tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46561772203662280812024-03-20T00:27:36.133-07:00In Support of SanityAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.comBlogger147125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-44484066406455214232016-01-30T07:25:00.001-08:002016-01-30T07:25:20.137-08:00Current films - <em>CONCUSSION</em><br />
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If you haven't seen <em>Concussion</em>, make it a point to do so. <br />
If you're a football fan, and haven't seen it, do. <br />
The public and the players need to know the risks. <br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-88672622755224857872013-06-01T06:45:00.002-07:002013-06-01T06:45:27.067-07:00<span style="font-size: x-large;"><strong>Renowned Doctor Gabor Mate on Psychedelics and Unlocking the Unconscious, From Cancer to Addiction</strong></span><br />
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/">AlterNet</a></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/gabor-mate">Gabor Mate</a></em> <!-- end: byline --> <!-- <div class="rssemail" style="clear: both;">
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<strong>Drug addiction expert speaks on the mind-body connection and the medical and emotional potentials of psychedelics.</strong></div>
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<cite>Photo Credit: By Gabor Gastonyi (Clare Day) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 </cite><br />
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<em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" content="2013-05-30T15:21:00-07:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date">May 30, 2013</span></span></span></span> </em> | </div>
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<em>Gabor Mate, M.D., says the "unconscious mind" can cause medical afflictions like cancer, addiction and trauma. In his speech at the MAPS conference, Mate rejects the assumption that the human mind and body are separate entities, and points to an inherant connection between </em></div>
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<em>psychological/environmental experiences and medical afflictions. He contends that the war on drugs is actually a war on drug addicts, and speaks to the addiction cessation potential of psychedelic substances. He also discusses the potential ability of psychedelic substances, particularly ayahuasca, to reverse medical issues like cancer and addiction when coupled with therapy.</em><em>The following is the transcript of Dr. Gabor Mate's speech, "Psychedelics and Unlocking the Unconscious; From Cancer to Addiction," which he delivered at the MAPS conference in Oakland Calif., on April 20, 2013.</em></div>
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My subject is the use of ayahuasca in the healing of all manner of medical conditions, from cancer to addiction. And you might say what can possibly a plant do to heal such dire and life-threatening medical problems? Well, of course, that all depends on the perspective through which we understand these problems.<br />
<br />
Now, the medical perspective, the allopathic Western medical perspective in which I was trained is that, fundamentally, diseases are abnormalities that occur either due to external causes such as a bacterium or a toxin, or they’re accidental or due to bad luck, or their due to genetics. So, the causes are outside of the usual internal experience—the emotional and psychological and spiritual life—of the individual. These are biological events, so the medical assumption goes, and the causes are to be understood and the treatments are to be administered purely in a biological fashion.<br />
<br />
Underlying that set of assumptions are two other assumptions. One is that you can separate the human body from the human mind, so what happens to us emotionally and psychologically has no significant impact on our health. Number two: that the individual is to be separated from the environment. So, what happens to me if I get cancer? That is just my poor personal, pure personal, misfortune, or maybe because I did the wrong things like smoked cigarettes. But, that my cancer might have something to do with the lifelong interaction which I’ve engaged in with my environment—particularly the psychological social environment—that doesn’t enter into the picture.<br />
But what if we had a different perspective?<br />
<br />
What if we actually got that human beings are bio-psycho-social creatures by nature, and actually bio-psycho-spiritual creatures by nature—which is to say that our biology is inseparable from our psychological emotional and spiritual existence—and therefore what manifests in the body is not some isolated and unique event or misfortune, but a manifestation of what my life has been in interaction with my psychological and social and spiritual environment?<br />
<br />
Well, if we had that kind of understanding then we would approach illness and health in a completely different fashion.<br />
<br />
What if, furthermore, we understood something in the West which has been the underlying core insight of Eastern spiritual pathways and aboriginal shamanic pathways around the world, which is that human beings are not their personalities, we’re not our thoughts, we’re not our emotions, we are not our dysfunctional or functional dynamics, but that at the core there is a true self that is somehow connected to—in fact not connected to but part of—nature and creation.<br />
<br />
An illness from that perspective represents a loss of that connection, a loss of that unity, a loss of that belonging to a much larger entity. And therefore, to treat the illness or the symptom as the problem is actually to ignore the real possibility that the symptom and the illness are themselves symptoms, rather than the fundamental problems.<br />
<br />
It’s in that perspective then, that I’ve come to understand, quite before my acquaintance with ayahuasca, but that's how I’ve come to understand human illness and dysfunction. <span>Which is to say that illness and dysfunction represent the products or the consequences of a lifelong interaction with our environment, particularly our psychological and social environment, and that they represent a deep disconnection from our true selves.</span><br />
<span></span><br />
<span>I mention particularly cancer and addiction, but those are only two examples. Allow me to read you something from an article that appeared in last February’s edition of <em>Pediatrics,</em> which is the major pediatric journal in North America, and this is an article from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, and it’s called “An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Development." Here’s what they say:</span><br />
<blockquote>
Growing scientific evidence also demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short term physiologic and psychological adjustments that may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior health and longevity.</blockquote>
In other words, that the emotional and behavioral patterns that as young children we adopt in order to survive stressors in our environment allow us to deal with the immediate problem, but in the long term they become prisons. They become sources of dysfunction, illness and even death, if we’re not able to let go of them.<br />
<br />
So, in other words, what was a short-term state, or meant to be a short-term state, in a helpful way, when it becomes a long-term state, when it goes from state to a trait, now it becomes a problem.<br />
Let me give you a few obvious examples of that. I myself have been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, a characteristic of which is tuning out, absentmindedness. Now, ADD in North America is seen as a disease, and we see many kids that have been diagnosed with it. Now we have 3 million kids in this country who are on stimulant medications for it. The rates are going up and up and up.<br />
<br />
According to the <em>New York Times</em> last week, 20 percent of American boys at one time or another have been diagnosed with it and 10 percent are, at any one time are on medication. Three million at least are on stimulants right now. It’s seen as a genetic disease. It isn’t at all. What the tuning out represents, as we all know, is actually a coping mechanism. Our brains tune out when the stress becomes overwhelming, too much to bear. And at that point the tuning out is a survival dynamic.<br />
The real question is: why are so many kids tuning out? What’s happening in their lives? What of course is going on is that the stress in this society, and the stress in the pending environment are greatly increasing. So, the child’s brain is actually affected by the stresses in the environment.<br />
And here’s further, from the same Harvard article, they talk about brain development and how the human brain actually develops, and here’s what they say about that:<br />
<blockquote>
The architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or fragile foundation for all the health, learning and behavior that follow.</blockquote>
So, in other words, the architecture of the brain is actually constructed by the interaction with the environment. And they continue:<br />
<blockquote>
<br />The interaction of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years.</blockquote>
Well, I can’t make this into a lecture on brain development; the point is that which circuits in the brain develop, and which patterns are engrained, has everything to do with the environment, particularly the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships. And therefore whatever interferes with that mutual responsiveness will actually interfere with the brain development of the child, including the neurochemistry of the child’s brain as well as the psychological emotional patterns.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Cancer</strong><br />
So then, if you look at cancer and addiction as two adaptations to stress, what do we find? Well, prior to my work with addictions, which is my most recent work —and I did that for 12 years— I worked for seven years as the medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver hospital working with terminally ill people. And both in family practice and palliative care I had ample opportunity to see who gets sick and who doesn't get sick. I noticed the people that got ill with chronic conditions invariably followed certain emotional dynamics that were ingrained in them so much so that these were unconscious and compulsive and for that reason all the more difficult to let go of. And, so who got cancer and who didn’t was no accident, nor was it for the most part genetically determined.<br />
<br />
And, I’ve collected a few clippings from the <em>Global Mail</em>newsletter<i>—</i>which is Canada’s newspaper of record, or at least it thinks it is—and these clippings illustrate the patterns that I found in people who get sick.<br />
<br />
And I’m saying all this because in talking about my work with ayahuasca and the potential healing that ayahuasca can induce in people, we have to understand what is being healed here. What is the underlying basis of these conditions? <br />
<br />
So, these newspaper clippings, then, illustrate something about what I have found in people who get sick chronically. And when I say chronic illness I mean cancer, I mean diabetes, rheumatic arthritis, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, chronic asthma, psoriasis, eczema, almost any chronic illness you care to name.<br />
<br />
The first of these clippings is written by a woman who is herself diagnosed with breast cancer. She goes to her doctor, Harold, and you have to know that her husband’s name is [Hye], and [Hye]’s first wife died of breast cancer, and not Donna, the second wife, who’s diagnosed with the same condition. So she writes:<br />
<br />
“Harold tells me that the lump is small, and most assuredly not in my lymph nodes, unlike that of [Hye]’s first wife whose cancer spread everywhere by the time they found it. You’re not going to die, he reassures me. ‘But I’m worried about [Hye],’ I say, ‘I won’t have the strength to support him.’”<br />
What you notice is she’s the one diagnoses with the potentially fatal condition and her automatic compulsive thought is, “While I’m getting radiation and chemotherapy, how will I support my husband emotionally?” So, this automatic regard for the emotional needs of others, while ignoring your own, is a major risk factor for chronic illness.<br />
<br />
These others are obituaries and obituaries are fascinating to me because they tell us not only about the people who died but also about what we as a society value in one another. And often what we value in one another is precisely what kills us. And the expression “the good die young” is not a mis-statement. Often the good do die young because “good” often represents compulsive self-suppression of their own needs.<br />
<br />
So here’s a man, a physician, who dies at age 55 of cancer, and the obituary says:<br />
<blockquote>
Never for a day did he contemplate giving up the work he so loved at Toronto Sick Children’s Hospital. He carried on his duties throughout his year-long battle with cancer, stopping only a few days before he died.</blockquote>
So if you had a friend who was diagnosed with the same condition, would you say to him or her, “Hey buddy, here’s what you do: You got cancer, go back to work tomorrow, and not for a moment consider your life, and the meaning of your life, and the stresses that you’re generating. Just continue working while you’re undergoing chemo, radiation or surgery,”?<br />
<br />
So this automatic identification with duty, role, and responsibility rather than the needs of the self is a major risk factor for chronic illness.<br />
<br />
The next one— [applause] thank you, but if you’re going to applaud every time I say something smart, you’ll be applauding the whole afternoon. The next one, the next obituary, is about a woman who dies at age 55 of cancer. Her name is Naomi. And this obituary is written by the appreciative husband:<br />
<blockquote>
In her entire life she never got into a fight with anyone. The worst she could say was "phooey" or something else along those lines. She had no ego, she just blended in with the environment in an unassuming manner</blockquote>
Now, I’m sure that many of you who are in relationships, sometimes you wish that your partner would blend into the environment in an unassuming manner, but the point is that the suppression of healthy anger that this woman engaged in all of her life actually suppresses the immune system. And I’m not going to go into the details of that, but the science of psychoneuroimmunology has amply shown that you can’t separate the mind from the body and when you’re repressing yourself emotionally you’re actually diminishing the activity of your immune system and therefore you're less capable of responding to malignancy or to invasion by bacteria.<br />
<br />
And again this idea that external things cause illness—take a condition like, uh, the flesh-eating disease, Necrotizing fasciitis is the medical term. And we think we know the cause, the cause is a bacterium, the strep bacterium. It isn’t. Because if we did swabs on the people in this audience, we did swabs of the throat or the crevices of the body, we’d identify the strep bacteria in probably 25, 30 percent of the people here. But there’s nobody here with necrotizing fasciitis, nobody here with flesh-eating disease.<br />
<br />
In other words, the presence of the bacterium does not explain the disease. What happens is that the self-suppressive patterns in somebody’s life at some point will suppress the immune system, and that bacterium that has been living on your body in perfect unity with your immune system all of a sudden becomes a deadly enemy. It’s not just a bacterium, but the self-suppression that suppresses the immune system that actually causes the illness.<br />
<br />
And I’ll leave you with one more obituary, and this is almost too incredible to believe except it is directly from the same newspaper. This is a physician who died of cancer:<br />
<blockquote>
