Tuesday, September 4th, 2018
Stephan: The Republican Party has contempt for the masses, because it is a party controlled by oligarchs. The party is a major force in stopping universal single payer healthcare. Profit is more important than social health. Read this, you may be affected.
Demonstrators in New York in 2017, protesting against Republican Medicaid proposals.
Credit: LightRocket /Getty
Comments close soon on New Hampshire’s new Medicaid waiver application. The Granite State is one of several states to already have a work requirement approved, and they want to continue it, which is what understandably gets the most attention.
But New Hampshire is also making another change to their Medicaid expansion plan, one that helps signal the end of an era for the program, the quiet death of what was once thought to be a promising conservative alternative to a conventional Medicaid expansion.
New Hampshire wants to end its Medicaid premium assistance program.
Premium assistance — alternatively known as the private option when it comes to Medicaid expansion — has almost been erased from the earth. Now that Republican-led states have an administration that will approve Medicaid work requirements, they don’t seem as interested in funneling expansion enrollees to the private market.
A quick refresher: Premium assistance — which has been around in Medicaid for decades, but we’re focusing […]
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Tuesday, September 4th, 2018
McKinley Corbley, - goodnewsnetwork
Stephan: As expected as the emphasis on non-carbon energy gains momentum new breakthroughs are coming more frequently and the entire field is morphing into the next level of cost and efficiency. Here's an example of what I mean. Old carbon-based centralized monopoly utilities as configured are doomed. But they won't go down without a fight, and they own the American Congress at this point.
Professor Paul Dastoor has created organic solar panels
An inexpensive new kind of solar power has just been launched in Australia and it could signal the start of a groundbreaking new market for renewable energy.
Professor Paul Dastoor has created organic solar panels that can be printed using conventional printers.
By using electronic inks that are printed onto sub-millimeter thin plastic sheets, the panels can be produced for less that $10 per square meter and installed by a few people within a single workday.
Since the University of Newcastle professor developed the panels back in May 2017, they are now being tested in a 6-month pilot installation on a pallet repair facility in Australia.
The 200-square-meter installation on the building is the first commercial application of the technology in Australia, and most likely the rest of the world. If the pilot is proven to be efficient, the solar tech will likely move into the more widely-available commercial market within the next few years.
According to The Guardian, the development of such a cheap and easy-to-install material could make signing up for energy accounts as easy as signing up […]
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Tuesday, September 4th, 2018
SIGAL SAMUEL, Associate Editor - The Atlantic
Stephan: When I was in China last fall to speak at conferences it was made very clear to me by people in the government, not directly but by the emphasis they put on things, that they have made an implacable social decision to separate church and state. They see religious extremism as a mental illness. And more than anything, having lost 65 million people to it between 1941 and 1979, the Chinese fear and dislike social instability produced by extremist ethnicity or religion. This is how that is playing out.
A woman stands behind a pillar during the Eid al-Adha festival at Niujie mosque in Beijing, China September 12, 2016.Credit: Reuters/Jason Lee – D1BEUAVHGQAA
One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates—most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority—have told reporters that over the course of an indoctrination process lasting several months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day. There are media reports of inmates being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which are forbidden to Muslims, as well as reports of torture and death.
The sheer scale of the internment camp system, which according to The Wall Street Journal has doubled in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region just within the last year, is mindboggling. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes it as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” […]
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Tuesday, September 4th, 2018
Stephan: There is so much we don't know about how the earth's ecosystem works. Consider this for example.
Credit: Robbie Shade/Creative Commons
Whales are the world’s largest animals, and they produce, as you might imagine, the world’s largest poops.
Researchers are finding that whale feces aren’t just recordbreaking: They actually play a really important role in marine ecology. With commercial whaling potentially resuming, it’s more important than ever to defend the world’s whale populations, including their emissions.
As in humans, whale poop can be a significant indicator of overall health. Researchers have been collecting stool samples and analyzing them for years. Along the way, they’ve found a variety of evidence that whale poop interacts with marine ecosystems. This interest isn’t purely scatological: Understanding how whales affect the marine environment is an important part of building a case for conserving whales, including a case for stopping commercial whaling.
Feces in general tend to be rich in nutrients, and whale poop is no exception. When they defecate, they produce a rich array of nutrients for algae and microorganisms, some of which turn into whale food — or feed the things that whales […]
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Monday, September 3rd, 2018
Stephan: I have thought for a long time that some organization with access to large datasets should reassess the place of religion in the United States, particularly as it pertains to Christianity which has, for a significant percentage of the population, been transformed from a spiritual worldview based on Jesus' teachings to a White supremacist christofascist political movement.
Most U.S. adults identify with a particular religious denomination or group. They describe themselves as Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Jewish, Mormon or Muslim– to name just a few of the hundreds of identities or affiliations that people give in surveys. Others describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or say they have no particular religious affiliation. These are the conventional categories into which Americans sort themselves. But a new Pew Research Center analysis looks at beliefs and behaviors that cut across many denominations – important traits that unite people of different faiths, or that divide people who have the same religious affiliation – producing a new and revealing classification, or typology, of religion in America.
The new typology sorts Americans into seven groups based on the religious and spiritual beliefs they share, how actively they practice their faith, the value they place on their religion, and the other sources of meaning and fulfillment in their lives.
Race, ethnicity, age, education and political opinions were not among the characteristics used to create […]
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