Tag Archives: family

PETA’s Five Most Tone-Deaf Stunts

by ADZMargievjv Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Proving once again PETA is unfamiliar with how to a deliver meaningful publicity campaign, the animal rights group is now looking to score a win off poor people’s thirst.

Some background: The bankrupt city of Detroit has been shutting off its tap water to thousands of poor residents in order to force them to pay for nearly $90 million in overdue water bills. Advocates have slammed the move, calling out the city for eliminating a basic human right. The NAACP recently filed a lawsuit calling the shut down discriminatory, as most of Detroit’s low-income residents are overwhelmingly black.

It takes a certain type of callousness to look at this situation and see anything other than misfortune. PETA saw an opportunity! The animal rights group has made an offer to poor Detroit residents: Be one of 10 families to denounce meat and they’ll put an end to your family’s thirst. PETA will even throw in a basket of vegetables for the effort.

“Vegan meals take far less of a toll on the Earth’s resources,” PETA wrote in a recent press release. “It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of meat but only about 155 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat.”

This seems like as good a time as any to look back on PETA’s misguided and often times exploitative PR campaigns of the past:

1. “Boyfriend went vegan and knocked the bottom out of me.” (2012)

Enhance your sex life by encouraging your boyfriend to go vegan. He’ll transform into a “tantric porn star,” breaking your neck and causing your body to go limp. The sex will be so mind-blowing, in fact, you’ll wander aimlessly in just a bra, as you reflect on the violent sex you had the pleasure of subjecting yourself to the evening prior.

2. “Holocaust on your plate.” (2003)

Here the group matches photos of factory farms with Holocaust inmates. The display was promptly banned in Germany—a move PETA found absurd considering a Jewish PETA member happened to fund the campaign.

3. Too fat for Plan B? Try “Plan V.” (2013)

Jumping on news Plan B may not work as well for women over 165 pounds, PETA urges women to shed a few pounds by going vegan.

4. Dog breeding is for Nazis. (2014)

Again conjuring up the atrocities of the Holocaust, which lets keep in mind systematically killed 11 million people, the group equates dog breeding to Hitler’s plan to bring about a pure Aryan race.

5. Don a fur coat and you’ll be beaten. (2007)

The disturbing video above even seems to justify senseless violence.

Detroit has already severed off the tap water supply to nearly 125,000 people, with thousands more likely to have their resources shut down in weeks to come. And anyone with a remote interest in current events understands most Detroiters are low-income residents, many of whom could not afford to have a vegan diet.

Nice going, PETA.

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PETA’s Five Most Tone-Deaf Stunts

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Making Use Of The Best Anti-Inflammatory Super Foods For Inflammation Problems

by James Redder Posted on July 16, 2014

Studies have repeatedly shown that there is a link between what you eat consistently and the conditions you tend to end up with. As a result of this correlation, studies have found a relationship between eating certain foods and inflammatory related diseases like arthritis. This should come as no big surprise given the obesity epidemic that the country is currently going through. However, the same research has also identified that certain foods can actually act as anti-inflammatories. That is they can actually reduce the pain of something like arthritis. It should be noted that these foods should be consumed as a preventative measure or temporary relief at best.

Teas Teas have actually been widely made use of as cleansers and detoxes for a long time. An uncommon fact was that they can really reduce and/or restrict the pain signals that are connected with diseases like arthritis. Given this information it should not be that big of a surprise that physicians recommend that people with arthritis make it a point to drink more tea. Since the research has not indicated any big difference from one type of tea to another the tea choice doesn’t matter. For it to be effective it will need to be made from real tea leaves. So you can drink the tea of your choice and get the same benefit.

Wine It’s common knowledge that drinking wine in moderation is a good cardioprotective activity. A lesser known quality of grape-based or red wine is that it is composed of high concentration of anti-inflammatory properties. To get the same effects you can also consume fresh grapes since the skin contains the same features.