Sydney and his mother had an incredibly special relationship, a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives until her death. As a married man with young children, Sydney made a point to have dinner with his parents every day as his wife Roslyn and their four young kids waited for him at home. Sydney would walk in greeted by yet another dinner to eat and to enjoy. Never wanting to disappoint either woman in his life, Sydney kept eating two dinners for years, until gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions.</blockquote>
Now, what this man believed, what he actually believed—and notice that there are core beliefs underneath all of this. The first one believes that she’s responsible for her husband’s feelings more than she is for herself. The second guy believes that he is nothing other than his responsibilities and duties and role in the world. There’s no true self there he can actually be with and be touched with. Naomi, the woman, believes, "If I am angry, I am a bad person.” And this man believes that he’s responsible for how other people feel and that he must never disappoint anybody.<br />
<br />
Now, these beliefs don’t come out of nowhere. They’re actually coping mechanisms in a certain parenting environment. If the parents can’t handle your anger, if they can’t handle your emotions, if they’re too needy to trouble themselves then the child starts taking responsibility for the parent as a way of maintaining the relationship. In other words, the psychological coping mechanisms of the child then become part of his or her personality, and these same patterns that helped to cope with the original stress now become the major contributors to his or her illness and possibly death. What we’re talking about here are core beliefs that reflect the child’s early experience, that become ingrained into the brain and body as automatic and compulsive responses to the world. That’s my take on chronic illness.<br />
<br />
And you begin to see now how some experiences could enlighten you that you are not those patterns, and if it can give you a sense that these patterns are simply adaptations, and that there’s a true self underneath that, and if they can put you in touch with the experiences that led you to adopt these patterns, then perhaps you can be liberated; then, perhaps you can let go; then, perhaps you can find the true self that doesn’t have to behave in those ways anymore. That’s where the liberation is. So, that’s with chronic illness.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Addiction</strong><br />
Now addiction. For 12 years I worked in what’s known as North America’s most concentrated area of drug use, the downtown eastside of Vancouver, where in a few square block radius thousands of people are ingesting, inhaling, or injecting all manner of substances.<br />
<br />
And the question again is why do people do that? Why do people do such terrible thing to themselves to the point of risking their health? They lose everything, they lose their wealth, their relationships, their families, their homes, their teeth, their dignity—and they still continue with it.<br />
<br />
The North American answer to that question is twofold. The legal answer, the socially sanctioned answer, is that these people are making a choice, they’re making a bad choice, destructive to themselves and harmful to others and the way to deter that choice is to deter them by means of draconian punishments.<br />
<br />
The so-called war on drugs. But there is no war on drugs because you can’t war on inanimate objects. A war on drug addicts is what there is. And as a result of such retrograde social beliefs and governmental practices, the United States which contains 5 percent of the world’s population contains 25 percent of the world’s jail population, which is to say that every fourth person in the world that is in jail is a citizen of the land of the free. And all because of the belief that we’re talking about a choice here.<br />
<br />
The other dominant belief, which is not identical—and you’d think would at least obliterate the first belief but it doesn't—and it’s the one held by most medical doctors, is that addictions represent illness of the brain and particularly on a genetic basis.<br />
<br />
The American Society of Addiction Medicine considers that up to 50 percent of the predisposition to addiction is actually caused by genetic inheritance. That is more forward looking in a way than our choice hypothesis, because at least you can’t blame people for the genes they either inherit or pass on to others, but it is no more right than the other hypothesis.<br />
<br />
Actually, if you look at it closely and if you understand human brain development which I alluded a little bit earlier in my talk you realize that if five percent of addictions are genetic. That’s not radical to say—and I doubt that anything more than five percent is genetically determined. In fact nothing is genetically determined because we know that even people that inherit genes, and there are some, that are predisposed—not predetermined by predisposed to addiction—some people that inherit genes, in the right environment those genes are never activated. Genes are turned on and off by the environment. Therefore, what is in an environment that causes the addiction?<br />
<br />
Of course the belief again then, among the many false beliefs about addiction, is that drugs are addictive. But we know that they're not. Nothing is addictive in itself. I mean, is alcohol addictive? If I asked a question, “How many people have had a glass of wine in your life,” most people would put their hand up. Many of you would put your hand up. But if I asked you, “How many of you have had an alcohol problem,” a much smaller minority would put their hands up.<br />
<br />
Now if alcohol was addictive in and of itself then anybody who ever tries it could become an addict. So, the power of an addiction does not reside in a substance. Whether that substance is crystal meth, or heroin, cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, or whether it’s behaviors like sexaholism, internet addiction, gambling, shopping, work and so on, it’s not the actual activity or substance that induces that addiction, it’s that internal relationship to it, the susceptibility. What creates susceptibility? It’s very simple: trauma.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Trauma</strong><br />
The drug addicts I worked with in the downtown eastside Vancouver, every single one of them had been abused as children. In the 12 years I worked there, out of hundreds of women I interviewed in the course of my professional work, there was not one who hadn’t been sexually abused as a child. And that’s not just only my personal opinion; it’s also what the large-scale population studies show. Not even controversial. Not controversial, but completely impenetrable to the medical profession and certainly to governments. <br />
<br />
So, the people who are in jail—there’s an American psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, many of you may know his work on stress and trauma, and he says that 100 percent of the inmates of the criminal justice system in this country are actually traumatized children.<br />
<br />
Now, trauma induces its own set of beliefs and coping styles. One coping style is to shut down emotionally so as not to feel. Now you become alien to yourself. So you don’t feel the pain, and as one patient of mine said very eloquently, pardon the language, “The reason I do drugs is because I don’t want to feel the fucking feelings I feel when I don’t do the drugs.”<br />
<br />
And Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones’ guitarist, in talking about his heroin habit in his book on addiction, sorry, book on his life —same thing—uh, [life], he called it, talking about his heroin habit, “It’s about the search for oblivion,” he says. The contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.<br />
<br />
Now why would somebody would not wish themselves to be themselves for a few hours? Because they're suffering, and why are they suffering? Because the early trauma, early emotional loss, induces certain beliefs. One belief is that “I'm worthless.” Because children are pure narcissists, and I mean narcissists in the pure sense of the word. In other words, when something happens to a child, particularly a young child, it’s happening because to him, and happening because of him. So bad things happen, it's because I’m a bad person. Good things happen because I’m a good person. But if bad things happen, I’m a bad person. If I’m hurt, I deserve it. I caused it. I’m unworthy.<br />
<br />
So there’s deep shame at the core of addictions; there’s also a sense that the world is indifferent and hostile, and of course the child who suffers them is abused—the world was indifferent and hostile as they experienced it. But, as the Buddha said it, "it is with our mind that we create the world." But, what the Buddha didn't say was that before "with our mind we create the world," the world creates our minds. And those minds are then shaped by those early experiences.<br />
<br />
So, to the addict, the world is hostile—is indifferent—in which he or she has to manipulate and find some way to soothe themselves because there ain’t no soothing in this world, there’s no healing in this world.<br />
<br />
Those are some of the core beliefs at the heart of addiction. And there’s a deep emptiness here, because as the spiritual teacher— and this leads me directly to speak about the ayahuasca experience—as a spiritual teacher here in California said, "The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is there was not any love or support," speaking of childhood.<br />
<br />
The greater calamity, which was caused by that first calamity, is that you lost the connection to your essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not.<br />
In other words, the greatest loss we endure is the loss of connection to ourselves, and that’s then when we experience a deep emptiness that we’re so afraid of.<br />
<br />
And this culture is all about stuffing full of products, and stuffing full of relationships, and stuffing full of activities, and stuffing full of false meaning. But of course the more we do that, the more addicted we become, because these things can never be truly satiating. So, that emptiness can never be filled from the outside. The way through the emptiness is through the inside—is from the inside. And that’s where the spiritual experiences, and the healing experiences, empowered by ayahuasca come into it.<br />
<br />
Now, my book on addiction came out four years ago now, and I never heard about ayahuasca until after it was published. While I was writing it I began to get emails and inquiries from people, "What do you know about ayahuasca and the healing of addiction?” and I would say, "Nothing, I don’t know anything about it."A week later, the same question. And this went on persistently for months.<br />
I finally began to be both irritated, and curious. And then it turned out that there was an opportunity to experience ayahuasca up in Vancouver; a Peruvian shaman was coming up and leading some ceremonies, and I did do a ceremony. And I sat there in the dark with my heart open and a feeling of delicious nurturing warmth, the tears of joy rolling down my face, and I got love. And I also got how many ways in my life I had betrayed love and had turned by back on it, which is a coping pattern, because when you’re as vulnerable and hurt as a child as I was as a Jewish infant under German occupation in Hungary, then you close down to love because it’s too painful to be open to it.<br />
<br />
The ayahuasca got rid of my coping mechanisms in a flash, and there I was experiencing something, and I knew then that this is something to work with. And within half a year I was working with people shamanically trained in Peruvian Shipibo tradition, and beginning to lead retreats. We’ve led a number now, and the results are increasingly but uniformly astonishing.<br />
<br />
So I’m going to read you some communications sent to me by people that have participated in our ayahuasca retreats and then I'll talk about their experiences and why ayahuasca is so potentially helpful. Although, as the previous speaker said, nobody should ever say that it’s a panacea.<br />
So this is Dr. Stuart Krichevsky, who writes about ayahuasca. ...<br />
<blockquote>
Decoctions like ayahuasca, similar to many forms of meditation, has salutogenic potential. Salutogenic meaning health-giving potential i.e. can enhance physical mental and spiritual health by calling into play what is referred to as participating consciousness.</blockquote>
So if you can become conscious of your patterns and your beliefs, these core beliefs, and how you attain these beliefs, then you can let go of them. Rigid feeling, thought, and behavioral patterns can unclench; the self can rearrange itself and develop its inner and outer resources more deeply. So there we get to the concept of a true self and one that can be reconfigured, or at least rediscovered with the help of the psychoactive plants, particularly ayahuasca.<br />
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So I’ll read you now what some people have said about their experience at our retreats, and I’ll talk to you more about the retreats and how they function.<br />
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“The last two nights have been challenging, but I'm getting good practice. Negative thoughts as they come up, under the effect, I can feel the physical sensation of fear in my gut as the thought arises and returns to a safer place."</blockquote>
In other words, when you have a certain thought, like you have a negative thought pattern—when I say negative, I mean a self defeating, self-deprecating, self invalidating thought pattern—that’s not just the thought up here, that’s immediately a physical impact on the body. You feel it in the gut, you feel it in the heart, if affects your whole nervous system, your cardiovascular system, your immune system, and this person is getting in touch with how their thoughts are influencing your body.<br />
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"In the past I’ve made many bad, irresponsible choices with hurtful consequences to myself in others. Despite knowing that right now, I’m presented with new choices I can make from a place of love towards myself and the people in my life. It’s hard to push despair aside. The despair that tells me I will continue to make the same poor choices over and over again.</blockquote>
That’s the core belief showing up again that "there’s something wrong with me." But this person at least is conscious of it.<br />
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This is a physician, by the way, who has nearly lost his license because of addictions, and his marriage is falling apart, and he came to the retreat. And he thought he had a perfect childhood, by the way, and I won't even go into the details.<br />
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“The other very powerful moment I had involved looking at the sense of being too much for my parents. I know no matter how much love they felt for me, they probably were all alone with their own fears and anxiety. Well yeah, the father had a near-fatal heart attack at age 28. I’ve experienced myself as a child when this child was a one-year old. I’ve experienced myself as too much for the world for a long time. I’ve made a grand effort over the years to prove that true, which is why it cracks my heart open so wide to feel welcomed in the hearts of you and the people here, knowing that my feelings, my hurt, fear, sadness, and need for connection are not too much. I feel that the world can hold me, in fact, always has. And maybe I can learn to hold myself. It’s painful to think that Miles, my son, may feel himself to be too much for me. I desperately don’t want that to happen. Much love and gratitude.”</blockquote>
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I won’t read you the other experiences, but they’re all the same sort of people experiencing love, gratitude, connection to themselves, experiencing the childhood trauma.<br />
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My daughter did an ayahuasca retreat. She said that she revisited all the sad places in her childhood, and because I was a workaholic, and was very stressed, and a very undeveloped adult when I was a father to my young kids, she’s has plenty of sorrow in her life. And she said that she revisited those sad places but did so with the loving consciousness and empathy and the compassion of an adult, and if you look at the brain scans on ayahuasca ... what you see is activation of the temporal lobe, where childhood memories are stored; of the limbic system where our emotions are modulated and they live, and the front part of the brain where insight is made available to us.<br />
