In 1932 Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, in the case of New Ice State co. v Liebmann observed, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”1 The statement had a profound effect on the thinking of the Court and the judiciary in general, and has been cited by Justices both liberal and conservative in some three dozen other cases. I want to invoke that idea to test a social theorem, The Wellness Theorem.
I have written many times in these pages comparing from the individual state to international levels wellness oriented social programs compared to the outcome data of profit as first priority policies. From this, I have developed what I will call the Wellness Theorem. It postulates that programs that have increased wellness as their first priority inevitably are cheaper, more efficient, more effective, more easily implemented, more productive, and pleasanter to live under.
To test the Theorem I want to move down from the international and national to the more granular […]
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Sunday, September 25th, 2016
Michelle Goldberg, - Slate
Stephan: There is a vile and nasty quality to American Evangelical "Christianity." Many think it, but few will say it out loud, however I will because I think our failure to openly discuss this toxic social force is degrading our society, as well as peoples' perception of the U.S. abroad. I have a number of friends, and one close family member, who are involved in African NGOs, and they have told me awful stories of "Christian" missionaries acting out their obsessions, particularly their sexual dysfunctionality. Here is an example of what I mean.
Steven Anderson has been banned from entering the U.K., Botswana and South Africa due to his homophobic views.
Credit: YouTube Screenshot/sanderson1611
U.S. pastor Steven Anderson was arrested and deported from the African nation of Botswana after calling for gay people to be killed, President Ian Khama told Reuters Tuesday, just days after the pastor was banned from neighboring South Africa over his anti-gay views.
Anderson, of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, notoriously welcomed the gunning down in June of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida by saying “there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world,” including Omar Mateen, the mass shooter.
Khama told Reuters he had ordered Anderson’s immediate arrest and deportation after the pastor said in an interview with a local radio station in the capital Gabarone that gays and lesbians should be killed.
“He was picked up at the radio station. I said they should pick him up and show […]
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Sunday, September 25th, 2016
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: The performance of corporate media in this election cycle has been abysmal, shoddy research, blatant bias, ratings pandering, everything a vital healthy media should not be. I share Paul Krugman's concerns, which is why I am publishing this in SR.
Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman
Because they are, at this point. It’s not even false equivalence: compare the amount of attention given to the Clinton Foundation despite absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, and attention given to Trump Foundation, which engaged in more or less open bribery — but barely made a dent in news coverage. Clinton was harassed endlessly over failure to give press conferences, even though she was doing lots of interviews; Trump violated decades of tradition by refusing to release his taxes, amid strong suspicion that he is hiding something; the press simply dropped the subject.
Brian Beutler argues that it’s about protecting the media’s own concerns, namely access. But I don’t think that works. It doesn’t explain why the Clinton emails were a never-ending story but the disappearance of millions of George W. Bush emails wasn’t, or for that matter Jeb Bush’s deletion of records; the revelation that Colin Powell did, indeed, offer HRC advice on how to have private email the way he did hasn’t even been reported by some major news organizations.
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Sunday, September 25th, 2016
Katie Fehrenbacher , - Fortune
Stephan: Here is a lovely story of good news that also illustrates the Wellness Theorem in action.
d.light solar installations have changed the lives of millions.
Decade-old startup d.light has sold solar-powered lanterns and lights to millions of customers in off-grid rural areas like Sub-Saharan Africa.
But now the company, founded by two Stanford entrepreneurs, is shifting its focus to grow its business of selling larger, more powerful solar panels and solar-powered gear like radios and fans. Their complete home solar product can hold its own against a traditional power grid connection and a local electronics store, but for a fraction of the cost.
D.light CEO and co-founder Ned Tozun, who spoke to Fortune on the phone from Nairobi, says that’s the entire point. “We think solar will leapfrog the electric grid, like cell phones have leapfrogged landlines in Africa and Southeast Asia,” he says.
On Wednesday morning, d.light announced that it had raised another round of $22.5 million in funding to grow its home solar business. About $15 million of that was in the form of equity from investors that specialize in energy investments in the developing […]
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Understanding the history of Aboriginal Australians, their origins and how their population changed over some 50,000-plus years has always been an enormous challenge.
