Stephan: Bernie Sanders is one of the very few uncorrupted members of the Senate, and one of the even fewer who believe the purpose of their office is to foster wellbeing for Americans. I doubt his bill will pass, the corruption is just too extensive. But what happens will tell all of us a lot about the Senate, so we will see.
Independent Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders Credit: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty
For the first time since 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) reintroduced his proposal to establish Medicare for All in the U.S., the only wealthy country in the world without universal health care.
Sanders introduced the legislation with 14 cosponsors on Thursday “to guarantee health care in the United States as a fundamental human right to all,” according to his press release. The Medicare for All Act of 2022 would establish a universal health care system over the next four years, gradually broadening the existing Medicare system until all medical benefit areas and all members of the public are covered.
Under the proposal, any member of the public can access whichever health care provider or health facility they want, without worrying about whether or not their care is covered. It would also allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower costs for the government and individuals.
The bill’s introduction came as the Senate Budget Committee, of which Sanders is the chair, held a hearing on the subject […]
Stephan: MAGAts, through the Republican Party, don't want children to be educated, they want them to be indoctrinated with MAGAt fantasies. Why? Not to protect them from critical race theory or pornography as the MAGAts claim, but because the more educated a person is the more likely they are to vote for Democrats. That's why they don't like public education, and it is why they are trying to control what children can read, and banning and burning books. Of course, like all MAGAt schemes, this is nonsense since any young person with a computer or a smartphone can google anything they want. But the desire to manipulate children's minds is the point of all this and the evil.
Vandegrift High School’s library in Austin, Texas has been dealing with book banning and censorship. Credit: Montinique Monroe / The Washington Post
Republican lawmakers across the country are proposing legislation that would target online library databases and library management technology — tools built by a half-dozen large companies that catalogue millions of books, journals and articles that students peruse for assignments.
These bills — already enacted in Utah and Tennessee, on the verge of becoming law in Oklahoma, and proposed in at least six other states — are broadly similar. They require databases to remove and block student access to material that is obscene, pornographic, sexually exploitative of children or “harmful to minors” — designations that opponents say could encompass a wide range of texts. Some laws, such as a bill advanced in Nebraska, also require that parents be able to view all content their children can view online.
So far, database companies — such as ProQuest, Gale, EBSCO Information Services and Follett School Solutions — […]
Stephan: This is a brilliant article that I hope all of you will read. We humans must change in consciousness and realize that we do not have dominion over the earth, instead we must recognize we are part of a matrix of life, and that all consciousness is interconnected and interdependent. This is what the change in consciousness I am talking about looks like.
When a plant root pushes into the soil, it triggers an explosion of activity in billions of bacteria. Credit: Liz McBurney / The Guardian
Beneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It’s as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. We depend on it for 99% of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Soil.
Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth’s mid-latitudes (which include the UK) there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil – less than a teaspoonful – contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.
When I first examined a lump of soil with a powerful lens, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. As soon as I found the focal length, it burst into life. I immediately saw springtails – tiny animals similar to insects – in dozens of shapes and sizes. Round, crabby mites were everywhere: in some soils there are […]
Cheryl Clark, Medica and Science Journalist - MedPage Today
Stephan: The American healthcare system is a shameful abomination. The worst in the world amongst the developed democracies. Why? Because the entire system is based on profit not wellbeing. The facts confirming what I am saying are clear for anyone to see. Why doesn't it change? Because the corporations which own the system rent America's grossly corrupt Congress to make sure no laws are changed that will impact their profits. In order to get decent care if you are on Medicare, and I speak here from direct personal experience and knowledge, you must have a good supplemental policy to augment medicare. And that is going to cost you another $5 or 6,000 a year for your partner and yourelf, on top of what you pay each month for Medicare. And if you don't have such a policy, well you have a one in four chance that you will be harmed hould you have to go into hospital. Here are the facts.
Credit: MedPage Today
Medicare patients continue to experience harm during hospital stays, even after a decade of intensive efforts to decrease provider-caused adverse events, according to a report from the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG).
Among the roughly 1 million Medicare patients who were discharged from hospitals in October 2018, a total of 258,323 experienced an adverse or temporary harm event during their stay.
And 12% experienced events that led to longer stays, lifesaving interventions, permanent harm, or death. “This projects to 121,089 Medicare patients having experienced at least one adverse event during the 1-month study period,” the report stated.
Of these adverse events, 45% were said to have been preventable. According to the report, such events were linked to substandard or inadequate care — for example, using more aggressive pain management regimens after surgery than necessary, or unnecessary delays in scheduling surgeries.
In one of many case studies and patient stories included in the report, a patient required surgery to remove dead tissue from the small intestine. “However, providers unnecessarily delayed surgery for 5 days […]
Stephan: Because the carbon industries basically rent the U.S. and the world's other congresses and parliaments, even though all evidence screams out that to go through climate change we must change the world's principal power technology, far too little actually does change. Because of corruption. The carbon industries are not helping. The economic system that runs the world's economy is flawed because its only real consideration is profit. Only making wellbeing the first social priority, regardless of local government, is going to work.
A new investigation published Wednesday reveals that some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world—from Exxon in the U.S. to Gazprom in Russia to Aramco in Saudi Arabia—are planning or currently operating nearly 200 “carbon bombs,” massive oil and gas projects that could unleash 646 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions and doom efforts to rein in planetary warming.
“They are destroying your future. They are doing it deliberately. They have been doing that for decades.”
Research shared exclusively with The Guardian ahead of its formal publication identifies at least 195 “carbon bombs” that are either in the process of being built or already in place across the globe as scientists warn that fossil fuel use must be quickly phased out to prevent catastrophic climate outcomes.
Led by Kjell Kühne from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, the research specifically defines carbon bombs as “projects capable of pumping at least 1 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes,” The Guardian noted in its detailed report on Wednesday.
Around 60% of the projects are already producing oil and gas, the research found.