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We can connect the childhood experience, no matter how traumatic—and it sometimes comes up for people. Some really deeply disturbing, traumatic experiences come up for people during the ayahuasca experience. And those experiences may take the form of direct memory, direct recall of an image, or what happened to them, such as a body invasion, or other kinds of trauma, or it may take the form of really scary images and creatures, but it’s like a dream. In the dream, when somebody’s chasing us, we’re not afraid because somebody’s chasing up—somebody’s chasing us because we’re afraid. In other words, during sleep, the centers in the brain where childhood memories are stored get activated, and then the brain makes up a story to explain the emotion. And I believe that much of the same is true of the scary visions that people have during the ayahuasca experience.<br />
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The beautiful images, of course, represent more the core self. We get to see both the experiences in response to which we develop these coping mechanisms that give us addiction or cancer or other form of illness. We get to experience that core self and the beauty of the world, as it actually is, when we don’t see it through a screen of suffering and misinterpretation induced by our early experience. So, we get to see both what we’ve been running from and trying to cope with, and trying to manipulate, but we also get to see that true connection that true love, that true beauty, that true vision, that pure insight, that pure strength, that pure compassion. And when we do that, we realize we don't have to cope anymore. We don't have to run anymore. We can just be right where we are.<br />
Now, that’s not to say that because you have that experience it’s going to stay like that. That takes work that takes practice. If you don't put in some practice afterwards, if you don't get follow up, if you don't put it into the context of your life, this experience just becomes a beautiful memory. But the impact of it will fade. So it’s transformative, but it’s only transformative if you allow it to be transformative. And it you work with it so that it becomes transformative. But if you do, it can be very, very powerful, it can be life-changing for many, many people.<br />
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I have to say something here about context here. I don’t lead ayahuasca ceremonies, I’m not on ayahuasca, I don’t chant, I just participate in the ceremonies. Leading the ceremonies are people who wouldn't call themselves shamans, but I would call them that because their work is that effective. They chant, and they work with people energetically. And they pick up on peoples’ energies in the dark. I don’t do that. I pick up people’s energies in the light. I hear it in the tone of their voice, facial expression, choice of words. They sit there in the silence while they chant and they are reading the energies of the people as they emanate from each individual in that circle, where they might be 30 of us in the Malacca. And then they chant to people specifically to unblock particular energies, or particular energy blockages.<br />
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Like a person with cancer recently—two weeks after she signed up she became diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ve told you my view of breast cancer, or cancer in general: it’s a repression of anger as one of the major dynamics in it. The shaman sits there in the dark and feels the blocked anger in that woman’s breast, and then works with it to unblock that energy. So, it’s not just the chemical effect of the plant, and I’m sure other people have emphasized the same point. ... It’s the context, it’s the responsiveness and supportive interaction of the environment.<br />
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Remember what I said when I was quoting from that Harvard article about how the brain develops in response to the mutual responsiveness of child and adult? In the same way the healing benefit of something like ayahuasca is not simply the chemical effect of the plant, although that of course is inseparable from its other effects. It's also the responsiveness of the environment in which people experience the ayahuasca. So, the experience has to be in a safe context, in a context where there’s guidance.<br />
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People sometimes have negative experiences, or they think they do because they had an experience they didn't like, and so they resist the experience. And also, the personality has a way of invalidating our essential self.<br />
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I’ll give you a quick example of that. There was a woman in a recent retreat who wanted to experience what was blocking her from engaging with life and herself in a full and passionate way. Next she reports with great disappointment and even resentment what she experienced during the ayahuasca ceremony.<br />
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“I just got psychedelic colors, for example, there was a psychedelic Indian elephant. I didn't come here to get a trip with Indian elephants.”</blockquote>
The Indian elephant is Ganesh, the god-figure who unblocks difficulties. That’s what she experienced. And in some part of her brain she knew that. But because she was resisting the experience rather than being open to it, she actually missed the point. Now, that’s okay. If you go through it that way you’ll still learn what you need to learn, so I’m not negating her experience. In fact, it turned out to be a beautiful experience for her. But people sometimes need the guidance to understand the experience. It’s not enough, the experience. We have to find the meaning of the experience, and that’s where my role comes in. That’s what I help people with. But that wouldn’t be possible without the astonishing work of the ayahuasceros, the ayahuasceras, that I work with.<br />
So it’s an overall gestalt; the plant, the ceremony, the chanting, the energetic work, and the psychological-emotional preparation beforehand, integration afterwards, and the joint exploration and the identification of meaning.<br />
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[applause]<br />
Well, thank you.<br />
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<!--smart_paging_filter--><!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><em style="font-size: 12px;">Gabor Mate is a Canadian physician, speaker and author of four books. </em><em style="font-size: 12px;">He teaches and leads seminars internationally.</em><em style="font-size: 12px;"> He has worked in family practice and palliative care and for 12 years worked on Vancouver's downtown eastside, notorious as North America’s most concentrated area of drug use. </em><em style="font-size: 12px;">For more information visit</em><em style="font-size: 12px;"> DrGaborMate.com. </em></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-81750813457122710582013-04-23T09:14:00.000-07:002013-04-23T09:45:34.179-07:00<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">It’s the End of the World Unless We All Start Cooking.</span></b><br />
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From The Daily Beast - By Rachel Khong<br />
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<b>Is the way we’re eating going to bring about end of the world?</b><br />
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The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which certainly threatens to bring about the end of the world as we’ve known it.<br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="body_inlineimage_0" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><figure class="multimedia section"> <img alt="PD" class="cq-dd-image" src="http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/04/23/it-s-the-end-of-the-world-unless-we-all-start-cooking/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage_0.img.503.jpg/1366721946369.cached.jpg" title="130422-michael-pollan-khong-tease" /> <figcaption class="figcaption">Michael Pollan at Toronto's Live Organic Food Bar in February 2008. (Keith Beaty)</figcaption></figure><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="body_text2" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><br />
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For better and worse, the industrial food system has made food very cheap. The poor can eat a better diet than they once could. It used to be that only the rich could eat meat every day of the week. Now just about everyone can, three meals a day. Fast-food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, and most of it is brutally produced, but it is within reach.<br />
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But meat has a tremendous carbon footprint: beef in particular because it takes so much grain to get a pound of beef. It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get 1 one pound of beef, and that grain takes tremendous amounts of fossil fuel—in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, farm equipment, processing, and transportation. All told, it takes 55 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of beef. The average for processed foods is 10 calories of fossil fuel per calorie of food.<br />
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Before World War II every calorie of fossil-fuel energy put into a farm—in the form of diesel energy for tractors, and in fertilizer—yielded 2.3 calories of food. That’s nature’s free lunch—the difference between that 1 calorie in and the 2.3 out, which is the result of solar energy. Now, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food. It’s absurd that we’re now running an energy deficit with food, the production of which is theoretically based on photosynthesis. It should be the one area in our lives that is carbon neutral or even better, because plants are really the only way to take energy from the sun.<br />
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Our goal should be to eat from the solar food chain to the extent we can and not from the fossil-fuel chain, which is what we’re mainly doing now. The question becomes: how do you do that? We have some powerful models. Grass-fed beef is basically a system where the sun feeds the grass, the grass feeds the ruminants, and the ruminants feed us. You’re eating sunlight when you eat from that food chain. Re-solarizing the food chain should be our goal in every way—taking advantage of the everyday miracle that is photosynthesis.<br />
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We’re not doing that, because fossil fuel has been so cheap. Over time, farms have been substituting fossil fuel for human labor as well as the energy of the sun. Fertilizer made with natural gas or diesel was a huge step away from using the sun. It is only in the last few years that people are starting to realize the role food can play in fixing environmental problems, and the fact that we’re not going to tackle global warming without reforming the food system.<br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="body_inlineimage" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><figure class="multimedia section"> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cooked-A-Natural-History-Transformation/dp/1594204217/ref=as_at?tag=thedailybeast-autotag-20&linkCode=as2&"><img alt="cooked-pollan-cover" class="cq-dd-image" src="http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/04/23/it-s-the-end-of-the-world-unless-we-all-start-cooking/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.503.jpg/1366706746449.cached.jpg" title="cooked-pollan-cover" /></a> <figcaption class="figcaption">‘Cooked’ by Michael Pollan. 480 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.<br />
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Take, for example, Assembly Bill 32 in California. The law is designed to gradually bring down the amount of carbon emitted by our fuel companies, power companies, and our cars, by capping carbon emissions. But the law doesn’t deal with agriculture. They didn’t know how to deal with agriculture, so they simply left it out. But by not capping agriculture, the state will be playing Whac-a-Mole. As all these other industries’ outputs go down, agriculture’s will continue to go up. We have to learn to deal with the effects of agricultural practices—especially cattle feedlots—or we’re never going to get a handle on carbon. We shouldn’t have as much dairy in California as we do—it’s that simple. It’s a desert, and cows need grass. Re-localizing food economies can—not necessarily, but can—help reduce our reliance on fossil fuel.<br />
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<b>At what point did we start making food worse instead of better?</b></div>
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Up until the 19th century, the history of cooking was all in the direction of making food more nutritious. But in the late 19th century, we learned how to refine grain and make white flour. In the 1880s, in England, we came up with roller mills, which can cleanly separate the endosperm—the pure starch—from the germ and bran, which is where most of the nutrients are.<br />
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With that “advance,” we began taking cooking too far. (Around the same time, we learned how to do something similar with sugar—turning cane and beets into pure sugar.) Cooking essentially went overboard. It began contributing to public-health problems. We started to have problems with tooth decay; with obesity; with nutrient deficiencies, because people began to eat lots of empty calories.</div>
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We basically got too smart for our own good; we moved from cooking to “food processing.” When people talk about processed food as being unhealthy, what they’re really talking about is cooking as it is performed by corporations. Companies cook in a different way. They’re trying to make food that our bodies can absorb as quickly as possible. You could argue that this process is continuous with the history that I’ve been describing, which is to make food progressively easier to digest. But at that point they’ve removed all the fiber, and they’re satisfying only the most basic desire for glucose, for sugar.</div>
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We love sugar. We’re hardwired to like sweetness. It’s one of the few food instincts we have. We don’t like bitter, because it’s usually a sign of a plant toxin. Most of the toxins in nature are bitter; they’re alkaloids. We’re attracted to sugar because in nature, sugar is a sign of calories, of concentrated energy. In nature, sweetness is a pretty reliable guide to healthy food. It indicates the presence of ripe fruit, which comes with fiber and lots of important nutrients and phytochemicals. But once you’ve crossed over and you’re making processed sugar, it no longer comes with all those good things.<br />
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The food industry has established a financial model where you take raw materials—corn, soy, wheat—and you “add value” by creating processed foods from those cheap building blocks.</blockquote>
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One of the main problems is that there are really two of us to feed: there’s our brain, which loves glucose, and then there’s our gut—the microbiome—which has very different dietary needs than “we” do. We really like sugar, but the gut really likes fiber and other parts of plants. We got really good at finding sugar, because the brain lives on glucose, but we neglect the fact that you have to feed the whole body, that we’re not just eating for one—we’re eating for the 10 trillion microbes living inside us. So in our cooking, we have to learn to cook for all 10 trillion. But it’s hard for us to listen to the desires of those 10 trillion—the brain is much easier to hear.<br />
