Stephan: This is a report which should appall you. When you read it you have two choices: Either the people of the United States are different than the people of the rest of the world; or something is seriously wrong with our legal system and gun laws. It has to be one or the other.
I think it is also important to recognize that this is in the leading English language newspaper, read by English speakers around the world, and it makes us look like barbarians.
It’s rather difficult to compare data from different time periods, according to different methodologies, across different parts of the world, and still come to definitive conclusions.
It is undeniable that police in the US often contend with much more violent situations and more heavily armed individuals than police in other developed democratic societies. Still, looking at our data for the US against admittedly less reliable information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait, and one that resonates with protests that have gone global since a killing last year in Ferguson, Missouri: the US is not just some outlier in terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar economic and political standing.
America is the outlier – and this is what a crisis looks like.
Stephan: Here is the latest in the human diaspora trend, the true story of how we spread across the Earth.
This image shows a typical group of Danish Bronze Age barrows from ca. 3,500-3,100 BP. Normally they were 3-5 meters high, constructed with cut out grass turfs (sods). One barrow would demand 3 hectares of grazing land. In Denmark 50,000 such barrows were constructed during the period 3,500- 3,100 BP for the leading chiefly lineages. Credit: Kristian Kristiansen.
Was it a massive migration? Or was it rather a slow and persistent seeping of people, items and ideas that laid the foundation for the demographic map of Europe and Central Asia that we see today? The Bronze Age (about 5,000 – 3,000 years ago) was a period with large cultural upheavals. But just how these upheavals came to be have remained shrouded in mystery.
Stephan: Our media lies to us, either by commission or omission, our politicians are increasingly craven cretins who depend on public money, and private bribes to live their lives. We seem to be unable or unwilling to see that their alternatives. This report describes one alternative.
What I find particularly galling is that as one of the cretins Governor Scott Walker runs for president, almost no one in the media seems interested in comparing his performance with that of Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton who, in contrast to the blatantly ethically compromised Walker, is quietly orienting his state towards wellness.
Why is it do you think that increasing wellness is of no interest to the media?
Governor Mark Dayton doing his job.
When Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton took office in 2011, Minnesota had more than a $6 billion dollar deficit and an unemployment rate of 7%. Today, Minnesota’s unemployment rate is now below 4% and they have a budget surplus of over $1.2 billion dollars. How did Mark Dayton do this? Did he heed his Republican opponent Tom Emmer’s advice?
Make no mistake, government cannot create the jobs we need to turn our economy around, but private business people can. State government can either help improve the necessary business climate – as I will do if elected governor – or it can hurt job development, as my opponents’ proposals to maintain the status quo would do.
During his first four years in office, Gov. Dayton raised the state income tax from 7.85 to 9.85 percent on individuals earning over $150,000, and on couples earning over $250,000 when filing jointly — a tax increase of $2.1 billion. He’s also agreed to raise Minnesota’s […]
Stephan: Here is the latest on the Illness Profit System. It is depressingly familiar, one of the many trends SR covers that just never seem to change. The problem is so obvious, the solution is so obvious, but implementing a correction would mean that profit would be reduced for some. We just don't seem to have the moral fiber as a society to take on real issues with real solutions. And in almost every case it is the pool who are exploited.
Would you go to a car mechanic who charges $200 for a $20 oil change? Surely not.
Yet a combination of a lack of regulation, competition and clarity in billing practices enables many hospitals to routinely charge fees to patients that are more than 1,000 percent of the amount that is reimbursable by Medicare, a new study has found.
The study, published today (June 8) in the journal Health Affairs, lists the 50 U.S. hospitals with the most extreme price markups. The researchers claim that these markups are largely motivated by profit, not service quality, and that this price-gouging trickles down to nearly all consumers, whether they have health insurance or not, contributing soundly to the high level of U.S. health spending.
Among these 50 hospitals: 49 are for-profit hospitals; the majority are operated by two health systems (Community Health Systems Inc. and Hospital Corporation of America); and 20 are located in Florida. Topping the list is North Okaloosa
Stephan: [caption id="attachment_20267" align="alignleft" width="300"] Solar Panel with green grass and beautiful blue sky[/caption]
Here is some good news. Researchers at Stanford have worked out what it really would take to convert from carbon to noncarbon energy.
It can be done, and it is clear it is now no longer a matter of technology but of political will, and America's willingness to choose wellness over profit for the few.
It will be cheaper, more efficient, productive of tens of thousands of jobs while, at the same time tens of thousands of lives in the U.S. alone would be saved. And it could happen by 2050.
One potential way to combat ongoing climate change, eliminate air pollution mortality, create jobs and stabilize energy prices involves converting the world’s entire energy infrastructure to run on clean, renewable energy.
This is a daunting challenge. But now, in a new study, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and colleagues, including U.C. Berkeley researcher Mark Delucchi, are the first to outline how each of the 50 states can achieve such a transition by 2050. The 50 individual state plans call for aggressive changes to both infrastructure and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies.
“The main barriers are social, political and getting industries to change. One way to overcome the barriers is to inform people about what is possible,” said Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. “By showing that it’s technologically and economically possible, this study could reduce the barriers to a large scale transformation.”
