Tag Archives: health

5 Reasons to Kick Factory Farmed Meats Off Your Plate

by HungHolub80 Posted on October 8, 2016

These days, just about everything is mass-produced, including our food, with large, factory-style farms churning out a seemingly endless supply ofmeat, chickens,eggsanddairy products. All that mass production equals abundance and lower prices, but if those factory-farmed products are eroding your health, is the savings really worth it? Not in my book. Heres whats really going on with mass-produced meats and why you should steer clear:

1. Factory-farmed animals eat crap. Literally.

To keep production costs low, animals raised in factory farms are fed the cheapest possible grains and feeds containing among other things, by-product feedstuff, which begs the question, whats feedstuff? Its a nausea-inducing assortment of disturbing ingredients, including municipal garbage, stale cookies, poultry manure, chicken feathers, bubble gum and even restaurant waste. So, when you eat factory-farmed animals, youre also getting an unintentional serving of feedstuff.

In short, their bad diet becomes your bad diet which is counter-productive to your health.

2. Bad diets make for sick animals and people too.

Cud-chewing critters such as cattle, dairy cows, goats, bison and sheep were designed to eat fibrous grasses, plants, and shrubsnot starchy, low-fiber grains and feedstuffs. When these animals are switched from pasture greenery to grains, many wind up suffering from a number of disorders and painful conditions. The sickened animals are then given chemical additives, plus constant, low-level doses of antibiotics.

Their drugs in turn enter your system when you eat antibiotic-treated animals, settingthe stage for drug-resistance in your body, particularly if youre a heavy-duty carnivore.

3. Lousy ingredients wont create a nutritious product.

It should come as no surprise that animals fed a crappy diet will make for a less nutritious meal. Compared to grass-fed, factory-farmed, grain-fed meats have less vitamin E, beta-carotene, and little of the two health-promoting fats called omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA.

So whats the end-result of the feed-em-fast-and-cheap factory farmed method? Inferior food with negligible nutrients and more of the unhealthy fats. Small wonder the stuff is so much cheaper than grass-fed.

4. Stress hurts everyone.

If your goal is to sustain wellness, factory-farmed products just dont deliver thenutritionalgoods. In factory farms, chickens, turkeys, and pigs are typically raised in inhumane conditions, tightly packed into cages and pens, unable to practice normal behaviors, such as rooting, grazing, and roosting.

In these conditions, the animals get stressed and wind up producing products that are lower in a number of key vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids talk about empty calories!

5. Factory farming pollutes the earth.

In a conventional feedlot operation, for example, confined cattle deposit large amounts of manure in a small amount of space. The manure must be collected and removed. As it costs money to haul it away, the manure is often dumped nearby, close to the feedlot. As a result, the surrounding soil gets over-saturated with the stuff, resulting in ground and water pollution. But when animals are raised on pasture, their manure is a welcome source of organic fertilizer, not a waste management problem.

Bottom line: raising animals on pasture is kinder to the environment.

In short, though factory farming enables us to have plenty of cheap and convenient food, its food with little nutritional benefit, that can increase your resistance to antibiotics as it pollutes your air, land and water. With so little going for it, doesnt it seem slightly crazy to eat factory-farmed meats? It certainly does to me which is why I strongly suggest that if youre going to eat meat, buy the good stuff, even if it means having to pay a bit more or buy less of it. Choose grass-fed beef, lamb, bison and poultry, to insure that youre eating nutritious and healthy meats, as nature intended.

This article originally appeared onDrFrankLipman.com, and reposted with permission from Naturally Savvy.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Reasons to Kick Factory Farmed Meats Off Your Plate

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Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

by KatrinaSxn Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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The withdrawal of Aetna from many of its Obamacare markets has unleashed a torrent of commentary about how Obamacare is now well and truly doomed. From Republicans, this is the usual hot air. From Democrats, it’s a little different. It’s also way overblown, and I’m happy to see Jonathan Chait make the case for Obamacare’s basic solvency here. Go read it.

For myself, I just want to focus on one of Chait’s points: The reason Aetna withdrew is that they weren’t making money. The reason they weren’t making money is because their premiums were too low. The reason their premiums were too low is because they were competing with other insurers for business. In other words, competing on a level playing field, they couldn’t succeed. That’s life in a free market.

