Stephan: The Great Schism Trend I have been talking about for some years, has reached a level of granularity that makes it very unlikely it will resolve any time soon. Here is a report on that granularity. I think this is all leading to a new form of America, which maintains many of the forms, but which sees a new states rights movement emerge in which power devolves to the states.
Credit: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Press
When liberals called for gun control, conservatives rushed to gun stores and rifle clubs. When Democratic cities suggested banning plastic straws, right-wing Twitter personalities posed with straws to own the libs. Now, amid a liberal-driven call for vegetarianism, a wave of conservative media personalities are promoting all-meat diets.
Meat is poised to be the next proxy battleground in a left-right culture war.
Vegetarians skew left. Meat production, particularly beef, creates more greenhouse gases and requires more energy than vegetable farming, leading environmentalists (statistically a left-leaning set) to call for meat reduction. In response, an all-red meat “carnivore diet” is surging in popularity among conservatives; Fox News has done so many segments where an anchor debates a feminist vegetarian in front of a steak they’ve become formulaic; Ted Cruz wrapped bacon around the barrel of a gun to cook it, ostensibly to upset liberals.
InfoWars founder Alex Jones laid out the looming debate on a platter in August 2016 when, apparently unprompted, he […]
AMANDA MICHELLE GOMEZ, Health Reporter - Think Progress
Stephan: The children kidnapped by the American government have moved off the media stage, but that doesn't mean they aren't still being held captive. As I have said before, this is so close to Nazism, that I literally find it hard to believe this is going on in America.
I doubt Trump even gives these kids a thought anymore, and obviously the Republican Congress doesn't, but I find this is a truly humiliating reveal about the United States to the rest of the world. And I think the people that did this should be shunned. I mean the ICE agents, the Border Control people. "I was just following orders," didn't cut it for the Nazis, and it shouldn't now.
CREDIT: DIANA OFOSU
The administration has reunited the majority of families they’ve separated, but still over 500 parents and their children remain apart, including 23 infants or toddlers, according the most recent government figures.
Family separation at the southwest border is a direct result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border control policy of criminally prosecuting migrant parents arriving at illegal (and, sometimes legal) entry points. Families have been apart for months because of this misdemeanor offense, resulting in longterm trauma.
On June 26, a federal judge overseeing an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit against the Trump administration ordered all families to be reunited by July 26. One month later, and officials still have not reunited all 2,654 families they identified as separated between April and June.
Here’s what we know about every family, as of the last court filing from Thursday, August 23:
1,923 kids are reunited with parents
203 kids were discharged “in other appropriate circumstances.” These kids could have turned 18 years old and been released or placed with sponsors, perhaps relatives. It’s unclear if the ACLU or the judge will count the latter as a “reunification,” as they’ve prioritized reuniting kids with their parents.
Stephan: Here is some good news about how immigrants are treated and, once again, it is about city-level social policy. As the federal government and state governments fail to meet the needs of the community I think we are going to see more and more of these stories
People wait in line to be processed for their New York City municipal ID cards January 14, 2015 at a midtown library in New York. One piece of plastic, but its going to open so many doors for our fellow New Yorkers, New York mayor de Blasio said at the Flushing branch of the Queens Public Library, one of 11 locations where the cards will be available. AFP Credit: Don Emmert/AFP
When Nate and his sister were children, their grandparents brought them to the U.S. from a rural farm town in Belize. They were fleeing domestic violence: Their father was a powerful government official who often threatened them.
“We came over here legally at first,” Nate recalled. “We flew over on a plane and met my mother in Oklahoma, where she already had a home and a job.”
He and his family had visas and passports, and were cleared to set foot on U.S. soil. But when he turned 18, his visa expired and he hadn’t been naturalized. Going back to […]
Stephan: The Illness Profit System that America has instead of a genuine healthcare system grounded in fostering wellbeing is literally destroying the medical profession, and we are all going to suffer because of the greed of the few who see general society as cows to be milked. There are already parts of this country where it may be a two-hour drive to a doctor, or a hospital. I have written about this extensively (see SR archives), here is the latest update on this trend.
If you are frustrated by wait times to see your doctor, the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, just wait until there may be no doctor to see.
NBC News recently broadcast a story about how fewer young people are entering the medical profession. The network cited a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges that “projected a shortage of 42,600 to 121,300 physicians by 2030, up from its 2017 projected shortage of 40,800 to 104,900 doctors.”
Only part of it has to do with the high cost of medical school and lengthy residencies. I asked my longtime family physician, Dr. John Curry, now retired, for his opinion. Dr. Curry holds MD and Ph.D. degrees but quit medicine for reasons he explained to me in an email.
“The explanation for the exodus is very simple: Over the 40 years I had my medical office, that which is described as ‘the Practice of Medicine’ underwent a profound and ‘fundamental change’: In 1974, ‘Medicine’ was a transaction between patients (who needed diagnosis, treatment, and/or prevention) and physicians (who belonged to […]
Stephan: Literacy is the foundation for a modern society, and this most essential of skills is being transformed almost without our being aware it is happening. This is a trend with profound implications for human society and its values.
Credit: Guardian
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing – a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research […]
If you are frustrated by wait times to see your doctor, the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, just wait until there may be no doctor to see.
