Tag Archives: top stories

Paul Ryan Refuses to Talk About the Cost of His Anti-Poverty Plan

by EUNMadiezhk Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) released a detailed anti-poverty proposal in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. One of Ryan’s top prescriptions seems to have been influenced by his previous career as a personal trainer. He has proposed that recipients of federal benefits get the services of a personal case manager who would help them craft long-term plans, find “opportunities for growth,” and nudge them to make better choices that would lift them out of poverty and off the government dole.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation about how much this might cost. Just for people on food stamps, the federal government would need about 700,000 social workers, to the tune of around $30 billion. On Wednesday, Ryan appeared at a press briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor and fielded questions about his plan, including several about the potential cost of his caseworker proposal.

But Ryan refused to say how much his life-coach-for-the-poor-plan would cost or how the government would fund it. He insisted that he wanted to talk only about “reforming” federal programs. Further explaining his reluctance to discuss money, Ryan, the House GOP’s number-one number-cruncher and the head of the House budget committee, said he didn’t want to talk about “statistics and numbers” because “that’s all we’ll talk about.” He said he didn’t want to distract from his laser-like focus on reforming the safety net.

It’s awfully difficult to discuss policy proposals without any sense of the pricetag, but Ryan claimed that his ideas for reform could be done in any budget context—a view that was greeted with some skepticism by the reporters present. Besides, he said, the caseworker idea isn’t something he’d “mandate,” simply something he recommended. So would this idea be in any legislation he might propose? Ryan was vague. Will he be introducing legislation embodying his anti-poverty plan in the fall? Maybe. Right now, he said, he just wants to keep talking.

Link to article:

Paul Ryan Refuses to Talk About the Cost of His Anti-Poverty Plan

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Paul Ryan Refuses to Talk About the Cost of His Anti-Poverty Plan

Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic Will Remain Open—For Now

by FrederiDarley Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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

The last abortion clinic in Mississippi has been on the brink of closure for nearly two years. But the fight to shutter the Jackson Women’s Health Organization may have ended Tuesday, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the strict anti-abortion measure that would have closed its doors forever.

The court fight to save the clinic began in 2012, after state lawmakers passed a bill requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital—or else face criminal charges. Restrictive anti-abortion bills had already closed several clinics in the state, and, had the Fifth Circuit not ruled against the state, Mississippi was poised to become the first state since Roe v. Wade without a single abortion provider.

Attorneys for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization argued that admitting privileges were unconstitutional and not medically necessary for the safety of its clients. (The clinic, after all, already had a patient-transfer agreement with a local hospital for rare cases in which a patient required hospitalization.) A federal judge was receptive to this argument and blocked the law from going into effect; in response, the state of Mississippi appealed the ruling to the Fifth Circuit.

Amid the legal wrangling, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization attempted to obtain admitting privileges to comply with the law. As Mother Jones has reported, all seven hospitals where the Jackson Women’s Health Organization was eligible for admitting privileges turned the clinic down. This was partly because its providers travel to Mississippi from out of state, and partly because hospitals refused to be associated with abortion.

As Mother Jones reported in 2012:

The doctors’ applications have been rejected by every hospital they’ve approached. Two hospitals wouldn’t let them apply at all. Five others denied the applications for “administrative” reasons, before even completely reviewing the doctors’ qualifications. Their rejection letters cited their policies regarding abortion and “concern about disruption to the hospital’s business within the community.” The clinic wrote follow-up letters to make sure the hospitals understood that the doctors were only seeking privileges to comply with the new law and wouldn’t actually be providing abortions at the hospital, but no dice.

Abortion rights advocates feared that the Fifth Circuit would be hostile to such claims. A three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit upheld a very similar Texas law in March. Appeals courts in the Fourth and Eighth Circuits have also upheld admitting privilege laws.

But on Tuesday, the appeals court ruled, “Mississippi may not shift its obligation to respect the established constitutional rights of its citizens to another state.” It is not yet clear if the state will appeal to the US Supreme Court. But the decision—short of intervention from high court—means the clinic will remain open for the foreseeable future.