So what happened? For some reason, insurers underpriced their policies substantially when Obamacare was introduced. It’s possible that their actuaries all badly miscalculated the makeup of the market. Or it’s possible that they were underpricing deliberately as a way of building market share. Or maybe a combination of both.

My own guess is that the underpricing was mostly deliberate. After all, even the Congressional Budget Office had a pretty good idea of what average premiums ought to be, and it’s hard to believe that a bunch of experienced insurance companies couldn’t do the same math as the CBO. Either way, though, this is, once again, life in a free market. Some vendors make mistakes and fail. Some can’t compete and fail. Some just decide to focus on other markets.

The flip side of this is that free markets usually stabilize eventually. In the case of Obamacare, this means premiums have to go up. Sorry. However, as that happens, new insurers are likely to enter. Eventually supply will more or less equal demand, and the market will find an equilibrium. This is why I’m much less panicked over Obamacare’s immediate problems than most people.

Obamacare is an artificial market in many ways, but that’s true of health care in general, which is highly regulated and has well-known eccentricities. Nonetheless, Obamacare is a market, and right now it’s operating like one. Prices are looking for an equilibrium, consumers are deciding whether to participate, and vendors are jockeying for position. That’s not painless, but then, nobody ever said capitalism was painless.

Of course, if you do want painless, we know how to do that too: true national health care funded through taxes. Dozens of countries do this, and it works fine.

Short of that, we could still reduce the pain considerably. Is Obamacare too expensive for many people? Yes. That could be fixed by increasing subsidies. Are insurers losing money in the early years? Yes. That could be largely fixed by funding the risk corridors. Are the poor still underserved? Yes. That could be addressed by adopting the Medicaid expansion in all states. Are there plenty of details here and there that ought to be cleaned up? Yes. That could be fixed via legislation.

If Republicans actually cared about providing health care to people, all of this would be trivial. But they don’t. To the extent that Obamacare has problems, this is why. There’s nothing inherent in the design that prevents it from operating successfully. In fact, as the chart on the right shows, even now, with all its problems, Obamacare is operating more successfully than anybody thought it would when it was first passed. 20 million newly insured people is nothing to sniff at.

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Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

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We Have Effective Treatment for Hepatitis C. So Why Don’t States Give It to 100,000 Inmates?

by IsabellaS44 Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Less than 1 percent of inmates with hepatitis C are receiving treatment in state prisons, according to a new study by prison officials, doctors, and researchers. It’s largely because prisons can’t afford the drugs they need to fight the dangerous liver disease that spreads through blood and bodily fluids.

Hepatitis C kills more Americans than any other infectious disease, including HIV and tuberculosis; about 17 percent of the prison population in America is suffering from it, compared with 1 percent of the general population. New treatments have been developed but are extremely expensive, so over the last two years, inmates in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania have sued for access to the drugs.

The study, published in Health Affairs, comes on the heels of those lawsuits. It was conducted by researchers at Yale University in collaboration with the Association of State Correctional Administrators, which includes the heads of corrections agencies in every state as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Researchers collected data from 41 states about hepatitis C infections and treatment in prisons. They found that more than 106,000 inmates in state prisons had the disease as of January 2015, and of those, only about 950, or less than 0.9 percent were being treated.

Prison officials who helped conduct the study have blamed the high cost of treatment. In 2013, new drugs were released that have proved very effective, curing the infection in 90 percent of cases in a few months. (Previous treatment options cured roughly half of cases, took much longer, and resulted in debilitating side effects.) But the cost of the new drugs can be prohibitive: A 12-week course of medication can range from $54,600 to $94,500, depending on the particular drug.

Some government agencies can get discounts. The federal prison system receives 24 percent off, while the Department of Veterans Affairs may have a discount of 50 percent, the researchers found. But state prisons aren’t so lucky. Many of them get a discount of less than 10 percent, and one state gets no discount at all. As a result, state prison officials say they must make tough choices about whom to treat.

Treating hepatitis C patients “requires resources and discounts we don’t have,” A.T. Wall, director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “What we desperately need are less costly drugs and more funding.”

