SMBC: War is a Victimless Crime (Webcomic)

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2275#comic

This comes from an amazing webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which you should definitely check out.

Who Holds the Federal Debt (CQ.com)

 Check out the Graphic on the Website

 From the article:

More than $9 trillion of the total debt is held by “the public” — a broad category that includes individual investors in the United States and overseas, the Federal Reserve system, and foreign governments and central banks. The remaining debt is held by government accounts, mostly trust funds established to collect dedicated revenue to pay for such programs as Social Security, Medicare and highway construction.

Women's Bodies Selective With Sperm (Article)

Image from awomanscorned2010.blogspot.com

From the article:

A woman's body may be unconsciously selective about sperm, allowing some men's to progress to pregnancy but killing off the chances of less suitable matches, an Australian researcher said Wednesday.

Will Soda Soon be Taxed? (Article)

From the article:

Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.

Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we should turn the tables and tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available. 

Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually. That money could be used to subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit. 

“Excise taxes have the benefit of being incorporated into the shelf price, and that’s where consumers make their purchasing decisions,” says Lisa Powell, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “And, as per-unit taxes, they avoid volume discounts and are ultimately more effective in raising prices, so they have greater impact.” 


Currently, instead of taxing sodas and other unhealthful food, we subsidize them (with, I might note, tax dollars!). Direct subsidies to farmers for crops like corn (used, for example, to make now-ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup) and soybeans (vegetable oil) keep the prices of many unhealthful foods and beverages artificially low. There are indirect subsidies as well, because prices of junk foods don’t reflect the costs of repairing our health and the environment.

The need is dire: efforts to shift the national diet have failed, because education alone is no match for marketing dollars that push the very foods that are the worst for us. (The fast-food industry alone spent more than $4 billion on marketing in 2009; the Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion is asking for about a third of a percent of that in 2012: $13 million.)

Health-related obesity costs are projected to reach $344 billion by 2018 — with roughly 60 percent of that cost borne by the federal government. For a precedent in attacking this problem, look at the action government took in the case of tobacco.

A study by Y. Claire Wang, an assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, predicted that a penny tax per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes and bring in $1 billion annually. Another study shows that a two-cent tax per ounce in Illinois would reduce obesity in youth by 18 percent, save nearly $350 million and bring in over $800 million taxes annually.

(Currently, 86 percent of food ads now seen by children are for foods high in sugar, fat or sodium.)

The Truth About Gluten (Article)

Image from http://whatisgluten.net/

From the article:

Gluten is a protein found in wheat. It's a binding agent, which means it makes ingredients stick together. If flour didn't contain gluten, breads would turn out like pancakes.  

For decades, scientists thought you were either allergic to gluten or you weren't. If you were allergic to gluten, you were given the diagnosis of celiac disease. But now we know that celiac disease isn't the only issue. You could be gluten intolerant.

The main difference between gluten intolerance and celiac disease is that with gluten intolerance your body's immune system doesn't nuke your intestines. Instead, your body just can't digest gluten (so you still end up with bloating and other issues). Either way, you should be opting for a gluten-free diet.

Aside from digestive discomfort, having an immune system that constantly attacks your intestines has serious repercussions. Those with celiac disease are at increased risk of arthritis and potentially colon cancer.

Get tested to see if you have an issue with gluten via antibody or genetic testing. You might not have celiac disease since only 1 in 133 people in America have it, but you could easily be gluten intolerant.
Some of us can eat gluten with no problem, but if you're battling the bloat, I don't recommend taking it on faith that you're one of those people.

At the very least, test how you feel with and without gluten. If you're completely symptom-free with it in your diet, then getting biopsied is a waste of time (and you'd never be able to convince your doc to do it). But if you're noticing mysterious stomach issues, test a gluten-free diet.

Crop Swap Begins in Berkeley (Short Article)

From the article:

Help is on the way. Beginning tonight the people behind the newly formed grassroots group Transition Berkeley invite residents to share their harvest at a Crop Swap in the public park next to the Ohlone Greenway on Sacramento Street.

Berkeley is just one of a grassroots network of more than 300 *transition towns around the globe organizing their communities to become more resilient, self-reliant and sustainable.

It couldn’t be simpler: you show up with your freshly harvested lettuces or lemons and share or swap them for some plums or potatoes. That’s it. No money changes hands.

“We hope this will be a forum for people to get to know others in the community who grow produce and exchange ideas about growing food,” said co-organizer Carole Bennett-Simmons

*The Transition Movement as defined by transitionus.org
The Transition Movement is comprised of vibrant, grassroots community initiatives that seek to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. Transition Initiatives differentiate themselves from other sustainability and "environmental" groups by seeking to mitigate these converging global crises by engaging their communities in home-grown, citizen-led education, action, and multi-stakeholder planning to increase local self reliance and resilience.

