Friday, November 6, 2015
Time to cancel
By
John Prager
After
all, National Geographic has traditionally been one of the most well-known
sources of scientific information, and Fox News is where any semblance of
scientific knowledge goes to be beaten mercilessly with socks full of pennies
before being unceremoniously dumped in a vat full of acid in Bill O’Reilly’s
basement for easy disposal.
While
National Geographic promised that
there would be no editorial “meddling” from 21st Century Fox, Murdoch is
already getting involved in other ways — specifically by laying off hundreds of
the staff that made the company worth acquiring in the first place.
Staff
members — all of them — were ordered into the office on November 3, unless they
were traveling for business, on vacation, or otherwise not there by a
rather horrific-sounding e-mail from CEO Gary Knell:
Is It Time to Put Down the Bacon?
Processed
meat may cause cancer, but your personal risk is probably low.
By
By now you’ve probably heard the sobering news: Red
meat may cause cancer. And bacon and other popular processed meats definitely
do, the World Health Organization says.
Does that mean we all need to quit eating processed meats — no
pun intended — cold turkey?
For nutrition-obsessed dorks like me, this pronouncement wasn’t
news: Bacon’s been suspect for decades.
Yet I still occasionally eat the
stuff, and I have a weakness for a particular variety of overpriced salami sold
at Whole Foods. (It’s great for camping trips, because it stays good outside
the fridge.)
Despite my mostly vegetarian diet, when I have bad days I head
to a favorite local restaurant and order up a hot ham sandwich with melted
cheese, homemade pickles, and whole grain mustard. It’s my comfort food. It
always hits the spot.
From the data, my occasional indulgences aren’t as bad as
smoking the occasional cigarette. As far as cancer is concerned, it’s much less
risky.
“Iron Ass”
We love to rag on Bush the second.
After all, he is the reason behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his response to Hurricane Katrina was absolutely disgraceful, and his lack of attention to pre- 9/11 warnings definitely render his judgement as a national and world leader more than a little questionable. However, it’s his father who is making headlines now — and not for anything the GOP, or his son and those who were a part of his administration, will be happy about.
Apparently, the elder George Bush is going to be the subject of
a new biography by Jon Meacham. He had a lot to say, much of it very negative towards his old
friends Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, both of whom were at the
helm in Bush 43’s administration during the aforementioned atrocities and more.
Do you get the Winter blah's?
Light
therapy might not be the best treatment.
From: UNIVERSITY
OF VERMONT via EurekAlert
A new study to be published online November 5 in the American Journal of Psychiatry casts a shadow on light therapy's status as the gold standard for treating SAD, or seasonal affective disorder.
While the treatment was effective at addressing acute episodes of
SAD, a SAD-tailored version of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) was
significantly better at preventing relapse in future winters, the study found.
Led by University of Vermont psychology professor Kelly Rohan, the research
initiative, funded by a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental
Health, is the first large scale study to examine light therapy's effectiveness
over time.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Congressional internships available
Opportunities
available for individuals interested in legislative process
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| Only humans are eligible |
Congressman
Jim Langevin (D-RI) is accepting applications for interns in his Rhode Island
and Washington, DC, offices for the spring 2016 semester.
This unpaid program
is open to civic-minded college students who are available for at least 10
hours per week.
News from the Worm Ladies of Charlestown
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Have You Heard The Good News?
The
Republican Party’s reliance on frothing at the mouth Christian extremists is
turning America’s younger generations away from religion:
The
share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still high compared
with other advanced industrial countries, slipped to 89 percent in 2014 from 92
percent in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape
Study.
The
proportion of Americans who say they are “absolutely certain” God exists fell
even more, to 63 percent in 2014 from 71 percent in 2007.
The
trend is most pronounced among young adults, with only half of those born from
1990 to 1996 absolutely certain of their belief in God, compared to 71 percent
of the “silent generation,” or those born from 1928 to 1945.
It’s
not hard to understand the mechanism at play here. Republicans have spent
decades conflating religion and politics. As their politics became more
extreme, so did their religion and as their religion became more extreme, so
did their politics. The GOP is caught in a feedback loop of insanity that they
cannot possibly break out of.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Activist etiquette
I’ve been around environmental news and politics for decades, either chronicling it or participating in it.
It’s a crucial time right now, so I respectfully offer five hunks of advice, based on the past mistakes I’ve seen. Or had a hand in.
1. Don’t expect climate
deniers to go away anytime soon.
When
beliefs become political articles of faith, they die hard, or not at all. It’s
been more than a decade since climate denial escaped the surly bonds of
reality. If a torrent of peer-reviewed science and on-the-ground evidence of a
changing climate can’t change calcified minds, what will?
A
few of the lions of denial will soon fade, but more likely it will be old age,
rather than politics, ecological turmoil, economics, or common sense. Senator
James Inhofe soon turns 81; Charles Koch turns 80 this weekend, and David Koch
is 76.
New database on corporate crime
Introducing
Violation Tracker
By
Phil Mattera, Dirt
Diggers Digest
Violation Tracker, the first national database on corporate crime, has arrived. For me it is the culmination of nine months of work collecting enforcement data, matching some 25,000 companies in the agency records to their corporate parents and designing the site, all of this done with the help of Rich Puchalsky of Grassroots Connection.
My involvement in this kind of project actually goes back 35
years. While a young researcher for Fortune magazine, I was
assigned to a story whose dubious premise was that lawbreaking was a lot more
common among small businesses than large corporations. I had serious doubts
about that notion and set out to collect as much information as I could about
wrongdoing by the Fortune 500.
Low-fat diet not most effective in long-term weight loss
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Researchers conducted a systematic review of randomized clinical trials comparing the long-term effectiveness of low-fat and higher-fat dietary interventions on weight loss.
The effectiveness of low-fat diet on weight-loss has been
debated for decades, and hundreds of randomized clinical trials aimed at
evaluating this issue have been conducted with mixed results.
Researchers from
Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health (HSPH) conducted a comprehensive review of the data generated from
randomized clinical trials that explored the efficacy of a low-fat diet and
found that low-fat interventions were no more successful than higher-fat
interventions in achieving and maintaining weight loss for periods longer than
one year.
Palinizing the GOP
To most people, Sarah Palin is a joke. Or better yet– she’s a punchline. Sarah Palin walks into a bar with no priest, rabbi or plumber from Philly, and still the magic can happen because the possibilities are endless.
Sarah Palin has proven
herself to be the most under-qualified person ever to exist in American
politics. She’s the equivalent of that trick play the Colts tried to pull
against the Patriots — nobody knew what was going on and the whole thing was a
complete disaster.
Just imagine for a moment that
you didn’t have the mental capacity to see past the guns, bibles and American
flags that Sarah Palin uses as symbols of some kind of biblical…resistance to
the…tea that the …King of England made Thomas…Jackson drink.
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