Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
AMANDA GENGLER, - CNN Money
Stephan: Fifty million of us have no healthcare at all, and tens of millions more have only medicare which, if you have to depend on it alone, is often Dickensian. The Illness Profit System in America is killing us by the hundreds of thousands. Here is a report from inside the system.
As administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, Donald Berwick has been in charge of paying for the health care of nearly one in three Americans. He has also had an important role in implementing last year’s health reform law, which uses the Medicare system as a big lever to change how doctors and hospitals do business, in hopes of containing costs.
Before taking the job — which he’ll leave in early December — the Harvard-trained pediatrician was a leading advocate for quality and patient safety, and often a blunt critic of our health system.
Berwick’s nomination faced opposition from conservatives who focused on, among other things, his praise of government-run British health care. Instead of being confirmed by the Senate, Berwick was given a temporary ‘recess’ appointment by President Obama, which was scheduled to run out this year.
He spoke to MONEY writer Amanda Gengler in October, as a special congressional committee was debating cuts to Medicare and Medicaid; the interview has been edited.
Long before you took over Medicare and Medicaid, you described the health care system as ‘unraveling.’ What did you mean by that?
We have in some sense a miraculous health care system.
When I was training as a young pediatrician, many children died […]
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
ROB HOTAKAINEN, - The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA)
Stephan: You should read this as an attempt by a conservative Republican to gut the Endangered Species Act under the spurious guise of it costing jobs that would otherwise be available. Conservatives have always hated the ESA, and this is just the latest assault. Their thinking traces to a Biblical literalism about humans holding dominion over all other species, and its corollary that they are just there for our use and exploitation.
Saying it’s time for a ‘thoughtful analysis
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Once again we have evidence of the interests of Big Agra trumping those of local people. All of this arises from the fact that regulatory oversight in agricultural chemicals has been reduced to meaninglessness by corporate special interests through the Congresspeople they control. In you live in a state where these chemicals are being used in agriculture, and you are a woman, you would be wise to get yourself tested for the presence of atrazine.
Yet again, scientists have looked at populations routinely exposed to the widely used herbicide atrazine, and yet again, they’ve found trouble.
The latest: In a study [1] published by Envionmental Research (summarized here [2]), researchers found evidence that atrazine could be causing menstrual irregularities and low estrogen levels in women, even when it appears in drinking water at levels far below the EPA’s limit of 3 parts per billion.
The study compared women ag-intensive areas of Illinois, where atrazine has been shown to leach into drinking water from farm fields, were significantly more likely to experience menstrual irregularities and low estrogen levels than women in ag-intensive areas of Vermont, where atrazine use is much lower.
The Vermont/Illinois paper comes on the heels of an analysis [3] of the Agricultural Health Study [4]-an ongoing look at people who regularly apply pesticides and their spouses-that found similar trends among women exposed to atrazine; as well as a 2009 study [5]finding that atrazine levels in drinking water tracked with low-weight birth incidences in Indiana.
Meanwhile, as I reported three weeks ago [6], an independent scientific panel convened by the EPA found ‘strong’ evidence linking atrazine to thyroid cancer and ‘suggestive’ evidence linking it to ovarian cancer, also […]
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
NEIL SWANSON, - Vancouver Sun (Canada)
Stephan: Three hundred million dollars a day of your tax money is being spent in Afghanistan. One of the arguments for doing this was that we were going to leave the country in better condition, including greater fairness and justice for women. This is what it has bought. Note, once again, I had to go to a non-U.S. corporate media source to find this out.
I wish someone in Stephen Harper’s government could explain definitively, what the Canadian mission in Afghanistan was attempting to accomplish.
When we finally pull out, 159 young men (to date) will have sacrificed their lives. And according to one government report, it will have cost $18.1 billion dollars. And for what?
It sure wasn’t for a fair, democratic and just society.
What we have is a government that allows a barbaric judicial system to imprison women for being sexually assaulted or raped, while the offender is totally exonerated of any crime.
The most recent case was a young woman who was raped and subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison. On reflection, the judges reduced this to three years because she wasn’t raped. The young lady had committed adultery because her assailant was married. If she wants to keep the child from this assault, she will be forced to marry this man.
I am disgusted, not only by this total waste of Canadian lives, but the lack of foresight by the Harper government. Did they think that they could change this country?
This is a nation made up predominantly of provinces run by tribal leaders who don’t have the need or inclination to listen to a […]
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
STERLING D. ALLAN with HANK MILLS, - Pure Energy Systems News
Stephan: The LENR trend continues to look more and more real. Now it is not just the Rossi technology but the Defkalion as well. Also note the references to the military as a backer/buyer. It is all still problematic but it looks like my six to 12 month prediction, by which time we will know if this breakthrough is real, is still on track.
There has been a lot of miscellaneous news items over the past few days. Rather than build news bullets for any one of them, I have decided to just post them here on one page, to streamline the effort on my end, and to illustrate the dynamics of this very exciting field. This is in addition to what we’ve posted in our news as archived at News:Rossi_Cold_Fusion.
It reminds me of when I’m making hot cereal in the morning. The water is boiling, and if you add too much cereal at first, it boils over. Even when you drop in a few flakes, the water boils wildly, as the flakes add surface area for the formation of bubbles. That’s what the excitement about the E-Cat makes me think of.
So, without further ado, here are some of the recent news items posted from around the web. I might have to make this compilation a weekly practice, to the extent I can.
Following this compilation is a list of hints about who the first customer is.
Customers
New eCat Customer To Be Public – Rossi writes: ‘Today we sold in the USA a […]
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