Tag Archives: california

Scientists Just Took a Big Step Toward Ending the Opioid Epidemic

by well Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Scientists are one step closer to designing a drug that relieves pain but doesn’t have the harmful side effects of today’s opioid painkillers.

The need is clear: In 2014, 14,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription opioids like oxycodone or hydrocodone (known by brand names OxyContin and Vicodin). The death toll from prescription opioid overdoses has roughly quadrupled since 1999. The drugs, prescribed for chronic pain, frequently lead to addiction; as many as one in four people prescribed opioids for long-term pain struggles with addiction, according to the Centers for Disease Control. When ingested in high doses, the drugs slow down breathing and can be fatal.

A team of researchers, whose work was published earlier this month in Nature, designed a compound named PZM21 that is producing promising results. Multiple experiments on mice appear to reduce pain without slowing down breathing or being addictive. When the rodents treated with the compound were placed on a hot plate, for example, they appeared to experience as much pain relief as those treated with morphine. Mice showed no preference between being in a chamber where they received PMZ21 and another where they received a saline solution.

Rather than tweaking an existing drug, as most drugs are created, the research team used a combination of computational modeling and synthetic drug generation to design a compound from scratch that would bind well with the known structure of the brain’s opioid receptors. Doing so was a four-year effort, involving researchers from Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Francisco, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.

Of course, there’s a long way between mice studies and a drug on the market for human use; the authors estimate it will be one to two years until the compound makes its way to the Food and Drug Administration for testing. Still, when it comes to developing a drug that could help mitigate today’s opioid crisis, Aashish Manglik, a Stanford physiologist and the study’s lead author, says he is “cautiously optimistic.”

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Scientists Just Took a Big Step Toward Ending the Opioid Epidemic

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What the Heck Is Up With California’s Recycling Program?

by BetteKershaw Posted on August 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Few states have a greener rep than California, and for good reason. The state has a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, solar-energy production exceeding that of all other states combined, and, at the behest of Gov. Jerry Brown, it’s now mulling new targets that would slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2030. The state has proved itself a national leader in environmental policy.

All of which makes California’s latest waste and recycling report, issued yearly by state Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), so bewildering. It reveals that landfill waste in the state jumped to 33.2 million tons in 2015, a one-year increase of 2 million tons, contributing to last year’s release of 200,000 extra metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Per capita, each Californian now tosses 4.7 pounds of stuff into the landfill.

The state’s rate of recycling also dropped to 47 percent in 2015. That’s the lowest rate since 2010, and the first time since the state began measuring that the number has gone below 50 percent—not the greatest news, given California’s 2020 goal of recycling 75 percent of all consumer waste.

CalRecycle spokesman Mark Oldfield points to a recovering economy as a primary contributor to the setback. Economic growth boosts consumption and construction, which necessarily results in more waste, he says: “All of a sudden people are buying new stuff and getting rid of the old.”

There are other elements at work, too. The low price of oil, combined with other plummeting commodity prices, has largely eliminated financial incentives for companies to use recycled materials. Thanks to cheap crude, points out Californians Against Waste, a Sacramento-based advocacy group, producers are using more petroleum-based plastics than before, and less (easily recycled) aluminum.

A four-year decline in the prices manufacturers are willing to pay for recycled materials has proved deadly for many for-profit recycling centers. In part, that’s because it’s a subsidized business. CalRecycle pays up to half of the centers’ operating expenses, depending on the amount of materials they collect, to encourage recycling centers to accept plastic containers alongside the more lucrative aluminum cans. The deposits consumers pay on beverage containers provide an incentive for individuals and companies that do curbside pickup to bring cans and bottles to the centers (and pocket the deposits). But CalRecycle’s payments to the centers are based on scrap prices over the previous 12 months, with a three-month time lag. Which means, when prices are in decline, the payments come up short, and the centers struggle to stay profitable. Statewide, the bulk recyclers have faced a cumulative shortfall of more than $50 million.