Cruciferous Fruits & Vegetables There is a lot of study that would recommend that specific vegetables lower the transmission of pain signals. When it comes to particular condition process like arthritis, the suggestions have likewise been made to cut animal protein from the diet entirely. Broccoli has been discovered to include glutathione, an efficient antioxidant and detoxer. This is very important due to the fact that studies have suggested that individuals with lower glutathione levels tend to have a higher affinity to arthritis than people with higher levels. The other vegetables that include this element include cabbage, potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes and cauliflower. You can also find this product in high concentration in pineapples.

Omega 3 It can be discovered in abundance in olive oil. Researches have suggested that compared to raw veggies, those that have actually been cooked in olive oil produced more anti-inflammatory properties.

Olive Oil Olive oil also contains a high concentration of fatty acids. One of the best ways to take advantage of this is to cook your vegetables in olive oil. This has been found to create more of an anti-inflammatory effect then eating raw veggies alone.

Soy A recent research study has suggested that soy beans or soy can result in reducing arthritis pain. It can also, of course, be used as a substitute for animal protein.

A great way to take advantage of the information you have just learned is to actually use it. Make it a priority to add one of the foods we listed here into your diet. You can do this as a preventative measure if you are not currently suffering from one of the inflammation based diseases. In either case it’s a smart decision to make.

For a great look at taking care of swelling check this out right here top anti inflammation food

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Medicare Just Keeps Producing Great Budget News

by KatriceEvu Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Medicare has been a bastion of good news lately. Every year, the CBO reduces its baseline estimate of Medicare costs, which have dropped by more than $1,000 since 2010. So what’s going on? Tricia Neuman and Juliette Cubanski of the Kaiser Family Foundation round up the evidence:

It is clear that the Medicare savings provisions in the ACA, such as reductions in provider payment updates and Medicare Advantage payments, have played a major role….In addition, the Budget Control Act of 2011 also exerted downward pressure on Medicare spending through sequestration that reduced payments to providers and plans by 2 percent beginning in 2013. And yet even after incorporating these scheduled payment reductions in the baseline, CBO has continued to lower its projections of Medicare spending.

So what else might be going on here? In addition to scheduled reductions in Medicare’s more formulaic payment rates, providers may be tightening their belts and looking to deliver care more efficiently in response to financial incentives included in the ACA, and it is possible that these changes are having a bigger effect than expected. For example, CMS recently reported that hospital readmission rates dropped by 130,000 between January 2012 and August 2013. It is also possible that hospitals and other providers are using data and other analytic tools more successfully to track utilization and spending and to reduce excess costs. Another more straightforward factor is that several expensive and popular brand-name drugs have gone off patent in recent years, which has helped to keep Medicare drug spending in check.

No one knows for sure if these reductions are permanent, or whether high growth rates will reappear in the future. But even if the low growth rates of the past few years can’t be sustained, I suspect that Medicare growth will continue to be lower than anyone expected. There are two reasons for this. First, the growth rate of medical costs in general has been declining steadily for the past 30 years, and this has now been going on long enough that it’s highly unlikely to be a statistical blip. After a surge in the 80s and 90s, we really are returning to the growth rates that were common earlier in the century, and obviously this will affect Medicare.

Second, Obamacare really will have an impact. Not everything in it will work, but it includes a lot of different cost-cutting measures and some of them will turn out to be pretty effective. And who knows? If Republicans ever stop pouting over Obamacare, we might even be able to experiment with different kinds of cost reductions.

There’s a fair amount of year-to-year variability in health care inflation, and we should expect to have some years of high growth. But I’ll bet the average over the next decade is somewhere around 2 percent above the general inflation rate. That’s not too bad.

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Medicare Just Keeps Producing Great Budget News

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Contact: Country Music Heiress Holly Williams Waves Her Flag of Independence

by MaricruFerraro Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Holly Williams in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Gabriel Kahane


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Jill Sobule


Benmont Tench


Leyla McCalla


Keith & Tex


Declan O’Rourke


Michael Daves

As the granddaughter of Hank Williams Sr. and daughter of Hank Williams Jr., Holly Williams‘ real inheritance may be the art of self-invention. Under a heavy mantle, Holly has carved out her own career as a singer-songwriter with a sweet but commanding voice and songs that tell the stories of family and friends in a wistful Southern setting.