Corrections departments in 16 states reported spending at least 10 percent of their total budget for drugs on hepatitis C medication. But states could actually save money in the long run if they invest in treatment right away, the researchers noted. When left untreated, patients with hepatitis C may need a liver transplant, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they can spread the infection to others. To get the drugs for less money, the researchers encouraged state prisons to partner with qualified health centers that can receive discounts through a federal program.

Thomas Castelli, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing inmates in Tennessee, said in a statement, “Incarcerating people under conditions that erode their health, safety and human dignity amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which not only has devastating long-term effects for those individuals, but which undermines the purported purpose of a rehabilitative criminal justice system.”

Health Affairs

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We Have Effective Treatment for Hepatitis C. So Why Don’t States Give It to 100,000 Inmates?

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Here Is When You Should Get Your Flu Shot

by WilburnMcLarty Posted on October 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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As flu season draws nearer, you may have noticed ads in your local pharmacy urging you to get your annual flu shot. On Thursday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doubled down on that message, urging Americans to get their vaccine as soon as they can. But last week, Americans got some conflicting advice. Some vaccine experts have suggested that it may be better to wait to get your flu shot. So which is it: Get your shot now or wait until the end of the month?

The conundrum is rooted in evidence that the immunity you get from your flu shot may wane over time, especially if you’re over the age of 65. Two weeks after you get your shot, your body develops antibodies—like little soldiers in your bloodstream that protect you from an influenza infection. The CDC recommends that everyone over the age of six months get a flu shot, and the immunity boost is especially important for children and the elderly, who are more vulnerable to complications. But some studies show that those antibodies may start to decline before the end of the flu season.

That’s why Laura Haynes, an immunology expert at the University of Connecticut Center on Aging, told Kaiser Health News that the ideal time to get your flu shot is sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

“If you’re over 65, don’t get the flu vaccine in September. Or August,” she said. Last year, the flu season peaked in December.

According to Kaiser Health News, the push to get people to vaccinate early is partly driven by economics. As more and more pharmacies offer flu shots, it makes sense for them to offer their vaccines as soon as they’re available in order to bring in more customers—even if it’s well before the flu season has begun.

However, waiting to get your vaccine carries its own risks. First and foremost, some people who delay getting their flu shot may simply forget to get one. An early vaccine is better than no vaccine at all.

“The problem is that a vaccination deferred is often a vaccination forgotten,” warned Tom Frieden, director of the CDC. At the annual National Foundation for Infectious Diseases press conference on flu vaccines, Frieden noted that even a small uptick of 5 percent in vaccination coverage could prevent nearly 10,000 hospitalizations.

In fact, last year saw a slight decline in the number of people who got vaccinated. About 45 percent of people got their vaccination last year, down about 1.5 percentage points compared with the previous year. And the largest decrease was among folks over the age of 50. According to Arthur Reingold, an epidemiology expert at the University of California-Berkeley and a member of the CDC’s immunization advisory committee, last week’s push to get people vaccinated is partly about keeping those numbers up.

“Each year, we have the challenge of getting people out the door—to their providers, to their drug store, to their work site—to do this,” Reingold told me. “So I would imagine that this suggestion that people get their flu shot now is partly to try to ensure that we don’t see a further decline in how many people actually do that.”

It’s also not entirely clear when your flu vaccine starts to wear off. Some studies show that you may still carry protection from your vaccination the previous year if the flu strains didn’t change. And there’s another reason you might not want to delay too long: You never know when the flu will arrive in your neighborhood. According to the CDC, the flu season can begin as early as October.

Overall, Reingold says, waiting a couple of weeks probably won’t make that much of a difference.

“My advice would be to get the flu shot whenever it’s convenient and not worry so much about trying to time it perfectly,” he said.

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Here Is When You Should Get Your Flu Shot

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Today Is the Anniversary of a Dark Day in Abortion Rights History

by ArethaMaxie Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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For decades, millions of low-income women have been prevented from getting Medicaid coverage for their abortions—a reality that disproportionately affects abortion access for women of color. The reason? The Hyde Amendment, an appropriations rider preventing the use of federal funding for most abortions. It was first passed in the House 40 years ago today.