Susan Collins, president of the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), says this has led to a rash of closures. Per her group’s estimates, more than 800 recycling centers have shut down in the past 16 months, unable to compete thanks to the low prices and insufficient subsidies. All told, nearly one-third of California’s recycling centers have gone out of business.

The setbacks are costing the state in additional ways: Recycling typically generates $8 million to $9 million in tax revenues annually and results in at least 3,000 full-time jobs. And income from collecting and redeeming recycled materials helps keep scores of desperate people off public assistance. Cities such as San Francisco have been hit particularly hard by the recycling-center closures; the city now has just six active recycling centers, down from 35, for 900,000 people. The vast majority of the city is now an “unserved zone.”

CalRecycle’s Oldfield preaches patience. “I don’t think we thought it was going to be easy to begin with,” he says of the 2020 goal to recycle 75 percent of all consumer waste. “I don’t think we mind running the risk of criticism if we fall short of a number on a time scale.” He points to AB 939, California’s Integrated Waste Management Act. The 1989 legislation mandated that 50 percent of solid waste be diverted from landfills via recycling, composting, and incineration by 2000. That goal wasn’t achieved until 2006, but it now stands at 63 percent.

As for the 75 percent number, which is not a mandate, CalRecycle is looking at new technologies it hopes will increase recycling rates for construction materials and organic matter, although there is no deadline for these developments.

Mark Murray, executive director at Californians Against Waste, bristles at the notion that the goal needn’t be met on time. Murray was disturbed by the startling dip in the recycling rate, and that the state remains so far from 75 percent: “I don’t want to make excuses in 2016 when there’s still four years to go.”

If the state is serious about reaching its goal, there is plenty of precedent. “We know exactly what needs to happen, it just isn’t happening,” Murray says. In the past, the state has set minimum standards for the amount of recycled content certain goods must contain. Newsprint must be 50 percent post-consumer materials; for glass containers, it’s 35 percent. Such standards also exist in California for electronics and paint.

Regulating plastic packaging the same way could have a big impact, Murray says, and would help reverse this troubling course. Legislation requiring producers to buy recycled content could also help. By Murray’s estimation, packaging accounts for 35 percent of the overall waste stream, and companies need to be called to task for their wasteful packaging. Collins, of the CRI, agrees that the state needs urgent, binding legislation, but given the scale of the closures, she’s worried it’s too late to flip the script quickly: “This is a devastating loss to the recycling infrastructure in California.”

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What the Heck Is Up With California’s Recycling Program?

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Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

by WinifredK29 Posted on August 28, 2016

Human/Nature

Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

By on Aug 28, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Summertime is prime time for national parks. As snow melts, wildflowers bloom, and waterfalls roar, generations of visitors have flocked to the natural wonders that dot the American landscape (to say nothing of all the amazing cultural sites the National Park Service protects).

The National Park Service was created a century ago — Aug. 25, 1916, to be exact — to keep an eye on the growing treasure trove of national parks. It’s been a good century as more and more land has been set aside and annual visitors now number more than 300 million, but it’s also not been without challenges. Chief among them is climate change, which will drastically alter national park landscapes in the coming decades including cranking up the heat.

As part of Climate Central’s ongoing States at Risk project, we analyzed just how much hotter parks are projected to get later this century. We looked at the future summer temperatures in all the parks in the Lower 48 states except Dry Tortugas National Park (sorry, Fort Jefferson lovers!) assuming greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trend. To put it in clearer context, we mapped out what places today are most comparable to park’s climates of tomorrow.

The results could make you sweat. Parks are projected to have summers that are 8 to 12 degrees F hotter by 2100. That means currently cool mountainous parks could be as hot as the plains. Parks in the Southeast, already a pretty hot place, will face even more extreme temperatures with a climate more like southern Texas. And otherworldly Joshua Tree National Park in southern California will face the greatest geographical climate shift, with temperatures more like Abu Dhabi by 2100.

We also analyzed how many more days with extreme heat the parks could face. Extreme heat is a hallmark of global warming, and its impact will be most arresting in the national parks where people go, by design, to be outside in the summer. Like the rest of the country, parks are going to be seeing more dangerously hot days above 90 degrees F, 95 degrees F, and 100 degrees F.