Jump to original:

Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic Will Remain Open—For Now

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic Will Remain Open—For Now

How Terrifying Is the New Ebola Outbreak?

by LorrieNuyts Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Two US aid workers in Liberia recently became the latest victims of an Ebola epidemic that health experts are calling “out of control” and the deadliest outbreak of the virus in history. The disease has a high fatality rate. There have been over 1,000 suspected and confirmed cases across Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone since March, and over 660 people have died. Health workers are having trouble aiding victims, the New York Times reports, due to being shut out by fearful communities. Here’s what you need to know about this outbreak.

When and where did it start?

On March 25, 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that 86 suspected cases of Ebola had been reported to the World Health Organization across four southeastern districts in Guinea. At that time, cases were also being investigated in Liberia and Sierra Leone. By April 1, Liberia was reporting eight suspected cases and two deaths. On May 26, a case of Ebola was confirmed in Sierra Leone. Since then, the disease has continued to spread across the region. Guinea has had the highest suspected death toll so far, with 314 fatal cases as of July 20.

Since March, the latest Ebola outbreak has already spread to three neighboring countries CDC

Have there been Ebola outbreaks of this size before?

No, health workers are reporting that this is the deadliest. According to data compiled by the BBC and the World Health Organization, the outbreak that comes closest occurred in 1976, when over 400 people died. Many of those cases occurred in then-Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) cropping up near the Ebola river (for which the disease is named). Since then, there have been several outbreaks across Africa, but none of this scale.

How does Ebola spread?

Ebola can infect humans and animals, and spreads through bodily fluids. Scientists believe that fruit bats are the natural carriers of the virus. According to the World Health Organization, African pig farms often play host to bats, allowing the disease to spread from the bats to pork. Eating “bushmeat“—or the meat from wild animals, such as gorillas, monkeys, or bats—can put you at risk for exposure. Recently, the government of the Cote d’Ivoire (otherwise known as Ivory Coast)—which borders two of the countries enduing the outbreak—prohibited the sale of bush meat. But the government does not have the means to enforce the ban, and it’s still easy to come by. Funerals for victims of Ebola can also be a source of transmission, with friends and family members potentially coming into contact with the blood and other fluids of the deceased. (Within some African cultures, mourners hug and kiss the bodies, making exposure even more likely.)

A monkey head roasts at a Gabon market. Butchering and eating wild animals is one way that Ebola has spread in Africa. David Maitland/Zuma Press

How fatal is Ebola?

One of the problems with treating the virus is that in its earliest stages it mimics a number of other diseases endemic to Africa. Usually within eight to 10 days of infection, according to the CDC, patients experience a fever, a headache, and muscle fatigue. Some people get better, but most—up to 90 percent—get worse. In a victim’s last days, he or she will begin to hemorrhage blood, internally and externally, as the disease lays waste to internal organs. There are no drugs approved for treating Ebola. For the infected, the only hope is that the virus will pass. According to the CDC, the only treatments available fall under the category of “supportive therapy“—providing patients with water, maintaining blood pressure, and treating for complicating infections—with the hope that a patient’s immune system can fight off the virus. Lab researchers have had some luck using drug cocktails to block the disease in animals shortly after exposure, but they haven’t yet tested these treatments on humans.

How easily is Ebola transmitted?

Doctors Without Borders calls Ebola “highly infectious,” and medical staff treating patients must wear full protective suits to avoid contracting the disease themselves. The Ebola virus is so contagious that researchers can only work with it in specially outfitted labs that boast the highest levels of biocontainment. However, David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tells CNN that Ebola can be controlled when the right precautions are taken: “It’s not rocket science to control these outbreaks but instead basic epidemiology: infection control, hygiene practices, contact-tracing, and safe burial practices.”

Is there a vaccine?

There’s no vaccine for Ebola. What is so vexing for researchers is that the virus keeps emerging in new forms. Scientists can’t predict what form the virus will take when it strikes next; a vaccine would have to inoculate a person against all of the variants. But Ebola is adaptive and hard to pin down. Even if a vaccine were developed, researchers worry the virus could adapt and overcome it.

Why are health workers having trouble containing the virus this time?

Marc Poncin, the emergency coordinator in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders, told the New York Times that “we’re not stopping the epidemic.” According to health officials, locals are fearful of aid workers and are threatening violence against them to keep them from entering communities and monitoring the virus, providing supportive therapy, and isolating patients. This has led to difficulties in placing victims into quarantine. In Sierra Leone, for example, the family of a woman who had tested positive for Ebola removed her from the hospital so she could be treated using traditional medicine. The woman has since died.