The diamond-studded “HW” ring on her right hand is the only outward indication of country-royalty glitz. She grew up mostly outside of the music business, picking up the guitar in her late teens with a little help from her step-father, Johnny Christopher, a busy Nashville session guitarist and songwriter who co-wrote the modern classic “Always On My Mind.“

Last year, Williams released her third album, The Highway, produced by Charlie Peacock and featuring guest appearances by Jackson Browne, Jakob Dylan, and Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s touring behind the album through August, here and in the United Kingdom. Jacob Blickenstaff photographed Holly in Brooklyn and spoke with her by phone from the road. The following is in her words:

It’s not that I see myself operating outside of country music in that I don’t like it, or I don’t want to be there. I’d like to think that my music would be played on country radio if it were the ’90s, when they had a lot more singer-songwriters on there, like Lyle Lovett and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Now it’s all that “bro-country,” with Daisy Dukes, beer, tailgating, and fireworks. So everybody calls me an Americana artist or singer-songwriter, along with those people who are not mainstream enough for country radio today. I think “The Highway” is a country song, but radio doesn’t hear it that way, so I’m just living on the outskirts.

I opened my first store a year and a half after the car wreck with my sister. I couldn’t play for about eight months, and I didn’t know how long it would be. My sister was terribly broken. She had 28 surgeries and was in bed for two years. I didn’t want to leave my family and go back on the road. The recession hit and I had split with my first label. I had to take off big chunks of time from music. Music is my first love and always will be, but retail is just in me. Hank Williams and his wife Audrey owned one of Nashville’s first retail stores on Broadway—Hank and Audrey’s Corral—and my grandfather on my mom’s side owned a mercantile, and that’s what my new store is named, White’s Mercantile.

It’s really nice for me to escape and have a couple of hours a day to work on the stores. When you’re a solo artist, you really just think about yourself all day: Here is my interview, here are my songs. I just love getting out of my own head. Even at home vacuuming, just staring at a machine sucking up dirt and it’s very mindless—these domestic things somehow bring the creativity and ideas.

I didn’t have a big struggle finding my own identity. I consider what my dad went through to be much harder, considering he was the son of Hank Williams. His mom had him on tour at eight years-old; he dealt with an unbelievable amount of pressure. He would sing his own songs and the audience would boo and leave. But he proved he could do his own music and sell 50 million records. I come from a line of very independent people.

In the beginning, people would come to the shows after drinking all day, thinking it was going to be rowdy because I’m Bocephus’ daughter. And here I am at the piano singing Tom Waits songs. I could probably be a lot wealthier if I had signed with a major label and did straight-up country songs. I wanted to be able to find it on my own. It’s the longer road, but the more fulfilling one.

I was completely kept away from the music business. It was always, “I’m not Bocephus, I’m Daddy.” All we knew was fishing on the farm and hunting and going to Montana and playing with the cows. Dad was on tour all the time, we saw him every two to three months. We lived a very normal life in Nashville. My dad didn’t even listen to the radio. It is the complete opposite of what people think.

The funny thing is, I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 17, and it was through my stepfather. It was his guitar in the house. My dad never once mentioned, “y’all want to learn an instrument?”

I was writing lyrics at a really young age, like seven or eight. I loved to write stories. Throughout my teenage years I actually wanted to write poetry. When I picked up a guitar and learned three or four chords, that first day I ran downstairs and said, “Mom, I wrote a song!” it seemed like it came out of nowhere. It was very natural.

Whenever I’ve tried to sit down and write a song it never happens. Usually they come out of nowhere. “Waiting on June” came when I was washing dishes. A lot of songs get started that way, at a still moment. I just started singing it like that. I wanted to follow the story as starting from my Papaw’s standpoint; he was always waiting for her, from when they met to when they went to heaven.