By 2100, the glaciers of Montana’s Glacier National Park will be long gone and rising temperatures will be one of the big reasons why. Visitors will not only have to contend with an ice-free landscape, but also hotter temperatures. Today the park sees an average of only one 90 degrees F day each year. It could see 27 days with temperatures above 90 degrees F by the end of the century.

Yosemite National Park, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, currently sees about two weeks of 90 degrees F weather every year. By 2050, it could see nearly a month of those temperatures, and by 2100 it could get nearly 50 such days each year.

And the Great Smoky Mountains, currently the most visited National Park, could go from fewer than 10 days above 90 degrees F each year, on average now, to three months with those scorching temperatures.

In numerous other parks, the number of days above 100 degrees F is projected to skyrocket. Big Bend National Park in Texas could see more than 110 days above 100 degrees F each year, on average. And Great Basin National Park in Nevada, which currently doesn’t have any days above 100 degrees F in a typical year, could see a month of those temperatures each year by 2100.

It’s likely that parks on the more extreme end of the temperature scale will see a drop in summer visitation, but more visitors are likely to show up in fall and spring when it won’t be fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. That may stretch park resources thin as most parks are set up to handle summer crowds and quieter shoulder seasons. How parks will deal with the change in visitation season is an open question.

And all this is to say nothing about the impacts extreme heat will have on the natural resources around which we created national parks in the first place. Joshua Tree could become too hot for its namesake trees, and there’s evidence that extreme summer days could create more rockfalls in Yosemite, which could change the face of the stunning valley at the center of the park. Wildfire risk will also skyrocket across the West and could make summer park vacations not only more hot but more smoky.

Those are just the most visible changes. Whole ecosystems are likely to be disrupted and there are consequences scientists probably haven’t even uncovered yet (those are the ones that could be the worst since we’ll be least prepared).

Despite the daunting situation facing the National Park Service in its second century, there are signs it’s up for the challenge. It’s already addressing climate change from the coast to the high mountains and has an A-Team team of experts to help parks answer the gnarly questions they face.

There’s no denying that national parks will look a lot different by the end of the century, but that won’t make them any less a part of the fabric of American identity.

Analysis by James Bronzan and Alyson Kenward, PhD.

Methodology: Future temperatures for 47 National Parks were calculated based on the median of 29 spatially downscaled climate models (CMIP5) at 1/8 degree scale, then averaged within park boundaries. National parks in Alaska and Hawaii, along with Dry Tortugas National Park, were excluded because projections at this resolution were unavailable. Temperatures for 2050 are based on the 20-year average of 2041-2060 and for 2100 are based on the period 2080-2099. Projected temperatures assume that greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate (RCP8.5). The interactive map features the average summer daily high temperature (June-August), while days over 90oF, 95oF, and 100oF were counted annually. The current period values for parks and climate divisions are based on the 1991-2010 average calculated using a gridded observational dataset by Ed Maurer of Santa Clara University. 

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More stories in this series:

If you think technology has no place in the national parks, think again

From smartphones to webcams, technology could help us understand — and appreciate — parks in the coming century.

People of color are fans of national parks, despite obstacles that keep them out

Only 57 percent had ever set foot in the parks, but 85 percent want more of them — especially in cities.

The uncertain, hopeful future of the National Park Service

“The goal of our centennial is not to scare everyone to death about climate change.”

More in Human/Nature: National Parks and the Humans Who Use ThemElection Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

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Wisconsin’s GOP Tried to Make It Harder to Vote. Their Plans Just Got Shot Down.

by Chong0688314236 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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A panel of three federal judges on Monday denied Wisconsin’s request to block an earlier court ruling that struck down several voting rights restrictions in the state including cuts for early voting hours, a requirement that cities have only one location for early voting, residency requirements aimed at limiting college students’ votes, and a number of restrictive voter ID requirements.

