Tag Archives: canada

Chart of the Day: Intriguing New Data on Getting Kids to Eat Their Vegetables

by BrianneJessep Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at Wonkblog, Roberto Ferdman passes along some fascinating new research on the frustrating problem of getting kids to eat their vegetables in school lunches:

It turns out there might be an ingenious solution hiding beneath everyone’s nose.

Researchers at Texas A&M University found there’s at least one variable that tends to affect whether kids eat their broccoli, spinach or green beans more than anything: what else is on the plate. Kids, in short, are much more likely to eat their vegetable portion when it’s paired with a food that isn’t so delicious it gets all the attention. When chicken nuggets and burgers, the most popular items among schoolchildren, are on the menu, for instance, vegetable waste tends to rise significantly. When other less-beloved foods, like deli sliders or baked potatoes, are served, the opposite seems to happen.

So let me get this straight. The way to get kids to eat vegetables is to serve them crappy-tasting food that makes the vegetables seem good by comparison? That’s the ingenious solution?

Yes indeed. So if we just starve the little buggers and then give them a choice of steamed broccoli or vegemite on wheat, they might go ahead and force down the broccoli. And since you are all sophisticated consumers of the latest research, I’m sure you want to see this in chart form. So here it is for veggie dippers (notably, a “vegetable” already disguised with mounds of ranch dressing). As you can see, when paired with yummy Chef Boyardee ravioli, the kids turn up their noses at the dippers. But when the entree is a yucky sunbutter sandwich, kids cave in and sullenly eat more than half of the little devils.

This all comes from “Investigating the Relationship between Food Pairings and Plate Waste from Elementary School Lunches.” However, if you click the link and read the report, you will almost certainly find yourself tormented with yet more questions. I’m here to help:

Q: What the hell is a sunbutter sandwich?

A: According to an exhaustive search of the entire internet, it’s a peanut-free peanut butter sandwich made out of sunflower seed spread.

Q: What vegetable do kids hate the most?

A: Sweet potato fries, which barely edge out green peas. Oddly, sweet potato fries are far more loathed than raw sweet potato sticks. I suppose it’s because the raw sticks are served with some kind of horrific dipping sauce.

Q: What’s the most popular vegetable?

A: Tater tots.

Q: Knock it off. What’s the most popular real vegetable?

A: It’s a little hard to say, but the garden salad with ranch dressing seems to do relatively well.

Q: Is a cheese-stuffed bread stick really considered a proper entree?

A: Apparently so. And as loathsome as it sounds, I suppose it’s not really all that different from a slice of cheese pizza.

Q: Is a whole dill pickle really a “vegetable”?

A: In west Texas, where this study was done, it is.

Q: How about mashed potatoes?

A: Yep.

Q: French fries?

A: Yes indeed.

Q: Seriously?

A: It appears so.

Q: Is one of the authors really from the Alliance for Potato Research and Education?

A: That’s what it says. In fact, they’re the ones who financed this study. I can’t tell if they got their money’s worth or not.

Visit source:

Chart of the Day: Intriguing New Data on Getting Kids to Eat Their Vegetables

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged alo, canada, cheese, crisis, Everyone, French, garden, Kids", mexico, photos, texas | Comments Off

House Benghazi Committee Breaks Record — Sort Of

by TaniaRizzo Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Today’s news:

The House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks is now the longest congressional investigation in history, committee Democrats announced today. As of Monday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has been active for 72 weeks — surpassing the record previously held by the Watergate Committee in the 1970’s.

I suppose this is technically correct. But let’s gaze through a broader lens and take a look at the Whitewater investigation:

The House Banking Committee began hearings in March 1994, and they petered out in early 1995. Call it 50 weeks or so.
The Senate Whitewater Committee began in May 1995 and issued its final report in June 1996. That’s 57 weeks.
But wait! The Senate investigation was a continuation of the Senate Banking Committee investigation, which began in July 1994. If you count this as one big Senate investigation, as you really should, it lasted 98 weeks.
But wait again! The Whitewater investigation really started on January 20, 1994, when special counsel Robert Fiske was appointed. It ended on September 20, 2000, when Fiske’s successor, Robert Ray, announced there was “insufficient evidence” to show that the Clintons had done anything wrong. That’s 348 weeks.

So sure: in terms of a single congressional committee in continuous existence, Benghazi is now the all-time record holder. But in terms of how long a political investigation has lasted through all its permutations, I’d guess that 348 weeks is unlikely to be beaten anytime soon. When it comes to political witch hunts, Whitewater was—and remains—the king of fruitless idiocy.

