Saturday, March 2nd, 2013
JOAQUIN SAPIEN, - Pro Publica
Stephan: Here is home truth about guns in the home. It is not what the NRA would have you believe. However, as I said the other day I am afraid this entire debate about guns has been rendered largely meaningless by the rise of 3-D printing.
During the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom 6,630 American service personnel were killed by enemy actions. During that same time 270,000 Americans were killed by firearms, approximately a third of all the deaths during the Civil War. We have a ongoing low profile war taking place on our soil. And if you have a gun in your house you are much more likely to be a casualty of this war.
President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn’t pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it, arguing that the studies were politicized and being used to promote gun control. We’ve interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency’s gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
We talked to Rosenberg about the work the agency was doing before funding was cut and how it’s relevant to today’s gun control debate. Here’s an edited transcript.
There’s been coverage recently about how Congress cut funding for gun violence research, but not much about what the agency was actually researching and what it was finding. You were in charge of that. Tell us a little bit about what the CDC was doing back then.
There were basically four questions that we were trying to answer. The first question is what is the problem? Who were the victims? Who was killed? Who were injured? Where did they happen? Under what circumstances? When? What times of the […]
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GARY BRECHER, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Although this is too polemic, it nevertheless makes a case I have not seen elsewhere, and which I think is correct. Military technology is being guided by new geostrategy. There will be no more tanks rolling across Poland; there will be no coldwar multiple nuclear exchanges. Instead it is asymmetrical warfare, mostly in urban settings.
Projecting power is no longer long range bombers, missiles and submarines. It is about drones that can kill individuals, and small gatherings no matter where they are, with long range precision, and arm's length safety.
But this transition is going to cause massive disruption of the existing defense contractor infrastructure, just as sail makers were wiped out by steam.
All the talk about drones focusses on their ‘morality.
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TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This piece spells out how technology is put into the service of profit in the food industry; and how this business model places no importance on wellness.
Riffing on his new book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Industry Hooked Us, ace New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss is suddenly everywhere-he’s out with a blockbuster article in the Times Magazine and just appeared on Fresh Air.
I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, but I’ve skimmed it, and it looks excellent. Here are nine quick takeaways:
1. The Cheeto is a modern miracle. Made of corn, fat, and something called ‘cheese seasoning’ (which itself is made of 11 ingredients, including canola oil and artificial color ‘yellow 6’), this ever-popular snack, which now comes in no fewer than 17 different flavors, may be the food industry’s creation par excellence. Here’s Moss:
‘This,’ Witherly [a food scientist] said, ‘is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.’ He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. ‘It’s called vanishing caloric density,’ Witherly said. ‘If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it
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ALYSSA BROWN, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: This Gallup survey is very important. Look at the lists, now consider the social policies of the states that are both the best and the worst.
This is why I make a point of defining the trends of the various interest groups in this country; I care about social outcomes. This is why I say Theocratic Right, Red value, Blue value. We should be making social policy on the basis of data, not ideology or theology. The proof of this is found in the order of the states in terms of wellbeing.
The purpose of government should be to produce wellness. It is the measure of our failure how far we fall from that standard.
Click through to see Gallup's always well-designed graphics.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hawaii residents have the highest wellbeing in the nation for the fourth consecutive year, with a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index score of 71.1 in 2012 — up from 70.2 in 2011. Colorado, Minnesota, Utah, and Vermont rounded out the top five states with the highest wellbeing scores last year. West Virginia residents have the lowest overall wellbeing for the fourth year in a row, with a Well-Being Index score of 61.3 in 2012 — slightly lower than the 62.3 in 2011. Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas also had among the five lowest wellbeing scores in the country.
Overall, there were few changes from 2011 to 2012 in the states with the highest and lowest wellbeing scores. Seven states with the 10 highest wellbeing scores and eight states with the 10 lowest wellbeing scores in 2012 held those same distinctions in 2011. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Iowa joined the top 10 highest wellbeing states in 2012. Louisiana, Indiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma newly rank among the bottom 10 states this year.
These state-level data are based on daily surveys conducted from January through December 2012, including interviews with more than 350,000 Americans nationwide and at least 1,000 residents in each state except […]
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DENIS CAMPBELL, Health Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here once again we can see profit placed above wellness. I think one it is incumbent on the individual to select a diet that supports their health, and that it takes some attention, and label reading. It you see high corn fructose or the like. Don't eat it.
Sugar is behind the global explosion in type 2 diabetes, say researchers who claim it plays a uniquely damaging role in causing a disease that experts fear could overwhelm the NHS.
Obesity is usually cited as the main driver of diabetes. But a new study by US medical researchers identifies sugar as a predictor of diabetes separately from obesity.
The findings, published in the scientific journal Plos One, do not claim that sugar causes obesity. But they are significant because they pinpoint it as being closely associated with diabetes, a disease that at least 2.7 million Britons already have.
Researchers led by Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor at Stanford University school of medicine, examined the availability of sugar and diabetes rates from 175 countries worldwide over the last decade.
‘We’re not diminishing the importance of obesity at all, but these data suggest that at a population level there are additional factors that contribute to diabetes risk besides obesity and total calorie intake, and that sugar appears to play a prominent role,’ said Basu.
The study ‘provides the first large-scale, population-based evidence for the idea that not all calories are equal from a diabetes risk standpoint’, and suggests sugar has ‘a direct, independent link to diabetes’, […]
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