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At the turn of the century, white flour became a huge part—something like 20 percent—of the diet. In the early years of the 20th century, people recognized that white flour was making us sick because of its lack of vitamins. But the beauty of white flour is that it meshes so well with our capitalist economy. It’s a commodity that is imperishable. It is largely indistinguishable: all white flour is white flour. White flour can be transported over great distances; it’s easier to cook with; it lends itself to industrialized baking; it’s a perfect capitalist commodity.<br />
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Capitalism is most concerned with food not being perishable, being shelf-stable. Whole grains make volatile, perishable flour, so big companies don’t want to rely on it. Instead, they figured out a techno-fix: supplementation. They said, OK, these are the vitamins we lost when we took away the bran and the germ, so we’ll just put them back in in chemical form. Various B vitamins, niacin, thiamine, all those things. And that took care of the problem. Sort of. It took care of the problem for us, but not for the 10 trillion. Your microbes didn’t care much about the vitamins; they wanted the bran.<br />
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In the history of food processing, you never turn back, you just come up with a technological fix for whatever problems you’ve created. Food gets more and more complex, more processed. The food industry has established a financial model where you take raw materials—corn, soy, wheat—and you “add value” by creating processed foods from those cheap building blocks. So instead of selling nutritious brown rice, we genetically engineered white rice that has vitamin A in it: “golden” rice. The more complex you can make a food product, the more profitable it is. But at the end of the day, all that processing and engineering is achieving is returning what we took out in the first place. Baby formula is the great example. Breast milk is the perfect food, formed by natural selection to have everything the developing child—and its microbiota—needs. We’ve spent almost two hundred years trying to simulate it, because food companies can’t make money when people are nursing their babies.<br />
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But we still can’t make formula as good as breast milk. There’s still that mystery X-factor because babies raised on formula simply don’t do as well. When we simulate formula, we try to design what the baby needs and once again we forget about the ten trillion. Only in the last ten years or so, did we discover that the oligosaccharides (a kind of sugar) in mother’s milk—a “nutrient” that the baby can’t digest—are vital to a baby’s gut microbes. They encourage the proliferation of bifida, a very important kind of bacteria. It’s human arrogance to think we can outwit nature.<br />
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<b>How do we go about fixing what we’ve messed up? Is it all bad news?</b></div>
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I sometimes find myself wondering whether we can posit or imagine a food science that is actually improving food in the way that cooking for most of its history succeeded in doing. Theoretically we should be able to do this. We came up with fermentation; we came up with cooking with fire. We’ve had food science and food technology now for a hundred and fifty years, and so far, not so good. So far we haven’t done anything that useful. But we understand a lot more, and we should be able to improve on things, not just make money and entertain people.<br />
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I can think of some examples of potentially useful food processing innovations. Here’s one that some people are actually working on. For reasons having to do with both our health and the health of our environment, we need really good meat substitutes. So far meat substitutes are really unsatisfying. No one but a vegan can get excited about fake bacon. They seem to think it’s really good. But most people who’ve actually eaten bacon? They don’t really see the point. It’s probably because vegans have forgotten how real bacon tastes, but they have this deep memory of the experience that is stirred by the fake bacon. Mock-meat hamburgers are not very satisfying, either. They’re also much more expensive than real hamburgers, which is odd considering they’re made from vegetable matter.<br />
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Today there are people using the most sophisticated food science to simulate meat, and it seems to me that if this is done well, it has enormous potential to contribute to our welfare and to the environment. Cheese that is not made with cows’ milk might be something to work on because we’re consuming huge amounts of the stuff, and dairy cows, like beef cows, have an enormous environmental footprint. The whole California central valley—especially Tulare County—is wall-to-wall dairy cows producing low-quality milk for low-quality cheese that’s put on Domino’s pizzas all over the world. Synthesizing this type of cheese is really not a very high bar to hit: all that’s needed is something white and cheeselike that melts. It seems to me that a good nondairy cheese would be a positive contribution to humankind, and something worth working on.<br />
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As a society this is a very important question we need to pose. How can we cook better—better for our health, and better for the health of the planet? Now we have molecular gastronomy, which is using lots of new techniques. But what has it really contributed? More in the way of novel experiences and entertainment, I would say, and very little toward solving any kind of public-health problem. I haven’t seen anything in that world that says to me, If we popularize this technique, it would have really positive effects. But this is what we need to work on. I have little doubt that if Nathan Myhrvold set that as his goal, he could help solve some of our real nutritional and environmental problems linked to food. But I don’t see that happening right now.<br />
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Yet there are reasons to feel encouraged. People are much more conscious of food politics and agricultural politics than they were a few years ago. The farm bill used to just be passed without anyone outside of the farm belt noticing. Now we see front-page articles about agricultural policy. We’re making some progress toward politicizing things that were once happening behind closed doors, and that’s a good thing.<br />
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But we have a long way to go. I want to see the FDA ban antibiotics. I want to see a farm bill that subsidizes healthy food and not just junk food. All that hasn’t come yet. The food movement is still a young movement. I’m optimistic, and I don’t think we should be discouraged. We’re talking about some really entrenched and powerful interests that need to be dislodged. You look at other comparable movements—the environmental movement or civil rights—and you see that change didn’t happen in a decade; it took generations. And this will take generations, too.<br />
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The food movement needs strong leadership. There are too many writers and chefs, and not enough smart politicians. We don’t yet have the skills we need to organize and force change in Washington. That said, I do think that chefs are playing a really constructive role. They have the cultural microphone right now, and they’re using it to promote good farming and careful thought about food. Part of what we need and what chefs are promoting is the cultural re-evaluation of food: recognizing that food is important both to your health and to your culture, and that it’s worth spending a little money on it if you can.<br />
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What I’m trying to do in this new book is make a case for cooking as a valuable way to spend your time. I want to lure people into the kitchen with the promise of pleasure, and not because it’s an obligation, or something you should do. I happen to believe cooking is as interesting as watching TV or being on the computer, which is what people seem to be doing with the time they “save” by not cooking. Cooking isn’t drudgery. It takes real mental engagement; it offers sensual pleasures; it’s very enriching to cook. My book has all these detours into microbiology and the science of flavor because truly amazing things are going on when you cook. As a cook, you are a chemist and you are a physicist and you are a cultural historian all at once. And what can seem boring to people is often just a failure to use their imaginations and intellect to understand what’s actually going on, what is at stake. It’s the same with gardening. Cooking and gardening to me are very similar activities on many levels; you could argue that pulling weeds is boring and you’d rather be looking at a screen. But I usually feel better after I’ve weeded my garden than after plowing through another hour’s worth of email. Ironically enough, I think there is actually more mental space for this kind of work now—our lives are so mediated by technology, so mediated by screens, that there’s a real hunger to recover the use of our hands, and our senses.<br />
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We’re sensorially deprived right now, in modern life. Our eyes are engaged—sometimes our ears—but our bodies? Not so much. These aren’t just bags of bones we’re carrying around. When we cook, when we garden, when we make things with our hands, we’re engaging all of our senses and that has—in ways we don’t really know how to quantify—deeply positive effects on our mental and physical health. We’re hungry for the all the complex sensory information that cooking can provide when approached in the right spirit.<br />
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<i>An excerpt from the “Apocalypse” issue of Lucky Peach magazine, published by McSweeney’s. To learn more, <a href="https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/lucky-peach-issue-6">click here</a>.</i><br />
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Rachel Khong lives in San Francisco. She edits cookbooks for McSweeney's, and is the managing editor of Lucky Peach.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-49260298386602579832013-03-01T13:11:00.002-08:002013-03-01T13:12:03.743-08:00<h1 class="node-title" datatype="" property="dc:title">
Nanoparticles Are in Our Food, Clothing and Medicine -- And No One Knows for Sure How Dangerous They Might Be.</h1>
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://orionmagazine.org/">Orion Magazine</a></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/heather-millar">Heather Millar</a></em> <!-- end: byline -->
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<strong><span style="font-size: small;">Inside nanotechnology’s little universe of big unknowns.</span></strong> <!-- start: body --> </h1>
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<!-- All spans have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers --> <!-- BODY --> <!--smart_paging_filter--><!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><em><strong>This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7278">Orion Magazine</a> under the title "<a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7278">Pandora's Boxes</a>." You can enjoy future<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> Orion articles by signing up to the </span><a href="https://subscribe.pcspublink.com/sub/subscribe.aspx?guid=c569d723-39c8-4f10-bf26-885f1ed6f658"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">magazine's free trial subscription program</span></a><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">.</span></strong></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University’s Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them—the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina’s piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.</span></span></div>
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Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.<br />
<br />
The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke’s Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.<br />
So far the questions about whether nanoparticles are an environmental risk outnumber the answers, which is why the Duke scientists take the precaution of wearing clean-suits while dosing the boxes—no one’s sure what exposure to a high concentration of nanoparticles might do. Among the few things we do know about them are that they sail past the blood-brain barrier and can harm the nervous systems of some animals.<br />
<br />
The regulation of nanoparticles has been recommended for more than a decade, but there’s no agreement on exactly how to do it. Meanwhile, the lid has already been lifted on nanotechnology. The use of man-made nanoparticles has spread into almost every area of our lives: food, clothing, medicine, shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen, and thousands of other products.<br />
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Regulatory structures, both here and abroad, are completely unprepared for this onslaught of nanoproducts, because nanoparticles don’t fit into traditional regulatory categories. Additionally, companies often shield details about them by labeling them “proprietary”; they’re difficult to detect; we don’t have protocols for judging their effects; and we haven’t even developed the right tools for tracking them. If nanotechnology and its uses represent a frontier of sorts, it’s not simply the Wild West—it’s the Chaotic, Undiscovered, Uncontrollable West.<br />
<br />
And yet, when I visit the boxes on a warm spring day filled with the buzzing of dragonflies and the plaintive call of mourning doves, they look perfectly benign and could easily be mistaken for a container garden. But there are hints that more is going on: each “mesocosm” (a middle ground between microcosm and macrocosm) is studded with probes and sensors that continually transmit data to CEINT’s central computer.<br />
<br />
As I instinctively squint my eyes to try and locate evidence of the silver nanoparticles inside each box, I realize I might as well be staring down at these research gardens from another arm of the galaxy. The scale of these two worlds is so disparate that my senses are destined to fail me.<br />
<br />
As with many things that are invisible and difficult to understand—think subatomic particles such as the Higgs boson, muons, gluons, or quarks—any discussion of nanoparticles quickly shifts into the realm of metaphor and analogy. People working in nanoscience seem to try to outdo each other with folksy explanations: Looking for a nanoparticle is like looking for a needle in the Grand Canyon when the canyon is filled with straw. If a nanoparticle were the size of a football, an actual football would be the size of New Zealand. A million nanoparticles could squeeze onto the period at the end of this sentence.<br />
<br />
But what is a nanoparticle? The very simplest explanation is that a nanoparticle is a very small object. It can consist of any bit of matter—carbon, silver, gold, titanium dioxide, pretty much anything you can imagine—that exists on the scale of nanometers. One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter. A nanoparticle may range in size from one nanometer to one hundred nanometers, although the upper boundary remains a matter of debate among scientists.<br />
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Nanoparticles exist in nature, but they can also be manufactured. One way is top-down: grinding up things that are big until they are really, really small, an approach used in nanolithography for electronics. Or you can make them from the bottom up, following instructions that read like a chemistry textbook: mixing one chemical with another by pyrolysis (heating a material in a partial vacuum), or with electrolysis (running a current through a liquid), or by other means.<br />
<br />
