From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

[giovonni]

“We are starting to break down”: Why so many Americans feel traumatized



I got the saddest email from one of my older readers yesterday talking about how his handicapped wife and he were facing decisions like medicine or food. Then I ran into another reader coming out of the thrift store with some children’s clothes who told me she had not been able to buy anything new for her two kids for more than two years. And I suspect many of you will identify with this report.

Lynn Stuart Parramore - Salon/Alternet

Recently Don Hazen, the executive editor of AlterNet, asked me to think about trauma in the context of America’s political system. As I sifted through my thoughts on this topic, I began to sense an enormous weight in my body and a paralysis in my brain. What could I say? What could I possibly offer to my fellow citizens? Or to myself? After six years writing about the financial crisis and its gruesome aftermath, I feel weariness and fear. When I close my eyes, I see a great ogre with gold coins spilling from his pockets and pollution spewing from his maw lurching toward me with increasing speed. I don’t know how to stop him.

Do you feel this way, too?

Read more

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Study Shows Dramatic Correlation Between GMOs And 22 Diseases

The more research I do on GMOs, the less the immediate problem seems to be the seeds, and the more it seems to center on the toxins used to protect the seeds, and the costs associated with this industrial chemical model of agriculture. Here is the latest.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers - Alternet (U.S.)

There is a growing movement for labeling of GMO crops, and many would go further and ban GMOs completely. Currently there is a close vote in Oregon on a GMO labeling initiative, with advocates for labeling 0.3% behind and raising money to check ballots (we urge your support). Those who profit from GMOs spent $20 million to prevent labeling in Oregon. Several states in the Northeast have put in place laws that will require labeling.

Vermont is about to be sued to prevent GMO labeling. GMO profiteers have an unusual marketing strategy. While most companies brag about their product, the GMO industry spends hundreds of millions to hide their product. The US does not requiring labeling of GMOs despite the fact that 64 countries around the world label GMO foods.

Millions have marched against Monsanto urging labeling or the banning of GMO products. There is a national consensus … Read more

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Students of Death


Belgian palliative doctor Wim Distelmans of Brussels recently generated significant controversy when he organized a trip to Auschwitz for some of the leading practitioners of euthanasia in Belgium. Euthanasia has been legal in the country for the terminally ill since 2002. Last year, 1,807 people received euthanasia, which amounts to two percent of all fatalities in the country.


I found this a very moving story of antipodes: enforced government inflicted death, and an individual choosing to end their own life. It is my personal belief that if you don’t have control over your own body you really have no control at all. For that reason I am pro-choice, and pro-assisted suicide. Having had a wife die in the agony of cancer I have direct experience with what the later involves. Although it was never a choice we chose I can understand why some might make choose it. These are powerful issues that get far too little discussion, and even when they do get attention it is usually from a position enmeshed in religion or ideology couched in polemics, rarely involving people actually faced with such decisions.

Katrin Kuntz - Der Spiegel (Germany)

A group of Belgium's leading practitioners of euthanasia recently visited the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial to learn more about death and humanity. The trip proved to be just as controversial for the doctors as it did insightful.

Wim Distelmans is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people. He's a man who scrupulously studies his field of work. In London he visited the world's first modern hospice, and he toured the first home for the dying in Scotland. He has even flown as far afield as Moscow to gain a better understanding of how we deal with death and dying... Read more

[giovonni]

The 14 Teens Killed by Cops Since Michael Brown

There is something deeply awry in our society, as this report shows. Just since Michael Brown was killed by Darren Wilson 14 teens have been killed by police. That’s not all the people killed by police, just teens — 14 of them. By way of comparison in 2013, 27 police officers were killed in the line of duty.

Nina Strochlic - The Daily Beast

Since Ferguson, police have killed more than a dozen teenagers, half of them black. Some did nothing more than carry a BB gun.

Michael Brown’s death on August 9 was a nationwide wake-up call to the death-by-cop of young minority men at the hands of law enforcement. According to data stretching from 1999 to 2011, African Americans have comprised 26 percent of all police-shooting victims. Overall, young African Americans are killed by cops 4.5 times more often than people of other races and ages.

Since Brown’s death, at least 14 other teenagers—at least six of them African-American—have been killed by law enforcement in a variety of circumstances... Read more

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Regulation Is Squeezing Out Potrepreneurs,
Clearing the Road For Big Cannabis




This is what I feared would happen. A few large players would through influencing the government come to control marijuana. Marijuana should be thought of like wine, a product growing from a living plant, not a pharmaceutical model. This is not a happy trend.

