Saturday, September 27th, 2014
CLIFF WEATHERS, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I will confess to being stunned by this report. I grew up in rural Tidewater Virginia, where drinking was a significant avocational activity, and knew something similar was true in many other places throughout the country, particularly in the South. People had something at lunch, then more again before dinner and then nightcaps. It kept a light buzz going until you went to bed. My parents drank very little, my father almost nothing at all, so it did not impact my home life. But I saw its effect on many other families. There was almost no falling down drunkenness, it was considered bad form. But the effect of chronic drinking took a fearsome toll over the years nonetheless, and shaped so many families that I knew. I left that world when I was 24. That was nearly half a century ago. I was surprised to find that in much of America nothing has changed for tens of millions.
Photo Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock
Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham [3] seems fascinated with charts and economic statistics and public policy professor Philip J. Cook [4] is fascinated with America’s love-hate relationship with alcohol. Let these two minds meet for a few moments and what you’ll learn about booze is shocking [5].
Ingraham got a hold of Cook’s new book, Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control, which chronicles the economic and societal costs of destructive drinking. And what he found in it is stunning. Cook says that 10% of American Adults participate in destructive drinking to the point where they’re consuming at least 10 drinks a day. That’s more than two bottles of wine or about two-thirds of a 750ML bottle of hard liquor. Or as Cook’s research shows, almost 74 drinks a week.
Moreover, Cook’s research shows about 30% of U.S. adults consume at least a drink a day and 20% have second.
If just thinking about that size of those tabs gives you nausea and inspires you to be nicer to […]
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Saturday, September 27th, 2014
JORDAN WEISSMANN, - Slate
Stephan: This also surprised me but, by asking the guys at my gym, I found the same results that are described in this report. Try it on your co-workers and see. Note particularly that around the world working people have pretty much the same sense of fairness.
Click through to see the charts, which are very helpful.
If Michael Norton’s research is to be believed, Americans don’t have the faintest clue how severe economic inequality has become-and if they only knew, they’d be appalled.
Consider the Harvard Business School professor’s new study examining public opinion about executive compensation, co-authored with the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok’s Sorapop Kiatpongsan. In the 1960s, the typical corporate chieftain in the U.S. earned 20 times as much as the average employee. Today, depending on whose estimate you choose, he makes anywhere from 272 to 354 times as much. According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO takes home more than $12 million, while the average worker makes about $34,000.
In their study, Norton and Kiatpongsan asked about 55,000 people around the globe, including 1,581 participants in the U.S., how much money they thought corporate CEOs made compared with unskilled factory workers. Then they asked how much more pay they thought CEOs should make. The median American guessed that executives out-earned factory workers roughly 30-to-1-exponentially lower than the highest actual estimate of 354-to-1. They believed the ideal ratio would be about 7-to-1.
‘In sum, respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates,” the authors write.
Americans didn’t answer […]
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Friday, September 26th, 2014
Jay Michaelson , - The Daily Beast
Stephan: In this report you can begin to see the true outlines of the Theocratic Right, and its religious fascism. This is the most dangerous anti-democratic social force in the world today.
Elena Scotti/The Daily Beast
Are you female, gay, non-Christian, or otherwise interested in the separation of church and state? Get to know The Gathering, a shadowy, powerful network of hard-right funders meeting Thursday in Florida.
Have you heard of the $1,750-per-person ‘Gathering,” which starts Thursday in Orlando, Florida?
Probably not. But if you’re female, gay, non-Christian, or otherwise interested in the separation of church and state, your life has been affected by it.
The Gathering is a conference of hard-right Christian organizations and, perhaps more important, funders. Most of them are not household names, at least if your household isn’t evangelical. But that’s the point: The Gathering is a hub of Christian Right organizing, and the people in attendance have led the campaigns to privatize public schools, redefine ‘religious liberty” (as in the Hobby Lobby case), fight same-sex marriage, fight evolution, and, well, you know the rest. They’re probably behind that, too.
Featured speakers have included many of the usual suspects: Alliance Defending Freedom President and CEO Alan Sears (2013), Focus on the […]
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Friday, September 26th, 2014
PATRIK JONSSON, - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: I don't think most people realize how many police shootings there are each year. It works out to be about three per day. And there is no question some are called for and justified. There are angry, crazy, and dishonest people in the world. But there has been a disquieting increase, occurring in more places, of questionable shootings. I read about one almost every morning when I begin to search media for the next days's SR. The citizen outrage of Ferguson, Missouri arises from one.
Corporate media doesn't cover the trend, nor the citizen response. But you can learn this for yourself. Read the comments under anyone of these stories and see the growing hatred and fear Americans feel about their police departments. It reminds me a great deal of the conversations I remember from my time spent in the old Soviet Union. This is incredibly corrosive in a democracy.
Click through to see the latest video.
Atlanta – Amid a number of US inquiries into worrisome police behavior, some critics are asking a difficult question: Have American police officers’ trigger fingers gotten too itchy?
South Carolina authorities on Wednesday released a dashcam video showing former Highway Patrol officer Sean Groubert asking motorist Levar Jones, who is black, to get his license and then shooting him in the hip as he reaches into his car for the license.
“Sir, why was I shot?” Mr. Jones, who is recovering from the shooting, can be heard saying.
The Sept. 4 incident led to the Highway Patrol firing Mr. Groubert, who was charged Wednesday with armed aggravated assault, which could lead to a 20-year prison sentence, if he’s convicted.
In other police shooting news, inquiries into the death of Michael Brown continue in St. Louis; the Department of Justice is reviewing a Ohio case where officers killed 22-year-old John Crawford, who is black, as he talked on a cell phone while holding, but not aiming, a BB gun at Walmart; and police in Savannah, Ga., last week shot and killed a handcuffed black man after he allegedly pulled out a hidden gun.
Over the past few years, certain cities have been hotspots for higher than […]
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Friday, September 26th, 2014
SAM BRASCH, - Modern Farmer
Stephan: The California drought may be local but it holds, as this report spells out, implications for the entire nation -- and beyond.
Meteorologists are already calling the current California drought the worst on record. B. Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California, Berkeley, used tree rings to look even farther back into the state’s past, only to find more bad news. She claims that this year is the state’s driest since Sir Francis Drake visited the west coast in 1580.
Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of drought emergency, which makes it easier to move water around the state, hire seasonal fire fighters and limit the landscaping irrigation around state highways. But even as cities struggle with extreme shortages, farmers – who take up 77 percent of the state’s water – have the most to lose.
The California Farm Water Coalition (CFWC) estimates the drought could take a $5 billion dollar bite out of an industry that brings in $44.7 billion annually.
Already, the drought is forcing hard choices between long-term sustainability and short-term hope. With costly hay and dry pastures, many dairy and cattlemen are opting to cull their herds. Almond farmers are tearing out older trees […]
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