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| Friday, 03 September 2010 |
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Survey: Employers Still Shifting Insurance Costs to Workers |
| This grinding down of the Middle Class is inevitable as long as the U.S. pursues the Illness Profit System, instead of a healthcare system. |
| TONY PUGH - McClatchy Newspapers |
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WASHINGTON - An annual survey released Thursday finds that workers are paying, on average, about $482 more for job-based family health insurance this year as companies force employees to shoulder more of the burden of health care costs. The premium hike, up 14 percent from last year, means that workers are paying nearly all of a $495 increase in the average cost of family coverage this year. Employers' contributions to family coverage showed no increase at all in 2010, according to the Employer Health Benefits Survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust. Drew Altman, the president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said it was the first time he could remember employers moving so boldly to shift health costs to workers. "Added health costs for workers means added economic insecurity for working people in tough times," Altman said. He ... |
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U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade |
| In the midst of Teabagger hysteria and hate over immigration, here's a little clarifying truth. |
| JEFFREY PASSEL and D'VERA COHN - Pew Hispanic Center |
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The annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants to the United States was nearly two-thirds smaller in the March 2007 to March 2009 period than it had been from March 2000 to March 2005, according to new estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center. This sharp decline has contributed to an overall reduction of 8% in the number of unauthorized immigrants currently living in the U.S.-to 11.1 million in March 2009 from a peak of 12 million in March 2007, according to the estimates. The decrease represents the first significant reversal in the growth of this population over the past two decades. These new Pew Hispanic Center estimates rely on data mainly from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and decennial census. The unauthorized immigrant population is estimated using the widely accepted residual method, in which a demographic estimate of the legal foreign-born population is subtracted from the total foreign-born population. ... |
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The Reckoning |
| It should be clear to anyone that this war, which arose from the triumphalism of the Bush-Cheney neo-conservatives, and which helped beggar our treasury, has left no clear outcome. Here I think is a pretty good assessment of where things currently stand as American reels away like a man recovering from a bad drug trip. |
| The Economist (U.K.)Baghdad |
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BAGHDAD -- The last American combat soldiers in Iraq shuffle through a half-empty base as they prepare for the one-way journey to the Kuwaiti border. Some recall their exploits during many tours of duty over the past seven years, charting their fortunes with language that has become common currency on television back home. The shock and awe of the invasion was eclipsed by insurgents using IEDs. Backed by contractors who erected blast walls around a green zone, the soldiers eventually inspired an awakening among Iraqi tribes that, aided by a surge of extra troops, in time brought something like order. In the soldiers' telling, the names of places that were little known before the war have acquired the resonance of history: Najaf, Sadr City, Abu Ghraib. Some 50,000 American troops will stay on in a support role, to 'advise and assist” the Iraqi forces that are now supposed to ... |
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Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap |
| I am trying to buy the Virgin G3 MiFi 2200. I forgot to do it day before yesterday, and David Pogue wrote this glowing piece about it in the NYT, so when I called tonight they were sold out. Coming back from a week teaching at Omega in upstate New York I stayed at a decent New York hotel -- whose name I will mercifully leave unmentioned, because they didn't mean for it to happen -- whose internet collapsed, forcing me out into the night to do SR. Think about it: $40 a month for unlimited usage, paid only when you need it, nothing when you don't, and it costs $149.95. Near Broadband speed. How cool is that? |
| DAVID POGUE - The New York Times |
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Someday, they'll build wireless Internet into every building, just the way they build in running water, heat and electricity today. Someday, we won't have to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we need to check our e-mail. If you want ubiquitous Internet today, though, you have several choices. They're all compromised and all expensive. You could get online using only a smartphone, but you'll pay at least $80 a month and you'll have to view the Internet through a shrunken keyhole of a screen. You could equip your laptop with one of those cellular air cards or U.S.B. sticks, which cost $60 a month, but you'd be limited to 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month (and how are you supposed to gauge that?). You could use tethering, in which your laptop uses your cellphone as a glorified Internet antenna - but that adds $20 ... |
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| Thursday, 02 September 2010 |
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Scientists Discover Oldest Evidence of Stone Tool Use and Meat-eating Among Human Ancestors |
| California Academy of Sciences |
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The evolutionary stories of the Swiss Army Knife and the Big Mac just got a lot longer. An international team of scientists led by Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Sciences has discovered evidence that human ancestors were using stone tools and consuming meat from large mammals nearly a million years earlier than previously documented. While working in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Alemseged's "Dikika Research Project" team found fossilized bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use-cut marks inflicted while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow. The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago and provide the first evidence that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools and consumed meat. The research is reported in the August 12 issue of the journal Nature. "This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behavior ... |
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Clues to Obama's Muslim Problem |
| I do not as a rule do politics, qua politics -- unless it represents a trend. This research does. It tells us something quite sad about ourselves. |
| JEANNA BRYNER, Managing Editor - LiveScience |
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Perhaps the belief that President Obama is a Muslim has nothing to do with him and everything to do with us, a new study suggests. While some conservative groups have continued to suggest the president is a Muslim, and polls have shown many agree with the Obama-Muslim belief, scientists are trying to tease apart reasons for the erroneous link between the Islamic faith and Barack Obama and what that belief means. "There's a general tendency to think, 'Well, people are ignorant,'" study researcher Spee Kosloff, visiting assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University, told LiveScience. "We've had plenty of time to get informed, and our research suggests there's something in addition" to ignorance, he said. The new research, which involved mostly white non-Muslim college students, showed that people are more likely to accept falsehoods like this one when subtle clues remind them of ways in which ... |
