Wednesday, November 27th, 2013
Stephan: Here in the U.S. 17 million children have food access issues, and the Republicans in the Congress just cut the SNAP program, to their everlasting shame.
As we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving I hope all my readers will buy some extra food and donate it to the poor. This is how desperate it is getting.
Recent cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves as a lifeline to millions of households struggling under a weak economy and high unemployment and underemployment, have been in effect for less than 30 days, but families are already feeling the impact as they struggle to put dinner on the table with reduced food budgets.
As a result, a growing number of families across the country are now turning to local food banks to keep staples like cereal and rice in their pantries.
As the New York Times notes, with Thanksgiving just days away, a line snaked around a Brooklyn block while people waited to enter an area food pantry, hoping to fill their grocery bags with potatoes, onions, milk and – if they were lucky – a chicken or ham for the week. The pantry had long ago run out of turkey, according to Melony Samuels, who runs the food bank.
Samuels’ pantry, like so many others, has been ‘wiped out
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Wednesday, November 27th, 2013
TRAVIS GETTYS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The more I read about this Pope the more I like him. It is going to be interesting to watch how the Theocratic Rightist Bishops and Cardinals appointed by his recent predecessors, who seem more at home with Anyn Rand's teachings than those of Jesus, are going to react. Pope Francis is quite correct in his assessment of the vampire capitalism that is shaping many of the societies of the world, particularly the U.S, to the detriment of those who live here.
In case there was any doubt left, Pope Francis made it clear that he shares little in common with U.S. conservatives.
The pontiff released his Evangelii Gadium, or Joy of the Gospel, attacking capitalism as a form of tyranny and calling on church and political leaders to address the needs of the poor.
‘As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems,
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Tuesday, November 26th, 2013
MOLLY REDDEN, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is a article about Plan B that all young women should know. The fact that outside of the U.S. women are warned, but inside the U.S. they are not is a matter of concern. But more than anything what caught my attention was this: 'Data for the years 2007 to 2010 show the average weight of American women 20 years and older is 166.2 pounds-greater than the weight at which emergency contraceptive pills that use levonorgestrel begin to lose their effectiveness. The average weight of non-Hispanic black women aged 20 to 39 is 186 pounds, well above the weight at which these pills are completely ineffective. A CDC survey published in February found that 5.8 million American women used emergency contraceptive pills from 2006 to 2010.' Those weights for American women should be very alarming on their own, the contraceptive issues aside.
The European manufacturer of an emergency contraceptive pill identical to Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, will warn women that the drug is completely ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds and begins to lose effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds. HRA Pharma, the French manufacturer of the European drug, Norlevo, is changing its packaging information to reflect the weight limits. European pharmaceutical regulators approved the change on November 10, but it has not been previously reported.
This development has implications for American women. Some of the most popular emergency contraceptive pills sold over the counter in the United States-including the one-pill drugs Plan B One-Step, Next Choice One Dose, and My Way, and a number of generic two-pill emergency contraceptives-have a dosage and chemical makeup identical to the European drug. Weight data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that, at 166 pounds, the average American woman is too heavy to use these pills effectively.
These pills, which use a compound called levonorgestrel to prevent pregnancies, are the most effective morning-after pills available without a prescription. Other pills sold in the United States require a prescription, are less effective at preventing […]
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Tuesday, November 26th, 2013
REID WILSON, - The Washington Post
Stephan: People other than myself are beginning to recognize the Schism Trend that is reshaping the U.S. Here is an excellent essay on the subject.
Click through to see the map that accompanies the report.
Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.
‘The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps - including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,
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Tuesday, November 26th, 2013
MICHAEL KIMMEL, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Increasingly I see an existential trend arising in the U.S.. Its source, I think, is the growing realization on the part of Whites, particularly White males who themselves are not successful, that even the birthright status previously accorded Whites, for just being White, is ending as the U.S. becomes a country with no racial majority. With their over-active Amygdalas and their Theocratic Rightist worldview these men are dangerous, and a toxic force in society.
The following is an excerpt fromAngry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, by Michael Kimmel (Nation Books, 2013).
Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland-small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of ‘southern pride
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