This decision means many more people in Wisconsin will be able to cast a ballot in November, and the state will be forced to provide state-issued IDs for those who might have had problems assembling paperwork in order to get identification.

Only one way remains for the restrictive laws to stay in place, Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote on his blog Monday. Wisconsin would have to immediately file an emergency stay request with the US Supreme Court. “Even then, getting over the 4-4 ideological split seems iffy,” Hasen wrote, saying that it is unlikely the state would attempt to appeal to the entire 7th Circuit Court of Appeals after Monday’s decision by three of the circuit’s judges.

This ruling follows the July 29 decision by Judge James Peterson in which he described the state Legislature’s attempts to limit voting rights as demonstrating that “a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.” Wisconsin officials asked the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay Peterson’s ruling on August 12, a request the three judges denied on Monday.

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Wisconsin’s GOP Tried to Make It Harder to Vote. Their Plans Just Got Shot Down.

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

by RandolphBeaureg Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, the Supreme Court gutted an important provision in the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a succession of voting restrictions. But recent court decisions have stymied efforts by mostly Republican-led legislatures to restrict voting access in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and elsewhere before the November election.

Still, as the following stats show, the fight for voting access isn’t over yet:

Sources: Card 1: Brennan Center for Justice; Card 2: National Conference of State Legislatures, Brennan Center for Justice; Card 3: North Carolina State Board of Elections, Veasey v. Perry opinion, Frank v. Walker opinion, University of California, San Diego; Card 4: TMJ4, Frank v. Walker opinion; Card 5: University of California, San Diego; Card 6: The Sentencing Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Card 7: 2012 Survey on the Performance of American Elections; Card 8: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

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Why Did Black Lives Matter and the NAACP Call for an End to More Charter Schools?

by OnitaKXCUdkj Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few weeks ago, the Movement for Black Lives, the network that also includes Black Lives Matter organizers, released its first-ever policy agenda. Among the organization’s six demands and dozens of policy recommendations was a bold education-related stance: a moratorium on both charter schools and public school closures. Charters, the agenda argues, represent a shift of public funds and control over to private entities. Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide.

The statement came several weeks after another civil rights titan, the NAACP, also passed a resolution, calling for a freeze on the growth of charter schools. The NAACP had equated charters with privatization in previous resolutions, but this year’s statement—which will not become policy until the National Board meeting in the fall—represents the strongest anti-charter language to date, according to Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education leadership and education chair of the NAACP’s California State Conference. “The NAACP is really concerned about unregulated growth of charter schools, and says it’s time to pause and take stock,” says Vasquez Heilig, who posted a copy of the resolution on his blog.

Such policy positions come at a time when parents, legislators, and philanthropists across the country—from Boston to Philadelphia to Los Angeles—are embroiled in fierce debates over the role of charters, particularly in poor, urban areas where most of these schools have been growing. Since 2000, the number of charters more than tripled, from about 1.7 percent to 6.2 percent of public schools.

Charter proponents—including prominent black educators like Secretary of Education John King Jr., Geoffrey Canada, and Steve Perry—argue that legislators need to continue this momentum for “choice” and competition among schools, citing the high test scores and college acceptance letters that many charter schools deliver. “We should not have artificial barriers to the growth of charters that are good,” King told reporters at the recent annual National Association of Black Journalists–National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention, adding that “charters should be a part of the public school landscape and can be a driver of opportunity for kids.”

Skeptics counter that charter schools contribute to racial and socioeconomic segregation, and that high percentages of charter school students in poor, urban districts can also contribute to the fiscal stress and the downward spiral of the traditional schools. Throughout the country, Vasquez Heilig noted, state charter laws vary dramatically: Some charter schools find ways to exclude disadvantaged children; others are created with explicit commitment to serve the most disadvantaged students. Vasquez Heilig argued that a moratorium would allow the public to investigate current practices and promote those that work the best.

“It’s time to pause and investigate: Should there be so many entities that are allowed to open them?” he said. “If you are not an educator, should you be allowed to open a charter school? Is there a due process for parents who feel that their kids were pushed out? How do charters schools make decisions about firing and hiring? How do they spend public money?”