Health workers in Sierra Leone at a clinic for Ebola patients Youssouf Bah/AP

Where is the virus headed next?

Nigeria is the latest country to report a case of Ebola, with an infected man dying there after arriving from Liberia. (On Sunday, Liberia closed most of its borders.) Nigeria is taking preemptive steps to stop the spread of the virus, including shutting down the hospital where the man died, monitoring people who were on his plane, and putting border checkpoints on high alert.

How dangerous would Ebola be if it arrived in the United States?

Not as dangerous. Dr. Jonathan Epstein, a veterinary epidemiologist and Ebola expert with EcoHealth Alliance, recently told Mother Jones that infections likely wouldn’t be widespread in the United States, because it has better systems in place for controlling outbreaks.

Read original article: 

How Terrifying Is the New Ebola Outbreak?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Terrifying Is the New Ebola Outbreak?

The Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

by MervinValenti Posted on July 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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

At the 1964 Winter Olympics, Eero Mäntyranta won the 15 kilometer cross-country skiing competition by a whopping 40 seconds—a margin of victory that has never been equaled. That same year, he won the 30 kilometer race by a full minute. So what made this legendary Finnish skier such a success?

According to sports journalist David Epstein, Mäntyranta became the “greatest endurance athlete” of his generation in part because of a single mutation to his erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) gene, which helps regulate the production of red blood cells. Remember Lance Armstrong’s blood doping scandal? It turns out that because of his DNA, Mäntyranta had a similar advantage over his competition—but without ingesting or injecting a single cell. Mäntyranta “produced about 50 percent more oxygen-carrying red blood cells than a normal person,” explains Epstein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “So he essentially was naturally what…Lance Armstrong was through doping technology.”

Epstein says Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation is the clearest example of a “sports gene”—a single genetic variant that has the ability to turn someone into a superior athlete. But these genes are rare. More often, says Epstein (whose recent book is also called The Sports Gene), “we’re talking about networks of genes and suites of traits that make people better suited to some sports than others.”

Saying that some people are “better suited” than others sounds a lot like the idea that some of us are born more talented. But in recent years, much of the sports community has embraced the notion that achievement in athletics is attributable largely to logging 10,000 hours (or so) of dedicated training. The “10,000 hour” rule also permeates education in other domains, such as music and chess, where complex skills need to be developed. But with athletes like Mäntyranta in the competition, can this status quo idea possibly still hold true? And what, exactly, is the scientific recipe for building an elite athlete?

Here are a few of the key factors that Epstein lays out:

Start with the right genes. Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation isn’t the only gene variant that can make or break an athletic career. On chromosome two of the human genome, there is a gene that codes for a protein called myostatin. (Myo meaning “muscle,” and statin meaning “to halt.”) For most people, this gene does exactly what its name suggests—it stops the production of muscles. But in rare cases, says Epstein, “someone has a mutant version, and it basically doesn’t tell their muscles to stop growing on time, and they end up being really, really muscle-bound.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, explains Epstein, the first adult determined to have this mutation was a professional sprinter. But it’s been detected in young children, as well. In 1999, for instance, a bouncing baby boy with seemingly superhuman strength was born in Germany. Unlike his roly-poly peers, this baby was ripped. The muscle mass in his lower limbs was off one end of the charts, while his limited body fat was off the other end.

When this “Superbaby” was tested for the presence of myostatin, none was detected in his blood. And other babies with similar mutations have begun to pop up, including Liam Hoekstra, who apparently could do a difficult gymnast move called the iron cross by the time he was 5 months old and could do a pull-up at eight months.

But if one gene can have such a significant effect, what other gene variants might be combined in a person to optimize athletic performance?

In his book, Epstein cites Alun G. Williams and Jonathan P. Folland, scientists in England who are studying 23 gene variants strongly linked to athletic endurance. The chance that any single individual currently on the planet has all 23 variants is incredibly small—less than one in a quadrillion (one thousand million million). The most any one of us can hope for is about 16 of these 23. The chance of having none of these variants, or very few of them, is also extremely small. Most of us have some but not too many. The end result? We need to train to build up endurance.

But genetics can also make a big difference when it comes to that training. “No two people respond to the medicine of training the same way because of differences in their genes,” says Epstein. “And so it’s turning out that the talent of trainability—the ability to get more biological adaptation out of your one hour of training than the next guy or the next girl—is really the most important kind of talent.”