But what do they look like? Raju Badireddy, a postdoctoral researcher, is happy to satisfy my curiosity. He greets me with a smile at the door to one of CEINT’s basement labs and guides me around his little domain. For much of his work, Badireddy uses a “dark field” microscope that excludes certain wavelengths of light, reducing the “noise” in the image to provide unparalleled clarity. Sensing my anticipation, he doses a slide with silver nanoparticles similar to those in the mesocosm boxes in the forest, and slips it under the lens.<br />
<br />
As I look into the scope, it fairly takes my breath away. There are so many dots of light that I’m reminded of staring up at the Milky Way on a trip across the Tibetan Plateau years ago. Yet the silver dots throb and undulate as if alive. Here and there, giant spheres of dust, as large as Goodyear blimps, porpoise through the nanoparticles. I pull back from the oculars, feeling as if I’ve intruded upon something private. This world is so close—it’s even inside me—yet it looks so other, so mysterious.<br />
Scientists don’t really have a full theoretical foundation to explain reality at this scale. But all agree that one of the most important aspects of nanoparticles is that they are all surface. Consider a conventional chemical process: When one element is reacting with another, it’s really just the surface molecules that are involved in the lock-and-key dance of classical chemistry. The vast majority of the molecules remain interior, and stable. But there are many fewer molecules in a nanoparticle, so most of the molecules are on the outside, thus rendering nanoparticles more reactive.<br />
<br />
Myriad surface imperfections cause randomness to dominate the nano world. If you hit a billiard ball with a clean shot at the macro level, you can have a good idea where it will go. But at the nano level, a billiard ball might shoot straight up, or even reverse direction. These bits of matter are hot to trot: ready to react, to bond, and to do so in unpredictable ways.<br />
<br />
This makes life at the nano scale more chaotic. For instance, aluminum is used everywhere to make soda cans. But in nanopowder form, aluminum explodes violently when it comes in contact with air. At the macro level, gold is famously nonreactive. At the nano level, gold goes the opposite way, becoming extremely reactive. Bulk carbon is soft. But at the nano level, if you superheat it, the molecules bend into a tube that is very strong and semiconductive. In the nano world, gravity fades to the background, becoming less pronounced, the melting temperature of materials changes, and colors shift. At 25 nanometers, spherical gold nanoparticles are red; at 50 nanometers they are green; and at 100 nanometers they’re orange. Similarly, silver is blue at 40 nanometers and yellow at 100 nanometers.<br />
<br />
So chemistry and physics work differently if you’re a nanoparticle. You’re not as small as an atom or a molecule, but you’re also not even as big as a cell, so you’re definitely not of the macro world either. You exist in an undiscovered country somewhere between the molecular and the macroscopic. Here, the laws of the very small (quantum mechanics) merge quirkily with the laws of the very large (classical physics). Some say nanomaterials bring a third dimension to chemistry’s periodic table, because at the nano scale, long-established rules and groupings don’t necessarily hold up.<br />
<br />
These peculiarities are the reason that nanoparticles have seeped into so many commercial products. Researchers can take advantage of these different rules, adding nanoparticles to manufactured goods to give them desired qualities.<br />
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Scientists first realized that nanomaterials exhibit novel properties in 1985, when researchers at Rice University in Houston fabricated a Buckminsterfullerene, so named because the arrangement of sixty carbon atoms resembles the geodesic domes popularized by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller. These “Buckyballs” resist heat and act as superconductors. Then, in 1991, a researcher at the Japanese technology company NEC discovered the carbon nanotube, which confers great strength without adding weight. Novel nano materials have been reported at a feverish pace ever since.<br />
With these engineered nanoparticles—not even getting into the more complex nanomachines on the horizon—we can deliver drugs to specific cells, “cloak” objects to make them less visible, make solar cells more efficient, and manufacture flexible electronics like e-paper.<br />
<br />
In the household realm, nanosilica makes house paints and clothing stain resistant; nanozinc and nano–titanium dioxide make sunscreen, acne lotions, and cleansers transparent and more readily absorbed; and nanosilicon makes computer components and cell phones ever smaller and more powerful. Various proprietary nanoparticles have been mixed into volumizing shampoos, whitening toothpastes, scratch-resistant car paint, fabric softeners, and bricks that resist moss and fungus.<br />
<br />
A recent report from an American Chemical Society journal claims that nano–titanium dioxide (a thickener and whitener in larger amounts) is now found in eighty-nine popular food products. These include: M&Ms and Mentos, Dentyne and Trident chewing gums, Nestlé coffee creamers, various flavors of Pop-Tarts, Kool-Aid, and Jell-O pudding, and Betty Crocker cake frostings. According to a market report, in 2010 the world produced 50,000 tons of nano–titanium dioxide; by 2015, it’s expected to grow to more than 200,000 tons.<br />
<br />
At first some in the scientific community didn’t think that the unknown environmental effects of nanotechnology merited CEINT’s research. “The common view was that it was premature,” says CEINT’s director, Mark Wiesner. “My point was that that’s the whole point. But looking at risk is never as sexy as looking at the applications, so it took some time to convince my colleagues.”<br />
Wiesner’s team at CEINT chose to study silver nanoparticles first because they are already commonly added to many consumer products for their germ-killing properties. You can find nanosilver in socks, wound dressings, doorknobs, sheets, cutting boards, baby mugs, plush toys—even condoms. How common is the application of nanoparticles? It varies, but when it comes to socks, for example, hospitals now have to be cautious that the nanosilver in a patient’s footwear doesn’t upset their MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines.<br />
<br />
Wiesner and his colleagues spent several months designing the experiments that will help them outline some general ecological principles of the unique nanoverse. He knew they wanted to test the particles in a system, but a full-scale ecosystem would be too big, too unmanageable, so they had to find a way to container-ize nature. They considered all sorts of receptacles: kiddie pools (too flimsy), simple holes in the ground (too dirty, too difficult to harvest for analysis), concrete boxes (crack in winter). Finally, they settled upon wooden boxes lined with nonreactive, industrial rubber: cheap to build, easy to reuse, and convenient to harvest.<br />
<br />
They built thirty boxes and a greenhouse to hold them. The large number would make it easier to replicate experiments, and to answer the spectrum of questions being posed by CEINT’s interdisciplinary team. The ecologists were interested in community diversity and how the biomass shifts over time. The biologists wanted to know whether the nanoparticles become concentrated as they move up the food chain. The toxicologists wanted to track where the particles went and how fast they got there. The chemists wanted to know about reactivity.<br />
<br />
Whatever the goal of the experiment it houses, each mesocosm features a slanted board upon which a terrestrial ecosystem slowly gives way to an aquatic one. It’s a lot more complicated than a test tube in a lab, but it remains an approximation. The team had hoped to run streams through the mesocosms, but the computing power and monitoring vigilance necessary to track nanoparticles in the streams proved prohibitive.<br />
<br />
In 2011, the team dosed the boxes with two kinds of nanosilver made on campus: one coated in PVP, a binder used in many medicines, and the other coated in gum arabic, a binder used in numerous products, including gummi candies and cosmetics. Both coatings help to stabilize the nanosilver. In some boxes, the researchers let the silver leach slowly into the box. In other boxes, they delivered the silver in one big pulse. In some, they introduced the silver into the terrestrial part of the box; in others, they put the silver into the water.<br />
<br />
Then the researchers watched and waited.<br />
<br />
Reading through descriptions of nanoparticle applications can make a person almost giddy. It all sounds mostly great. And the toxicology maxim “Dose makes the poison” leads many biologists to be skeptical of the dangers nanoparticles might pose. After all, nanoparticles are pretty darn small.<br />
Yet size seems to be a double-edged sword in the nanoverse. Because nanoparticles are so small, they can slip past the body’s various barriers: skin, the blood-brain barrier, the lining of the gut and airways. Once inside, these tiny particles can bind to many things. They seem to build up over time, especially in the brain. Some cause inflammation and cell damage. Preliminary research shows this can harm the organs of lab animals, though the results of some of these studies are a matter of debate.<br />
Some published research has shown that inhaled nanoparticles actually become more toxic as they get smaller. Nano–titanium dioxide, one of the most commonly used nanoparticles (Pop-Tarts, sunblock), has been shown to damage DNA in animals and prematurely corrode metals. Carbon nanotubes seem to penetrate lungs even more deeply than asbestos.<br />
<br />
What little we know about the environmental effects of nanoparticles—and it isn’t very much—also raises some red flags. Nanoparticles from consumer products have been found in sewage wastewater, where they can inhibit bacteria that help break down the waste. They’ve been found to accumulate in plants and stunt their growth. Another study has shown that gold nanoparticles become more concentrated as they move up the food chain from plants to herbivores.<br />
<br />
“My suspicion, based on the limited amount of work that’s been done, is that nanoparticles are way less toxic than DDT,” says Richard Di Giulio, an environmental toxicologist on the CEINT team. “But what’s scary about nanoparticles is that we’re producing products with new nanomaterials far ahead of our ability to assess them.”<br />
<br />
As a society, we’ve been here before—releasing a “miracle technology” before its potential health and environmental ramifications are understood, let alone investigated. Remember how DDT was going to stamp out malaria and typhus and revolutionize agriculture? How asbestos was going to make buildings fireproof? How bisphenol A (BPA) would make plastics clear and nearly shatterproof? How methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) would make gasoline burn cleanly? How polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were going to make electrical networks safer? How genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were going to end hunger?<br />
<br />
The CEINT scientists are trying to develop a library that catalogues all the different kinds of engineered nanoparticles. They’re designing methods for assessing potential hazards, devising ways to evaluate the impact nanoparticles have on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and creating protocols that will help shape environmental policy decisions about nanoparticles.<br />
<br />
Wiesner says the boxes in the forest provide “ground truth” for experiments in the lab. Sometimes, he says, environmental research leads to generalizations that become so abstracted that they have no relationship to reality. The example he likes to give is Freon: if you were to study the toxicology of Freon in the traditional way, you’d never get to the ozone hole. “Nature changes things,” Wiesner says. “So we need to be able to understand those transformation processes, and we need to understand them in complex systems.”<br />
<br />
The first large set of CEINT experiments ended about a year ago, and the team spent most of last year figuring out where the nanoparticles went, what they did, and how they added up. They superimposed a grid on each box, then harvested the plants and animals section by section. They clipped the grasses, sorted them by type, and ground them up. They took bore samples of the soil, the water, and the rocks. They anesthetized and flash froze the vertebrates. Then they started measuring the nanoparticle concentrations in the plants, the animals, and core-sample slices.<br />
<br />
But consider the magnitude of the scientific problems that face the scientists at CEINT, or anyone else trying to answer a multitude of questions as nanotech applications gallop into the market and man-made nanoparticles begin to litter our world. Just try tracking something a billion times smaller than a meter in even a modestly sized ecosystem, say, a small wetland or a lake. Do carbon nanotubes degrade? And if not, then what? And how do you tell the nanotubes from all the other carbon in your average ecosystem? Even if we did regulate nanoparticles, how would we detect them? There’s no “nanoprobe” that could find them today, and given the challenges of developing such a thing, the team at CEINT considers it unlikely that there will be one any time soon. Thus, gathering evidence of nanoparticles’ effects—whether positive or negative—turns out to be a titanic task. Simply finding them in the experiment samples seems about as complicated as finding that needle in a haystack the size of the Grand Canyon.<br />
<br />
Lee Ferguson, a chemistry professor who directs the nanoparticle analysis, meets me in the basement of the CEINT building and leads me on a tour of all the hulking, pricey instruments the researchers use. Despite the cutting-edge aura of this machinery, none of it is fully up to the task of locating and analyzing the proverbial nanoneedle.<br />
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“With nanoparticles, we’re playing catch-up as a scientific community—not only to ask the right questions, but to have the right tools to investigate them,” Ferguson says as he pushes through a door into the first lab. “We were well prepared to answer questions about PCBs—we’d spent half a century refining the chemistry and the instruments that were used to analyze the molecules in those chemicals. But simply measuring nanoparticles is a challenge. It’s one thing if they’re concentrated, but if you’re looking for nanoparticles in soil, for instance, you just can’t find them.”<br />
<br />
He spends the next hour showing me how the CEINT team has back-engineered methods to detect and characterize nanoparticles. The fluorometer aims three lasers at carbon nanotubes. Another instrument uses ultrasonic waves to flush out its tiny quarry. Across campus, huge electron microscopes train electron beams on the nanoparticle samples, projecting their images onto a charge-coupled device camera, like the ones used on the Hubble Telescope, and atomic force microscopes form images of them by running a probe over samples like a hypersensitive, high-tech record player.<br />
As the team’s methods continue to advance, their experiments have resulted in some surprising data. “After we dosed the water, we took some of it to the lab and exposed fish to it,” says Wiesner’s research assistant, Benjamin Espinasse. “Some of the particles turned out to be more toxic in the lab. And the reverse also happened: some things didn’t appear to be toxic in the lab, but they were more toxic in the boxes. It seems that the organic matter in the mesocosms changed the coatings of the particles, making them more toxic or less toxic,” Espinasse continues. “We could never have imagined that.”<br />
<br />
While CEINT has only published the results of the preliminary mesocosm experiments, the team has been able to make a few conclusions: When the nanoparticles come in a burst, they tend to stay in the soil. But if they bleed into the system slowly, they filter into the water column. Regardless, nanoparticles seem to have a tendency to stick around—that was also the case with DDT.<br />
Meanwhile, CEINT has begun a new set of experiments in the boxes: testing nanoparticles that have been combined with various other substances.<br />
