Stephan: Here you see another proof of Schwartz’ Law of Wellbeing. The evidence that policies that foster wellbeing are always more successful, easier to implement, more efficient, more productive, nicer to live under, longer enduring, and much much cheaper, is once again demonstrated in this Canadian project.
The evidence for this law is so irrefutable one has to ask, why isn’t this always the policy choice? The answer, I think, is that people who are well off, feel that people who are not, are in those reduced circumstances because they are lazy and feckless and should be punished for being that way.
A man protests homelessness in Vancouver. Around 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness each year, and the rates continue to rise. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty
Ray is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency homeless shelter. But over the past couple years, he’s been able to pay for a place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called the New Leaf Project.
The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairlysimple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was […]
Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic Senator for Vermont - The New York Times
Stephan: What both saddens and amazes me about Israel is that for the last thousand years Jews were routinely put in ghettoes, restricted from education, precluded from certain professions, and treated like second or third class citizens. You would think that within that culture there would be an understanding of what such persecution evokes in its victims. WHat the Israelis should have done is make the Palestinians happy and middle class. Why Israelis of all people did not get this, I do not know. But it is causing endless violence, suffering, and death.
Gaza Credit: Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
“Israel has the right to defend itself.”
These are the words we hear from both Democratic and Republican administrations whenever the government of Israel, with its enormous military power, responds to rocket attacks from Gaza.
Let’s be clear. No one is arguing that Israel, or any government, does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people. So why are these words repeated year after year, war after war? And why is the question almost never asked: “What are the rights of the Palestinian people?”
And why do we seem to take notice of the violence in Israel and Palestine only when rockets are falling on Israel?
In this moment of crisis, the United States should be urging an immediate cease-fire. We should also understand that, while Hamas firing rockets into Israeli communities is absolutely unacceptable, today’s conflict did not begin with those rockets.
Palestinian families in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah have been living under the threat of eviction for many years, navigating a legal system designed to facilitate their forced displacement. And over the past weeks, extremist settlers have intensified their efforts to evict them.
Stephan: I have been researching and writing about what the opioid crisis should teach anyone interested in facts. (Go to the SR archives for these papers) This piece lays the story out very clearly. The illness profit system for healthcare is both absurdly expensive compared with healthcare costs in any other country in the world, it is also markedly and notable inferior.
OxyContin is extremely dangerous, and unless an individual requires immediate relief from extreme pain—say, from a horrific accident, medical procedure, or disease—it’s best avoided. Like its legion of prescription opioid brethren, it is, in effect, heroin in pill form. And yet thanks to the efforts of the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma and the corporations that followed its lead, OxyContin is now consumed by millions of citizens who are addicted to it, and die from it, just like any other deadly narcotic. No matter Purdue’s protestations to the contrary, this so-called miracle drug has helped spawn a ghastly opioid crisis that from 2000 to 2019 caused 487,842 overdose deaths in America.
And as Alex Gibney’s latest documentary contends, this wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of a vitally needed treatment. It was a deliberate and dastardly crime, carried out in the name of profit.
Gibney’s two-part HBO documentary The Crime of the Century (premiering May 10 and 11) is an evisceration of Big Pharma, which it argues purposefully and aggressively flooded the market with OxyContin—and, later, the even more powerful fentanyl—in order to […]
Simon McCarthy-Jones, Fellow of the US-based Brain and Behavior Research Foundation - Neuroscience News
Stephan: This is an excellent research-based article on an important aspect of the consciousness of our culture that must be recognized and understood before it can be diffused.
Another reason people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Image is in the public domain
Why are some humans cruel to people who don’t even pose a threat to them – sometimes even their own children? Where does this behavior come from and what purpose does it serve?
Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.
We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”
Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless – either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.
Another reason people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Someone who doesn’t imperil your body or wallet can still threaten your social […]
Stephan: I hope my readers are taking very seriously the attempt by Trump Cultists and their dark money masters to destroy democracy in America, and convert it to a christofascist White supremacy authoritarian pseudo democracy. This is a very well funded, and nationally coordinated effort, and it is working, as this report, and the video attest. If you live in a Red state you just lost a lot of your voting rights. Or maybe you are a Trump Cultist and that doesn't matter to you.
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With […]