But if we can’t change our genes, what can we do to become better athletes?

Learn to to predict the future. When it comes to professional baseball, says Epstein, “keep your eye on the ball” is useless advice. That’s because Major League pitches take far less than half a second to reach the plate—they’re simply moving faster than the eye can track. What batters are actually keeping track of is a specific pattern of movements that the pitcher is making.

Ted Williams in 1957, on his way to the Major League batting title. AP

The ability to predict where the ball will go based on how the pitcher releases it is the real talent of an all-star hitter. That’s why Mariano Rivera could strike out batter after batter with one pitch: a 90+ mile-per-hour cut fastball whose final destination was very difficult to predict. With just a subtle difference in how much pressure he put on the ball with two of his fingers, he could alter its course dramatically.

That’s also why no amount of trips to the batting cage will turn you into a slugger like Albert Pujols or Ted Williams. “We’ve only just realized that pitching machines are totally worthless for baseball practice,” explains Epstein, “because they don’t teach you to read body movements the way that you need to.”

Putting this idea to the test, softball pitcher Jennie Finch struck out Pujols and other Major League batters during the 2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game—her windup and delivery confounded their ability to predict where the pitch will go, despite the fact that she threw a bigger ball.

To understand how complex skills like hitting a small projectile traveling at speeds of over 90 miles per hour are performed, consider a famous study in which chess players of different levels were given a few seconds to study a chess board. What separated the experts from the amateurs was the fact that grand masters could memorize the location of pieces on the board after looking at it for just three seconds. At first, it seemed as though they had superhuman memory skills. But when the scientists asked them to memorize the placement of pieces on a board that didn’t conform to the rules of the game, they were no better than novices. In other words, what grand masters have actually developed is the ability to organize the board into meaningful units in their mind’s eye—what psychologists call “chunks”—that they can then easily recall.

Major League Baseball players can’t hit Jennie Finch’s pitches. C5813/Wikimedia Commons

We all use chunking to remember complex things: “If I gave you 20 random words right now, you’d have a lot of trouble repeating them back to me,” explains Epstein. “But, if I gave you a 20-word meaningful sentence, you might be able to repeat it back to me or very closely.” Why? Because “you’ve learned a system of grammar and groups of words and phrases that you can break down into meaningful chunks. So, you don’t have to…rely on your working memory.” And, adds Epstein, “it turns out sports works in a very similar way.”

So it’s not that MLB players have superhuman reflexes; instead, over the course of many years of training, they learn to “read” a pitcher’s upper body movements and predict where the ball will end up. “It’s really this kind of cognitive expertise that they’ve learned that allows them to look as if they’re reacting faster than is humanly possible,” says Epstein. “They are judging the field—their version of the chess board—and seeing what’s going to come in the future.”

Sample many sports in childhood—don’t specialize too early. As every parent knows, elite athleticism comes at a high price in the US, with many coaches pressuring talented children to start specialized practice immediately—often to the exclusion of other sports and activities. “AAU basketball has a second graders’ national championships now,” notes Epstein. “This is like kids who are over-hand heaving a ball at a 10-foot rim. They’ve convinced parents it’s like an important part of the scouting pipeline and their kids will get behind if they don’t go.”

Epstein argues that this push towards specialization—which he attributes to the popularization of the 10,000 hours rule—has been a “disaster.”

“There’s now a pretty strong body of evidence that we’ve over-specialized kids too early, and it actually makes them worse athletes,” he says. What Epstein is getting at is that there seems to be a critical “sampling period” before puberty, during which many eventual professional athletes play a variety of sports. Hyper-specialization makes it harder for kids to find the sport that is best suited to their biology. As an example for parents to follow, Epstein points to two-time NBA most valuable player Steve Nash, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was 12 or 13.

Grow up in a small town. The trend towards hyper-specialization might even explain why professional athletes come disproportionately from small towns, far away from elite training programs, instead of from major metropolises. If you’re from a city with a population of more than 5 million people, you’re actually less likely than the average Joe to make it to the NBA. If you come from a town of 50,000 to 99,000 people, your chances are 11 times greater than average of making it to the NFL or the NBA. These towns “are vastly over-represented for producing elite athletes,” says Epstein, “because they’re big enough to have a team, and small enough to avoid all of the hyper-specialization that the 10,000 hours has caused.”