Alex Halperin - Fast Company

A 46-year-old mother of three, Dooley is the cofounder and president of Julie’s Baked Goods, a purveyor of cannabis-infused snacks. She has celiac disease and wanted to create gluten-free products that would relieve her pain without damaging her intestine. Dooley’s Denver company released its first product, granola mixed with cranberries and almonds, in 2010 and now sells about 6,000 units a month, employing 11 people.

Even in Colorado, where medical and recreational marijuana are both legal, the cannabis business involves its share of hassles. Initially, Dooley’s license cost $1,250 and required a 25-page application. Renewing it, she said, cost more than twice that and required investing about $25,000 in the company’s kitchen, including a security system with 24-hour video surveillance. She wouldn’t have a business today if her husband weren’t a manufacturing specialist, she says.

As hard as she’s worked, Dooley’s experience has been relatively easy … Read more

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Nation’s Largest Food Bank Reduces Portions,
Turns Away Needy After Massive Food Stamp Cuts


This is what foodbanks should be. This is the Good Cheer Food Bank on Whidbey Island, Wa. (where i live) and the
volunteer maintained organic garden that provides much of its produce to low income families and individuals.


Thanks to the Republican Party — to the three readers who wrote me this morning asking why I don’t like the Republican Party, here is one part of my answer — the food stamp program was gutted. It made hunger in the U.S. an even bigger crisis than usual. The hunger didn’t go away of course, when the cretins of Congress cut off Federal support. It just transferred to the charities that have tried to fill the gap, as this report describes.

The great irony here is that poor Whites in Red value states voted in the congresspeople who then legislated the policies that are making other poor White lives miserable. Most food stamp recipients are low income Whites.

It is another example of the triumph of fear and hate politics funded by special interest groups seeking to manipulate those low-information voters who mostly watch Fox News and listen to Rightwing radio. As a marketing strategy it has proven incredibly successful, as a generator of public policies that create wellness, however, the Republican approach is a disaster. This is an objectively verifiable fact.

Alan Pyke - Reader Supported News/Think Progress

27 November 14

"Thanks to billions of dollars in food stamp cuts over the past year, the nation’s largest food bank has seen need jump so dramatically that it can’t keep up, the Food Bank For New York City (FBFNYC) announced Monday.

At least one facility out of every three that the FBFNYC operates, three have had to turn people away at some point in the past year. Almost two thirds have started giving out smaller amounts of food to try to stretch their resources, Al Jazeera America reports, as four out of five food bank locations reported a rising number of people coming in the door since last November’s food stamp cuts.

The cuts followed the expiration of an increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that Congress enacted as part of the 2009 stimulus law. The emergency increases to SNAP during the depths of the Great Recession helped the system respond to a massive leap in food insecurity and hunger nationwide. They were intended to last through 2015. But various other budget priorities eventually lead Democrats to give grudging support to a pair of 2010 bills that pushed the wind-down up first to 2014, then to three weeks before last Thanksgiving.

In New York City alone, the cuts wiped out about 56 million meals’ worth of benefits, the FBFNYC guesses. The group estimates that 1.4 million people in the city rely on emergency food services like food banks and food pantries, meaning that the country’s most densely populated metropolis is also one of its hungriest areas. Feeding America, the hunger charity network that includes the FBFNYC, estimates that it serves 14.5 percent of the national population each year, and the FBFNYC numbers put city participation at 16.5 percent.

The New York charity is the single largest food bank in America, but the strain it faces is hardly unusual. Feeding America’s latest survey of member charities reported that one in every six of its food banks nationwide is worried about having to close down due to a lack of resources and surging demand. Those fears come despite eye-popping figures on volunteer participation: 2 million people volunteer more than 8.4 million hours at Feeding America charities every month.

These statistics cut against one common refrain from conservative lawmakers who want to cut food stamps further. As national Republicans pushed to drop 6 million people from SNAP and cut the program by $40 billion last year, some in their ranks justified the push by suggesting that American charities should be left in charge of feeding the hungry without government interference. Even then, actual hunger charity operators warned that this faith was misplaced and that food banks were already operating beyond their capacity. (Republicans ultimately settled for an $8 billion cut to the program in the bipartisan farm bill passed earlier this year, and governors in several states have acted to shield roughly a million SNAP recipients from those benefit reductions.)

Now, in New York City, food bank officials seem resigned to the smaller rations, longer lines, and annual shortfalls as a sort of new normal. “It’s no longer an emergency,” FBFNYC head Swami Durga Das told Al Jazeera. “This is part of the fiber of New York.”