Continued here:

House Benghazi Committee Breaks Record — Sort Of

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged benghazi, canada, europe, house, jesus, mexico, mother, public, record, whitewater | Comments Off

It’s Really Hard Not to Hate the Pharmaceutical Industry

by AngieKerns Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Another day, another drug. Today comes news of Nitropress, a generic blood pressure drug that was priced at $44 per vial way back in 2013. Then it was sold to Marathon Pharmaceuticals, which raised the price to $257. A few months ago it was sold yet again, this time to Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which raised the price to $806. But no worries! According to a spokesman, no one will ever be denied this medication:

“These are drugs that are only used by hospitals — they are not sold in pharmacies — in accordance with specific surgical procedures. This means that whenever the protocol calls for use of these drugs, they are used. Patients are never denied these drugs when the protocols call for their use.”

And there you have it. Hospitals have to use it, and no one else makes it, so Valeant can charge whatever they want. Satisfied?

Anyway, Democrats are “demanding answers” from Valeant, which will probably do about as much good as it did when they demanded answers from Marathon last year about their price increase. Or all the other companies they’ve demanded answers from ever since 10x price increases became the pharmaceutical industry’s favorite new sport. That is to say, none.

It’s a funny thing. I’ve probably read just about every reason in the book explaining why national health care is supposed to be a terrible idea. Most of these reasons are pretty lousy—either unsupported by the evidence or else directly contradicted by it. But there’s one exception: the argument that a national health care plan would drive down the price of drugs—as it has everywhere else in the world—and this would stifle innovation in the pharmaceutical biz. There’s some real merit to this claim.

It’s not quite that simple, of course, and it would take a longish post to go through this topic in detail. Nonetheless, you can put me in the camp of those who want to tread pretty carefully when it comes to regulating pharmaceutical pricing. But these guys are sure making it hard to maintain that position, aren’t they?

Original source –

It’s Really Hard Not to Hate the Pharmaceutical Industry

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged canada, crisis, democrats, Drug, europe, jesus, lai, mother, Ona | Comments Off

Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Is Written in Pixels, Not Stone Tablets

by LuellaHayman Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

There’s nothing Republicans like more than talking about taxes. So Chris Wallace asked Jeb Bush about his tax plan this weekend. In particular, he wanted to know why the rich were getting such a big break under Bush’s plan. Jeb replied that this was simply a law of nature:

The simple fact is 1 percent of people pay 40 percent of all the taxes. And so, of course, tax cuts for everybody is going to generate more for people that are paying a lot more. I mean that’s just the way it is.

You will be unsurprised to learn that this isn’t true. Bush’s plan includes new tax brackets for everyone, and the rich pay a lot less under his plan because he chose to cut taxes in their bracket a lot. He didn’t have to do that. He could have left their tax rates where they are or lowered them only a little. Instead he chose to lower them a lot. However, as my comprehensive graphic below shows, this was handed down in pixels, not stone tablets. So Bush can change this anytime he wants.

Continue reading here:

Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Is Written in Pixels, Not Stone Tablets

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged canada, david-maurice, heartbreak, jesus, kevin drum, king, Ona, photo essays, slideshows, taxes, written | Comments Off

This Map Shows Who Wants To Move To Your Country

by CleoYanezbx Posted on September 3, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As the migration crisis in Europe continues to unfold, the images of dead children, crowded train platforms, and people trying not to be sent to migrant camps have triggered worldwide concern. Those jammed in Hungarian train stations or washing up on the shores of Greece each have very specific stories, but they are also a part of a long history of displacement. As long as there has been starvation and war, there has been migration to countries of peace and economic opportunity.

What is new, however, is the ability to look for information about a potential destination before going there. And all over the world, people are clicking on Google searches to learn more about lands of opportunity, especially the prosperous G-8 countries—France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, Canada, and Russia.

In the map below, the Google News Lab has come up with a way to chart comparative levels of curiosity about the G-8 countries from others all over the world. For instance:

And here is the interest of Syrians in France:

Check out Google’s full map below:

Original post:

This Map Shows Who Wants To Move To Your Country

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged canada, health, hungarian, japan, king, kingdom, peace, police, russia, syrians, united | Comments Off

Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

by ShaniTasman Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If Sandra Bland indeed committed suicide after spending three days in a Texas jail, as the Harris county medical examiner determined last week, her death fits a pattern: Half of all suicides behind bars occur within the first 14 days of custody. Twenty-three percent happen within the first 24 hours following an arrest. And like two-thirds of the 750,000 people in US jails, Bland had not yet been convicted of any crime.

Bland had two options to get out of jail. The court set a $5,000 bond. If she had the money, which she didn’t, she could have posted it and gotten it back when she appeared for trial. Alternately, she could have paid a bail bondsman a 10 percent fee to post bond for her—$500 that she or her family would not get back. Her family’s attorney has said that they were working on trying to secure the fee to have her released.