Take a scientist’s approach to your own training. Ultimately, as scientists learn more about the biology of athletic prowess and the skills we need to excel at specific activities, what’s becoming clear is that training needs to be more individualized. Given the highly variable nature of our genes, what can you do to make sure that you’re using those training hours most effectively? Think like a scientist: test and retest your assumptions constantly.

“In studies of kids who go on to become elite, whether it’s in chess, sports or music,” says Epstein, “they tend to more often exhibit that self-regulatory behavior where they’re almost taking a scientist’s view of themselves…and continually evaluating and evaluating. And they better figure out what works for them.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion with skeptical pediatrician Clay Jones.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

See original:  

The Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Science Behind the World’s Greatest Athletes

Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

by CSNMindyihta Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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

When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) laid out a new set of proposals to revamp the federal safety net during a speech on Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, central to his vision was the idea of consolidating federal programs to create a “personalized, customized form of aid—one that recognizes both a person’s needs and their strengths—both the problem and the potential.”

The plan, wrapped in caring language about giving the poor individual attention, has earned plaudits from both the right and the left for avoiding partisanship and offering up a concrete idea that policy makers will have to take seriously. Liberals have given Ryan—an Ayn Rand devotee who on the campaign trail reduced American society to one of makers versus takers and whose budgets have proposed slashing millions in spending on the poor—credit for getting out of the office and spending some time with actual poor people during his year-long “listening tour,” whose genuine impact is evident in his proposal.

Continue Reading »

See the article here:  

Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

by CharlenLowman Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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

When I penned my little opus about almond milk last week, I really didn’t intend to insult anyone’s intelligence, provocative headline aside. What I really wanted to do was encourage people to think about what they’re buying when they buy this hot-selling product. My editors chose the title and I went along, because they know more than me about what makes people click. And people clicked! I’m pretty sure that “Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters” is my most-read piece ever at Mother Jones.

It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond. How does an almond’s water footprint stack up to other foods’?

Reactions mostly hovered in a range between mild annoyance and blind rage. One guy dropped by the Facebook page of the farm I helped found, Maverick Farms, to inform me that he planned to keep drinking almond milk—and spilling it, even. To drive his point home, he even looked up the farm’s phone number and repeated his pledge on the answering machine. Thanks for the update!

The oddest response came from Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, who took the opportunity to school me in the art of the “food troll”:

This fool is talking about how almond milk is not as good as just eating almonds. False comparison. I eat tons of almonds. Love em. And I drink almond milk too. Love it. I can have both. You love regular almonds so much? Do you eat more almonds than me? Not a chance. I eat more almonds than you. And still drink almond milk. Case closed on that particular argument I guess.

Still not convinced? Nolan adds the coup de grace: “If I puked up almond milk it probably wouldn’t even taste that bad relative to other kinds of puke.”

Right. Meanwhile, several people thundered that since I dare question the value of almond milk, I must be a tool for Big Dairy. “Were you paid off by the Dairy Farmers of America to write that piece?” one wag wondered on Twitter, adding, helpfully ” PS I’m no hipster and I love my Almond Milk!”

Actually, my piece did not purport to judge almond milk against the standards of dairy milk and find it wanting. “I get why people are switching away from dairy milk, I wrote, since “industrial-scale dairy production is a pretty nasty business.” I did cop to drinking a bit of kefir, a fermented milk product. But my intention wasn’t to promote Big Dairy, but just to point out that almond milk is nutritionally pretty vapid compared to other products. An eight-ounce serving of Helios brand organic kefir contains 16 grams of protein, vs. 1 gram per serving in most almond milk brands. That’s a remarkable difference. But of course, people consume things for all sorts of good reasons, not just protein content.

Now, I didn’t get into much of an ecological analysis in my piece, but there is an interesting one to make here. Back in May, my colleagues Julia Lurie and Alex Park looked at the literature and found that it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a glass of almond milk and 35 gallons to produce a serving of yogurt. Let’s assume that it takes a similar amount of water to make Helios kefir, which is essentially fermented skim milk. On the surface, the almond milk looks a lot easier on the water supply. But if you look at it on a protein basis, almond milk looks like a disaster: it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a gram of almond milk protein—and less than two gallons to produce a gram of kefir protein.