Here are some of the most significant concerns charter school critics have cited over the years:

Some charter schools practice “skimming.” There is growing evidence that some charters accept only the least difficult (and that means the least expensive to educate) students. Earlier this month, a report by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates found that 1 in 5 California charter schools practice restrictive admissions requirements or other exclusionary practices—even though charter schools are required by law to admit all students who wish to attend. Some of these practices included denying enrollment to students with lower grades or test scores; expelling students who struggle academically; or requiring students and parents to write essays and go through admission interviews.

Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles’ Center for Civil Rights Remedies also expressed similar concerns when they noticed a national pattern in their 2016 study: Some charters had both high test scores and very high suspension rates, they noted, prompting the authors of the report to conclude, “Although beyond the scope of this report, the possibility certainly exists that some charter schools are artificially boosting their test scores or graduation rates by using harsh discipline to discourage lower-achieving youth from continuing to attend.”

Meanwhile, traditional schools tend to educate students with greater challenges that cost more. One study in Philadelphia, for example, found that students with severe needs—those who have been in foster care, involved with the juvenile justice system, or whose families are on welfare—are concentrated in traditional public schools in Philadelphia. Traditional schools in Philadelphia also educate 10 percent more students living in poverty, 4 percent more English learners, and 2 percent more students with special needs.

Unregulated growth and lack of strong oversight. In June, the New York Times published a scathing investigation of Detroit’s school district, which has a bigger share of students in charters than any other city except New Orleans. Reporter Kate Zernike concluded, among many other findings, that insufficiently regulated growth—including too many agencies that are allowed to open new charter schools—contributed to a system with “lots of choice, with no good choice”:

The unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives. Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

Other districts and states with high percentages of students in charter schools have come under similar criticism. In April, the general auditor of Pennsylvania published a report concluding that the state’s charter laws are the “worst in the US,” contributing to questionable financial practices in some charters in the district of Philadelphia, as well as fiscal woes in the state’s largest school district.

Unregulated explosion of charters drains money from traditional public schools. In most districts, per-pupil money follows students, but many expenses, such as building costs, salaries for teachers, and principals don’t go away when a student leaves for a charter school. Students in charter schools can also create extra costs. In Philadelphia, for example, the district has to pay for transportation for students attending charter schools that are often not in their neighborhood. The city also found that 30 percent of all charter students come from outside the district, but the city still has to pay for their education. As a result, a study by the Boston Consulting Group estimated that each new student in a charter school in Philadelphia creates as much as $7,000 in additional costs for the district.

Charter schools suspend more black students and children with disabilities. This year, UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies published a study that for the first time looked at the numbers of “out-of-school” suspensions for 5,250 charter schools and 95,000 public schools. The researchers found that while overall suspension rates have been going down since 2012, in charter schools, black students and students with disabilities were suspended at higher percentages in all grades than their peers in traditional schools. In middle and high schools, 12 percent more students with disabilities and 2.5 percent more black students were suspended in charters compared with noncharters.

Paying attention to this data is important, because researchers have found that being suspended is a strong indicator that a student will eventually drop out. And students who drop out are much more likely to end up in prison, becoming part of the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This issue disproportionately affects black students (in charter and noncharter schools), who are suspended at a rate four times greater than white students.

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Why Did Black Lives Matter and the NAACP Call for an End to More Charter Schools?

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California smog is getting worse again, but because of climate change, not cars

by LenaRoof4575566 Posted on August 12, 2016

smog-eat-smog world

California smog is getting worse again, but because of climate change, not cars

By on Aug 12, 2016 2:58 pmShare

Hospitals have been reporting increased visits from patients seeking treatment for respiratory ailments this summer in Southern California. The culprit? Smog.

Southern California has experienced its worst smog in seven years. Ozone levels have exceeded federal standards on 91 days in 2016, nearly 30 percent more than this time last year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Every day of August has exceeded the federal standard of 70 parts per billion.