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U.N. torture watchdog urges U.S. crackdown on police brutality



How do you feel having the United States admonished by the U.N. for being a country with a police brutality problem that needs to be addressed? Is that the United States as you think it should be? I was angry and disgusted. The U.N. is right. I could fill SR every day with stories of children shot, pregnant women slammed to the ground, old men shot in their homes as the blackshirts break in at 2 a.m. in full military gear — to the wrong house because of a typo on a piece of paper. Happily it has gotten so bad that I think ordinary people are finally pushing back.

The Department of Transportation reports that one out of five Americans have never flown on a commercial airliner. Youth and child rates are, of course, even higher. Net: a large part of the American population have never flown. They have little to no idea what people outside of the U.S. think about us. Those of us who have travelled have been watching the decline of affection and respect people have for America for more than 30 years, starting with the Viet Nam war.

Stephanie Nebehay - Reuters

The U.N. Committee against Torture urged the United States on Friday to fully investigate and prosecute police brutality and shootings of unarmed black youth and ensure that taser weapons are used sparingly.

The panel’s first review of the U.S. record on preventing torture since 2006 followed racially-tinged unrest in cities across the country this week sparked by a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury’s decision not to charge a white police officer for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.

The committee decried “excruciating pain and prolonged suffering” for prisoners during “botched executions” as well as frequent rapes of inmates, shackling of pregnant women in some prisons and extensive use of solitary confinement... Read more

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Everything you learned about breakfast is wrong



I have always thought breakfast was the most complicated meal of the day and, as Ronlyn will tell you,
I am always trying to figure out what to eat. This story sheds some light on this.

Ari Levaux - The Raw Story/Alternet

Recent studies suggest that the benefits of that first meal of the day are not so simple.

The institution of breakfast is rarely challenged. It ranks somewhere between sleep and oxygen in reputed health benefit, and supposedly supplies irreplaceable energy to get you going, primes your metabolic system, keeps your muscles healthy, feeds your brain, and generally prepares you for the day to come. But what if the age-old wisdom is an old wives tale? Recent studies suggest that at the very least, the benefits of breakfast are not so simple.

For our purposes, breakfast means a meal eaten soon after waking, before going about one’s daily business. Thus, a 2 pm meal could be considered breakfast if you’ve just woken up, but not if you’ve been awake since 8 am... Read more

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Worldwide, Tobacco Regulators Monitoring Philip Morris Lawsuit Against Uruguay



You’re not going to read about this in the corporate media, but this decision concerning tobacco is going to be a very important legal precedent, as this article explains. It illustrates about as clearly as one could, how profit is much more important to corporations than any consideration of wellness. Our product kills people… tough… buy more.

Carey L. Biron - Mint Press News

WASHINGTON — A lawsuit that some say began as an attempt by a multinational company to intimidate a small Latin American country has instead drawn the attention of major players in global health, civil society and philanthropy circles.

Further, the legal action – brought by the tobacco giant Philip Morris International against the government of Uruguay – has led other countries to halt the implementation of new tobacco regulations until after the case is decided.

After Uruguay filed its formal defense in the case last month, the issue has been receiving increasingly broad attention, including from the World Health Organization, which has been a prominent anti-tobacco crusader.

“Uruguay’s continuing efforts to protect its population against tobacco consumption and exposure to secondhand smoke, despite challenges … Read more

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Bill Moyers: The Long, Dark Shadow That Plutocracy Casts on American Society



Here is yet another way inequality is playing out. I hadn’t thought of this one. But I did notice the last time I was in London that many of the posh condo buildings had no lights on in the flats at night. People buy these multi-million dollar (pound) places as getaways if their governments go bad, and as investments. The result is that in London and New York it is very hard for an ordinary middle class person to live in any comfort. One of my godchildren lives in a flat about the size of my bedroom, and pays almost twice my mortgage.

Bill Moyers - Alternet (U.S.)

Some people say inequality doesn’t matter. They are wrong. All we have to do to see its effects is to realize that all across America millions of people of ordinary means can’t afford decent housing.

As wealthy investors and buyers drive up real estate values, the middle class is being squeezed further and the working poor are being shoved deeper into squalor — in places as disparate as Silicon Valley and New York City.

This week Bill points to the changing skyline of Manhattan as the physical embodiment of how money and power impact the lives and neighborhoods of every day people. Soaring towers being built at the south end of Central Park, climbing higher than ever with apartments selling from $30 million to $90 million, are beginning to block the light on the park below... Read more

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‘Tis The Season To Be Greedy: America’s Largest Companies
Pay CEOs More Than They Pay In Taxes



This spells out in the starkest of terms how badly off the rails our economy has gone, and how corrupt it has become.