Even though kefir costs more than $4 per quart vs. about $2 for almond milk, it starts to look like quite a bargain on a protein basis.

Almond milk’s dilute nature lies at the heart of the critique made by Slate’s Maria Dolan, the most thoughtful one I’ve seen of the piece. My basic complaint against almond milk is that it’s a watered-down product: you take something that’s quite nutrient-dense and deluge it with water, essentially selling people a few almonds and a lot of water.

I’m thinking about it in the wrong way, counters Dolan. “Is drowning them in water to create almond milk really a bad thing from an environmental perspective?” she asks. “Just as making meat a garnish, not the centerpiece of your meal, thins the environmental impact of eating beef, so consuming almonds sparingly—by diluting them into milk, for instance—reduces their ecological impact.”

But I’m not sure that almond milk works to moderate people’s almond consumption. California’s rapid, and ecologically troubling, expansion of almond production is largely driven by booming exports, mainly to Asia. But US consumption is booming too. According to the Almond Board of California, the US market consumed 394 million pounds of almonds from the 2007-’08 harvest and 605 million pounds in 2012-’13. That’s a 50 percent jump in five years. And as I noted in my post, almond milk sales are surging at an even faster clip. It seems to me that the almond milk craze, whatever else it is, reflects a clever food industry strategy to sell yet more almonds, not a way for consumers to reduce their environmental impact.

The Almond Board also reports that California now provides 84 percent of the globe’s almonds. Given the state’s severe water constraints, and that current levels of production already require 60 percent of managed US honeybees for pollination, often to disastrous effect, we may all have to ease up—not just on the almond milk, but also on almonds themselves. Hell, even ignorant hipsters like me love almonds.

Excerpt from – 

Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

Glenn Beck Tells Common Core Activists They Shouldn’t Mention His Name

by Luz67Wegjv Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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

On Tuesday, 40 minutes into Glenn Beck’s nationally broadcast “night of action” targeting the Common Core education standards being implemented in schools across the nation, a North Carolina activist named Andrea Dillon announced live that her state’s governor had just signed a law directing the board of education to rewrite its standards—a step shy of jettisoning North Carolina from the initiative outright. A murmur went through the audience of two dozen or so parents and kids at the cinema in Ballston, Virginia where I was watching, one of hundreds of theaters around the country that was broadcasting the interactive event, dubbed “I Will Not Conform” (a nod to Beck’s new book on the standards, Conform). Beck offered a few words of congratulation, and Dillon patted her allies on the back: “North Carolina’s got a lot of gumption.”

It wasn’t the biggest political story of the night—that would be either David Perdue’s victory in the Georgia Republican Senate primary, or President Barack Obama’s consumption of multiple cheeseburgers, depending on your point of view. But Tuesday was a big day for opponents of the Common Core State Standards, a set of math and language-arts guidelines adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia in 2010, and, of late, an object of obsession for Beck and his army of parent activists. North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory became the latest once-supportive governor to hop the fence in opposition to the standards. Last week, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker called on his state to repeal Common Core, echoing an earlier move by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to extricate his state from the standards. (That effort has turned the state board of education and Louisiana’s lieutenant governor against Jindal, and is now mired in litigation.) Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Republican officials in the state have previously been staunch supporters of the standards, an anti-Core teacher holds a narrow lead in the Republican primary for state superintendent—a position with broad powers for Core implementation.

Continue Reading »

Link – 

Glenn Beck Tells Common Core Activists They Shouldn’t Mention His Name

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Glenn Beck Tells Common Core Activists They Shouldn’t Mention His Name

An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

by BlairMullah Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Talk about a David and Goliath case. On Monday, a guy from West Virginia who doesn’t want to pay $21 a year for health insurance scored a victory over the Obama administration in a lawsuit that could deprive nearly 5 million Americans of their newly won health care.

In a 2-1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit sided with plaintiff David Klemencic and gutted a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that provides premium subsidies to millions of low-income Americans. The decision in Halbig v Burwell, a case spearheaded by a battery of conservative groups who backed Klemencic and his co-plaintiffs (many of whom are GOP political operatives), is based on what is essentially a typo in the ACA. The opinion is a symptom of what happens when a dysfunctional Congress can’t manage to do even the simplest part of its job, such as correcting routine drafting errors in legislation.

