Monday, February 24th, 2014
CHELSEA PARSONS, - Nation of Change
Stephan: The American gun psychosis manifests like all epidemics: just like a killer flu it is killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. This social illness is a peculiarity of our culture, no other society on Earth suffers from this mental derangement.
Click through to see the graph.
Guns kill a lot of young people in the United States. Not just in school shootings or horrific ‘accidents” between toddlers that tend to garner the most media attention, but in every day shootings in communities around the country that result in the deaths of thousands of children and teenagers.
In 2010, 6,201 young people between the ages of 15 and 24 died by gunfire. Guns were a close second to the leading cause of death among this age group, car accidents, which took the lives of 7,024 young people that year. But, while car accident deaths among young people have been steadily declining over the past decade, gun deaths have remained relatively unchanged. And, as described in a new Center for American Progress report released Friday, if current trends continue, gun deaths will surpass car accident deaths among young people sometime in 2015.
Gun deaths
How can we explain these numbers? For car accident deaths, these numbers represent a significant victory. Deaths of young people as a result of car accidents have dropped dramatically in the last two decades, from a high of more than 12,000 deaths among this age group in 1990. This decline is not an accident: billions of […]
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Monday, February 24th, 2014
BEN PRICE, - Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
Stephan: Here is some excellent news. I hope this initial story becomes a trend. You can help make that happen.
DENVER — The Colorado Community Rights Network (COCRN) has submitted to the state for review and comment the language for a Community Rights Constitutional Amendment to be placed on the 2014 ballot. The significance of the proposed state constitutional amendment was explained by COCRN member, Cliff Willmeng:
‘Communities throughout Colorado and across the country are finding that, in the face of corporate exploitation, they don’t have full authority, due to state preemption, to protect public health, safety and welfare, economic and environmental sustainability, property value, and overall quality of life. To do so without repeated challenges from corporate lawyers and our own state requires changes to our structure of law. The Community Rights Amendment would codify into law the right to local self-government, enabling local governments to define fundamental rights and prohibit activities that violate those rights.”
Lotus, another member of COCRN, commented, ‘When the thirteen colonies revolted to gain independence from England, the very first grievance listed in the Declaration of Independence was the refusal of the central government to recognize local laws enacted as an exercise of the people’s right to local self-government. The Declaration states that the king ‘has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and […]
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Monday, February 24th, 2014
REX DALTON, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: Another door to the past opens. So much of what we thought we knew about the past has proven to be little more than mythology.
Despite general resistence, representatives of tribes in the US recently gave their blessing for DNA analysis of the remains of a Stone Age child. Research conducted on the boy’s genes indicate that Native Americans have European roots.
It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn’t have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey.
The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child’s burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the Yellowstone River, the boy’s Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.
Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy’s origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy’s ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.
Their findings go even further: More than […]
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Monday, February 24th, 2014
Stephan: Here is further proof that water is destiny.
A federal agency said California farmers hit hard by a withering drought will receive no irrigation water this year from a sprawling system of rivers, canals and reservoirs across the parched state.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Friday there simply isn’t enough water in the Central Valley Project, which provides irrigation and municipal water to wide swaths of California’s midsection. A third of the country’s fruits and vegetables are produced in the region.
Last year, Central Valley farmers received 20 percent of their normal water allowance – but that figure has sunk to zero percent amid an environmental crisis that has threatened to decimate the $44.7 billion agriculture business in the country’s top farming state and put countless jobs on the line.
“Severe Crisis’ Leaves California Farmers Without a Harvest
Nightly News
Gov. Jerry Brown last month declared a drought emergency. President Barack Obama this month pledged millions of dollars in federal assistance to California during a visit to Fresno.
State officials who oversee the State Water Project – California’s other chief water system – have already announced they won’t be allocating any water for farmers. The decision marks a first in the system’s 54-year history.
Federal officials also said Friday that water used by […]
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Monday, February 24th, 2014
Stephan: The American Illness Profit System, and I include the changes wrought by Obamacare, is by any criterion but the profit it makes, an abject failure. The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks us in the world as 37th in excellence. Here are the five best systems.
Why don't we mimic these successes? The answer is not really complicated. Because in the United States profit is more important than health.
InternationalLiving.com’s annual Global Retirement Index reports that France, Uruguay and Malaysia provide the best and most affordable health care in the world.
The Health Care category in the Index considers the cost of care and the quality. Also considered are the number of people per doctor, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people, the percentage of the population with access to safe water, the infant mortality rate, life expectancy, and public-health expenditure as a percentage of a country’s GDP.
France comes in first in this category as the best country in the world for health care.
1. France
According to the World Health Organization, France has the number one health care system in the world. The country also comes first in the health care category of the InternationalLiving.com annual Global Retirement Index 2014. Despite their meat-and cream-rich diet augmented by alcohol and cigarettes, the French have been living much longer in recent years. Life expectancy now averages 85 years for women and 78 for men.
2. Uruguay
Uruguay has a variety of health care options available that include a public health care system for people who […]
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