Sunday, December 23rd, 2012
MATTHEW YGLESIAS, - Slate
Stephan: Here is an aspect of Obamacare about which you may be unaware. It has the potential, as this report describes, to seriously change one of the biggest health damagers in our society -- the fast food industry. Ultimately, what happens is going to depend on how you react.
One of the least-noticed elements of Obamacare is a federal rule requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus starting in 2013. Similar laws have been enacted already on a state or local basis in several jurisdictions, but it’s only now that the policy is going national that it really makes sense for companies to start building strategic decisions around it.
That corporate decision-making is the key to whether the new rule drives meaningful gains in public health. If chains continue to emphasize maximum fat at minimum cost, eating habits probably won’t change much. But if the labeling regulations really emphasize the dangers of high-fat foods and the benefits of fruits and vegetables, it could encourage healthier eating.
One chain that seems potentially poised to benefit is Chop’t Creative Salad Company, a D.C. and New York chain that’s a personal lunchtime favorite of mine and sells what some would consider outrageously expensive salads. When I asked founder Tony Shure about the new law last week, he wasn’t incredibly eager to engage, noting that ‘very few people find politics appetizing,
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Sunday, December 23rd, 2012
Stephan: In answer to a question several people asked me today: I do read the comments that you post. And I also read the emails many of you write me personally. If you have written me you know you have received a response. In both instances the piece yesterday about the NRA produced a lot of mail. The study Paul Smith cites in his comment is, I am sorry to say, very poorly designed, and reaches conclusions that are apples and oranges put together. It is junk science.
Common sense should tell you that a bunch of armed civilians in a dark movie theater having a shoot out with some nutcase, with bullets flying around from all directions would not end well. Anyone who has been in combat in the service knows that having a number of people shooting at one another is very scary, and people lose control. Even supposedly well-trained police in all too many instances do so in a fire fight, and end up spraying bullets all over the place, often killing or wounding people in the vicinity who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There have been several recent examples of this.
The NRA's idea of a paramilitary public, with everyone going around armed is insane. I mean really insane. I am not anti-gun. I was, until I got out of the service, where I was a medical corpsman, an avid competitive shooter. However, I was never interested in hunting, nor could I see it as a sport. I was by Army standards an expert marksman, and potential sniper. With a 30-06 and a scope, unless the deer also had a weapon, hunting to me was like shooting a cow in your driveway from your front door. Sport had nothing to do with it.
However, I could see how it might be important as a source of protein for a family, although that was never relevant to my life. So although I don't hunt, don't even own a gun anymore, I can see its attraction, particularly in rural areas, and I think the Second Amendment is important.
But I can see no reason whatever for a private citizen to own an assault rifle with a 100 round drum magazine, silencer, and special bullets -- all of which as one of my readers, Rick Berger, demonstrated to me can be purchased online in a few minutes.
We require people who want to drive a car to be trained, licensed, and insured. And we have tens of thousands of uniformed men and women roaming the roads to enforce those rules. How is it possible that we ask so much less of individuals, so that they may obtain a device whose only real function is ending life under violent circumstances?
-- Stephan
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Sunday, December 23rd, 2012
HEATHER MILLAR, - The Orion Magazine
Stephan: What you will see clearly in this essay on nanotechnology is that we have opened a door that leads to... we know not what, except that it could change our world in ways great and small, good as well as horrible. This is yet another case of a public silence, where a vigorous public conversation if called for.
A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University’s Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them-the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina’s piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.
Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.
The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke’s Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.
So far the questions about whether nanoparticles are an environmental risk outnumber the answers, which is why the Duke scientists take the precaution of wearing […]
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2012
SADHBH WALSHE, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Reader Supported News
Stephan: This is the latest on the New American Slavery trend accelerated by prison privatization. The American Gulag is being transformed into a profit driven system. Another way of turning the poor into valves through which to access the public treasury. We are going to pay a fearsome price for this, particularly in the South where it is most advanced.
The US department of justice released a report this week (pdf) showing that 26 states have recorded decreases in their prison populations during 2011. California boasted the biggest decline of over 15,000 prisoners and several other states including New York and Michigan reported drops of around 1,000 prisoners each. This is the third consecutive year that the population has declined, and as a result, at least six states have closed or are attempting to close approximately 20 prisons.
This should be welcomed as good news considering that pretty much every state has been going over its own version of a fiscal cliff for the last several years and out-of-control corrections budgets play a significant part in that. But sadly, because incarceration has become a virtual jobs program in many states and because certain corporations are profiting handsomely from the incarceration binge that has been in place for the past few decades, the reduction in prison populations and prison closures is being met with huge resistance.
According to a recent report by the Sentencing Project called On the Chopping Block (pdf), which detailed all the prison closures and attempted closures in the past year, several state governors have been dragged into legal battles […]
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2012
CARL BERNSTEIN , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I think Bernstein raises a significant question, and makes a case. Fox News is a naked attempt to manipulate American society in the service of Murdoch and Ailes Rightist interests. The last election made it clear, the current War on Christmas is whatever you call beyond self-parody.
The craveness of the rest of the media has rarely been more brazenly displayed.
So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America’s democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.
In the American instance, Murdoch’s goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.
Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch’s centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News’ inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama’s expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense ‘analyst’ […]
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