Floating Hotels (Short Article)

From the article:

“Each cabin would use solar energy to move and have networked GPS systems, allowing the user to enter a simple command in order to return to the main hotel.”

Canstruction: Serious Scrap Metal Recycling (Pics)

From the article:

There’s often a large amount of difference between community service and innovative design. Canstruction is an annual event that’s aimed at changing that. The design event is held in cities all around North America, Australia and across the world. Over an 8-12 week period, teams of engineers, architects and students band together to create fascinating and amazing sculptures out of thousands of cans of food.

Planned Parenthood NC Banned, Not Just Cut (Article)

From the article:

So, no, we’re not suing because our funding was reduced. We’re suing because we were BANNED from doing business with the state in a purely political move by the new legislative majority despite a gubernatorial veto.

They suggested women could just go to the local health department. Aside from my suspicion that few of these virtual commentators get their health care from a health department, they seem clueless as to the wait involved in such an endeavor.

In most cases, Planned Parenthood can see a woman who calls the same day or week. We’re also open on Saturdays and evenings—additional access not always available through health departments.

Proven access, in fact, is a major reason why Planned Parenthood won competitive state grants to deliver family planning services to women time and time again.

The issue isn’t Planned Parenthood vs. health departments. We’re partners in making sure that women with little or no health coverage receive quality health care. Simply put, most health departments are at capacity.

Will you help us stand strong for our patients? Please make a gift today. 

Your gift will be DOUBLED! Thanks to a generous friend, your gift before September 1st will be matched dollar for dollar, up to $20,000. Your gift today will help us and more importantly, help our patients.  Thanks to you, We're Here!

Climate Change Deniers Lack Peer-Reviewed Results (Article)

Image from sappo.net

From the article:

So the number of peer-reviewed papers that adequately expose the ideas of Carter and co-authors (Climate Change Deniers) to the scientific peer-review system on the climate change issue is 0, 0, 0 and 0.

Comment on the article:

Bart Laws · Top Commenter · Assistant Professor at Brown University

Unfortunately, you already know what their response is -- peer review is itself a closed system of belief, the reason they don't have peer reviewed publications is because reviewers are intolerant of dissent from orthodoxy, yadda yadda yadda.

The essential problem, I think, is that many people distrust the culture of science. They think of scientists as a kind of priesthood, that controls arcane knowledge as a source of power. So we see vicious vituperation, and even death threats, not only against climate scientists but also against biomedical investigators and physicians who contest the faith some people have in various forms of quackery or non-standard etiological theories of disease. They're all in it for the money, and for power, the enraged villagers proclaim.

I think the response has to be, not so much to circle the wagons and insist that peer review is dispositive, but rather to try to democratize science. You seem to be saying, "We know more than anybody else so just shut up." I don't think that's going to persuade many people. Academic culture, quite frankly, strongly discourages public and community engagement -- it can actually damage careers to write for a lay audience or show up all the time on TV. At the same time, the academy is exclusive, and does very little outreach to the surrounding community.

I say, invite the people in, show them how we work, spend real effort sharing educational opportunities widely, not just with the lucky few who survive our selection processes. Make the science accessible and, when there are dissenting cranks, learn how to talk back and unmask them. Just claiming that people should ignore them because they don't have the right credentials is feckless, indeed counterproductive. It makes you look like you're actually afraid of them.

A tool that finds 3x more breast tumors, and why it's not available to you (TED Video)

Image from smashinglists.com

"The breast has become a very political organ."

Physician Deborah Rhodes details her collaboration with a team of physicists to create a cheaper, more effective, and perhaps most importantly, painless diagnostic breast cancer technology called MBI.

Whether you have breasts or just care about someone who does this is a must watch. This serious and informative video, which I admit to giggling at for the first few minutes, is roughly 20 minutes long and so I've distilled it into about a minute's worth of bullet points for those who don't have time to watch it in full.

• Breast Density is major factor in breast cancer diagnosis
• Denser breasts are less amenable to traditional mammography methods because dense breast tissue looks very similar to cancerous tissue. This leads to a high proportion of false negatives.
• Breast Density is a strong predictor of developing breast cancer. It is actually a stronger predictor than having a mother or sister with breast cancer.
• The Density rating of your breasts is available on your mammogram report
• In current mammography the law requires that the equivalent of a 40lb car battery come down on your breast during this procedure, (mammogram).
• The speaker and her colleagues have developed a breast screening method known has Molecular Breast Imaging or MBI (FDA approved). MBI technology uses light pain free compression and is impervious to the diagnostic problems associated with breast density
• MRI also has high levels of diagnostic efficacy but is plagued by a much higher cost and requires a notoriously high level of expertise in order to interpret results. MBI is eminently more cost-effective and requires far less technical skill for diagnosis (which I imagine would further lower the cost).
• The speaker believes that adoption of this technology will be unreasonably slow due to the large financial stake of current breast screening technology, and has already reported some unsavory political hurdles.
• For this reason the speaker has abrogated financial ties with the technology so that she can continue to raise awareness without marshaling doubt as to her motives.
• Ask your doctor about this technology the next time you get a check-up.

