of the workers, mostly Blacks and Hispanics, some almost certainly underage, who were housed like dogs and paid paltry sums, and did this day after day. The position of Big Agra is so immoral I am left breathless.
[When I was 12] they gave me my first knife. Week after week I was cutting myself. Every week I had a new scar. My hands have a lot of stories.
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BILL BLAKEMORE, - ABC News
Stephan: Willful Ignorance -- the denial of facts in favor of theology and ideology -- has produced this, another self-inflicted wound.
One of the world’s most widely known and respected senior scientists tells ABC News that current denial about the basic daunting realities of manmade global warming is ‘just foolishness.
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