Carey L. Biron - Mint Press News

WASHINGTON — Out of 30 of the largest companies in the United States last year, nearly a quarter paid more to their chief executive than they did in federal taxes, according to new research.

That proportion appears to hold true for a larger sample of U.S. companies, as well. Of the country’s 100 top-paid CEOs last year, 29 received more in compensation than their companies paid in taxes. And that trend appears to be strengthening... Read more

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Olive oil’s disastrous year: Prices soar as extreme weather and pests decimate harvest



The Mediterranean diet may be just the thing, but one of its principal components may not be as available or at a reasonable price. Another unintended consequence of climate change. But, hey, the Republicans tell us it’s a hoax, and the American population voted for them, so… not to worry.

Lindsay Abrams - Salon

Italy’s calling it the “Black Year of Italian Olive Oil.”

Wacky weather and pests wreaked havoc on this year’s olive crop, resulting in a harvest down 35 percent from last year. And Italy’s not alone: Production is down across the Mediterranean Basin, home to 97 percent of the world’s olive oil production, as well as in California, where drought and an early winter cold spell led to a disappointing harvest. The International Olive Council predicts the global yield is going to reach a 15-year low, and prices are soaring as a result — in the EU, a bottle of the good stuff from Italy now costs more than double what it did last year; olive oil from Spain, which is suffering through a record-breaking drought, costs 15 percent more... Read more

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Like Seafood? Enjoy it now: Commercial seafood set to disappear from oceans in 2048



This summer, while I was cruising on a friend’s boat in Alaskan waters, I had occasion to speak with several commercial fisherman. They each reported that the fishing catch was down, and the eco-system seemed to be in trouble. Just how bad it has gotten this report describes. I don’t think the toxic combo of governmental incompetence, corruption and ignorant ideology that plagues the U.S. and Canada is likely to be able to muster the political will to address this issue in any meaningful way. So I assume seafood will be something that will soon be gone, like the carrier pigeon. We don’t seem to be able to stop ourselves from continuing down a path of self-destruction.

Cliff Weathers - The Raw Story

Both scientists and economists are concerned that commercial seafood harvesting may end within three decades.

A prominent marine research ecologist says that commercial seafood could disappear from our oceans within the next three decades if humans don’t take action immediately.

Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada said the oceans are quickly losing biodiversity and that nearly 30% of seafood species humans consume are already too small to harvest. If the long-term trend continues, there will be little or no seafood available for a sustainable harvest by 2048.

Dr. Worm’s study was recently published in the journal Science and is an update of a study published in 2006. Importantly, the study is about the collapse of commercial catches, not species extinction. Catch collapse means that fish are caught at 10% or less of the rate they had been caught historically... Read more

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U.S. hospitals make fewer serious errors; 50,000 lives saved



Here is some very welcome news, a consequence of the ACA that you won’t hear critics talking about.
But if the 50,000 people whose lives were saved all cry out at once maybe it will get some attention.


Dec 2 (Reuters) About 50,000 people are alive today because U.S. hospitals committed 17 percent fewer medical errors in 2013 than in 2010, government health officials said on Tuesday. (emphasis added)

The lower rate of fatalities from poor care and mistakes was one of several “historic improvements” in hospital quality and safety measured by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. They included a 9 percent decline in the rate of hospital-acquired conditions such as infections, bedsores and pneumonia from 2012 to 2013.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell is scheduled to announce the data on Tuesday at the CMS Healthcare Quality Conference in Baltimore. It is based on a detailed analysis of tens of thousands of medical records, but because data was collected differently before 2010, it is not possible to compare pre-2010 figures to later ones... Read more

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Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State



Based on the data this is the truth about Afghanistan and the insane war we have been waging there. Hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives have been thrown away on what I believe history will call one of the the most calamitous foreign policy decisions in American history.

Matthieu Aikins - Rolling Stone

Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan is named for the wide river that runs through its provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, a low-slung city of shrubby roundabouts and glass-fronted market blocks. When I visited in April, there was an expectant atmosphere, like that of a whaling town waiting for the big ships to come in. In the bazaars, the shops were filled with dry goods, farming machinery and motorcycles. The teahouses, where a man could spend the night on the carpet for the price of his dinner, were packed with migrant laborers, or nishtgar, drawn from across the southern provinces, some coming from as far afield as Iran and Pakistan. The schools were empty; in war-torn districts, police and Taliban alike had put aside their arms. It was harvest time... Read more

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Free Wi-Fi more important than a good night’s sleep when booking a hotel
(because 60% of guests want to update social media)



I have to confess that I too consider fast, reliable, free wifi a major factor in where I stay while traveling. How else could I do SR? Right now I am writing from a B&B in the Bay area, selected not only for its appearance but its wifi.