Cities like Los Angeles have never been known for making it easier to breathe. Yet as bad as the air currently is, it’s still far better than than it was in the ’70s and ’80s, when LA had 200 smog-filled days a year.  

While emissions from vehicles are usually the culprit behind smog, the reason for this season’s poor air quality has more to do with the particularly hot and dry weather, and an influx in wildfire activity. Ozone regulations and federal fuel efficiency standards for trucks and cars, meanwhile, have helped cities cut pollution.

But in the future, as climate change increases both wildfires and temperatures in the region, it’ll take even greater effort to make Southern California’s air clean again.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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Wall Street Billionaires To Advise Trump On Populist Economics

by AdolfoLipinski Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Excellent. Donald Trump has introduced his blue-chip economic advisory team:

The list includes strikingly few academic policy experts, usually the bread-and-butter of campaign policy teams. Instead, the advisory team of 13 men — and no women — consists largely of personal friends or longtime business associates of Trump. The median net worth of Trump’s official economic advisers appears to be at least several hundred million dollars.

That wealthy group includes Harold Hamm, a self-made oil billionaire…. Dan DiMicco, a former chief executive of steelmaker Nucor…. Steven Mnuchin…. chief executive of the hedge fund Dune Capital Management…. Steve Roth…. Vornado Realty Trust; hedge fund billionaire John Paulson…. The only academic economist on the team — the only one who has a doctorate in economics — is Peter Navarro of the University of California at Irvine, who focuses on trade with China.

….Trump’s outsider crew at times conflicts with his message of economic populism….His team is filled with hedge fund managers, bankers and real estate speculators.

A whole bunch of Wall Street billionaires plus Stephen Moore, an annual contender for stupidest man in the world. This fits Trump perfectly, especially since he’s not going to listen to any of them anyway. Why should he, after all? He knows more about how the economy works than any of them, believe me.

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Wall Street Billionaires To Advise Trump On Populist Economics

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Are the US Dietary Guidelines on Milk Racist?

by RollandCockerill Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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The federal government’s dietary guidelines urge adults to consume at least three cups of milk a day to guard against osteoporosis, a disease in which bones become brittle and weak. People who are lactose intolerant—a group that includes 75 percent of African Americans—”can choose low-lactose and lactose-free dairy products,” the guidelines say. But a new study has called into question this one-size-fits-all approach. It suggests that most African American adults might not need milk at all.

Read: The Scary New Science That Shows Milk Is Bad for You

Scientists have known for some time that people who live in Africa have some of the world’s lowest rates of osteoporosis. Researchers long assumed that the difference was due to Africans’ lower life expectancy (since the condition usually shows up later in life), more active lifestyles, and a lack of doctors to diagnose and treat the condition. Yet a study published in June in BoneKEy, an offshoot of the journal Nature, offers a compelling alternative explanation: Many Africans are genetically adapted to low-calcium diets.

Study author Constance Hilliard, an evolutionary historian at the University of North Texas, examined osteoporosis rates in Nigeria and Cameroon, two African countries that fall within an area known as the tsetse belt. Dairy farming is impossible in this equatorial region because of the presence of the tsetse fly, a tropical pest that transmits parasites that kill cattle. Despite a nearly complete lack of dairy consumption in the two countries, their osteoporosis rates are among the lowest in the world—just two to three cases out of every 100,000 people.

In an effort to figure out why, Hilliard looked at Kenya, a country outside the tsetse belt where milk consumption is common yet life expectancies and socioeconomic conditions remain essentially the same. Kenya’s rate of osteoporosis is dramatically higher—245 cases out of 100,000 people. That’s also much closer to levels in the United States, where the rate is 595 per 100,000 people.

So what’s going on here? One possibility is that milk consumption actually increases the risk for osteoporosis. As I mentioned in a magazine piece last year, a 2014 Swedish study found women who drank more than two and a half glasses of milk a day had a higher fracture risk than their counterparts who drank less than one glass a day. Though other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, researchers have found, on balance, that calcium intake does not significantly reduce the risk of hip fracture in women or men.

