HAROLD EVANS, - Daily Beast
Stephan: Zbigniew Brzezinski has been assessing America's place in the world for more than half a century, and his views have proven remarkably prescient. This essay presents his thinking with clarity. It is worth your attention.
I recommend his book: Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power. By Zbigniew Brzezinski. 208 pages. Basic Books. $26.
In the vicinity of July 4, it’s probably imprudent to mention that America has lost its dominant position of world leadership, according to a renowned scholar of geopolitics, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He is as sturdily patriotic as anyone, but as a Cold Warrior, presidential adviser, and foreign-policy professor at Johns Hopkins, he has seen too much to follow the drum.
He went against the grain of elite opinion in the 50s by predicting that the Soviet Union was doomed to break up, and break up along nationalist lines; he foresaw the danger of allowing Ayatollah Khomeini to control the Iranian revolution and urged military action to forestall him; in the late 70s, he forecast the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He’s been so right on Soviet matters that it is downright disconcerting to read in his new book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power that America now exhibits the same symptoms of decay as the Soviet Union did just before its fall: a gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions, bankrupting itself with a gross military budget; failing in a decades-long attempt to control Afghanistan; a ruling class cynically insensitive to widening social disparities while hypocritically masking its […]
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REBECCA MOSS, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This very sad report is yet further evidence of the concerted effort to debase our schools, which is going to cause the loss of an entire generation, to the detriment of America's future. If national wellness were a real priority our schools would look very different. That we do not make such a commitment tells us something important about who we really are.
Elaine Gil is the only gym teacher at P.S. 24, a large and growing dual-language elementary school in the heart of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The 50-year-old bounds from class-to-class in her sweatpants, sneakers and t-shirt, teaching 40-minute periods for kindergarten through fifth graders, one after the other. Yet, of the 750 students at the school, only about 450 are able to take physical education in a given year because of limited space and money. And those who do, have gym class only once a week.
The loss of gym time in city schools is not new, but it’s become ever more urgent. Slightly more than half of the children in P.S. 24 have been found to be overweight or obese.
‘My main goal is to get them moving,
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DANA HUNSINGER BENBOW, - USA Today
Stephan: I think this report is not only good news it reveals what citizen choice can achieve. People are voting with their pocketbooks for natural organic food and against the corn fructose, fat filled, sugar laden processed crap that Big Agra is pushing.
INDIANAPOLIS — There’s shower gel made from carrots. Egg-white protein powder. Diapers with no chlorine. Medjool dates and dried papaya.
This isn’t some exotic, hippy supermarket au natural. This is Kroger, one of the largest mainstream grocers in the nation.
‘Used to be this was all very faddish,’ said Gregg Proctor, who heads up natural foods for Kroger’s central division, which includes Indiana. ‘Not anymore. We’re adding new items constantly because if we don’t get it when it comes out, our competition will.’
There seems to be a race to pure foods among the nation’s largest supermarkets as they ramp up their offerings, even launch their own brands of organics and naturals, and then heavily advertise the healthy choice.
It all makes sense, considering sales of this segment of groceries are outpacing traditional grocery sales.
Nationwide, natural and organic food sales grew 8 percent in 2010 versus the less than 1 percent growth in the $630 billion total U.S. food market, according to the Nutrition Business Journal. It grew at about a 5 percent rate each year from 2005 to 2009.
With that growth and popularity comes a definite consumer advantage: Slowly but surely, the price of natural foods is falling.
‘Make no mistake, there is a […]
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VIVIAN GOLDSCHMIDT, MA and KATIE THOMAS, - Save Our Bones
Stephan: Here we see, in their own words, the criminality of Big Pharma, and its complete disdain for national wellness.
It could be the plot of a best-selling medical thriller. A web of deception and lies tied to a new blockbuster drug is uncovered during a financial fraud investigation of a major pharmaceutical company. Unfortunately, this plot is not imaginary.
Back in the year 2000, Pfizer and its partner Pharmacia, makers of the pain drug Celebrex, purposely released partial information on a study to (erroneously) show that the drug was safer on the stomach than common over the counter pain killers such as ibuprofen.
‘They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,
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MARISA LAGOS, Staff Writer - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: I consider this to be the best news in some time. It is going to change for the better -- in many ways -- the future of California. It is the sort of big picture infrastructure project we should be carrying out all over the country. It is the kind of stimulus we have needed these past four years. It will create thousands of jobs that will, with the railroad's completion, create yet tens of thousands more long lasting good middle class enabling jobs. It will reduce California's carbon footprint, improve its economics, and change the face of the state. Governor Jerry Brown, the best governor California has had in a generation, should be applauded for getting this through the legislature.
SACRAMENTO — A divided state Senate approved billions of dollars in funding to start construction on California’s ambitious high-speed rail line Friday, handing the controversial project $7.9 billion in state and federal money for the first 130 miles of track and a series of local transit upgrades.
The funding measure, which was easily approved in the Assembly Thursday, will now head to Gov. Jerry Brown, who pushed lawmakers to approve it. In all, the Legislature this week authorized the issuance of $4.6 billion in state bond funds – about half of the $9.9 billion approved by voters in 2008 – and opened the door for California to obtain $3.3 billion in federal grants, for a total of $7.9 billion.
It was a key vote: Federal transportation officials had warned that if the money were not made available this summer, they would yank the $3.3 billion in stimulus funds and give it to other states.
And it was a tough win for Democratic leaders, who weren’t sure by midday if they had the votes to pass the measure, which got the bare minimum of 21 votes, all of them Democrats. But some in the party refused to support the plan.
One of those lawmakers, Sen. […]
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