You Can’t Always Drink What You Want: Keith Richards goes stone cold sober!
Who saw this one coming? The NME reports that Keef is giving up the hooch!
Keith Richards has given up booze. The legendary drinker ?
Who saw this one coming? The NME reports that Keef is giving up the hooch!
Keith Richards has given up booze. The legendary drinker ?
A wealthy donor has sent a group of 50 Haitian-American doctors and volunteers from the Church of Scientology to Haiti at the cost of $400,000. The church members are using a controversial healing technique to help relief efforts:
“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,” she said.
“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”
Okay. Let’s accept this at face value. If this works, why doesn’t medical science know about it?
“One hour ago he had no sensation in his left leg, so I explained the method to him, I touched him and after a while he said ‘now I feel everything’,” said Sylvie.“Otherwise they might have had to amputate his other leg. Now his sister knows the method and she can do it.”
Asked about the method being used on him, a smiling Elweels described it as “a sort of harmony between the nerves, a kind of exercise. I couldn’t feel at all, but then I could.” Does he know Scientology? “Yes, it’s a French organization,” he said.
“All the patients are happy with the technique,” said Sylvie. “But some doctors don’t like the yellow T-shirts. It’s a color thing,” she insisted. Another group of Scientologists distributed antibiotic pills. “The doctors said give everyone with wounds antibiotics,” said Italian volunteer Marina.
Some doctors at the hospital are skeptical. One US doctor, who asked not to be named, snorted: “I didn’t know touching could heal gangrene.”
When asked what the Scientologists are doing here, another doctor said: “I don’t know.”
Do you care? “Not really,” she said, wheeling an unconscious patient out of the operating room to join hundreds of others in the hospital’s sunny courtyard.
Get tickets at www.firesigntheatre.com. And you can listen to an NPR interview with David Ossman and Philip Austin here.
We can finance stable housing for Haiti for the same money that would otherwise be wasted on disposable relief tents. Check out this document proposing the use of Hexayurts in Haiti I just helped Hexayurt inventor and disaster housing specialist Vinay Gupta put together to see how.
The Hexayurt is a tent for the real world. Relief tents are a lie: they last for a year. By the time the tent has rotted and the people are homeless again, the eyes of the media have moved on to some other disaster, and everybody says the situation is fine. “Transitional sheltering” is supposed to take over from the tents, but it’s always, always, always too little too late. Nobody can afford a thousand bucks a family anyway. Not for all of them. NGOs, being fairly small compared to the size of the problem, generally count the successes rather than the failures anyway.
In Hexayurt Country, we count the dead, and we ask their names, even if all we have left at the end is a picture.
If you put half a million to a million Haitians in tents, a year from now, when all the tents have rotted, how many do you think will have permanent homes again?
A million homeless people. Five people a house. Two hundred thousand homes. Let’s say $1000 each for a transitional shelter. That’s two hundred million dollars - the lion’s share of the pledged support - and that’s on top of $400 per family for the initial tent - another eighty million dollars per million people.
Do we have two hundred and eighty million dollars for rehousing in Haiti before we start taking infrastructure (water, sanitiation etc.) costs into account?
There is not enough money on the table to take care of Haiti. And everybody in the industry knows this
Nobody will tell Joe Donor that they’re sticking a bandaid on a gunshot wound, because then he stops sending money and things get even worse. Lose-lose.
A hexayurt is a hundred bucks of plywood and some screws. Even really poor people can afford that, and you can buy four of them - 12 years of decent shelter, maybe - for the price of a sodding relief tent.
A website with the odd name of “Neon Tommy” is not exactly where you’d expect to find good solid reporting, and even, gasp, investigative journalism, but that’s because it’s not obvious with a URL like that that the site is the digital domain of the prestigious Annenberg School for Communication at USC.
One story in particular, The Real Reason Behind California’s H1N1 Racial Disparity by senior editor Olga Khazan, caught our eye this morning. Noting the recent California Department of Public Health findings that blacks and Latinos are much more likely to be hospitalized and die from H1N1 than whites, Khazan takes issue with state epidemiologist Dr. Gilberto Chavez’s vaguely worded statement that blacks and Hispanics suffer higher rates of chronic ailments because “for cultural reasons, they may be waiting too long to seek care.”
Huh? You mean “cultural reasons” like no access to quality healthcare?
“[...] while “cultural reasons” cannot fully explain why H1N1 kills people of some races more than others, socio-economic ones can. In any case, there’s no culture-based reluctance to protect against H1N1, according to Al Hernandez-Santana, executive director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, a Sacramento advocacy group.
‘The conclusions by the chief epidemiologist are flawed,’ he said in an e-mail interview. ‘There are no significant differences in cultural attitudes towards vaccination that we have seen. If anything, flu shots, polio vaccines and others have a long history of acceptance in Latino communities.’
