Monday, January 30th, 2012
FELICITY OGILVIE, - The World Today
Stephan: I got a very nasty little note from a climate change denier this morning, telling me I was a fool: Climate change was a fraud cooked up by liberal professors to capture money. It was the same basic line you hear from each of the Republican Presidential Candidates, just in cruder language. Willful ignorance is a very difficult and almost incurable cultural disease because it is impervious to facts.
ELEANOR HALL: And staying with climate change, another international group of scientists says it has new evidence that ocean currents around the world are being affected by global warming.
The scientists said it was not news to them that the East Australian Current was a hot spot but when they examined several other currents near Japan, Africa and North America, they found a worldwide trend of warming waters, as Felicity Ogilvie reports from Hobart.
FELICITY OGILVIE: The scientists have studied and compared five ocean currents that run along the east coasts of Africa, Japan, the USA, Brazil and Australia.
They’ve found that over the past century the water in the currents has warmed two to three times faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.
An Australian scientist who worked on the study is Wenju Cai from the CSIRO.
WENJU CAI: The significance is that we can now link to the changes of these currents to global warming because it is synchronised around the globe, not just an isolated part of the Tasman Sea.
FELICITY OGILVIE: The study is being published in the journal Nature Climate Change and another one of the authors is Michael McPhaden from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA.
MICHAEL […]
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Monday, January 30th, 2012
, - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: This is the wrong way to go. All this is going to do is pit the sheriff against the local people. A relationship that was beginning to heal because suddenly it was in everyone's interest for the growing of marijuana to be policed and controlled and a stable business like wine grapes in Nappa. The growers were attempting to do with medical marijuana what the vintners had done further south. Just as wine makers have developed Merlots and Cabs, growers were beginning to specialize in strains particularly good for pain, nausea, or stress reduction. Cannabis is a sophisticated and complex plant with many gifts. Now it will go back to the Mexico Mafia, and there will be an increase of violence and death.
UKIAH, CA — A major source of funding for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department is going up in smoke over the county’s decision to cancel a medical marijuana permit program.
County officials have calculated the sheriff’s department will be losing more than a half-million dollars in revenue after the Board of Supervisors voted last week to end the program of issuing permits to cannabis collectives.
The permits allowed the collectives to grow up the 99 plants at a time, but also required deputies to conduct monthly inspections.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports ( http://bit.ly/wcIAIY) that sheriff’s officials collected $663,230 last year in fees for the inspections.
Despite the loss of revenue, Sheriff Tom Allman says he doesn’t expect to have to lay off any deputies.
Supervisors voted to stop issuing the permits after representatives from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag’s office warned that Mendocino’s law was at odds with federal law.
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Monday, January 30th, 2012
Stephan: This is latest in the growing trend of militarizing the police, and linking them with the military. It is very ominous development because it is going to radically escalate the potential for violence with any large demonstration like Occupy99. It is just a matter of time until we have another Kent State demonstration catastrophe. If you don't know what Kent State is Google it. This gets very scary, very quickly.
LOS ANGELES (CBS) – If you notice a heavy military presence around downtown Los Angeles this week, don’t be alarmed – it’s only a drill.
Joint military training exercises will be held evenings through Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The LAPD will be providing support for the exercises, which will also be held in other portions of the greater Los Angeles area, police said.
Training sites ‘have been carefully selected to ensure the event does not negatively impact the citizens of Los Angeles and their daily routine,
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Monday, January 30th, 2012
EMILY P. WALKER, Correspondent - MedPage Today
Stephan: Here we have further evidence of the corruption of the Illness Profit System. This isn't ordinary people screwing the government out of tax dollars. This is the full corporate scam. Let me say again, we do not have a healthcare system in the U.S. we have an Illness Profit System, in which the only relevant priority is profit. Wellness, either individual or social, is not really the point.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government overpaid private insurance companies administering Medicare Advantage plans by as much as $3.1 billion in 2010, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
About a quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) paid about $114 billion to the plans in 2010.
Democrats have criticized CMS for paying Medicare Advantage plans too much in comparison with traditional fee-for-service Medicare plans, and the Affordable Care Act cut payments to Medicare Advantage by more than $100 billion over 10 years.
CMS determines how much it pays Medicare Advantage plans and traditional fee-for-service providers by calculating a risk score for each enrolled beneficiary. To calculate the score, CMS determines how much that individual’s healthcare costs are expected to be relative to the entire Medicare fee-for-service population. CMS generally pays more money for beneficiaries in poor health than for those in good health.
Risk scores should be the same for beneficiaries with the same health conditions, age, and other characteristics, GAO said. However, its investigation found that’s not the case.
CMS gets information on the medical diagnoses of fee-for-service patients by analyzing the claims that fee-for-service providers submit […]
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Sunday, January 29th, 2012
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Another example of profit trumping wellness. The consequences of this toxic marriage will haunt us for generations.
During the late December media lull, the USDA didn’t satisfy itself with green-lighting Monsanto’s useless, PR-centric ‘drought-tolerant’ corn. It also prepped the way for approving a product from Monsanto’s rival Dow Agrosciences-one that industrial-scale corn farmers will likely find all too useful.
Dow has engineered a corn strain that withstands lashings of its herbicide, 2,4-D. The company’s pitch to farmers is simple: Your fields are becoming choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. As soon as the USDA okays our product, all your problems will be solved.
At risk of sounding overly dramatic, the product seems to me to bring mainstream US agriculture to a crossroads. If Dow’s new corn makes it past the USDA and into farm fields, it will mark the beginning of at least another decade of ramped-up chemical-intensive farming of a few chosen crops (corn, soy, cotton), beholden to a handful of large agrichemical firms working in cahoots to sell ever larger quantities of poisons, environment be damned. If it and other new herbicide-tolerant crops can somehow be stopped, farming in the US heartland can be pushed toward a model based on biodiversity over monocropping, farmer skill in place of brute chemicals, and healthy […]
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