Stephan: As someone who has worn glasses since he was eight years old, and who is now up to trifocals, this story held my immediate interest. Perhaps it will be of interest to you as well.
Credit: www.loupiote.com
“When you get the Bionic Lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away”
A British Columbian optometrist has invented an artificial lens that he says not only corrects a patient’s sight, but offers a level of clarity three times greater than natural 20/20 vision.
Garth Webb, an optometrist in British Columbia, has spent eight years and more than $3 million in funding to develop the Ocumetics Bionic Lens, CBC News reports. The bionic lens, which was designed to replace the eye’s natural lens, is surgically implanted in the eye in an eight-minute procedure.
“If you can just barely see the clock at 10 feet, when you get the Bionic Lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away,” Webb told CBC News.
Webb said arrangements for clinical trials on animals and blind patients were already underway. He expects the product to become commercially available within two years.
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2015
Terrence McCoy, Reporter - The Washington Post - Standard Examiner (Ogden, Utah)
Stephan: I think this is very good news, if we can just hear it. Here is what wellness oriented social policy looks like. Note that it is cheaper, easier, more efficient, and more effective at solving the problem — in this case ending homelessness — than the anti-wellness punishment models currently in use. Hands down this is the better option.
This approach by the way mirrors Benjamin Franklin's views on how to create effective life-affirming social policy.
Sam Tsemberis, founder and CEO of Pathways to Housing, stands near one of the buildings in NW that offers housing to formerly homeless.
Credit: The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The process of innovation is often one of mystery. Where does an idea come from? How do innovators find it? What makes them different from everyone else fumbling around in the dark?
Compounding the puzzle is the irony that those most likely to innovate are rarely the experts. They’re outsiders who see things freshly.
And so, on a recent morning, one such outsider picks his way down a sun-splashed Brookland street. Face patched in scruff, wiry frame crammed into a Patagonia jacket, he doesn’t at first seem like an innovator who has had national impact. But few thinkers today are in greater demand.
Meet Sam Tsemberis. According to academics and advocates, he’s all but solved chronic homelessness. His research, which commands the support of […]
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2015
Robert Greenwald and Vanessa Baden, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Robert Greenwald and Vanessa Baden are two of the most respected documentarians in the the U.S., so they know whereof they speak about filming law enforcement in action. From my perspective of course a citizen can video his police in action.
When I read about this issue I am taken back 20 years to the old Soviet Union, when filming the police could get you into real trouble. Bullies and jackboots it goes without saying do not like to be filmed. They know what they are doing is morally wrong, whatever they say publicly. And they don't want their actions memorialized. The fact that this is even a debated issue in the U.S. tells you how compromised civil liberties have become.
Greenwald and Baden present the case for why assess things as I do.
Without the video from the cases of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott, these cases and many others would have gone uninvestigated and unnoticed; with many holding staunchly to the belief that whatever is written in a police report is fact. Still, even with these cases, large public outcry, and overwhelming evidence, there is still mistrust and demonization of the people decrying their treatment by law enforcement. The bias is so bad, in fact, that as opposed to doing further investigation into the claims of misconduct on a larger, more comprehensive scale, such as those seen in our video above, local law makers and states have attempted to curtail the filming of law enforcement that bolsters the claims.
That’s right. Instead of admitting that the state of policing in this country is hugely problematic and working with communities to fully uncover depths of the problem, many are systematically working to cover up any trace that a problem exists. Some of the more notable attempts as of late:
· Just this March, Texas State Rep. Jason Villalba(R) tried to pass a law in Texas that would make it a class B misdemeanor […]
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2015
John Feffer, Director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: Here is a good exegetic essay on the current status of geopolitics. So many missed opportunities.
Imagine an alternative universe in which the two major Cold War superpowers evolved into the United Soviet Socialist States. The conjoined entity, linked perhaps by a new Bering Straits land bridge, combines the optimal features of capitalism and collectivism. From Siberia to Sioux City, we’d all be living in one giant Sweden.
It sounds like either the paranoid nightmare of a John Bircher or the wildly optimistic dream of Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, however, this was a rather conventional view, at least among influential thinkers like economist John Kenneth Galbraith who predicted that the United States and the Soviet Union would converge at some point in the future with the market tempered by planning and planning invigorated by the market. Like many an academic notion, it didn’t come to pass. The United States veered off in the direction of Reaganomics. And the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. So much for “convergence theory,” which like EST or cold fusion went the way of most crackpot ideas.
Or did it? Take another look at our world in 2015 and tell […]
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2015
Stephan: Four years ago I became so concerned about the American gulag that I wrote a paper called:
The New American Slavery. This is the update on this trend. And note the opening reference to the importance of voting. I had two people recently tell me that they saw no reason to vote because the whole thing was rigged and there was no difference between the parties. I told both of them that was completely wrong, and spelled the different social outcomes that arise from different social policies, and what voting could accomplish. Look at Ireland.
This report assesses voting from a perspective few consider, the felon community. It is a very damning picture.
Yet this canard is deeply engrained in many people's thinking, and that is how the many are weakened and fall under the power of the rich few.
Prison inmates wearing firefighting boots line up for breakfast at Oak Glen Conservation Fire Camp #35 in Yucaipa, California November 6, 2014. Thousands of convicted felons form the backbone of California’s wildfire protection force under a unique and little-known prison labor program. But California may soon find it harder to recruit […]
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