Saturday, April 16th, 2016
Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan - Nation of Change
Stephan: This is an excellent, and important exegetic essay on hate in America, containing some good news and some bad news, most of which centers on Muslims. We must dissipate this trend. Nothing good ever comes of religious hate. Nothing. Ever. The piece is really well researched and the data will in some cases surprise you.
American Muslim women waving flags
Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990, and since then the FBI has been issuing annual reports on crimes of bias or hate crimes.
I thought it might be useful to compare the year 2000, Bill Clinton’s last in office, with 2013 and with 2014, the last two for which statistics are available, to see how the nation has changed. Unsurprisingly, there has been an eight-fold increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes during these 14 years.
There are lots of caveats here. The FBI depends on local police departments to report hate crimes, who in turn depend on victims to report them in the bulk of cases. The whole country is not even covered.
Muslim-Americans are disproportionately first- and second-generation immigrants and while they are typically middle or upper middle class, they often came from countries where the police are not your friends, and they may be hesitant to report hate crimes against them.
Then, there aren’t that many hate crimes reported. […]
No Comments
Peter Dizikes , - MIT News
Stephan: Wealth inequity is not only about bank accounts. As this study reports its literally about life. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; who are we kidding. As this report says, "The richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average." This is a tale of social immorality.
Credit: Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MIT
Poverty in the U.S. is often associated with deprivation, in areas including housing, employment, and education. Now a study co-authored by two MIT researchers has shown, in unprecedented geographic detail, another stark reality: Poor people live shorter lives, too.
More precisely, the study shows that in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average. (emphasis added)
This eye-opening gap is also growing rapidly: Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables.
“When we think about income inequality in the United States, we think that low-income Americans can’t afford to purchase the same homes, live in the same neighborhoods, and […]
2 Comments
Stephan: The climate change timeline is collapsing even faster than anyone anticipated. Read this. We are moving into a civilization changing crisis, bigger than World War II. And the enemy is ourselves and our unwillingness to make wellness our first priority.
Greenland’s melt season officially began on Monday—two months earlier than normal.
Credit: Danish Meteorological Institute
On Monday, Greenland began to melt. Parts of Greenland melt every year and the whole thing freezes again each winter, but lately, thanks to global warming, the melting has come earlier and then peaked in the summer at higher levels than usual.
Even in light of these trends, Monday’s melt was unlike anything the scientists studying Greenland have ever seen—it was so different, in fact, that they thought the data was wrong.
“We had to check that our models were still working properly,” Peter Langen, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, told Polar Portal, a Danish government website which chronicles monitoring of the ice sheet. Sure enough, thermometers on and around the ice showed temperatures as high as 64 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday—more than 35 degrees warmer than normal for […]
1 Comment
Stephan: The great margarine myth that margarine is superior for health to butter is now in tatters. Here is the latest research.
Reference: J Lennert Veerman. Dietary fats: a new look at old data challenges established wisdom,
BMJ (2016). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.i1512 ,
www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1512
Oil extracted from safflower seeds are used mainly in margarine and cooking oil.
Credit: USDA.
A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional “heart healthy” practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid.
The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using
vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing
heart disease, though more research needs to be done on that front. This latest evidence comes from an analysis of previously unpublished
data of a large controlled trial conducted in Minnesota nearly 50 years ago, as well as a broader analysis of published data from all similar trials of this dietary intervention.
The analyses show that interventions using linoleic acid-rich oils failed to reduce heart […]
1 Comment
Serena Gordon, - U.S. News & World Report
Stephan: As you read this report please bear in mind the article I ran the other day about the Type II Diabetes epidemic. If you chart the increase in incidence of disease, with the increase in price you will see a strong correlation. This is proof of what I keep saying: The United States does not have a healthcare industry it has an illness profit industry; wellness is a secondary consideration because illness is often more profitable than wellness in our system.
Americans with diabetes who rely on insulin to keep their blood sugar levels in check are facing sticker shock: A new study finds the price of insulin has tripled in only 10 years.
Moreover, since 2010, per-person spending on insulin in the United States was more than spending on all other diabetes drugs, the study found.
“The cost of insulin has risen rapidly over the last few years,” said study senior author Philip Clarke, a professor of health economics at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Clarke added there should be an assessment to see whether this price hike is justifiable in terms of improved clinical outcomes.
One reason for the price climb, he said, is a switch from human insulins to analog insulins, which cost more but may offer additional benefits. Also, doctors are more apt to prescribe insulin for people with type 2 diabetes now, Clarke added.
Findings from the new study are published as a letter in the April 5 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Insulin is a naturally occurring hormone that’s necessary for the body to use the sugars found […]
1 Comment
