Tuesday, November 24th, 2015
Natasha Geiling, - Climate Progress
Stephan: Here is some more good news. The voters of Alberta, once a Canadian province in the vice grip of corporate greed, much like West Virginia, pushed back by voting for the more life-affirming option, and good news has followed. It is a tragedy that West Virginians either don't vote or v0te for the corporate Theocratic Right and, as a result their environment is degraded so badly it will take generations to recover, and will never really be the same, and their own health has been seriously diminished.
Alberta tar sands, the rape of a once beautiful province.
Credit: Shutterstock
Alberta’s carbon footprint, spurred on by the tar sands industry, has been steadily growing in recent years. So when the New Democratic Party took power in a surprise victory earlier this year, environmentalists hoped it signaled a turning point for Canada’s largest oil-producing province.
On Sunday, new Alberta Premier Rachel Notely lived up to those expectations. Notely announced new pledges to limit fossil fuels in the province, by phasing out all coal power usage by 2030, imposing a carbon tax beginning in 2017, and placing a limit on carbon pollution from the tar sands industry.
“This is the day we stop denying there is an issue, and this is the day when we start doing our part,” Notley said. “Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity.”
The announcement comes after months of statements by high-ranking government officials within Alberta signaling a change in the province’s approach to […]
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Tuesday, November 24th, 2015
Stephan: I am in France to speak at two conferences the first in Paris, the other in Pau. When this story about yet another shootout in the U.S. that injured more than a dozen people who came for a concert broke today the French, who have just undergone a massacre that has rocked the country, looked at us pityingly. "It's just America, that's the way they live. I guess they're used to it." What could I say, they're right. Someone asked me how many people are killed by gun fire every day in America? I told him 92, and he just shook his head
Another day, another gun tragedy.
A manhunt was underway across New Orleans on Monday after 16 people were shot during a gunfight at an impromptu music video recording at in a city park, authorities said.
The victims were all in stable condition.
The shooting broke out late Sunday at Bunny Friend Park in the Upper Ninth Ward where about 500 people were gathered for the video shoot, officials said.
“At the end of the day it’s really hard to police against a bunch of guys who decide to pull out guns and settle disputes with 300 people between them,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at a news conference.
The shooting followed a second-line parade by the Nine Times Social & Pleasure Club that had taken place a block or two from the shooting scene, Landrieu said.
Witnesses told WWL-TV that at least two gunmen fired into the crowd.
Detectives are combing the neighborhood for surveillance video of the incident or suspects.
City police officers had been monitoring the parade, but witnesses said they were beginning to disperse as the after-party kept going, The […]
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Tuesday, November 24th, 2015
Vyckie Garrison, - The Raw Story/Alternet
Stephan: The United States ranks 27th in the world in terms of gender equality, and this report shows one reason why this is the case.
Christianity in the U.S. has been largely captured by militantly sexist, racist, and willfully ignorant people whose views on women are little different than those of ISIS.
Mega-family patriarch, Jim Bob Duggar recently re-posted a whimsical note of advice to Christian fathers who wish to be spiritual leaders in their homes: Start protecting your family by removing books, magazines, television, or internet that have worldly or sensual content. Replace them with good things like wholesome music, biographies of great Christians, good old-fashioned family fun and games.
Jim Bob — who believes that by Divine design, men are to be leaders while women were created to bear children and submit to their husbands’ God-ordained supremacy — might seem to be the embodiment of modern Christian evangelical sexism, but in truth, Daddy Duggar is only a minor-league chauvinist when compared to these Quiverfull leaders whose “WTF!-Did-He-Really-Say-That?!!” blog commentaries are regularly quoted and debunked at No Longer Quivering, a website devoted to exposing the dangers of Christian fundamentalism:
Vaughn Ohlman
“Husband of one, father of six,” Vaughn Ohlman, who advocates for early marriage via father-led “betrothal,” blogs at TrueLoveDoesn’tWait.com. The popular “True Love Waits” campaign, which is inspired by the contemporary Christian purity […]
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Monday, November 23rd, 2015
Adam Johnson , Associate Editor - Alternet
Stephan: U.S. Pharmaceuticals are the most expensive in the world. We pay two, three, five times more for the same drug than it costs in other countries. And Americans appear to have just accepted this as the norm. But it is reaching absolutely crazy levels of greed, as this report describes.
Wonkblog’s Carolyn Johnson noticed a study published this Friday that reached a rather shocking conclusion: The average annual retail cost of certain specialty pharmaceuticals now exceeds the median U.S. household income. These drugs are used to treat complex diseases such as multiple sclerosis, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, (emphasis added) according to the Post.
The study, published by AARP Public Policy Institute, illustrates how expensive some specialty drugs have become in just the last two years. They found that roughly 576,000 Americans spent more than the median household income on prescription medications in 2014—up a whopping 63% from 2013. In 2014, the last year for which data is available, median household income was $53,657. The number of patients with costs exceeding $100,000 a year nearly tripled in 2014 to 140,000. In total, the extra cost burden, according to the study, is about $52 billion annually.
Put plainly: certain life-saving drugs are rapidly getting obscenely expensive. Even though most people don’t pay the full retail cost of drugs, as the Washington Post notes, the effects begin to add up:
A study this year by the pharmacy benefit […]
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Monday, November 23rd, 2015
Alec MacGillis, - Pro Publica
Stephan: This is the first article I have seen explaining what is happening in Red states where people seem to vote against their own self-interest. As it turns out that may not be the problem,
It is one of the central political puzzl
es of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly
voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul railed against “intergenerational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.
It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map […]
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