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Editor's Note |
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As you noticed SR was hacked. Who actually did it we don't know. Who cares? Some people have much too much free time, and a very limited negative imagination. There is so much that needs to be done for the good in this world, it is sad that someone thought this worthwhile. Thanks again to Jeff Vander Clute, and to SR reader Court Kizer, who contacted me and offered to assist in sorting the attack out and getting SR up and running again. Thank you both. -- Stephan |
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Healing Cities Comes to Gaining Ground Conferences |
| This is another emerging trend in the redesign of cities. First, they are being broken down into internally coherent segments, such as is happening in Detroit; second, this movement for healtful cities; third, the Green Transition. |
| Gaining Ground |
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VANCOUVER, BC -- At the turn of the 19th Century no one would have considered planning, designing or building urban spaces without consulting health professionals. Somewhere between then and now until today, where it's a rare occurrence, that drop off the agenda. But if you've been paying attention, it's starting to change. "The notion of Healthy Cities has been coming into it's own for the past 30 years and you will find that urban planners and developers are starting to take many health considerations into account in their thinking and implementation," says Mark Holland, Urban Planner, a part of the Working Group and this year's moderator. Holland continues, "What is different for us is switching from "health" as an absolute, to "healing" as a whole health process that is ongoing. It's not something that's done and then finished. Healing takes place over time and covers very broad territory ... |
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Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury |
| This is a sourced report, and must be taken seriously. To the extent that Sarah Palin is a plausible candidate, she should be understood as a manifestation of America's shadow, the anger, fear, sense of displacement and loss felt particularly by white older Protestants. |
| MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS - Vanity Fair |
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Backstage in the arena, a little girl in Mary Janes pushes her brother in a baby carriage, stopping a few yards shy of a heavy, 100-foot-long black curtain. The curtain splits the arena in two, shielding the children from an audience of 4,000 people clapping their hands in time to 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The music accompanies a video 'Salute to Military Heroes” that plays above the stage where, in a few moments, the children's mother will appear. When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage. He ... |
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'Love Plus' Resort Caters to Men with Virtual Girlfriends |
| This story caught me in two ways: it highlights a segment of the population, particularly in Japan, now experiencing its primary emotional relationship in electronic space. It also would tend to train these men to treat women more life-affirmingly, in a culture that has not traditionally done so. |
| CATHERINE SMITH |
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Atami, a seaside resort town in Japan, is aiming to give tourism a boost by catering to male enthusiasts of Love Plus, a dating simulation game, according to Discovery News. The town, formerly a popular destination for couples in love, has partnered with gaming company Konami Digital Entertainment, the creators of Love Plus, to establish a resort that brings together the virtual girlfriend and her real-world paramour in a beach-side setting. Love Plus is described by Konami spokesman Kunio Ishihara as an extended scenario in which the real-life "beau" plays a high school boy character in a relationship with a virtual girl. "The goal," Kunio Ishihara told Discovery News, "is to see how good you can be to her [the virtual girlfriend] and to build a relationship." And what better way to reach a digital woman's heart than by whisking her away for a romantic weekend by the ... |
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| Saturday, 28 August 2010 |
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Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan: 1,200 People Approved So Far |
| Now we begin to see the torturous reality of the incremental path chosen by the Obama administration in lieu of a public option and universal health care. At this rate it could be a decade or more before people get processed. And note the fees that will be charged. No family with an income of less than $100,000 could afford a straight fee-for-services out-of-pocket payment system as some have proposed. And even $100,000 would not be enough if they had a child with a chronic condition. This is just another of the poison pills built into the recent legislation to prolong the illness profit industry. |
| ARTHUR DELANEY - The Huffington Post |
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Just 1,200 people have been approved so far for a new program to provide insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. The program, known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, launched in July as one of the immediate benefits of the new health care reform law, offering coverage to the uninsurable until 2014 when people should be able to choose from affordable policies available on an "exchange." There are roughly four million people uninsured because of pre-existing conditions, and Democrats touted the new program as one of the best immediate provisions of health care reform. But the PCIP's administrators have said they expect it to reach only 350,000 over the next three years. The program is run by the federal government in 22 states and by the state government in the rest. Kaiser Health News reported that 3,600 people have applied and about 1,200 have been approved ... |
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Middle School Segregates Student Council Elections by Race |
| Never doubt that there is a hardcore of whites whose hate for racial equality has never abated, particularly in the South. And Southern readers please don't write me and tell me that I don't understand the South. I grew up in rural "old" Tidewater Virginia, worked as a reporter for several newspapers throughout the Commwealth, and I understand it all too well. And as bad as it was in Virginia it was far worse in the deep "cotton" South. |
| DANIEL TENCER - The Raw Story |
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Administrators at Nettleton Middle School in Nettleton, Miss., say they are "reviewing" their processes for student elections after a shocked parent went online to publicize the school's policy of racially segregating student council positions. According to a school memo, obtained and uploaded to the Web by parent Brandy Springer, eight-grade candidates for class president must be white; vice-presidential candidates must be black. The same applies for seventh-grade students, but in the sixth grade, both the president and vice-president have to be white, and the only position open to black students is that of class reporter. "Additionally, it is unknown how children who are not black or white would run for student government offices," notes the Smoking Gun. Springer first went public with her revelations on a Facebook page devoted to supporting mixed-race marriages. Of Springer's children, two are mixed black and white, and two are mixed ... |
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Stephan A. Schwartz
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