Hilliard finds a more compelling explanation in genetics. The tsetse belt is largely inhabited by the Niger-Kordofanian ethnicity (also the predominant ethnicity among African Americans), which is known to be lactose intolerant. Niger-Kordofanians make up for the lack of milk in their diets by better absorbing calcium. In the United States, studies have shown that black children and adults excrete less calcium than whites on essentially the same diets, thereby retaining more calcium in their bones. “This is why certain populations can maintain strong bones and are at low risk of osteoporosis even though they consume 200 mg of calcium day”—a fifth of what the federal government recommends, Hilliard says. It could also be why the rate of osteoporosis and related fractures in African American women is half that of Caucasian women.

“This is a very interesting paper,” says Connie Weaver, the director of the Women’s Global Health Institute at Purdue University and an expert on osteoporosis. “We know that genetics determine 60 to 80 percent of bone mass and lifestyle choices the rest. This paper offers one genetic difference that is likely more controlling of bone mass than diet or other lifestyle choices.”

Still, Weaver doesn’t think African Americans should consume less dairy. Though they may have less of a genetic disposition for osteoporosis, she argues that “there still would be a range of risk within that genotype that would be improved by adequate dairy or the nutrients provided by dairy.”

Hilliard makes no dietary recommendations—after all, she is a historian, not a nutritionist. Still, she points out that African Americans may be uniquely susceptible to some of milk’s side effects. Multiple studies have correlated high levels of dairy consumption to prostate cancer; African Americans are 2.4 times as likely to die from the disease as the population at large. Though other genetic and socioeconomic factors may explain their higher risk, some studies have pointed to dairy. The California Collaborative Prostate Cancer Study, published in 2012, found that calcium consumption was closely related to an increased risk of prostate cancer, particularly in black men who carry a genotype common in populations of African origin.

Yet the federal government’s dietary recommendations don’t account for such distinctions. And that omission, she says, amounts to something like discrimination. “What has happened is the medical community has universalized the particular biology of Caucasians,” Hilliard says. “And the medical community has yet to frame its questions in ways that investigate whether foods that have been culturally labeled as ‘good for you’ have deleterious consequences for minorities.”

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Are the US Dietary Guidelines on Milk Racist?

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Sanders Delegates to Bernie: You’re Not the Boss of Me

by AmyPalacios Posted on July 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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At a press conference held on Tuesday by the Bernie Delegates Network, an outfit independent of the Sanders campaign, none of the speakers indicated they had any knowledge that dozens of Sanders delegates later that day would walk out of the convention, stage a sit-in in the media workspace, and join a protest mounted by Sanders supporters outside the Wells Fargo Center. On Wednesday morning, Karen Bernal, a Sanders delegate who co-chairs the large and boisterous Sanders delegation from California, explained how that demonstration transpired. It was an organic action, with Sanders delegates deciding spontaneously to express their discontentment with a dramatic gesture. The protest signaled that some Sanders delegates were not looking for unity and had rejected Sanders’ request that his delegates not stage such actions during the convention. The message from these delegates to Sanders: You’re not the boss of me.

At the Wednesday morning briefing conducted by the Bernie Delegate Network, it was clear that Sanders was not in full control of his delegates. The group noted that the previous day, it had polled the 1,846 Sanders delegates on two questions. The first query: Did listening to the speakers on the first night of the convention (which included Sanders, who made a strong pitch for Hillary Clinton) make you more or less enthusiastic about the Clinton-Tim Kaine ticket? Of the 311 delegates who responded, only one-fifth said the night had juiced them up. Fifty-five percent said they were less enthusiastic. The second question: How much had Sanders’ message—work for Clinton in order to stop Donald Trump and don’t disrupt the convention—influenced you? Of the 276 who responded to that query, 43 percent said considerably, 30 percent replied somewhat, and 27 percent said that Sanders’ request had no influence on them.

Put that all together and here’s the picture: There is a noisy and substantial portion—perhaps a minority—of Sanders delegates who do not want to go quietly into the good night of a Hillary-Rah-Rah convention. And they’re not listening to the guy who brought them—or whom they brought—to the party.

