Monday, August 12th, 2013
JACQUES PERETTI, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The Big Ag Food Industry like the Illness Profit Industry presents itself as being one thing, when in fact it is quite another. It has only one priority and that is profit, nutrition if it happens, is just a marketing ploy.
When you walk into a supermarket, what do you see? Walls of highly calorific, intensely processed food, tweaked by chemicals for maximum ‘mouth feel’ and ‘repeat appeal’ (addictiveness). This is what most people in Britain actually eat. Pure science on a plate. The food, in short, that is making the planet fat.
And next to this? Row upon row of low-fat, light, lean, diet, zero, low-carb, low-cal, sugar-free, ‘healthy’ options, marketed to the very people made fat by the previous aisle and now desperate to lose weight. We think of obesity and dieting as polar opposites, but in fact, there is a deep, symbiotic relationship between the two.
In the UK, 60% of us are overweight, yet the ‘fat’ (and I include myself in this category, with a BMI of 27, slap-bang average for the overweight British male) are not lazy and complacent about our condition, but ashamed and desperate to do something about it. Many of those classed as ‘overweight’ are on a near-perpetual diet, and the same even goes for half of the British population, many of whom don’t even need to lose an ounce.
When obesity as a global health issue first came on the radar, the food industry sat […]
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Monday, August 12th, 2013
TESSIE SWOPE CASTILLO, - Salon
Stephan: As Marijuana Prohibition begins to crumble, the ugly racist truth about the War on Drugs is beginning to come out.
It’s not every day you read a book that blows the lid off of everything you’ve ever been taught about drugs, but Dr. Carl Hart’s recent work, ‘High Price,
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Monday, August 12th, 2013
KRISTEN WYNNE, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I thought I had seen everything involving Marijuana and then I came across this.
A recent study published in the International Journal of Drug Policy estimates that 50 to 80 percent of inmates in Swiss prisons use marijuana. Prison staff told researchers they found marijuana to be a relatively safe drug and that cracking down on consumption would have more negative effects than positive ones.
Surveys of detainees and guards revealed similar opinions on marijuana use, with both groups describing the effects of marijuana as analgesic, calming and a way to decrease the traumatic prison experience. Negative consequences included sleepiness, social isolation, and decreased perception of danger. But survey participants also said that more restrictive regulation could increase fear, trafficking, and a shift to harder drug use.
While prisoners estimated that up to 80 percent of prisoners use marijuana, guards reported a lower estimate at 50 percent.
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Sunday, August 11th, 2013
MICHAEL T. KLARE, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: This is the best explanation of what carbon energy interests are trying to do that I have read. Because they don't properly acknowledge climate change, they do not see that it is going to soon be obvious to even the meanest intelligence that we cannot go forward with carbon. But the damage... President Obama's failure to effectively act in a compassionate and life-affirming way on this issue is one of the reasons I find him so disappointing.
Don’t for a Second Imagine We’re Heading for an Era of Renewable Energy.
hen it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems. Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of Coal. President Obama offered exactly this vision in a much-praised June address on climate change. True, fossil fuels will be needed a little bit longer, he indicated, but soon enough they will be overtaken by renewable forms of energy.
Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on ‘clean’ natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. All this sounds promising indeed. There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down. The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables. Instead, it is pouring its historic […]
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Sunday, August 11th, 2013
Stephan: If you read a novel that described the current surveillance state in America, and its interaction with increasingly militarized law enforcement agencies, you would see clearly that the U.S. is a soft police state. All reviewers of such a book would exclaim this. Just as happened with Orwell's 1984.
But, because we are living it day-by-day, people seem to hardly notice.
So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budget and the location of its office – has been using the immense pools of data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to go after American citizens for ordinary drug crimes. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have been coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what’s called a ‘parallel construction,
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