This system, in which people either stay locked up or pay money to a private company to get out, is almost entirely unique to the United States. The Philippines is the only other country with something similar. In Canada, acting as a bail bondsman can earn you two years in prison on a charge equivalent to bribing a juror. “We don’t have a system currently that does a decent job of separating who is dangerous and who isn’t,” Tim Murray, director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, told me when I wrote about the commercial bail industry. “We only have a system that separates those who have cash and those who don’t.”

Continue Reading »

Link to article –

Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged alo, attorney, canada, international, kentucky, king, Ona, police, prisons, private, united, washington | Comments Off

Hillary Clinton Refuses to Take a Position on the Keystone Pipeline

by Stephanj0r Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hillary Clinton took a strong stance on clean energy Monday, telling a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, that her efforts to tackle climate change would parallel President John F. Kennedy’s call to action during the space race in the 1960s.

“I want to get the country back to setting big ambitious goals,” Clinton said. “I want us to get back into the future business, and one of the best ways we can do that is to be absolutely ready to address the challenge of climate change and make it work to our advantage economically.”

Her remarks tracked closely with an ambitious plan her campaign released Sunday night, which set a target of producing enough renewable energy to power all the nation’s homes and businesses by 2027.

“America’s ability to lead the world on this issue hinges on our ability to act ourselves,” she said. “I refuse to turn my back on what is one of the greatest threats and greatest opportunities America faces.”

Still, the Democractic front-runner refused—as she has several times before—to say whether or not she supports construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That project, which would carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries and ports in the United States, is seen by many environmentalists as a blemish on President Barack Obama’s climate record. It has been stalled for years in a lengthy State Department review that began when Clinton was still Secretary of State. The Obama administration has resisted several recent attempts by Congress to force Keystone’s approval, but it has yet to make a final decision on the project—although one is expected sometime this year.

“I will refrain from commenting on Keystone XL, because I had a leading role in getting that process started, and we have to let it run its course,” Clinton said, in response to a question from an audience member.

Her non-position on Keystone earned derision from environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose organization 350.org has been at the forefront of opposition to the pipeline.

“I think it’s bogus,” he said in an email. “Look, the notion that she can’t talk about it because the State Dept. is still working on it makes no sense. By that test, she shouldn’t be talking about Benghazi or Iran or anything else either. The more she tries to duck the question, the more the whole thing smells.”

Clinton also punted on an audience request to reveal further details of how exactly she would finance the renewable energy targets she announced yesterday, which aim even higher than those already put in place by Obama. She reiterated that one key step would be to ensure the extension of federal tax credits for wind and solar energy that have expired or are set to expire over the next few years. And she said that she would continue Obama’s practice of pursuing aggressive climate policies from within the White House, saying that “we still have a lot we can do” without waiting for a recalcitrant Congress to act.

Clinton acknowledged that the clean energy boom would come at a cost for the US coal industry, which is already in steep decline. She said she would “guarantee that coal miners and their families get the benefits they’ve earned,” but didn’t elaborate on what she meant or how specifically she would achieve that.

Environmental groups offered a generally positive reaction to Clinton’s policy announcement Sunday. In a statement, League of Conservation Voters vice president Tiernan Sittenfield commended her for “calling out climate change deniers and effectively illustrating the urgent need to act on a defining issue of our time.” She also earned praise from billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has set a high bar on climate action for any candidate who wants to tap his millions.

“I refuse to let those who are deniers to rip away all the progress we’ve made and leave our country exposed to climate change,” Clinton said.

From –

Hillary Clinton Refuses to Take a Position on the Keystone Pipeline

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged 2016 elections, blue marble, canada, climate desk, congress, conservation, Everyone, league, venta | Comments Off

Polar bears don’t hibernate, so screw polar bears

by AmeeGreenleaf51 Posted on July 17, 2015

Polar bears don’t hibernate, so screw polar bears

By Suzanne Jacobson 17 Jul 2015comments Share

Well, well, well. It looks like climate change activists are gonna have to find a new mascot. Polar bears, it turns out, are greedy bastards who don’t hibernate and want to just stuff their faces all year like the world isn’t going through some serious shit right now. We all have to make sacrifices, guys!

Actually, researchers never really knew whether or not polar bears hibernated, but they suspected that the big white beasts entered a kind of walking hibernation during the summer, when food is scarce. Other bears lower their body temperatures during hibernation so they don’t need as much energy and therefore don’t need to eat as much. But polar bears? They, apparently, can’t go one freakin’ season without a nosh.

