Author Archives: ShannonEsh

Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

Mother Jones

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Coffee is one of the pleasures of existence. It’s also really good for us, an ever-expanding body of research suggests. The latest: an analysis of three large population studies by a team of researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They concluded that regular consumption of between one and five cups a day is associated with significantly lower risk of dying from from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and brain disorders like Parkinson’s. (For those who drink more than five cups per day, the association unravels.)

Interestingly, the benefits are roughly the same for regular and decaf coffee—suggesting that something in the beloved beverage besides caffeine is the trigger. “Bioactive compounds in coffee reduce insulin resistance and systematic inflammation,” the study’s lead author, Ming Ding, said in a press release. The authors make clear that their results are consistent with “numerous” previous studies.

Now that coffee’s health-giving value is well-established, we should probably think harder about an alwaysvexing problem: how to ensure that the people who tend and harvest this tropical crop get their fair share of the profits generated from it.

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

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Conservative Group ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco’s Homicides

Mother Jones

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Gay people recruit small children in public schools and S&M accidents are a leading cause of death in San Francisco, according to a 1985 newsletter from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the national, corporate-funded conservative group best known for pushing stand your ground laws and union-busting bills.

The report was dug up and highlighted by the liberal watchdog group People For the American Way, which is organizing a protest of this week’s ALEC conference in Washington, DC. Titled “Homosexuals: Just Another Minority Group?,” the report reads today like the script for a bizarre nature channel program on gay people. In it, ALEC outlines six primary types of gay people: “the blatant”; “the secret lifer”; “the desperate”; “the adjusted”; “the bisexual”; and “the situational.” (The “blatant” homosexual “is the obvious ‘limp-wristed’ individual who typifies stereotype of the ‘average’ homosexual.”)

According to the report, 10 percent of all homicides in San Francisco at one point in the 1980s were “a result of S&M accidents among homosexuals.”

The newsletter also serves as a cheat-sheet for gay men or women looking to meet like-minded people. “If a bar scene is preferred, the ‘Gayellow Pages,’ helps the homosexual find appropriate meeting places for socializing with other homosexuals,” the report says. If that doesn’t work, the newsletter discusses “public restrooms” and “massage parlors” as havens for “the desperate homosexual.” Gay people even had their own language: “The homosexual’s vocabulary is another part of their culture that separates them from the heterosexual mainstream.”

The ALEC newsletter asserted that homosexuality was not only a choice (“the homosexual makes the conscious choice to pursue members of his/her own sex”), but one that its practitioners often came to regret. “Tom Minnery, who writes for Christianity Today, has written about homosexuals forsaking their homosexuality upon becoming Christian,” the newsletter notes. “He says, ‘the fact is, many people are experiencing deliverance from homosexuality. The evidence is too great to deny it.'”

But those who refused to abandon their homosexual urges were a risk to public health and children, according to ALEC. “Whatever the type of homosexual, one of the more dominant practices within the homosexual world is pedophilia, the fetish for young children,” warned the newsletter. The reason for this was simple. “What is important to remember here is the fact that homosexuals cannot reproduce themselves biologically so they must recruit the young.” And gay people came at a significant cost to the taxpayers, in the form of research for infectious diseases and tax-exempt status for LGBT non-profits. “In addition to federal funding of AIDS research, the federal government has been active in funding the homosexual movement.”

The report even took aim at the early stages of gay-rights legislation, which the ALEC newsletter warned would force conservatives into uncomfortable and perhaps dangerous situations. Under new anti-discrimination laws for some public employees, “parents will no longer be able to keep their children out from under the tutelage of homosexuals.” Bans on LGBT discrimination in housing would mean “Landlords will be forced to rent their property to a homosexual couple even if the landlord’s family shares the same building.” But the most ominous piece legislation concerned a proposal to end LGBT discrimination in immigration: “This bill would permit known homosexuals from other countries to become citizens of the U.S.”

The horror.

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Conservative Group ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco’s Homicides

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