Even in 1976, abortion rights advocates recognized that this amendment would prove detrimental to women’s reproductive health care access. Soon after its passage, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups launched a movement to circumvent Hyde by restoring Medicaid coverage for abortions through state constitutions. Today, 15 states provide public funds for abortion coverage. But efforts to repeal the federal funding ban have gained new momentum over the last year, beginning with the introduction of the EACH Woman Act in Congress in July 2015. The bill has been stuck in committee, but this summer another proposal to repeal Hyde cropped up, this time in the Democratic Party platform, a first. Hillary Clinton also announced her support for a repeal. Now, Democrats are trying to use this momentum—as well as the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, striking down two abortion regulations in Texas—to rejuvenate debate about the country’s ban on public funding for abortions.

But here’s the catch: Even if Hyde is repealed, an old and relatively obscure Supreme Court case, Harris v. McRae, could stand in the way of making public funding for abortion a reality.

The McRae case dates back to 1976, three years after the Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. In those in-between years, low-income women on Medicaid could use their insurance to cover the costs of abortion. And they did: An estimated 300,000 women each year used federal funds through Medicaid to help pay to end their pregnancies. Female federal employees, military personnel, and federal prison inmates also relied on federal money for abortion coverage.

But that changed in 1976, when a freshman congressman from Illinois, Henry Hyde, tacked on to a budget bill an amendment to ban the use of federal dollars toward abortion coverage. Hyde made clear on the House floor that his goal in proposing this amendment was to curb abortion access as much as possible within the confines of the law: “I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” he said. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the HEW Medicaid bill.”

Immediately after the Hyde Amendment was enacted, a group of abortion rights advocates, including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of women who needed Medicaid abortions and doctors who wanted to provide them, arguing that the law was unconstitutional because it didn’t equally protect the rights of poor women.

In a 5-to-4 decision in 1980, the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment, ruling that even though women should have the choice to abort, the government doesn’t have an obligation to help. “The Supreme Court basically said, ‘The government isn’t creating the problem,'” says Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University. “‘If women are too poor to get an abortion, that’s not our problem, that’s just life.'”

Congress has approved the amendment every year since 1980, which it has to do because the measure is still just a rider on the budget. Debate over Hyde more or less went dormant after McRae, save for a failed attempt to drop the rider during the Clinton administration. As a result of Hyde, an estimated 1 in 4 low-income women aren’t able to get the abortions they want because they can’t pay for the procedure.

But Harris v. McRae means getting rid of public funding bans won’t be so easy; even if Hyde no longer exists, prohibitions on Medicaid coverage for abortion would still be constitutional, thanks to McRae. States would not be required to change the way they use public money to cover abortion. And given the conservative and often volatile politics around abortion at the state level, it’s unlikely most would make an effort to do so.

“To end Hyde but to keep McRae in place is to allow public insurance for abortion to float on the political wind,” says Jill E. Adams, a lawyer and the executive director of the Center for Reproductive Rights and Justice at the University of California-Berkeley. “My guess is it would remain the status quo.”

That’s why Adams and CRRJ have focused their attention not on ditching Hyde, but on overturning McRae. “The dream is for the court to say, ‘The nature of the abortion right compels the state to furnish the resources necessary to ensure equal access by all people,'” Adams says, because it would effectively invalidate public funding bans.

Repeal-Hyde advocates, including House Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.), probably know that doing away with the budget rider will not remedy the problem. Lee, along with more than 120 co-sponsors, introduced the EACH Woman Act, a bill to require abortion coverage in Medicaid and other public health insurance programs. In that case, with McRae still alive, federal law and Supreme Court precedent would contradict each other. And yet, according to Adams, the law and the ruling would coexist until another court case was brought.

Either way, the two strategies to overturn federal funding bans might not prove successful anytime soon, despite the momentum from Whole Women’s Health, according to Ziegler. “In terms of the climate in Congress and the will to move abortion policy, it’s going to be really hard to get rid of Hyde.”

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Today Is the Anniversary of a Dark Day in Abortion Rights History

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

by DieterBainton Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2009, trains arrived in Uniontown, Alabama carrying four millions tons of coal ash, the toxic residue from burning coal. The ash was recovered from a spill in Kingston, Tennessee—a town that is more than 90 percent white—and brought to a new landfill less than a mile from the residential part of Uniontown, which is 90 percent black. Soon, Uniontown residents began reporting breathing problems, rashes, nausea, nosebleeds, and more.