When controlling for insurance coverage, Latinos get seasonal flu shots at rates comparable to whites, according to data from the 2005 and 2007 California Health Interview Survey, and insured Latinos are vaccinated at slightly higher rates than insured whites.
Furthermore adult African-Americans have a higher rate of vaccinations, nationwide, than whites. The “cultural reasons” Gilberto Chavez speaks of, can be, once you look behind the statistics just a little bit, better understood like so: the uninsured poor often have chronic diseases that they can ill afford to treat, so when H1N1 hits them, it hits them much harder than it would hit healthy folk, you know, the kind who can actually afford health insurance. The article further reports:
‘If someone is sick to start off with, and they have an underlying condition, if you add flu on top of that, it’s a tipping point,’ said Elizabeth Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
And behind those underlying conditions lies the root cause for the health department’s startling figures, and it has little to do with culture. In California, chronic diseases tend to afflict minorities more severely than whites with the same conditions, because in California, Latinos, blacks and Asians are all uninsured at much higher rates than whites.
For those without health insurance, minor problems left untreated can grow into chronic conditions and debilitating diseases. It’s important for people with underlying health issues like asthma, diabetes, obesity and kidney disease to get vaccinated before these conditions, coupled with the H1N1 virus, kill them.
Cross posting from Brand X
AlterNet reports on a group of protesters who have been incarcerated for protesting the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay. The protest comes in the wake of Obama missing his stated deadline for closing the prison facility. (Something, one may remember, that formed part of his campaign platform.)
Washington, DC: In a dramatic protest, 42 activists with Witness Against Torture were arrested this afternoon at the U.S. Capitol. The protest comes on the eve of the since-voided deadline President Obama had set for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo.
Those arrested on the Capitol steps held banners reading “Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives.” Inside the Capitol, 14 activists performed a “memorial service” for the three men whose deaths at Guantanamo in 2006 were initially reported as suicides and callously described as “acts of asymmetrical warfare” by military officials. New reports provide strong evidence that the men may have been tortured to death at a CIA secret prison in Guantanamo.
The ceremony brought the names of the men—Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani—into the Capitol Rotunda, where deceased presidents have lay in state. “We perform this ceremony to recognize the humanity of those whose lives have been broken by our government’s policies of torture and indefinite detention,” says Jerica Arents of Chicago, Illinois, one of those arrested in the Capitol.
Witness Against Torture has called for an immediate, independent investigation of the deaths, as it has called for the criminal investigation of all those who allegedly designed, executed, and carried out torture policies.
This is good stuff. A trial in the full light of day would have shown the world their bigoted faces, but this is the next best thing. Kudos to John Ireland and team, what a brilliant idea! These people are heroes for doing this.
Patrick Range McDonald writes on the LA Weekly blog, Queer Town,
The U.S. Supreme Court probably never saw this coming.
?
Worldchanging reports on efforts to establish solar powered cities in Haiti. Self-sufficiency seems a key idea here instead of dependence on Shock Doctrine-style foreign loans for energy.
Last week’s quake cut electricity to most of Haiti’s capital. Without power, residents and aid workers are struggling to maintain basic communication, lighting and water purification systems.
CBC News had reports of officials queuing to recharge their mobile phones. What power there is comes from gas powered generators, but diesel is running low.
In the aftermath of the quake, Reuters reported that at night the only lights visible over the city came from solar powered traffic signals. Now there is a push to roll out more solar. But beyond the emergency, renewables are key to making cities more resilient to natural disasters.
It was a noble experiment, giving us talent like Rachel Maddow and Al Franken, but now progressive/liberal radio talker Air America has gone kaput:
It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.
The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.
Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success.
With radio industry ad revenues down for 10 consecutive quarters, and reportedly off 21% in 2009, signs of improvement have consisted of hoping things will be less bad. And though Internet/new media revenues are projected to grow, our expanding online efforts face the same monetization and profitability challenges in the short term confronting the Web operations of most media companies
Citizen Voice says:
Carlos Laurel, 31, and Andre “Sug” Hardy, 39, of Lincoln Street, face eight charges related to cocaine trafficking. Police arrested Laurel and Hardy after they showed up at a Kingston residence and allegedly delivered 50 bags of cocaine to the unidentified occupant Tuesday at about 5:53 p.m. Police estimate street value of the cocaine was $2,500.
Hardy, who is on federal parole for previous cocaine distribution charges, also had 10 bags of marijuana hidden in his waistband, cash and a cell phone. Laurel is on Luzerne County probation until 2013 and has been previously arrested on drug-related charges, according to Luzerne County records.
(via Arbroath)