The saying is true: “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” My grandparents died and suddenly we can’t go to their house for Christmas anymore; the family July 4 is over. There’s so much tradition that ends when a couple who had been together for 60 years are gone. We try to do it the same, but it will never be the same. Part of what I write is about getting older and reminiscing and wanting things to be back how they were, like picking pecans and hanging with the cows on Papaw’s farm.

The cemetery that the song “Gone Away From Me” was written about, Oak Ridge Cemetery, is about two miles from my grandparent’s house. It’s where they are buried and my great-great-aunt Stella who died in infancy is buried, as well as relatives that go back five generations. The song is from my mom’s viewpoint, and also the generation before her—they had a lot of tragedy. Every year, the whole White family would go down to the cemetery around July 4 and visit in the afternoon and be there for each other. Now my grandparents are buried there with just a quiet little oak tree, it’s a sacred place for me.

July 3rd was a dreaded friend of mine
We’d all go down to the family plot in the Louisiana pines
Staring at that little baby’s grave
Stella was as young as she was brave

And what I’d give to go there again
Kiss my daddy’s face, hold my mama’s hand
Little did I know soon they would be
Lying right beside her, gone away from me
Gone away from me.

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Contact: Country Music Heiress Holly Williams Waves Her Flag of Independence

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How to Tackle a Mold Problem

by RandolpTrammell Posted on June 21, 2014

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How to Tackle a Mold Problem

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About Half of Obamacare Exchange Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured

by AntoniaHUW Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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A new Kaiser survey shows that 57 percent of those who bought health insurance on Obamacare exchanges were previously uninsured. That’s about 4.5 million people who gained private insurance via the exchanges, and the vast majority of them say they would have remained uninsured if not for Obamacare. If this number is correct, it suggests that the number of newly insured by the end of the year will be a little higher than I’ve projected before—perhaps around 11-13 million.

But is it correct? Sarah Kliff provides the chart on the right showing the wildly different estimates from different sources, and explains that much of the divergence is due to different organizations asking different questions:

McKinsey asked people to identify the insurance they had “most of the year” in 2013….The RAND estimate relies on the research firm’s ongoing American Life Panel….It found that, when it reached out to them mostly in early March, that 36 percent of those who had exchange coverage were, in earlier surveys, uninsured.

….Health and Human Services has estimated 87 percent of certain Obamacare enrollees lacked coverage when they signed up. This figure comes from a question on Healthcare.gov….The Kaiser Family Foundation report….asked survey respondents this question: “Before you began coverage under your current health insurance plan, were you covered by a different plan you purchased yourself, were you covered by an employer, by COBRA, did you have Medicaid or other public coverage, or were you uninsured?”

To a certain extent, there is no right answer. The basic problem is that the pool of uninsured has a lot of churn: people are covered for a while, then lose their jobs, then get another job, etc. So if you had insurance last August, but lost your job and signed up for Obamacare in November, do you count as previously uninsured? According to McKinsey, no. According to Kaiser, yes.

My own guess is that the Kaiser methodology is probably the closest of the four to what we’d normally think of as “uninsured,” and its sample size is big enough to be reliable. In any case, when you combine these surveys with the Gallup results, the most likely number seems to be somewhere around 50 percent. Given the inherent subjectivity of the topic, that’s probably about as good an estimate as we can get. There’s just no reliable way to get precision any higher.

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About Half of Obamacare Exchange Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured

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WARNING: Do NOT Plant This. Ever!

by RusselBenson Posted on May 30, 2014

From:

WARNING: Do NOT Plant This. Ever!

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A Health Care Scandal That’s Way Bigger Than the VA

by LilianW64evhn Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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The VA hospital scandal is basically composed of two separate things:

  1. A longstanding problem of excessive wait times for non-urgent appointments as well as problems with access to the VA system in the first place.
  2. A specific and recent case of hospital officials allegedly gaming the system by putting some vets on a “secret” waiting list so that the performance reports they submitted to Washington would look better than they really were.