“The materials we most see now are nanomaterials incorporated into other products: textiles, foams, mattresses, nanotubes in display screens,” Wiesner explains. “How it will get out into the environment will be very different than just the pristine particle.”<br />
<br />
And then there are the nanobots to plan for. “As we get closer to even simple nanobots, we will need to understand how to do research on them, too,” Wiesner says. Although they remain a marvel of the future, scientists are working toward nanomachines that may someday be able to replicate red blood cells, clean up toxic spills, repair spinal cord injuries, and create weapon swarms to overwhelm an enemy. Researchers are already working on simple versions of nanobots using the chemical principles of attraction and repulsion to help nanostructures arrange and build themselves in a process akin to the way DNA works: a strand of DNA can only split and rebuild in one particular way, and the desired structure is preserved, no matter how many times the DNA replicates.<br />
<br />
As if trying to figure out the effects of simple nanoparticles weren’t enough of a futuristic challenge, concerns surrounding nanobots that replicate like DNA are so theoretical they’re spoken about in narratives resembling science fiction. Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy famously warned that, if released into the environment, self-assembling and self-replicating nanomachines could spread like pollen or bacteria, and be too tough and too small to stop before invading every part of the biosphere, chewing it up and reducing all life on earth to “gray goo.” In nanotech circles, this is called the “gray goo problem,” but no one really knows if this vision is prophetic or simply hysterical.<br />
<br />
Down the basement hallway, postdoc Badireddy motions to me to join him at a computer monitor next to the dark field microscope in his lab. He clicks on a movie he’s made from images he’s captured. It shows silver nanoparticles interacting with bacteria.<br />
<br />
At first, the nanoparticles don’t seem to be doing much. Then, all of a sudden, they start to clump to the outside of a bacterium. The nanoparticles build up and build up until the bacterium’s cell membrane bursts. Then the nanoparticle clumps dissolve into small units before clumping back up again and attacking more bacteria. “The whole cycle happens in about thirty minutes,” Badireddy says. “It’s so fast. If you leave the nanoparticles overnight, when you come back in the morning, all the bacteria are ground mush.”<br />
<br />
If you’re looking for stink-free athletic socks, maybe this is a good thing. But could that same process someday turn out to have some sort of nasty biological effect? We just don’t know yet.<br />
“The fact that they re-cycle suggests they might persist for a long time,” Badireddy says as we watch the movie a second time. “They might enter the food chain. And then, who knows what will happen?”<br />
<br />
<strong><em>For more on the topic, <a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/audio-video/item/nanotechnologys_little_universe_of_big_unknowns/">listen to the</a><a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/audio-video/item/nanotechnologys_little_universe_of_big_unknowns/">audio recording of the forum Orion hosted with Millar</a>, a researcher, ethicist, and consumer advocate on the topic, here, which expanded on several themes Heather didn't have room for in this article. </em></strong><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.21px;">Heather Millar has covered science, health, and technology for twenty years, contributing to magazines such as </span><span class="book_title" style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.21px;">Sierra, Smithsonian</span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.21px;">, and </span><span class="book_title" style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.21px;">The Atlantic</span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.21px;">. She lives with her family in San Francisco.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-88935334663999870832013-02-25T16:20:00.000-08:002013-02-25T16:20:21.815-08:00<h1>
Would You Halve How Much Meat You Eat?</h1>
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by <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/author/autismvox" rel="author" title="Posts by Kristina Chew">Kristina Chew</a><br />
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We need to halve the amount of meat we eat or risk causing even more damage to the natural world than we already have, says a new report from the <a href="http://www.unep.org/" target="_blank">United Nations Environment Program</a>. Entitled <a href="http://www.gpa.unep.org/component/docman/cat_view/37-gpnm.html?Itemid=139" target="_blank">Our Nutrient World: The challenge to produce more food and energy with less pollution</a>, the report underscores the unpleasant truth about how modern farming practices are creating more food, and more meat in particular, at lower cost but at a terrible price to the long-time health of the planet.<br />
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Eating less meat is a challenge many may shrink from, but it is one that people in wealthy nations must take up, says Professor Mark Sutton, the lead author of the <a href="http://www.gpa.unep.org/component/docman/cat_view/37-gpnm.html?Itemid=139" target="_blank">report</a>. Just a generation or two ago, people ate quite a bit less meat. The U.N. <a href="http://www.gpa.unep.org/component/docman/cat_view/37-gpnm.html?Itemid=139" target="_blank">report</a> asks people not to stop eating meat entirely, but presents the case for a more measured approach, urging people to go “demitarian” and cut the amount of meat they consume by half.<br />
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<strong>Raising Livestock Consumes Precious Natural Resources</strong><br />
Previous studies have underscored <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/go-vegetarian-or-the-world-will-go-hungry.html" target="_blank">how many more resources</a> — water, arable land, grain — are used up in raising livestock rather than in cultivating crops. In addition, to provide plenty of meat at cheap prices, the farming industry has come to rely on an ever-larger arsenal of techniques and tools (pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, fertilizer, cages so small that animals cannot move) that are unethical and inhumane.<br />
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Our insatiable demand for meat has actually “caused a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health.” The numerous chemical substances we have devised to improve the quality of meat has only done so in the short run. Run-off from chemicals has played a role in “dead zones in the seas, causing toxic algal blooms and killing fish, while some are threatening bees, amphibians and sensitive ecosystems,” says the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/18/halve-meat-consumption-scientists" target="_blank">Guardian</a>.<br />
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We need look no farther for evidence of what is wrong with the modern meat industry than the ongoing <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/horsemeat-lasagne-who-responsible.html" target="_blank">horse meat scandal</a> in Europe. Just this week, Nestle announced that it was <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-nestle-horsemeat-idUSBRE91H0RB20130219" target="_blank">withdrawing some of its products over concerns</a> about horse meat, which has turned up in other manufacturers’ frozen meals and “extra value” — cheaply priced — burgers. “The attention this meat scare has drawn [highlights] poor quality meat. It shows society must think about livestock and food choices much more, for the environment and health,” said Sutton in the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/18/halve-meat-consumption-scientists" target="_blank">Guardian</a>.<br />
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<strong>Can You Be a “Demetarian”?</strong><br />
Nonetheless, billions of people in developing countries should still increase their meat consumption, says Sutton. In order for this to happen, people in wealthy nations need to reduce their consumption of meat, in a sort of global give-and-take with the goal of extending the nutrition benefits of animal protein to those whose diets are insufficient.<br />
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The UN report is a wake-up call to take a good, hard look at how our taste for meat, and lots of it, has created a product that is not exactly appetizing and is endangering the world’s food supply. The report’s call to many in richer countries to “do the demetarian thing” is a call to consider what we consume and to ask, do we really need to eat all that?</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-49696313835305683062013-02-19T05:30:00.001-08:002013-02-19T05:30:20.584-08:00<h1 class="node-title" datatype="" property="dc:title">
The Most Loathsome People in America: The Double Dirty Dozen.</h1>
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://buffalobeast.com/">Buffalo Beast</a></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/ian-murphy">Ian Murphy</a></em> <!-- end: byline --> </div>
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<strong>A mix of familiar names we all love to hate, and some new loathsome Americans on the block.</strong></div>
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<em>The following is AlterNet's own selections and rankings of two dozen from <a href="http://buffalobeast.com/the-50-most-loathsome-americans-2/">America's 50 Most Loathsome Americans</a> by Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast.</em></div>
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<strong>24. Sean Hannity</strong></div>
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Charges: Left the seminary upon realizing he could abuse, manipulate, and molest more people as a conservative broadcaster. The sneering, self-righteous poster boy for every right-wing nontroversy (see Benghazi and Fast & Furious), Hannity’s something of a Piltdown Newsman. One can easily imagine him a 19th century Boston cop, bashing brown folks and loving it. But in this age of media saturation, even bullies like Hannity must prostrate themselves and grovel occasionally at the feet of reality. After hyping Tucker Carlson’s black-cent “bombshell,” and then stubbornly realizing it was nothing, he had Fox’s resident melanin-haver Juan Williams join the panel to flog him. That way, Hannity cleverly avoided looking foolish.<br />
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Smoking Gun: Look at his jaw; he always seems like he’s about to bite someone.<br />
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<strong>23. Dinesh D’Souza</strong><br />
Charges: An intellectual imposter whose career’s swung casually between vicious conservative think-tank lackey and moronic Christian apologist. He reached a fraudulent low last year with the release of2016: Obama’s America which, through the prism of Potemkin journalism, imagined the fake horrors awaiting America at the end of Obama’s second term–like unstoppable Sharia Law. According to D’Souza’s armchair psychoanalysis and “super serious” scholarship, this impending doom springs from Obama’s need to fulfill the anticolonialist dreams of his father’s ghost with the help of John Edwards and an Ouija board. Or some such.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit.”<br />
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<strong>22. <strong style="border: 0px currentColor; color: black; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sam Harris</strong></strong><br />
Charges: As the former’s confused reason for Fox News dogma, and the latter comedy for cackling, Sam Harris has official overtaken Ricky Gervais as the world’s funniest atheist (they’re tied for most annoying). He recently added Muslim profiling and NRA talking points to a sophist’s portfolio already bulging with hawkish appreciation for war and torture. Populated with more strawmen than a Kansas corn field, Harris’s post-Sandy Hook paean to firearms justified the death of 20 children because, well, Sam Harris is scared of sharp objects, and he’s too dimwitted to imagine a nonlethal knife-deterrent.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “Fantasists and zealots can be found on both sides of the debate over guns in America.”<br />
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<strong>21. Frank VanderSloot</strong><br />
Charges: Overly litigious gay-bashing billionaire Mormon CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a cultish pyramid-selling “Wellness Company” that promises its “partners” “total financial freedom” for “families trying to get out of debt”–likely incurred from purchasing overpriced Latter-day douche and snake-oil supplements in bulk to pawn off on other pious dupes. The natural grifter to co-chair Romney’s national finance committee, he dumped $1 million into Mitt’s Restore Our Future PAC, and even makes casino creep Sheldon Adelson seem like a nice guy.<br />
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Smoking Gun: He ostensibly believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri, and that Native Americans are actually Jews.<br />
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<strong>20. Penn Jillette</strong><br />
Charges: Humiliating himself as Donald Trump’s dancing business-monkey. Featured on a not-so-secret list of sexist creepers within the skeptic/atheist community. He’s an intolerably smug know-it-all who actually knows very little. A devout Randroid and Glenn Beck fan, he’s to the rationalist movement what John Wayne Gacy was to clowns. His thankfully defunct, eponymously titled show “Bullshit,” operated under the tired formula of dirty hippy debates Cato Institute whore, and we learn that second-hand smoke is as safe as Gerber’s. Magic! The Anti-Lorax, Jillette’s an environment-hating buffoon who denied anthropogenic global warming until as late as 2008–because he was too scared of the “political climate.” At least Teller has the decency to never speak.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.”<br />
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<strong>19. Ghost of Breitbart</strong><br />
Charges: The P.T. Barnum of modern conservatism, he was a traveling hypocrisy circus, a one-man confidence game, who never missed an opportunity to employ the Alinskyite tactics he pretended to deride. Most obviously, smearing your political enemies with your own failings…like calling everyone on the left an Alinskyite. Spent the final months of his life pitching a video–with all the coked-up vigor of the late Billy Mays–that was going to shake up the world. Released posthumously, the Obama-hugs-black-professor video riled few outside of the Klan, and that’s the real tragedy of his death: Andy never did taste the failure. Just sidewalk.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him…from his college days to show <br />
you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”<br />
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<strong>18. Alex Jones</strong><br />
Charges: A shower and shave away from doomsaying hobo, Jones makes a decent living off of his borderline schizophrenia. He “KNOWS” that every mass-shooting is staged by a global cabal who wants to steal your guns, global warming is a New World Order hoax, Beyonce flashed an Illuminati symbol which caused the Super Bowl blackout, and every other super-secret, unfalsifiable plot perpetrated by a shifting and shadowy “THEY”–who engineer society based upon the wishes of interdimensional elves with whom “THEY” confer using Satanic hallucinogens. Jones is the very “false flag” propagandist he claims to despise by diluting real concerns, such as drone strikes on American soil, with an endless stream of loonitarian logorrhea that makes David Icke sound like Neil DeGrasse Tyson.<br />
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Smoking Gun: Ancient cave paintings depict the Illuminati Anti-Christ as a quick-tempered, red-faced psycho with a bad hair cut…WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!<br />
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<strong>17. David Barton</strong><br />
