Sunday, September 9th, 2012
Stephan: Several people have written me to ask why I don't do more positive articles. They usually send me an example of something going on in their area. And today a reader posted a comment to this effect. I think all this deserves a response.
I don't do news per se. Lots of websites do that. SR covers trends that are shaping the future. And trust me, I am always looking for positive trends. It depresses me to do negative trends day after day, but I deal in facts, so I have to do what is actually happening.
Let me also make the distinction between trends and local phenomena. There are thousands of wonderful very helpful and positive projects that affect in a positive way a dozen, or a few hundred or, even, a few thousand people. I completely support these efforts and work on behalf of a number of them in my private life. Trends, however, affect millions or even billions.
I think all of us who have a compassionate life-affirming perspective are called to support local efforts. And, over time, at the nonlocal level of consciousness they may reach the critical threshold of linkage required to produce social change. They become trends. This is one reason why it is important to support them. That is how slavery was ended, women got the right to vote, and the environmental movement began, to cite but three examples.
But right now many of the trends are not positive and, since SR is about facts I have to report the reality that is, in the hope that people will thus make different choices, and the trends will change for the positive. In the end, it all comes down to individual choices. Trends are the aggregate result of millions upon millions of small mundane personal choices.
I began SR as an exercise in social acupuncture, believing that if I could point out the trends that readers would be informed and able to make different choices and trends would move in a more compassionately life-affirming direction.
-- Stephan
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Saturday, September 8th, 2012
VICTORIA COLLIVER, - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: The Illness Profit System because it is not really a healthcare system, but a financial structure to make profit, not only tolerates it encourages waste and inefficiency, because they are profitable.
As I have written many times before, and this story now confirms, if we had a single payer system with national wellness as its first priority, the crush of medical costs would disappear like a morning fog.
The U.S. health system wastes more than $750 billion a year – or 30 percent of medical expenses – in unnecessary, inefficient services, and each year tens of thousands of deaths could be averted through better care, according to a report released Thursday by the Institute of Medicine.
Despite those sobering figures, the 18-member committee behind the national report, which includes several Bay Area health experts, concluded that improving quality and lowering cost is not only possible but could be done with tools and technologies that exist.
‘In some ways, the American medical system is the best the world has ever seen. We do things every day that are exceptional, almost miraculous,’ said the committee’s chairman, Dr. Mark Smith, president and chief executive officer of the California HealthCare Foundation, a health care philanthropic group in Oakland.
Smith also described a ‘maddening paradox’ in which patients get either too little treatment or too much and a system that ‘rushes some things into widespread practice before there have even been enough studies and there are other things we have known for 100 years and still can’t get people to do.’
The report outlines a series of recommendations to improve the system, including rewarding health care providers […]
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Saturday, September 8th, 2012
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I find it significant and revealing that the story of the Gulf tragedy mostly gets coverage in the British press. Nationally, American corporate media has no time for it. The damage done by BP and Transocean will haunt the Gulf for decades. Prince William Sound, Alaska, site of the Exxon Valdez disaster on 24 March 1989 still shows signs of severe damage. In hours a millennia old ecosystem can be destroyed
Louisiana is investigating whether tar balls deposited on Gulf of Mexico beaches by Hurricane Isaac were relics of the 2010 BP oil disaster.
Government agencies and environmental groups this week reported weathered oil in areas which took the brunt of last week’s hurricane – and which were also heavily damaged by the 4.9m barrel gusher from BP’s leaking oil well.
‘I’d say there is a smoking gun,
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Saturday, September 8th, 2012
Stephan: The corporate media has long since moved on from this story, rather like putting down a book midway through. But this tragic story continues media or no.
This is why you see all those BP ads of smiling people, and pristine shores, saying how much BP loves everyone and is dedicated to helping those in the Gulf. This is the Big Lie Strategy, and you can see it being used by corporate special interests on behalf of one party in the current campaign. You see it coming out of the mouths of certain candidates. Repeat something often enough and it becomes 'true' for many people. Goebbels must be very proud.
Shares in BP were the biggest fallers in the FTSE 100 on Wednesday morning, dropping 3% to 423p, as the US justice department ramped up its rhetoric against the oil company for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In new court papers, the justice department gave examples of what it calls ‘gross negligence and wilful misconduct’ over the spill, the largest in US history.
The court filing is the sharpest position yet taken by the US government as it seeks to hold the British group largely responsible. Gross negligence is a central issue to the case, set to go to trial in New Orleans in January 2013. A gross negligence finding could nearly quadruple the civil damages owed by BP under the Clean Water Act to $21bn (£13.2bn).
The US government and BP are engaged in talks to settle civil and potential criminal liability, though neither side will comment on the status of negotiations.
‘The behaviour, words, and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall,’ government lawyers wrote in the filing on 31 August in federal court in New Orleans.
The filing comes more than two […]
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Saturday, September 8th, 2012
Stephan: Another unintended consequence of the genetic manipulation of food stuffs to make them more profitable. Once again when profit is the only priority this is the outcome. How many bad outcomes does it take to question the basic premise?
Modern wheat is a ‘perfect, chronic poison,’ according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world’s most popular grain.
Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn’t the wheat your grandma had: ‘It’s an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the ’60s and ’70s,’ he said on ‘CBS This Morning.’ ‘This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there’s a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It’s not gluten. I’m not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I’m talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year.’
Asked if the farming industry could change back to the grain it formerly produced, Davis said it could, but it would not be economically feasible because it yields less per acre. However, Davis said a movement has begun with people turning away from wheat – and dropping substantial weight.
‘If three people lost eight pounds, big deal,’ he said. ‘But we’re […]
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