We’ve heard a lot about #1, but this is largely a policy problem, not a scandal. No administration has ever secured enough resources from Congress to properly staff the VA system, and the result has been waiting lists and backlogs. In the past few years this has started to improve as more vets have been allowed into the system; funding has increased; mental health has become a bigger priority; the paper-based approval process has become more automated; and the backlog of vets waiting for approval has been cut in half.

The real scandal—in the normal sense of “scandal” as opposed to inefficiency and underfunding—is #2. As scandalous as these charges are, however, they’re localized; small; and entirely nonpartisan. Everyone agrees that heads need to roll if they’re confirmed. That’s in stark contrast to a far, far larger denial of medical services to sick Americans that could be fixed instantly if there were the political will to do it. Ezra Klein explains:

It’s a relief to see so much outrage over poor access to government-provided health-care benefits. But it would be nice to see bipartisan outrage extend to another unfolding health-care scandal in this country: the 4.8 million people living under the poverty line who are eligible for Medicaid but won’t get it because their state has refused Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

As appalling as the wait times are for VA care, the people living in states that refused the Medicaid expansion aren’t just waiting too long for care. They’re not getting it at all. They’re going completely uninsured when federal law grants them comprehensive coverage. Many of these people will get sick and find they can’t afford treatment and some of them will die. Many of the victims here, by the way, are also veterans.

….All in all, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that more than 7.5 million uninsured adults would be eligible for Medicaid but live in a state that has refused the expansion….The point here isn’t to minimize the problems at the VA, which need to be fixed — and fast. But anyone who feels morally outraged over the extended wait times at the VA should be appalled by the literally endless wait times the poor are enduring in the states that are refusing to expand Medicaid.

Fat chance of that, I suppose. Nonetheless, it’s at least as big a scandal as VA #1, and far, far bigger than VA #2.

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A Health Care Scandal That’s Way Bigger Than the VA

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The Alarming Impact of Pesticides on Our Children’s Brains

by HalleyMowll Posted on May 27, 2014

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The Alarming Impact of Pesticides on Our Children’s Brains

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Don’t Ask Me to Explain. You Just Have to See This Photo of Macaulay Culkin.

by BusterCriswell Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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(Knock knock)

“Who’s there?”

“Pizza.”

“Pizza who?”

“Pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band Pizza Underground.”

…

“What?”

“I said, we’re Pizza Underground. We’re a…hey, can you hear me through this thing? Look, maybe you should open the door.”

“No, no, I can hear you fine. Did you say you were a pizza-themed cover band?”

“A pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band, yes. Have you heard of the Velvet Underground?”

“And what are you selling?”

“Well, nothing, really. I mean, I guess technically we’re selling pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover songs.”

“I think you have the wrong house.”

“No, look, you know Macaulay Culkin?”

“My family is just sitting down to dinner. I really don’t have time for this.”

“Macaulay Culkin? The actor? Home Alone, The Good Son? You know him?”

“Yes, I know of Macaulay Culkin.”

“He’s with us! He’s in the band.”

“Please. I don’t want to have to call the police.”

“No, look, I’m going to slide this photo under the door, ok? (slides photo under door) You see that? That’s a photo of Macaulay Culkin wearing a shirt with a picture of Ryan Gosling wearing a shirt with a picture of Macaulay Culkin on it.”

“Now does that not blow your mind?”

…

“Sir?”

…

…

“Sir??”

…

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, it blows my mind.“

“OK…OK! Now we’re cooking with fire! So, how about it, friend? You want to open the door and let us in? It’s freezing out here.”

“Yeah…yeah, OK. (begins unlocking door) Honey, could you make up some more spots at the table? A pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band is going to be joining us for dinner…Don’t ask me to explain. You just have to see this photo of Macaulay Culkin.”

The End.

(via Bullett Media)

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Don’t Ask Me to Explain. You Just Have to See This Photo of Macaulay Culkin.

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