Monday, October 17th, 2016
Samantha Olson , - Medical Daily
Stephan: I have never had much interest in getting a tattoo. Every time I thought of it I asked myself, how will this look when you are in your 70s? The answer was never happy. But I know a lot of people chose differently, and if I was thinking about having a tattoo removed I think I would like to know what this woman's story has to tell. It was a brave act to tell it.
Proper laser tattoo removal at the beginning and half way through Credit: Medical Daily
I am the cliche of the rebellious teenager with a tattoo who grew up to be a young adult with regret. Two weeks after my 18th birthday — the golden age when you know everything and you’re always right, despite your mother’s lament warnings — I sat proudly in a tattoo chair. I remember lying down on the taut black leather recliner with satisfaction as the gun flickered to life with a high-pitched hum, and shot a delicate yet rhythmic pain deep into my back.
I had come up with the design for my tattoo two years prior, which led me to believe I’d be ready by the time I was legally old enough to get the ink. After I got off the black recliner and went home that night with a big white bandage taped under my shirt like a wonderful secret, I thought I had made the right choice. But it only took a few years before the novelty of my […]
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Sunday, October 16th, 2016
Grant Tomkinson, Associate Professor University of North Dakota - The Conversation/CNN
Stephan: Yet another proof of the Theorem of Wellbeing -- this time another negative proof. Of 50 nations studied American children rank 47th in fitness. Social priorities which place profit at the top have produced a society which is fat, dumb, and unhappy -- literally. I say this not as a polemic but on the basis of dozens of studies. And, just as the Theorem predicts, the cost of these inferior social policies has been obesity and poor fitness which while very profitable for the American Illness Profit System and Big Agriculture, are enormously costly -- think 100s of billions per year. And perhaps most tragic of all these non-wellbeing oriented policies cut years off of people's lives.
Here is the fitness story about our children.
Recently, colleagues and I set out to see how the fitness of American kids stacked up relative to other countries. Our findings were surprising. Not only did the U.S. finish at the back of the pack, but U.S. kids ranked behind much smaller and some poorer countries, such as Iceland, Chile and Suriname.
Fitness level is an important indicator of sporting success, but it’s also
important for your health. You can be fit in different ways — you can be strong like a weightlifter, run fast like a sprinter, be flexible like a gymnast or be skillful like a tennis player.
However, not all of these types of fitness relate well to your health. The most important type of fitness for good health is
“aerobic” fitness, which […]
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Sunday, October 16th, 2016
Lauren Camera, Education Reporter - U,S, New & World Report
Stephan: Another proof of the Theorem, unfortunately a negative one again. The pedagogy adopted under the Bush Administration for standardized testing and the attempt to privatize public education through Charter Schools has been a disaster. Not only do American students perform pathetically compared with other developed nations, but these non-wellbeing oriented policies have driven away droves of teachers, and we now face a teacher crisis. Here are the facts.
Do I need to mention that in the present current surreal election cycle we have endless hours to spend talking about how a Presidential candidate touched an unwilling women on her vagina through her panties -- God I can hardly believe I just wrote that, or that it is true -- but no time to discuss climate change, or the failing of America's fundamental institutions?
Credit: Shutterstock
As students headed back to school this year in and around Tampa, Florida, thousands of teacher positions had yet to be filled. It followed a year in which tens of thousands of teachers were hired on emergency or temporary credentials to help fill empty slots around the country – 900 of them in Oklahoma alone. And in Arizona, which has one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the country, school districts routinely report having unfilled teaching positions three months into the school year.
The teacher shortage crisis is here, at least according to a new report from the Learning Policy Institute, and it stands to get worse.
“We are experiencing what appears to be the first major shortage since the 1990s,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, professor at Stanford University and president and CEO of the institute, a nonpartisan education organization launched last year. “And teaching is, in some respects, as an occupation, at its lowest point in 20 years.”
The report, […]
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Sunday, October 16th, 2016
Charles Derber and Yale Magrass, Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Yale Magrass is Chancellor Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth - University Press of Kansas/truthout
Stephan: Bullying. In Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of a trend that has infected every authoritarian institution in the U.S.. It is not pretty. It is not effective, it is not productive of wellbeing, but it is wildly expensive to the public purse and incredibly profitable for the industries that service authoritarianism. Here is one of the best takes on this social effect, and what causes it that I have seen.
What causes bullying in the United States? In Bully Nation, Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass show how US inequalities of power, militarism and aggressive capitalism make both personal and institutional bullying commonplace. Click here to order the book from Truthout and learn what we can do to stop this insidious trend!
The following excerpt of Bully Nation is from Chapter Six, “Marching to Bully: How the Military Trains Bullies, Both Inside and Outside the Services”:
American militaristic capitalism is a bullying system that draws upon bullying traditions found in, for instance, the Roman and British Empires. Our approach to the study of bullying is different from that of other investigators because we do not emphasize its psychological causes. But that does not mean we negate psychological and even biological influences. Clearly, a bullying society needs bullying personalities. There is no contradiction between focusing upon individual or psychological bullying and the study of institutional or structural bullying. Rather, both aspects depend on and reinforce each other. Elites depend upon institutions that build attitudes, values, and behaviors that make the rest of the population docile, willing to accept their subordinate position and to act and think in ways that maintain the […]
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Sunday, October 16th, 2016
Geof Wheelwright, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The shadow of the cyber world is that cyberwarfare is evolving into a geopolitical expression of aggression with almost no real comprehension amongst the electorate as to what that means. We cannot solve climate change without universal connectivity; we can not understand Earth's meta-systems until we see the matrix of life. Cyberwarfare works against those values. Here's the report.
Credit: The Sovereign Investor
SEATTLE — It could have been a cold war drama. The world watched this week as accusations and counter-accusations were thrown by the American and Russian governments about documents stolen during a hack of the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.
The notion that public figures have any right to privacy appears to have been lost in the furore surrounding the story, stolen correspondence being bandied around in attempts to influence the outcome of one of the nastiest, most vitriolic US presidential campaigns in history.
Some have argued that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s emails were fair game for hacking because had they not been held on a private server, they would have been subject to freedom of information requests and available to the general public.
There may be some truth to that, […]
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