Friday, September 21st, 2012
MARSHALL ALLEN, - Pro Publica
Stephan: Here is the latest assessment of the illness profit industry that has replaced the previous healthcare system in the U.S.
What amazes me is how docilely Americans accept this, believing the 'big lie' fiction that we have the best healthcare system in the world.
Medical care has its own code and culture, which often does not put patients first, according to Dr. Marty Makary, a cancer surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the School of Public Health. And providers who speak against that code can pay a heavy price.
Makary’s new book, ‘Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care,
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Friday, September 21st, 2012
Stephan: Here is a follow on report concerning the GMO study I published on the 19th. Entitled 'A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health,' in a perverse way I think it is good news. I urge you to click through and see the pictures of the rats.
I think it is finally becoming clear, even to skeptics, that, as this reports says, 'GMOs may be the new thalidomide,' referring to the pharmaceutical that resulted in horrifying birth defects in a generation of children. We need to get to a critical consensus and this study may prove, in retrospect, to be the tipping point.
Eating genetically modified corn (GM corn) and consuming trace levels of Monsanto’s Roundup chemical fertilizer caused rats to develop horrifying tumors, widespread organ damage, and premature death. That’s the conclusion of a shocking new study that looked at the long-term effects of consuming Monsanto’s genetically modified corn.
The study has been deemed ‘the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats.’ News of the horrifying findings is spreading like wildfire across the internet, with even the mainstream media seemingly in shock over the photos of rats with multiple grotesque tumors… tumors so large the rats even had difficulty breathing in some cases. GMOs may be the new thalidomide.
‘Monsanto Roundup weedkiller and GM maize implicated in ‘shocking’ new cancer study’ wrote The Grocery, a popular UK publication.
It reported, ‘Scientists found that rats exposed to even the smallest amounts, developed mammary tumors and severe liver and kidney damage as early as four months in males, and seven months for females.’
The Daily Mail reported, ‘Fresh row over GM foods as French study claims rats fed the controversial crops suffered tumors.’
It goes on to say: ‘The animals on the GM diet suffered mammary tumors, […]
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Friday, September 21st, 2012
DEXTER FILKINS, - The New Yorker
Stephan: Here is an excellent assessment of the Afghanistan situation. Not surprisingly it is extremely grim. All I can think about is the hundreds of thousands of lives ruined by this war, including tens of thousands of American young people and their families. And the end result: vast profit for war contractors, and violent anti-Americanism that will last for generations.
We can’t win the war in Afghanistan, so what do we do? We’ll train the Afghans to do it for us, then claim victory and head for the exits.
But what happens if we can’t train the Afghans?
We’re about to find out. It’s difficult to overstate just how calamitous the decision, announced Tuesday, to suspend most joint combat patrols between Afghan soldiers and their American and NATO mentors is. Preparing the Afghan Army and police to fight without us is the foundation of the Obama Administration’s strategy to withdraw most American forces-and have them stop fighting entirely-by the end of 2014. It’s our ticket home. As I outlined in a piece earlier this year, President Obama’s strategy amounts to an enormous gamble, and one that hasn’t, so far, shown a lot of promise. That makes this latest move all the more disturbing. We’re running out of time.
According to American military officers, the order suspends joint patrolling at the battalion-level and below without approval of a general. An American battalion is made up of about eight hundred soldiers; an Afghan battalion is about half that size. The overwhelming majority of foot patrols-and the overwhelming majority of the fighting with the Taliban-take […]
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Friday, September 21st, 2012
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Here is the latest on the deteriorating American food system -- deteriorating in the sense that profit increasingly trumps actual nutrition and health. Once again, I urge all of you to choose organic food and, where possible, locally produced food. Rice obviously isn't grown everywhere, but many organic centered food venues offer bulk organic rice at reasonable prices. This business of picking carefully what you and your family eat is becoming evermore urgent.
As I’ve reported before [1], the US poultry industry has a disturbing habit of feeding arsenic to chickens. Arsenic, it turns out, helps control a common bug that infects chicken meat, and also gives chicken flesh a pink hue, which the industry thinks consumers want. Is all that arsenic making it into our food supply? It appears to be doing so-both in chicken meat [2] and in, of all things, rice. In a just released report [3], Consumer Reports says it found significant levels of arsenic in a variety of US rice products-including in brown rice and organic rice, and in rice-based kids’ products like cereal and even baby formula. Driving the point home, CR’s analysis of a major population study found that people who consume a serving of rice get a 44 percent spike in the arsenic level in their urine.
Rice is particularly effective at picking up arsenic from soil, CR reports, ‘in part because it is one of the only major crops grown in water-flooded conditions, which allow arsenic to be more easily taken up by its roots and stored in the grains.’
Arsenic, CR reports, is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a ‘group […]
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Thursday, September 20th, 2012
VALERIE STRAUSS and PASI SAHLBERG, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here is a remarkably cogent and coherent assessment of U.S. schools in the context of the superior Finnish education model. We look pathetic in comparison.
Finland’s high-achieving public school system is now part of the conversation about U.S. education reform these days. What, it is often asked, can we learn from Finland? (Plenty, actually, though U.S. reformers consistently ignore the lessons .) The query has been asked and answered so often that it seems like a good time to ask what the United States can’t learn from Finland. So I asked Pasi Sahlberg, author of ‘ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?
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