A pro-Clinton convention/infomercial is just too hard for these delegates to swallow. “They’re accustomed to healthy granola,” said Norman Solomon, a coordinator of the Bernie Delegates Network, “and they get into the convention and they hear puffy white bread. It’s a shock to their system.” It certainly did not ease any of their concerns, he pointed out, that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime pal of the Clintons, said on Tuesday night that he was sure that Hillary Clinton would reconsider her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal if she were to become president. As Solomon noted, his group’s survey of Sanders delegates found that the opposing the TPP is their paramount issue.

Speaking at the Bernie Delegate Network, Bernal explained that the Sanders delegates spoiling for a fight—or a protest—at the convention are beyond Sanders’ control and are not an organized force. “No one organized yesterday’s quiet walk-out,” she said. “It was Occupy-style…It came together very organically in the most old-fashioned way. People were talking to one another.”

Bernal excoriated the Democratic establishment for not making room for the Sanders dissidents. “If you don’t allow for the space for that type of dissent within the party, you basically say we don’t have a place for you in the party,” she said. As a leader of the California Sanders delegation, she added, she could not rein in the protesters even if she wanted to (which she does not). “It is not a top-down affair,” she said. “We feel that we are not willing to go along with being extras in a scripted production.”

The delegates who walked, she said, were upset by the Kaine pick and remain angry about numerous slights directed at the Sanders crowd by the Democratic powers that be. “We’re still fighting an establishment orthodoxy we have pledged to fight against,” Bernal explained. “This is our one shot of doing that. We’re doing what we were elected to do.”

Solomon and Bernal both said they accept Sanders’ analysis that Trump must be defeated and that means Sanders people should support Clinton. Asked whether walk-outs and protests during the convention are in sync with this mission of thwarting Trump, Bernal responded with a long explanation about how the Democratic Party must respect and incorporate the Sanders wing:

It is a big experiment. The Democratic Party is being tested with our actions on how they will respond…We don’t start out with a plan of agreement. If you’re negotiating with an adversary…you don’t start out with below your bottom line…If they don’t provide that kind of space, the rank-and-file Bernie delegates say there is no place in this party for me.

Sanders has declared that he and his delegates did succeed in winning victories during the deliberations over the party platform and the party rules governing future presidential contests. Yet Bernal said she and other delegates were still upset that they lost platform fights on several matters: fracking, single-payer health care, TPP, and Middle East policy. And she was not satisfied with the rules change that will diminish the influence of superdelegates in future elections. She explained passionately that it was hard for many Sanders delegates to sit through the roll-call vote the previous night that included superdelegate votes that heavily favored Clinton and “skewed” the overall count. The roll call, she said, “spat in the faces” of the Sanders delegates.

Repeatedly, Bernal noted that a slice of Sanders delegates will not heed Sanders. “Sanders has a job to do,” she said. “He’s in a difficult position. We have a different job.” But, she added, she thinks that Sanders is actually delighted to see delegates upset the order of the convention. “I have to believe that deep down, secretly, he’s happy about some things,” she said. He had the motto during the campaign: ‘Not me, us.’ And some of the Bernie delegates have taken this to heart.”

A reporter asked Bernal if Sanders had started a fire that he no longer controls. She quickly replied, “He was never in control of it.” She then added, “We haven’t gotten much instruction from the Sanders campaign at all. And that silence speaks volumes.”

Yet Sanders, with his direct messages to his delegates and his speech to the convention, has been clear that he wants his base to join the party to elect Clinton. But Bernal shows that there is a band of Sanders delegates who embraced his crusade but who now believe they have a better strategy than he does. She said she had no idea what this group might do on the final nights of the convention. (Will they disrupt Kaine’s address on Wednesday night? There could be disorder. Or maybe not.) Their version of the Bernie revolution is not organized at this moment. The Sanders campaign empowered them, and now they are using that power on their own.

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Sanders Delegates to Bernie: You’re Not the Boss of Me

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