Hours later, though, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, issued a diametrically opposed decision affirming Obamacare and perhaps setting up a future battle before the Supreme Court.

Here’s the backstory, as I reported last winter:

When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.

That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law…

The Obama administration argues that the language Halbig’s case is premised on is merely a drafting error common in legislation and routinely reconciled after passage. (Indeed, if Congress were functioning normally, such copy mistake would have been corrected by now, but given the level of polarization in that body, it’s been impossible to make such fixes that were once routine.) An amicus brief in the case filed by Families USA, a nonprofit health care advocacy group helping the administration combat some of the bad PR surrounding Obamacare, argues that the plaintiffs are disregarding the vast body of evidence showing that Congress intended for all low-income Americans to be eligible for tax subsidies, regardless of which exchange they used to purchase insurance.

Continue Reading »

Follow this link:  

An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

Inside the AIDS Conference Reeling From Losses Aboard MH17

by LewisOMahony Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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

As news broke last Thursday that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine, it quickly became known that top-level AIDS researchers and activists were among the dead. Initially it was reported as 100 or more, but that number has now been debunked. At least six are confirmed dead, including the celebrated Dutch AIDS researcher Dr. Joep Lange, 59, who was en route to the world’s largest AIDS conference, held this year in Melbourne, Australia. All 298 people on board the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed.

Sunday night’s opening ceremony of the 20th International AIDS Conference, a biennial gathering run by the International Aids Society (IAS), was used to pay tribute to the six colleagues, who were honored as some of the brightest minds in the field of HIV research and activism.

“I think it was a touching opening ceremony,” Craig McClure, UNICEF’s top HIV/AIDS advocate told me. “I think for most of us, we’re sill in a state of shock.”

McClure was close friends with Dr. Lange, a former IAS president and world-renowned professor of medicine in Amsterdam, as well as Lange’s partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren, who worked at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development. Both were killed in the attack.

“Joep was really a giant in HIV research,” McClure said. Lange “changed the face of the epidemic”, he said, through his pioneering early work on combination antiretroviral trials that led to a crucial, and hard-won, advancement in the fight against AIDS. Antiretroviral therapy consists of the combination of at least three drugs that act in concert to suppress the HIV virus, slowing its replication in a patient’s body. Deployed in the mid-1990s, this treatment allowed an HIV diagnosis to be viewed as something other than an automatic death sentence.

“His contribution there in the early years was phenomenal,” a clearly emotional McClure told me when I reached him by phone as the conference’s formal schedule kicked off earlier today (Australian time). “But he was also very involved in the early years of work on prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and the role antiretrovirals play there, and pediatric treatment.”

“But he didn’t stop there,” McClure said. Lange would have continued to play a major role in going “that final mile” to end the epidemic in the next decade or so, he said, highlighting Lange’s energetic ability to work across varying fields of policy, medicine, and politics to hammer out responses to the spread of the disease, especially in poor countries.

McClure himself was appointed Executive Director of the International Aids Society in 2004 by Lange when he was president of the organization. “We were very, very close friends,” he said. Of Lange’s partner Jacqueline van Tongeren, McClure added, “They were very much in love. She was as dedicated to the HIV response as he was. It’s a very personal loss.”

Early reports that around 100 delegates were lost aboard MH17—repeated by President Obama on Friday—now appear to have been wrong. IAS has confirmed the names of six advocates who had been scheduled to attend the conference, but said that the number may increase with new information.

“The number that we have confirmed through our contacts with authorities in Australia, in Malaysia, and Dutch authorities as well, is six people,” said IAS president Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. “It may be a little bit more, but not the numbers that have been announced.”

In addition to Lange and van Tongeren, IAS confirmed the deaths of Pim de Kuijer, an AIDS campaigner for Stop Aids Now!; Martine de Schutter, a program manager at the same organization; Lucie van Mens, director of support at the Female Health Company; and Glenn Thomas, a former BBC journalist and spokesman for the World Health Organization.

McClure said it was important the conference go ahead to honor these six lost colleagues. “This community, we’ve lost 35 million people in the last 30 years to AIDS, so we know what it means to lose friends, to lose patients, to lose family members,” he said. “So this is not the first loss, and one of the things that has come together over the years is our collective sense of loss and our anger at the epidemic, and the loss of Joep and Jacqueline and the others on that plane just brings us together again and reminds us of why we’re doing this work, and gives us again that sense of solidarity.”

