Friday, December 20th, 2019
MARILYNN MARCHIONE, - Associated Press
Stephan: Obesity has become a defining characteristic of Americans but, as this report describes, it is not uniform across the country. It is worse in Red value states, and in states (often the same) where income is lower. It is one of the reasons life expectancy in the U.S. has been declining for the past three years.
When I look at the research data it seems obvious that this obesity is arising because of wealth inequality, which results in a large percentage eating processed foods,
which are aggressively promoted, making it a deadly loop. This is all a function of making profit the only social priority. The entire food system in this country could be transformed from farm field to kitchen into a system that promoted wellbeing. It is a lie that social programs that foster wellbeing cannot be profitable. Nor is it best as Neoliberals assert for everything to be private. There are things like healthcare that are best run as a public national system with wellbeing as their first priority. The same with prisons.
As a people we are literally killing ourselves under the system now operating.
everything to be private. There are things like healthcare that are best run as a public national system, as like as they have wellbeing as their first priority. The same with prisons.
As a people we are literally killing ourselves under the system now operating.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this news: Nearly half of American adults will be obese within a decade and one-quarter will be severely so, a new report predicts.
It corrects for a weakness in previous estimates that may have made the problem seem not as big as it really is. Those estimates often relied on national health surveys and people tend to understate their weight in those.
The new work used a decades-long federal study in which weight was measured to get a more accurate picture of trends and to project into the future.
“It’s alarming,” said a nutrition expert with no role in the study, Dr. Lawrence Appel of Johns Hopkins University. “We’re going to have some pretty awful problems” medically and financially because so many people weigh too much, he said.
The New England Journal of Medicine published the study Wednesday. It was led by scientists at Harvard and George Washington universities.
Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and other health problems. It’s gauged by body mass index, or BMI, a measure of weight relative to height. Underweight or normal is a BMI under 25; overweight […]
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Friday, December 20th, 2019
Jerry Lambe , - Law & Crime
Stephan: The impeachment doesn't even touch the seemingly endless criminality of Trump and his family. Not the politics, just your basic grift, lack of ethics, and incompetence. This all quite apart from politics although political power makes it so much easier and more profitable. Trump just wrote a $2 million check to pay off the fine on an earlier grift. $25 million for the grifter university. The failed casinos, the thousands of laws suits, unpaid workers, six bankruptcies, payoffs to porn stars, it just goes on and on. How can anyone possibly support this man to be the president of the United States?
President Trump has come under scrutiny about his charitable foundation’s use of funds. He has been ordered to pay $2 million in damages by a New York judge.
Following President Donald Trump officially changing his residence from Manhattan to Palm Beach, Fla., several members of the New York City Council have introduced a resolution seeking to end the president’s business ties with the city’s municipal parks.
Democratic City Councilman Mark Levine on Thursday was expected to introduce a non-binding resolution calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to sever the Trump Organizations four contracts with the city, three of which are up for renewal in 2021, according to the New York Daily News. The resolution was co-sponsored by Councilwomen Margaret Chin and Carlina Rivera.
The president’s son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization Eric Trump responded in the story that it was “unfortunate” Levine was making the contractual issue into a political issue.
“For over 20 years, The Trump Organization has been a partner of New York City and has saved many iconic assets, such as Wollman Rink and Trump Golf Links at […]
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Friday, December 20th, 2019
Jonah M. Kessel, - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is an aspect of the carbon industry revealed by a new special camera. And what does it tell us? It is just another alarm telling us we really need to get out of the carbon age, and close all of this down.
MDC Texas Operator facility methane emissions
Nov. 8, 2019
Credit: Jonah M. Kessel/The New York Times
Immense amounts of methane are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming, even as the Trump administration weakens restrictions on offenders.
To the naked eye, there is nothing out of the ordinary at the DCP Pegasus gas processing plant in West Texas, one of the thousands of installations in the vast Permian Basin that have transformed America into the largest oil and gas producer in the world.
But a highly specialized camera sees what the human eye cannot: a major release of methane, the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas that is helping to warm the planet at an alarming rate.
Two New York Times journalists detected this from a tiny plane, crammed with scientific equipment, circling above the oil and gas sites that dot the Permian, an oil field bigger than Kansas. In just a few hours, the plane’s instruments identified six sites with unusually high methane […]
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Friday, December 20th, 2019
Alleen Brown, - The Intercept
Stephan: The fossil fuel folk just don't get it. They want to corrupt the youth climate movement because they think it will hurt their profits. Such a short-term view. They are blinded by greed and don't realize that climate change is going to destroy their world, and the world of their children, just as it will people of lesser means.
BP CEO Bob Dudley, left, and chief economist Spencer Dale speak during a session at the One Young World Summit in London on Oct. 23, 2019.
Credit: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
The same day that 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a stirring speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September, in which she criticized delegates for “stealing my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” the architects of the climate crisis welcomed select youth participants from the summit to dine.
CEOs from fossil fuel corporations including BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Norway’s Equinor were attending the annual gathering of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative in New York, which includes industry leaders who claim to be committed to taking “practical” action on climate change. On the agenda for lunch was to “explore options for long-term engagement” with young people the industry could trust. Student Energy, a nonprofit based in Alberta, near Canada’s tar sands region, helped organize the event, which included time for students to grill the CEOs about […]
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Thursday, December 19th, 2019
Jake Johnson, - Raw Story
Stephan: When you know you are rapidly becoming a minority party what do you do? Why keep as many people as possible, particularly those who do not support you from voting. And that is exactly what the Republicans are doing.
Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp
Warning of 2020 impact, one critic said Georgia could remain a red state solely “due to the GOP purposefully denying people the right to vote.”
A federal judge Monday night allowed Georgia to move ahead with a purge of over 300,000 voters deemed “inactive” by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, sparking outrage from rights advocates who accused the GOP of an illegal voter suppression effort ahead of the 2020 elections.
“Georgians should not lose their right to vote simply because they have not expressed that right in recent elections, and Georgia’s practice of removing voters who have declined to participate in recent elections violates the United States Constitution,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Abrams lost to Republican […]
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