“The smell, the pollution, and the fear affect all aspects of life—whether we can eat from our gardens, hang our clothes or spent time outside,” resident Esther Calhoun later said.

Uniontown residents filed a complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights in 2013, alleging that the waste was disproportionately affecting black property owners. By allowing the landfill to exist, they said, Alabama was violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandates that federeal funds not be used in a discriminatory purpose. The EPA is supposed to respond to such complaints within 6 months. Three years after filing the complaint, Uniontown residents are still waiting for an answer.

The story is one of many detailed in a scathing report by the US Commission on Civil Rights, a government watchdog group, on the EPA’s “long history” of not effectively enforcing its anti-discrimination policies. “EPA does not take action when faced with environmental justice concerns until forced to do so,” it reads. “When they do act, they make easy choices and outsource any environmental justice responsibilities onto others.”

For years, critics have accused the EPA of neglecting communities of color, pointing to cases from toxic air in Richmond, California to lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

The report sheds light on why this might be the case: Despite receiving early 300 discrimination complaints since 1993, the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights has “never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history,” the report found. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity found that it takes the EPA a year, on average, to decide to accept or dismiss a Title VI omplaint, and that the agency dismisses or rejects the discrimination complaints in more than 9 out of 10 cases.

Much of the US Commission on Civil Rights report focuses on coal ash, which typically contains arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals that are “associated with cancer and various other serious health effects,” according to the EPA. The ash is America’s second largest industrial waste stream (after mining waste), with 130 million tons generated each year—more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Until recently, the coal ash was typically dumped in unlined pits and covered with water, sometimes contaminating local water sources.

In 2014, the EPA came out with the first ever a coal ash storage rule—after environmental groups sued the agency for evading its responsibility to revise its waste regulations. The regulations say that new coal ash pits must be lined, and unlined pits need to be cleaned up—but only if they’re connected to active power plants and found to be polluting groundwater. What’s more, the rule doesn’t allow federal enforcement, leaving lawsuits as the only mechanism of ensuring that the guidelines are followed.

The US Commission on Civil Rights report took issue with these weaknesses, saying the rule “requires low-income and communities of color to collect complex data, fund litigation and navigate the federal court system—the very communities that the environmental justice principles were designed to protect.”

It recommends that the EPA bring on additional staff to respond to discrimination complaints and handle the current backlog (some cases are decades old). It calls for the agency to classify coal ash as hazardous waste, test water near coal ash ponds in poor and minority communities, and study the health effects of the waste. It also points out that all this will be difficult without funding from Congress—currently, only eight EPA staff members are directly responsible for Title VI compliance.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA said that the report had “serious and pervasive flaws” and included factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of EPA findings. Mustafa Ali, environmental justice advisor to EPA head Gina McCarthy, said, “EPA has a robust and successful national program to protect minority and low-income communities from pollution.”

In places like Uniontown, Alabama, it’s hard to see evidence of such a program. “EPA is more focused on process than on outcomes; more focused on rhetoric than results,” wrote commission chairman Martin Castro in in the report. “By any measure, its outcomes are pathetic when it comes to environmental justice.”

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

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The Clinton Foundation Sure Is a Great Charity

by CaseyYZQswynlze Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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When it comes to charity, Dylan Matthews is pretty hardnosed. To earn his approval, a charity better focus on truly important problems and be damn good at it. So how about the Clinton Foundation? After starting out as a skeptic, he says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the Clinton Foundation is a real charitable enterprise that did enormous good.” In particular, he praises the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which helped lower the cost of HIV drugs and saved untold lives. But there’s a catch:

And—perhaps uncomfortably for liberals and conservatives alike — it is exactly the kind of unsavory-seeming glad-handing and melding of business and politics for which Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken years of criticism that led to its greatest success….The deals made required buy-in from developing governments. The person tasked with getting that buy-in was a former US president with existing relationships with many of those people. Bill Clinton essentially used his chumminess with foreign politicians and pharmaceutical executives, the kind of thing about the Clinton Global Initiative that earns suspicious news coverage, to enlist their help in a scheme to expand access to HIV/AIDS drugs.