Katie Amey - Mail (U.K.)

When looking for the perfect hotel, its Wi-Fi service is the most important factor, according to new research.

A survey on important factors when searching for accommodation revealed that 67 per cent of travellers are most concerned with Wi-Fi, above any other factor.

The internet connection ranked higher than the hotel’s location, a good night’s sleep and friendly staff. A new study found that fast, free Wi-Fi to be most important factor when booking a hotel stay

According to the study, carried out by London’s Amba Hotel, 67 per cent of those questioned said that free Wi-Fi would make them more likely to choose accommodation, beating 65 per cent, who would judge a hotel on location...
Read more

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The Incredible Shrinking Incomes of Young Americans



This report describes another aspect of America’s abandonment of its young. I find it sad and ironic that the people that fight so hard to stop a woman from being able to control her own body, supposedly to protect children, clamor for policies that make it almost impossible for them to thrive. Since a country’s children are literally its future, our future as a country does not look good.

Derek Thompson - The Atlantic

American families are grappling with stagnant wage growth, as the costs of health care, education, and housing continue to climb. But for many of America’s younger workers, “stagnant” wages shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, they might sound like a massive raise.

Since the Great Recession struck in 2007, the median wage for people between the ages of 25 and 34, adjusted for inflation, has fallen in every major industry except for health care... More here

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Propaganda Has Triumphed over Journalism, and the Consequences Are Enormous




Much of my life has been involved with media, and I have watched over the decades as journalism became first a celebrity activity and, then, a corporate captive. A healthy democracy requires a healthy Fourth Estate and ours is sickly, as this report explains. Citizen journalism and social media give the illusion of coverage, but good investigative journalism is a skill set just like law or accountancy.

John Pilger - Alternet

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003... Read more

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Big Pharma’s guinea pigs: 8 drugs used by millions before being pulled for dangerous side-effects




Big Pharma, like Big Carbon Energy is an industrial model based entirely on profit. As a result both have a shadow that often overpowers whatever good they do. No one in media talks much about Big Pharma’s dark side. But in the U.S. where drug advertising is legal — it is not in most countries — we all know those absurd ads that clog our television programs: Bucolic scenes of happy people doing happy comforting things while a voice intones over the picture as quickly as possible, “May cause permanent liver damage, stroke, or death”. It is a nasty trend, and it is getting worse.

Martha Rosenberg - The Raw Story/Alternet

Blockbuster drugs like Viagra, Lipitor, Prozac and Nexium have made Big Pharma one of the nation’s top industries. Even before direct-to-consumer advertising on TV, there were blockbuster drugs like Ritalin, Valium, Tagamet and Premarin. To be a blockbuster a drug has to 1) be usable by almost everyone; 2) be used every day; 3) be used indefinitely; 4) solve an everyday health problem like heartburn or high cholesterol; 5) have a fun or memorable ad campaign; 6) get social buzz; and 7) be sold to a large number of people quickly.

The last qualification—quick sales to millions—is crucial because Big Pharma has a small sales window before a patent runs out. But it’s also dangerous because many risks don’t emerge until millions take the drug so the public serves as unwitting guinea pigs. In fact, the “early user/guinea pig” factor is what sunk Vioxx 10 years ago... Read more

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Australia develops world’s most efficient solar panels



Here is the latest on the Solar Trend, and it is very good news. The price of non-carbon energy is dropping so quickly and so far, that will will soon be clear to anyone that whatever one’s views on climate change, carbon energy is simply no longer competitive. A conversion generally thought to take 30 years, is compressing down to perhaps half that.

RT (Russia)

Australian researchers have developed a new method of using commercial solar panels that converts more electricity from sunlight than ever before.

The new photovoltaic (PV) system created by University of New South Wales (UNSW) researchers converts 40 percent of solar light into electrical energy, which is a 15 percent increase over regular panels.(emphasis added)

Laboratory tests have shown the solar cell method can convert up to 46 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity. The new Australian technique works with regular commercial PV panels under normal conditions, and could potentially make solar plants more competitive with other energy sources, such as fossil fuels... Read more