Charges: Armed with only a BA in religious studies from Oral Roberts University and the integrity of a serial rapist, pseudo-historian David Barton has successfully convinced millions of benighted Americans that the Founding Fathers debunked the theory of evolution a half-century before it was ever proposed, that the Constitution is a “verbatim” copy of Scripture, Jesus opposed a minimum wage, and that the Bible warns against net neutrality. He’s recently taken to defending the Second Amendment with an apocryphal story of armed, 19th century school children protecting their teacher which Barton apparently–not a joke–ripped off from a Louis L’Amour novel.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “… life begins before conception…”?<br />
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<strong>16. Dana Loesch</strong><br />
Charges: The ideological love-troll of Phyllis Schlafly and Grover Norquist, Loesch wants to reduce government to a size where it can drown in your vagina. Whether comparing intrusive, state-mandated transvaginal ultrasounds to consensual intercourse, defending Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin, or fabricating a conspiracy over her husband’s temporarily suspended Twitter account, Dana’s a cheap, hyper-partisan squid, squirting a cloud of imagined liberal sins which she thinks nullifies the original criticism because she’s a total fucking moron. And when that invariably fails, she’ll just lie about what she said, or call you a sexist/pedo. Quite possibly still on the CNN payroll only to make Piers Morgan seem slightly more palatable.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “Seems to me like Akin was trying to fit medical explanation into a soundbite. Not the best statement, but some are stretching it majorly.”<br />
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<strong>15. Dick Morris</strong><br />
Charges: Jamming gaydar everywhere with a love of pastels and a lispy slobber-mouth that looks to crave more than toes. As a close Clinton adviser, Morris is as responsible as anyone for transforming Democrats into a moderate wing of the Republican Party, and thereby shifting the GOP toward extremism. During the election, however, it was Morris’s poll-stroking Romney delusions that confirmed he’s a man living in total denial.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “We’re gonna win in a landslide.”<br />
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<strong>14. Marco Rubio</strong><br />
Charges: Bobby Jindal redux whose impending melanin-lite response to the State of the Union will be a handsome, ineffective pander to a demographic most Republicans would most like to mow their lawns, for Pete’s sake. His RNC speech focused on an upward mobility his party has all but made impossible. Every time I see him I hear Phil Collins singing in my head, “Ru-Ru-Ru-Rubio! Whoa-o!” And now you will, too.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “There is only one savior, and it is not me. #Jesus”<br />
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<strong>13. Tucker Carlson</strong><br />
Charges: Trust fund douchebag whose perseverance in the face of consistent “journalistic” failure would be admirable were it not derived from a wholly undeserved sense of entitlement. Fought his impending and absolute irrelevance by rerunning a video clip (with the help of Drudge and Hannity) he first reported on in ’07 while at MSNBC which reveals that Barack Obama–hold on to your motherfucking October surprised genitals!–is a black guy. One of the few American pundits who believes that incredulous squinting qualifies as commentary.<br />
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<strong>12. Mark Cuban</strong><br />
Charges: Training-jowl billionaire whose first major business venture was a chain letter, and one of his latest is exploiting rubes on reality TV. He’s an alleged inside trader, and cowardly 9/11 truther, who credits his success to Ayn Rand. The ipecac of Übermensch, his anti-worker appetite unsated in the boardroom, he’s now sunk to stealing work from struggling commercial actors because, unlike the rest of us, he can’t get enough of Mark Cuban’s self-satisfied face.<br />
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<strong>11. Matt Drudge</strong><br />
Charges: The Internet’s answer to William Randolph Hearst, his only credibility comes from one sperm-related scoop 15 years ago, and a surname that makes him sound like an old-timey muckraker. He’s the shamelessly hungry middle segment in the human centipede between GOP operatives and vapid talking heads, constantly swallowing and shitting a stream of propaganda that would make Goebbels cringe.<br />
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Smoking Gun: Falsely claimed Obama ditched Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet with a parrot-toting pirate in an eye patch. True.<br />
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<strong>10. “Papa” John Schnatter</strong><br />
Charges: Infantile Romney-garch who threatened to raise the cost of his shitty pizzas by 15¢ and cut workers’ hours because Obamacare mandates that he provide meager health benefits to his underpaid employees.<br />
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Smoking Gun: His 2 million-pizza giveaway marketing strategy cost his company roughly 6 times what Obamacare does.<br />
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<strong>9. Dan Cathy</strong><br />
Charges: The Fred Phelps of chicken, the Chick-fil-A COO finally revealed what his family’s charitable donations have been screaming for years: “I’m probably gay, and I need the government to keep me from indulging in the gay marriage I so desperately desire!” They gave $5 million to the Family Research Council since ’03 alone. They’re hyper-religious dicks who’re closed on Sundays, and damn them for making decent chicken you can’t eat with a side of conscience.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage’. I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”<br />
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<strong>8. Jennifer Rubin</strong><br />
Charges: WaPo’s Dershowitz in drag, she’d report you to the Anti Defamation League for so much as disrespecting a bagel, and imagines herself the blogging bulldozer to Palestinian legitimacy. Meant to satisfy conservative Post critics with the even-handed Washington Times Moonacy they crave, Rubin’s occupied literary territory mainly covered histrionic Arab-hating until branching out as Romney’s stenographer–even reposting campaign press releases to counter her own paper’s accurate reporting.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “Now wait a minute. Is this an act of anti-long hairism or anti-gay?”<br />
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<strong>7. Joe Arpaio</strong><br />
Charges: “America’s Sheriff” (in the way rat vomit is “America’s Snack Food”) has a long history of racism, prisoner abuse, and protecting pedophiles, but last year his low-rent Wyatt Earp routine turned overtly cartoonish. In a blatant effort to distract from an investigation into his illegally misspending nearly $100 million on immigrant roundups and spying programs, Arpaio launched the “Cold Case Posse”–meant to finally expose Obama’s Manchurian Presidency. The citizen “posse” determined the President’s birth certificate to be fraudulent, and then, as you remember, Obama was removed from office and Arpaio was given the Golden Key to Fantasy City for not totally wasting everyone’s time.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “At the very least, I can tell you this, based on all of the evidence presented and investigated, I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic.”<br />
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<strong>6. Lance Armstrong</strong><br />
Charges: Sociopathic, ten-speed Escobar who brazenly lied, ruined lives, and played on our collectively gullible patriotism and misplaced respect for blatantly selfish charity PR, so that he could reap millions, bang Sheryl Crow then drop her like a cancerous testicle, and feast on undeserved fame–only to finally come clean in a venue that granted Oprah 15 more terrifying minutes of relevance.<br />
Smoking Gun: “I have the facts on my side.”<br />
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<strong>5. Rush Limbaugh</strong><br />
Charges: The hardest-blowing blowhard in a media landscape littered with windbags. And he knows it. Every second of it. Every lie. Every distortion. Every racial and sexual dogwhistle, it’s blown through a smirk connoting he knows he’s the biggest, fattest, carnival-barking swindler of our bilious age, capable of conning millions into believing he possesses any principles beyond self-aggrandizing greed.<br />
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Smoking Gun: Just turn on the radio.<br />
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<strong>4. Karl Rove</strong><br />
Charges: Hubris. A fledgling act of perception management, he cheered on Nixon when he was 9 years-old, and he’s become exponentially more depraved as the years went by. He weaseled out of Watergate investigations, turned Texas red, and crowned a vegetable president with dirty tricks. He sold an illegal war, stole an election, outed Valerie Plame and suffered no consequences save for power and money. Why wouldn’t he think his heavily funded Crossroads GPS–which he basically promised the Koch brothers would win them the election–could possibly fail in convincing Americans to elect a cardboard cutout who thinks he’ll become a god in the afterlife? Hubris. A hubris that unfolded on live TV during his epic election night Fox News meltdown. Incredulous. Shocked. He’d spent all the money. He’d done all the evil. What went wrong? Finally, milk was spilled, and Rove responded like a petulant toddler. And, lo, the schadenfreude was sweet.<br />
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Smoking Gun: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (2004)<br />
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<strong>3. Paul Ryan</strong><br />
Charges: Compulsively lying, arrested adolescent Muppet whose sheltered mind is still blown byAtlas Shrugged and Stairway to Heaven. The Uri Geller of economics, he managed to bend the will of MSM patsies like Ezra Klein into portraying him as a credible policy wonk, rather than what he truly is: a two-bit illusionist who wants to disappear Grandma’s Medicare and Social Security money and make it reappear in the pockets of the rich wankers he secretly wishes would rape him in a rock quarry.<br />
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Smoking Gun: Even Fox News said Ryan’s RNC performance “was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”<br />
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<strong>2. Donald Trump</strong><br />
Charges: A convincing argument against the 1st and 5th Amendments, this walking combover needs to just shut the fuck up and die already. The consummate huckster, and sufferer of verbal dysentery, his countless transgressions defy cataloguing. So I’ll spare you everything save for his moronic ploy to gain Obama’s passport and college records in exchange for a $5 million charity donation. Insult to racist injury, the video announcement was so low rent that he looked like an 8mm-shot Boehner/Oompa Loompa with a disgruntled squirrel on his head.<br />
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Smoking Gun: So awful he makes Mark Cuban seem awesome.<br />
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<strong>1. Wayne LaPierre</strong><br />
Charges: As the NRA’s well-paid CEO of death (and thinly veiled fear of brown people), it’s his role to obscure the very basic fact that more guns equals more gun violence–by any cognitively dissonant means necessary. In the ’90s, he called federal agents jack-booted Nazis in a fundraising letter, yet in his preposterous Sandy Hook speech he implored Congress to post armed guards at every school in the nation. In pure Alex Jones fashion, he once accused President Clinton of needing a certain level of gun violence to justify the assault weapons ban–which the NRA was keen to shoot full of holes. Asinine rhetoric about gun-free zones advertising massacre, violent video games, TV and movies aside, it’s the annual multi-million dollar lobbying efforts painting Smith & Wesson as benevolent job creators which cows even alleged democrats like Harry Reid. And with two recent PR blunders–a commercial slamming Obama’s “hypocrisy” for having armed Secret Service agents protect his daughters, and a shoot-’em-up app marketed to 4 year-olds!–LaPierre came off more tone-deaf than the early audition stage of “American Idol.”<br />
<br />
Smoking Gun: “There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people through vicious.<br />
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<br />
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<!--smart_paging_filter--><!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Ian Murphy is the editor of </span></span></span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx" xml:lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://buffalobeast.com/"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Beast</span></span></a></u></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">. </span></span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-44413404065256812572013-02-14T16:52:00.002-08:002013-02-14T16:52:33.323-08:00<h1 class="node-title" datatype="" property="dc:title">
Why You Should Be Outraged By What Is Being Done to Our Postal Service.</h1>
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By Dave Johnson</div>
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<strong>Like so many other "crises" imposed on us lately, there is a lot to the Post Office pivatization story that you are not being told.</strong></div>
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You are probably hearing that the Post Office is "in crisis" and is cutting back Saturday delivery, laying people off, closing offices, etc. Like so many other "crises" imposed on us lately, there is a lot to the story that you are not hearing from the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6">"mainstream" media</a>. (Please click that link.) The story of the intentional destruction of the U.S. Postal Service is one more piece of the story of crisis-after-crisis, all manufactured to advance the strategic dismantling of our government and handing over the pieces to billionaires.<br />
<br />
Here are a few things you need to know about the Postal Service "crisis":<br />
<ul>
<li>The Postal Service is the second largest employer in the United States after Walmart. But unlike Walmart, which gets away with paying so little that <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/dec/06/alan-grayson/alan-grayson-says-more-walmart-employees-medicaid-/" target="_hplink">employees qualify</a> for government assistance, the Postal Services is unionized, pays reasonable wages and benefits and receives no government subsidies. (Good for them!)</li>
<li>Republicans have been pushing schemes to privatize the Postal Service since at least 1996. In 2006 Republicans in the Congress pushed through a requirement that the Postal Service pre-fund 75 years of retiree costs. The Postal Service has to pay now for employees who are not even born yet.No other government agency -- and certainly no company -- has to do this.</li>
<li>Unlike other government agencies (like the military) since 1970 the Postal Service is required to break even. Once more: the Department of Defense is not required to break even.</li>
<li>While required to break even the Postal Service has to deliver mail to areas that are unprofitable for private companies to operate in. A letter sent from a small town in Alaska is picked up and transported across the country to a farm in Maine for 46 cents. While the internet and recession have eaten into some of the Postal Services letter business, magazines, books, newsletters, prescriptions, advertising, DVD services like Netflix and many other services still depend on the Postal Service for delivery. And many people for one reason or another still send letters. In a democracy these people are supposed to count, too.</li>