IAS president Barré-Sinoussi urged delegates to honor their memory by redoubling efforts to fight AIDS. “I strongly believe that all of us being here for the next week to discuss and learn is indeed what our colleagues who are no longer here with us would have wanted,” she said.

Ken Legins, who works with McClure as a senior advisor to UNICEF on HIV among children and adolescents, said Tuesday’s scheduled candle-light vigil in Melbourne’s Federation Square will incorporate memories of those lost aboard MH17, with memories of those taken by AIDS in the last two years. “We’re used to remembering people that die of AIDS, and now I’m going to remember people because they’re shot out of the sky. It just seems unfair but it’s a community that’s used to dealing with things that are unfair,” Legins said.

“With the same passion, caring, and love that we have always drawn upon to adjust to this epidemic, we will adjust to the challenges of managing the loss of the people on that flight,” he said. “I really think you’ll see recovery. But that’s not to say that people are not greatly affected by what happened, it’s just fucking unbelievable.”

More – 

Inside the AIDS Conference Reeling From Losses Aboard MH17

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Inside the AIDS Conference Reeling From Losses Aboard MH17

Check Out These Vintage Photos of New York City’s 1970s Punk Playground

by TatianaPropstin Posted on July 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Two notable recent books from Glitterati Incorporated take readers deep into New York City’s 1970s punk underground. Playground: Growing Up In the New York Underground by Paul Zone, with Jake Austin (of Roctober fame!), features photos and firsthand accounts from a foot soldier in the rock and roll wars waged in the city’s now infamous clubs, including Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. White Trash Uncut, meanwhile, comes out of Andy Warhol’s factory scene and, as you might expect, takes an artier look at the New York scene.

Given that my tastes tend more towards the Ramones/Dead Boys/Dictators and less Warhol/Waters, Playground hits a real sweet spot. Zone’s photos pull back the curtain on that time and place in a way few other books on the ’70s NYC scene have done. Sure, you get plenty of (mediocre) performance photos. But that isn’t why you’re here. Where Playground shines is in its casual photos of friends—famous and not—behind-the-scenes, after hours and off guard, almost 240 pages of them. It also brings John Holstrom’s awesome oral history of the early New York punk scene, “Please Kill Me,” to life. It’s a perfect companion.

With the recent passing of Tommy Elderly/Ramone, Playground is particularly timely. It’s an exciting visual romp through a unique period in the history of rock and roll. Looking through the photos, it’s hard not to notice how many of the people featured have died, many way before their prime: drugs (too many to list), AIDS (which also took Zone’s brother, Miki), cancer (three of the original Ramones) and weird car crashes (Stiv Bators). How the hell are all the Stones still alive and the Ramones all dead? Here are some samples from that book:

Sylvain Sylvain, Johnny Thunders, and Jerry Nolan (New York Dolls) at Max’s. (August 1973)

Tish and Snooky at Manic Panic on St. Marks Place (1978)

Debbie Harry (Blondie) at Max’s. (1975)

Dee Dee Ramone and Connie Gripp in Max’s kitchen. (1975)

Wayne County at the Coventry, in Queens. (1973)

Crayola at Max’s. (1977)

Originally published in 1977, White Trash Uncut, by Andy Warhol Factory devotee and one time Interview staff photographer Christopher Makos, quickly went out of print and became something of a collector’s item. Finally reprinted, the book consists of a mix of artier photos—close-ups of body parts and portraits of players in the art and music scenes, focusing on that point of intersection between the two in venues like Max’s Kansas City. It leans heavy on photos of the well-known, if not outright famous: Richard Hell, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, the Dead Boys, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, David Bowie, Divine, Man Ray, John Waters, Marilyn Chambers and plenty other luminaries of that era. The reprint includes 25 photos not included in the original book. Here’s a sampling:

Punk rock fans, New York City.

David Bowie in Los Angeles.

Divine and John Waters

A hustler, posing. (Jeans by Fiorruci, Milan.)

Earring by Gillette.

The two books go well together, together giving a representative look at the intersection of music, art, scene-making, fashion, hustling, and hanging out that made the early New York City punk scene so indelible.

Visit site:

Check Out These Vintage Photos of New York City’s 1970s Punk Playground

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Check Out These Vintage Photos of New York City’s 1970s Punk Playground