Sunday, September 22nd, 2013
MARSHALL ALLEN, - ProPublica
Stephan: Here is some more depressing news about the failures of the illness profit system of healthcare we have in the U.S.. Medical mistakes are the third greatest killer after heart disease and cancer. Just going into a hospital is dangerous. We spend more than any other country in the world on healthcare and get second or third rate results as study after study has shown. And yet Americans tolerate it and a large number want to see the pathetically modest improvements of Obamacare crushed. Our own bad choices in the voting booth are the cause of all of this.
It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient’s death, the numbers come out worse.
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous ‘To Err Is Human
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Sunday, September 22nd, 2013
Stephan: Here is the very interesting trend showing the next transition in communications. Except for 60 Minutes on CBS, and the local PBS station I don't think I have seen a broadcast program in several years. Cable has replaced it and, now, it would seem, cable is being rejected by under 30s.
For the first time, the total number of Americans who pay for a TV subscription is on pace to decline this year, Bloomberg News reports. It’s a sobering statistic for the cable industry, which has been fighting for years to thwart ‘cord-cutters’ who ditch their subscriptions in favor of streaming video online. It’s becoming increasingly clear this is a losing battle.
It isn’t just cord-cutters who are the problem for the pay-TV industry, Bloomberg’s Ian King points out. It’s ‘cord-nevers’-young people who have never paid for cable or satellite TV and have no intention of doing so in the future. The piece leads with an anecdote about a 23-year-old cord-never from Mountain View who says she spends four hours in front of the TV every day just streaming shows and movies from Netflix, Amazon, and broadcasters’ websites. She describes this approach as ‘very typical
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Saturday, September 21st, 2013
Stephan: Not a word of this in the American corporate press, but I take this as further evidence of our declining status in Latin America as a result of the U.S.'s bullying behavior. The craziness and paranoia ginned up in this country after 911 looks, to people outside of it, like a kind of national madness.
Bolivian President Evo Morales will file a lawsuit against the US government for crimes against humanity. He has decried the US for its intimidation tactics and fear-mongering after the Venezuelan presidential jet was blocked from entering US airspace.
‘I would like to announce that we are preparing a lawsuit against Barack Obama to condemn him for crimes against humanity,
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Saturday, September 21st, 2013
REBECCA LEBER, - Think Progress
Stephan: As with the Gulf disaster, once again it is clear that the carbon energy interests had done essentially no planning or preparation for a crisis event such as the one that has devastated Colorado. It is a measure of the corruption of our government that this is true. Proper regulation would have seen them prepared.
Colorado flooding has not only overwhelmed roads and homes, but also the oil and gas infrastructure stationed in one of the most densely drilled areas in the U.S. Although oil companies have shut down much of their operations in Weld County due to flooding, nearby locals say an unknown amount of chemicals has leaked out and possibly contaminated waters, mixing fracking fluids and oil along with sewage, gasoline, and agriculture pesticides.
‘You have 100, if not thousands, of wells underwater right now and we have no idea what those wells are leaking,
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Saturday, September 21st, 2013
Stephan: There is clearly a mental health issue to the Theocratic Right but, in my view, this report completely misses perhaps the most important point. There is a third option between excessive religiosity and atheism -- spiritual but not religious. That is where I stand and, I suspect, many of my readers do as well. It is the largest demographic in the country. And it isn't even discussed. So the only takeaway that matters is that more religious people are more depressed.
While non-religious people tend to reject religion because they find the evidence for a supernatural deity unconvincing, a new study shows that rejecting religion can be good not just logically, but emotionally.
While previous studies had suggested some emotional and social value to being religious, a new study that examined a huge number of people from around the world discovered that being religious is a risk factor for depression. As explained by the Huffington Post, over 8,000 people from different countries from the UK to Chile, had their levels of religiosity measured. The study covered various economic and social groups and looked at the relationship between religiosity and depression.
The researchers found that religious people were more prone to depression, with rates of developing depression in places like the United Kingdom being three times as high for believers than non-believers. Studies like this are merely measuring risk factors and not necessarily suggesting a causal relationship so much as suggesting to clinicians traits to look out for when determining a patient’s chances of developing depression. However, the fact that the finding was both cross- and intra-cultural suggests that there may be more going on here than a simple correlation.
Is there anything about religion […]
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