I don’t get it. Why should this make anyone feel uncomfortable? Lots of people have star power, but very few have star power with both rich people and foreign leaders. Bill Clinton is one of those few, so he chose a project that (a) could save a lot of lives, (b) required buy-in from both rich people and foreign leaders, and (c) was right at the cusp where an extra push could really make a difference.

I can’t even imagine why anyone would consider this unsavory, unless they’ve lived in a cave all their lives and don’t understand that glad-handing and chumminess are essential parts of how human societies operate. Matthews may be right that many people feel uneasy about this, but I can’t figure out why. It sounds like Clinton chose to do something that his particular mix of experience and character traits made him uncommonly good at. That’s pretty smart.

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The Clinton Foundation Sure Is a Great Charity

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

by JoleenRayner Posted on September 19, 2016

Mother Jones

Donald Trump used the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey to amp up his call for profiling of Muslims. “You know, our police are amazing—our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, referring to terrorists. But, he said, “they’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling, and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”

Only a few days after picking up the endorsement of the nation’s largest police union, Trump was, without evidence, making an incendiary accusation about some of his most important supporters—that police are knowingly letting terrorists walk free because they’re too politically correct. (In reality, the Elizabeth, New Jersey, police department that apprehended the alleged bomber was not familiar with the suspect, although the family’s chicken shop had received noise complaints.)

Just as notable is what Trump proposed instead. As an example of what more effective policing would look like, the Republican presidential nominee pointed to Israel. “You know, in Israel they profile,” he said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do.” If a person looks suspicious in Israel, “they will take that person in.” He added, “They’re trying to be politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse.”

There are many components to Israeli-style profiling, but a key aspect is racial profiling. Being of “Arab nationality” is enough to get you flagged by screeners, interrogated, and maybe strip-searched at an Israeli airport. The US State Department’s travel advisory page for Israel even includes a warning about the country’s racial profiling: “Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.” Case in point: Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, was detained and interrogated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2010, despite having just returned from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump, for his part, has previously made clear that he’s interested in profiling Muslims specifically. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he told Yahoo News in November when asked if he’d consider warrantless wiretapping of American Muslims. He added, “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” In that same interview, he declined to rule out creating a database of Muslims in the United States and suggested the government should conduct more surveillance of mosques. He proposed hiring ex-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose department’s “Demographics Unit” spied on select “ancestries of interest” and even infiltrated a Muslim Students Association rafting trip. (For its years of work, Kelly’s Demographics Unit produced a total of zero terrorism indictments and was ultimately shut down as a result of a lawsuit.) Trump even entertained the idea that the government could shut down mosques.

A few weeks later, Trump took his religious profiling several giant steps further, unveiling his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump has never clarified how such a ban would be enforced, but it would by definition entail wide-scale profiling by customs officials. That proposal is still posted on his website. Trump revisited the subject in June, after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said, invoking Israel as an example of a successful program. He has repeatedly cited racial profiling—or fear of being accused of racial profiling—in his discussion of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack, alleging that neighbors of the couple had seen bombs scattered across the floor but not done anything. This was, again, baseless; there is no evidence that anyone ever saw the bombs.

Trump’s positions on many issues have fluctuated wildly. But his solution to threats against Americans has been uncharacteristically consistent, if alarming to many observers: an expanded, unconstitutional police state targeting a religious minority.

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

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The Hidden Life of Trees – Peter Wohlleben & Tim Flannery

by Myrna Posted on September 13, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Hidden Life of Trees

What They Feel, How They Communicate —Discoveries from a Secret World

Peter Wohlleben & Tim Flannery

Genre: Nature

Price: $16.99

Publish Date: September 13, 2016

Publisher: Greystone Books

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


In The Hidden Life of Trees , Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware. Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group. As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group. Drawing on groundbreaking new discoveries, Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.

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The Hidden Life of Trees – Peter Wohlleben & Tim Flannery

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I Contain Multitudes – Ed Yong

by Myrna Posted on September 13, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

I Contain Multitudes

The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Ed Yong

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 9, 2016

Publisher: Ecco

Seller: HarperCollins


Joining the ranks of popular science classics like The Botany of Desire and The Selfish Gene, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin—a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth. Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Ed Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squid with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people. Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.

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I Contain Multitudes – Ed Yong

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