Superhero ski pyramid

Apparently this pic comes from Seaworld in the 70's. Sub-mariner is my favorite.

Basketball Trash (Pic and Short Article)

http://popupcity.net/2011/06/the-was-basket-bin/

From the article:

"unintentionally building upon Volkswagen’s Fun Theory that claims that man’s behavior in public space could be changed in a positive direction when making things fun to do. (This Arcade Bottle Bank is one of the results of the Fun Theory campaign.)"

Advertising is the New Poetry (Pics)

From the article:

http://popupcity.net/2011/05/advertising-was-the-new-poetry/

Blaise Cendrars claimed advertising to be the new poetry. Robert Montgomery makes us think the other way around. In his ‘Words in the City at Night’ series, the London-based artist hijacks large advertising billboards and bus stops to display his melancholic poems, echoing the Situationist concept of détournement.

Wealth Distribution Around the Globe

Millionaire Politician Defends Oil and Gas Subsidies (Video and Short Article)

**Question Starts at 1:40**

From the article:

Kelly’s defense of oil and gas subsidies is bad enough on the merits, but it is all the more troubling given that he owns up to $6.25 million in oil and gas companies.

MODERATOR: This question is from Joshua from Erie. How can you justify continuing subsidies for oil companies with record profits while cutting vital services for working families? Oil companies don’t need subsidies and working families shouldn’t have to pay for them with…
KELLY: First of all, let me just ask one thing. Is there anybody in here that has a pension? Anybody have a portfolio? I want you to very carefully look at those portfolios. Those are usually made up by profitable companies.
CONSTITUENT: Why are we subsidizing them?
KELLY: If you really want to understand the whole thing, I would say that, number one, we want companies to be profitable. I said earlier about the class warfare, if we’re going to start classifying, “they’re too rich, they’re too wealthy, they’re too greedy. We don’t get enough, we need more, and we need to have rich people putting more money in. We need, we need, we need, we need, we need, we need, we need.”

Reader Comments:

second chair: Top Commenter (signed in using Hotmail)  

Instead of hearing about the murder case in Fl. NO one cares about, why doesn't the MSM expose these stories? This topic is at the heart of America... but could it be the corporate media in bed with other corporations have an interest in 'No raised taxes?'

Matt Harris: Top Commenter

The media spent hours in live coverage of the trial in FL, but often spends NO time whatsoever on issues matters that affect all people -- it's really disingenuous to say the media practices journalism -- they are merely stenographers when it comes to news, and they are voyeurs of sexual behaviors. and they are gossip-mongers.
As a result, we all know more than we care to know about certain people and not nearly enough about what we should know about government.

Article at http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/07/05/260558/mike-kelly-oil-subsidies/

Ghost of Despair (Short Webcomic)

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2UnDAI/drawingboardcomic.com/index.php?comic=159

 The kid who wrote this is in high school. I was impressed.

Many Elected Officials are Uneducated (Short Article)

From the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/education/13legis.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&src=recg&adxnnlx=1307977215-FsOF1btCkk4ezlcnisP6RQ

About one in four of the nearly 7,400 elected representatives across the country do not possess a four-year college degree.

Arkansas has the least formally educated Statehouse, with 25 percent of its 135 legislators not having any college experience at all, compared with 8.7 percent of lawmakers nationwide.

Image from kuvaton.com

Stomach Staples

 

The Article in Short:

"In India, for example, real incomes rose and the price of food fell between 1980 and 2005. Yet evidence suggests that Indians, even those who were originally eating less than recommended, reduced their calorie consumption in that time.

 Since calorific needs differ from person to person, a universal number is clearly only a guide. What’s more, concentrating on calories ignores the important role of micronutrients such as minerals and vitamins (see article). But the economists argue that this approach to measuring hunger also does not accord with how people themselves think about it. They propose a new way to use people’s eating choices to tell whether they are hungry.

The economists argue that the pain caused by hunger will prompt insufficiently nourished people to spend a larger share of their food budget on staples like rice and millet, which are cheap sources of calories. But once people are no longer hungry, they do not need to spend their incremental cash on the cheapest source of calories but can base their choices on things like variety and taste.

 By looking at the prices of various foods, it is possible to work out what share of a person’s calories would come from staples such as rice and wheat if he were trying to fulfil his dietary needs as cheaply as possible.
Someone who is consuming a significantly higher share of calories from staple foods than predicted is likely to be hungry.

The two measures also give opposing results about long-term trends in hunger. The average household in the sample got richer between 1991 and 2000, but the fraction that consumed less than the mandated daily number of 2,100 calories actually rose, from 53% to 67%. The share of calories coming from staples points in a different direction, however: by this measure, the number of hungry households dropped from 49% to 32% over this period."

Image from mrbigben.com