At least that’s according to a new study published yesterday in the journal Science. John P. Whiteman, a PhD candidate in ecology at the University of Wyoming, led the research and explained to The New York Times exactly how he and his colleagues uncovered this damning information, and, well, let’s just say I can’t wait for the movie adaptation:

“This data did not exist at all,” [Whiteman] said, because it was so hard to obtain. The researchers used helicopters and a United States Coast Guard icebreaker to find and dart the bears with tranquilizers. The study was done in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska and Canada, and on its coast.

The researchers set up wind screens and lights, Dr. Whiteman said, “trying to recreate an animal surgical suite in the field.” They inserted devices into the abdomens of 10 bears to record body temperature. They also used collars to track location and activity levels, and inserted temperature recorders into the rumps of some bears.

About two dozen bears were studied in all, with the overall goal of getting a better picture of the physiology of polar bears in the summer. The researchers also took body measurements and fur and blood samples.

“We’ve got years and years of working with this data ahead of us,” he said.

To be fair, polar bears don’t exactly stuff their faces during the summer, because there’s not much to stuff them with, and they do tend to lose a lot of weight. But don’t let that tug at your heartstrings — it’s time for environmentalists to officially let Coca-Cola have the polar bear; those poor gluttons are gonna need something to cool off with as climate change makes summers longer and longer.

Source:
Polar Bears Don’t Go Into Hibernation-Like State in Summer, Researchers Say

, The New York Times.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series

Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next

Get Grist in your inbox

Read this article:

Polar bears don’t hibernate, so screw polar bears

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged alaska, canada, climate & energy, lai, science, special, united, whats-next, wyoming | Comments Off

Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse

by ElishaGetty076 Posted on July 16, 2015

Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse

By John Lighton 16 Jul 2015comments Share

It’s the season when wildfires rage, and this year they’re raging particularly hard: In June alone, Alaska saw 1.1 million acres go up in flames. In California, firefighters had responded to 3,381 wildfires by July 11, “1,000 more than the average over the previous five years,” The New York Times reports in a big feature on wildfires in the state.

And that’s likely not a coincidence. A study published this week in Nature Communications connects worsening wildfire seasons to climate change, and suggests the trend will continue in the years ahead as climate change rolls forward. “Wildfires occur at the intersection of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources,” the study’s authors write. Of those factors, “weather is the most variable.”

The study also suggests that wildfires will themselves play a role in driving climate change, creating a nasty feedback loop.

After combing through decades of data, the report’s authors show that, globally, wildfire seasons on average became 18.7 percent longer between 1979 and 2013. Some regions, of course, have it far worse: In parts of South America, wildfire season has increased by roughly 33 days over the last 35 years.

“We may be moving into a new normal. If these trends persist, we are on track to see more fire activity and more burned area,” lead author W. Matt Jolly told ClimateWire.

This map highlights areas where the length of the fire season has changed significantly since 1979, with the red areas seeing the most increase.

Click map to embiggen.

Nature

Longer fire seasons take a heavy economic toll. From the study:

Over the last decade, annual wildfire suppression costs on US federal lands exceeded $1.7B US dollars and $1B US dollars in Canada. When all components are considered, including preparedness/suppression costs and economic losses, these total costs are substantially higher. In Australia in 2005, total wildfire costs were estimated at nearly $9.4B US dollars or 1.3% of their Gross Domestic Product.

The fires, worsened by climate change, then hasten climate change by spewing carbon into the atmosphere in amounts that can be more than half of what we humans generate by burning fossil fuels.

That leads to the most worrying theory posited in the paper: That the world’s forests will become less able to take CO2 out of the atmosphere as climate change advances, in part because climate change–driven wildfires are killing them off. That means wildfires would be functioning as what climate scientists call a positive feedback mechanism, a phenomenon that is made worse by global warming and, as it gets worse, also drives warming — a vicious cycle that it might be too late to break.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series

Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next

Get Grist in your inbox

See more here:

Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged alaska, anchor, atmosphere, california, canada, climate & energy, science, season, south, study, world | Comments Off

These ocean trash shoes aren’t even ugly!

by KandiMRYfxeypn Posted on June 30, 2015

These ocean trash shoes aren’t even ugly! | Grist

Adidas

literal garbage

These ocean trash shoes aren’t even ugly!

By Grist staffon 30 Jun 2015comments Share

They are knitted from enormous plastic gill nets left drifting at the bottom of the ocean … and they aren’t completely hideous! See? Not bad for a trash shoe, Adidas — not bad at all.

Source:
Adidas Knit These Sneakers Entirely From Ocean Plastic Trash

, Fast Co.Exist.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.