<li>But along with require the Postal Service to break even, Congress has restricted the Service's ability to raise rates, enter new lines of business or take other steps to help it raise revenue. In fact, while detractors complain that the Postal Service is antiquated, inefficient and burdened by bureaucracy the rules blocking the Postal Service from entering new lines of business do so because the Postal Service would have advantages over private companies.</li>
<li>For example, Republicans in Congress forced the Postal Service to remove public-use copiers from Post Offices and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/us/postal-service-seeks-to-widen-activities-and-revenue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">even blocked the Postal Service</a> from setting up a secure online system that allowed Americans to make monthly bill payments.</li>
</ul>
The Postal Service is a public service for We, the People, not a business. The Service is hamstrung by people who pretend it is supposed to compete and then won't let it. They won't help with taxpayer dollars and say it has to compete in the marketplace (again: the Department of Defense is not required to break even.) Then they give it rules that no private company could survive. Then when it gets into trouble, say that government doesn't work, start laying people off, selling off the public assets, and saying it has to be "privatized" (so all the gains will go to a few already-wealthy people instead of to the public).<br />
<br />
<strong>Manufacturing A Crisis</strong><br />
So Republicans have hamstrung the Postal Service, forcing it into "crisis" and are now "solving" the crisis by working towards dismantling and privatizing it. Here is how it works:<br />
<ol>
<li>Require the Postal Service to "break even." (Again: the Department of Defense is not required to break even.</li>
<li>Require them to serve all areas of the country. (Which is a service to democracy and should continue.)</li>
<li>Keep them from raising or lowering rates as needed.</li>
<li>Keep them from using their competitive advantages to compete with private businesses.</li>
<li>Require them to pre-fund 75 years of health benefits.</li>
<li>When the Postal Service has the inevitable resulting financial "crisis" complain about government and unions and demand their buildings be sold, employees laid off and the service be dismantled and given to private companies.</li>
</ol>
If you don't see the pattern yet, try this:<br />
<ol>
<li>Cut taxes, </li>
<li>Double military spending, </li>
<li>Obstruct all efforts to fix things, </li>
<li>Wait a few years, then scream loudly about a "deficit crisis" and say we have to severely cut back on government -- the things we do to make our lives better.</li>
</ol>
This is not the way an informed democracy is supposed to operate.<br />
<br />
<strong>Part Of Bigger Assault On Government</strong><br />
The postal service "crisis" is just one more instance of the <a href="http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130110/disarm-the-hostage-bomb-stop-governing-based-on-threats-intimidation-and-lies">ongoing pattern of government by lies, hostage-taking and manufactured crises</a>. This is one more assault on a government service.<br />
The "fiscal cliff" was a manufactured crisis, engineered to force cutbacks in the things We, the People do to make our lives better. The "debt ceiling" was a manufactured crisis, engineered to force cutbacks in the things We, the People do to make our lives better. The 2010 "tax deal" was a manufactured crisis, engineered to force cutbacks in the things We, the People do to make our lives better. Etc., etc., on and on...<br />
<br />
And the Postal Service "crisis" is one more manufactured crisis.<br />
<br />
<strong>Not Governing, But Destroying Government</strong><br />
Republicans don't talk about governing, they talk about killing government, and when they get power they don't govern, they destroy government. They appoint industry lobbyists to agencies that are supposed to oversee their own industries -- and they don't oversee their industries. They appoint polluters to the agencies that are supposed to protect us from pollution -- and they let the companies pollute. And they appoint people who have called for getting government out of areas like education, medical care, etc. to head up and dismantle those departments for the benefit of the companies they came from.<br />
<br />
This is not the way our government is supposed to operate. This does not serve We, the People and does not help us make our lives better.<br />
<br />
<strong>The Push To Privatize Public Assets</strong><br />
Privatization means dismantling government and public assets and turning them over to private companies. It involves "contracting out" or even ending the services that were performed by We, the People (government) to make our lives better. Instead these services are operated for profit, which the citizens (and certainly not the employees) share none of the gains.<br />
<br />
To be clear about this: contracting out government services "saves money" by laying off people who have good wages with benefits, and rehiring them at minimum wage with no benefits, while removing the accountability that goes along with a government service. For example, when a city "contracts out" its garbage collection what happens is all the city employees who had government jobs doing this work are laid off. The private company that contracts to do the service "saves money" by hiring employees at a much lower wage with no benefits, doesn't have to meet the standards of government agencies, doesn't have to be transparent, doesn't have to use well-maintained equipment, etc. Obviously the city employees and the places they used to shop are worse off, but their lower wages mean everyone else's wages come under pressure, too. So the "money saved" comes at a great cost to the public.<br />
<br />
This same process occurs in all instances of privatizing or "downsizing" government. The public receives less service, wages generally are lowered, but a few people make a bundle at the expense of the rest of us.<br />
<br />
<strong>Cato Institute Push To Privatize The Postal Service</strong><br />
The Koch brothers' Cato Institute has been pushing to privatize the Postal Service (and the rest of government) for many years. (Note: Frederick W. Smith, Chairman & CEO, FedEx Corporation was on the Board of Directors of Cato Institute. FedEx is also a funder of the Cato Institute.) In 1996, for example, Cato's Edward L. Hudgins testified before Congress on <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/congressional-testimony/postal-service-privatization">Postal Service Privatization</a>.<br />
Today Cato employees write about "freeing the mail from the government's grip" and " getting the government out of the mail business." (from Cato's <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/stamp-out-postal-service">Stamp Out the Postal Service</a>.)<br />
<br />
While part of Cato's motivation for privatizing the Postal Service is their efforts to <a href="http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/">transfer all public assets to private hands</a>, Their website <a href="http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/usps">Privatizing the U.S. Postal Service</a> explains their reasoning,<br />
<blockquote>
The USPS is in deep financial trouble as a result of declining mail volume, bloated operating expenses, a costly and inflexible unionized workforce, and constant congressional meddling. At the same time, electronic communications and other technological advances are making physical mail delivery less relevant.<br />
America's postal system needs a radical overhaul. This essay ... concludes that taxpayers, consumers, and the broader economy would stand to gain with reforms to privatize the USPS and open U.S. mail delivery up to competition.</blockquote>
Cato's funders also oppose unions because they enable working people to bargain for a larger share of the pie, and the Postal Service is unionized -- the largest remaining union. In <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/postal-service-cant-afford-unions">The Postal Service Can't Afford Unions</a> Cato's Tad DeHaven writes, "A big drag on the USPS's bottom line is the pesky postal unions." DeHaven continues,<br />
<blockquote>
The USPS has been able to eliminate thousands of positions through attrition, but it still possesses the second-largest civilian workforce in the country, behind only Wal-Mart. With 85 percent of that workforce protected by collective bargaining agreement, the unions have become a giant anchor on an already sinking ship.</blockquote>
The Postal Service is a PUBLIC service, serving We, the People and our democracy. It is our second-largest employer. Like Social Security it demonstrates that government can and does serve We, the People. You should be outraged by what is being done to our Postal Service! It is time to step up and defend all of our democratic institutions.<br />
<br />
<strong>Other Voices</strong><br />
Here are a few other voices on this issue:<br />
<br />
John Nichols writes in The Nation, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/172692/postal-cuts-are-austerity-steroids">Postal Cuts Are Austerity on Steroids</a>,<br />
<blockquote>
The austerity agenda that would cut services for working Americans in order to maintain tax breaks for the wealthy -- and promote the privatization of public services--has many faces. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
Most Americans recognize the threats to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as pieces of the austerity plan advanced by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), and the rest of the Ayn Rand-reading wrecking crew that has taken over the Republican Party. But it is important to recognize that the austerity agenda extends in every direction: from threats to Food Stamps and Pell Grants, to education cuts, to the squeezing of transportation funding. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
But the current frontline of the austerity agenda is the assault on the US Postal Service, a vital public service that is older than the country. And it is advancing rapidly.</blockquote>
Dean Baker at CEPR: <a href="http://www.cepr.net/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/killing-the-messenger-the-downsizing-and-death-of-the-postal-service">Killing the Messenger: The Downsizing and Death of the Postal Service</a><br />
<blockquote>
Congress also has to be prepared to allow the Postal Service to win. About a decade ago, the Postal Service had an extremely effective ad campaign highlighting the fact that its express mail service was just a fraction of the price charged for overnight delivery by UPS and FedEx. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
The two companies actually went to court to try to stop the ad campaign. When the court told them to get lost, they went to Congress. Their friends in Congress then leaned on the Postal Service and got it to end the ads.</blockquote>
<br />
Sen. Tom Carper of Deleware has a good information page: <a href="http://www.carper.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/postal-reform-myths-vs-facts">Postal Reform Myths vs. Facts</a>, (click through for the details)<br />
<blockquote>
With all the information floating around about the U.S. Postal Service's financial crisis and the possible Postal Service default at the end of September, it can be difficult to wade through what is fact and what is fiction. Below are 8 Myths about the current crisis and 8 facts explaining what can and must be done to reform this vital American institution and ensure its services remain for generations to come. </blockquote>
MYTH #1: The U.S. Postal Service is bankrolled by taxpayers.<br />
<br />
MYTH #2: The U.S. Postal Service will inevitably see a total financial collapse in the coming months.<br />
<br />
MYTH #3: Congressional action to save the U.S. Postal Service amounts to yet another government bailout of a failing industry. <br />
<br />
MYTH #4: Allowing the U.S. Postal Service to default will simply force much-needed restructuring and reform. <br />
<br />
MYTH #5: A new government control board could better take the dramatic steps necessary to fix the U.S. Postal Service.<br />
<br />
MYTH #6: A new government commission -- similar to the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission - could help the U.S. Postal Service close or consolidate unnecessary processing and retail facilities free from political pressure. <br />
<br />
MYTH #7: The U.S. Postal Service must raise rates on certain postal products to help cover its losses.<br />
<br />
MYTH #8: Sen. Carper's bill -- the POST Act -- wants to end Saturday mail delivery.<br />
<br />
ThinkProgress: <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/02/06/1547551/postal-service-saturday-delivery/">Thanks To Congressional Incompetence, Saturday Mail Delivery Is History</a>,<br />
<blockquote>
Postal access is, ultimately, a rights issue for rural Americans; since they live in areas where internet coverage is inconsistent, post office closures and slowed-down delivery can mean big limitations on communication. A lack of access to postal services can lead to a growth in economic inequality. The new rules for Saturday delivery, set to take effect on August 1, 2013, will continue delivery of packages, but discontinue basic first-class mail.</blockquote>
From Sept 2011, Brigid OFarrell, writing at the Roosevelt Institute's Next New Deal blog, <a href="http://www.nextnewdeal.net/ten-reasons-us-postal-service-not-failure-and-vital-our-country?utm_source=Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=984b23b056-DD_2_7_132_7_2013&utm_medium=email">Ten Reasons That the U.S. Postal Service is Not a Failure -- and is Vital to Our Country</a>,<br />
<blockquote>
There is a crisis, but it is not because the Postal Service is inefficient and its workers overpaid. It is because the Postal Service: 1. Receives no taxpayer dollars 2. Is funded by the products and services it sells 3. Working with its unions, has already reduced its workforce by 110,000 employees, improved efficiency, and introduced new products and services 4. Handles more than 40 percent of the world's mail more efficiently and at lower cost than other services 5. Despite the growth of the digital world, continues to support a $1 trillion mailing industry with more than 8 million jobs 6. Has a workforce that is made up of 40 percent women, 40 percent minorities, and 22 percent veterans, many disabled</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
There is a crisis, but it is not because the Postal Service is inefficient and its workers overpaid. It is because the Postal Service:</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
7. Is the only federal agency or private company required to pre-fund retiree health benefits for 75 years</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
8. Is therefore required to pay $5.5 billion annually to the Treasury, an amount not required of any other agency or company</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
Without these unique requirements, it would have earned a surplus of over $600 million during the last four years. In addition, the USPS:</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
9. Has over-paid its obligations to the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) by an estimated $50 billion (and this money should be returned)</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
10. Has overfunded the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) by approximately $6.9 billion (and would be profitable if these funds were returned)</blockquote>
David Morris at AlterNet takes a good look at the history of the Postal Service and the current problems, in<a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-we-must-rescue-us-postal-service-brink-death">Why We Must Rescue the U.S. Postal Service From the Brink of Death</a>, and concludes,<br />
<blockquote>
The Postal Service can still be saved. But the grave has been dug. The coffin has been built. And funeral music is in the air. Only the most aggressive effort by AARP, the NAACP, Consumers Union and other affected constituencies can save this most public of all public institutions.</blockquote>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-84739527523356265192013-02-14T04:35:00.002-08:002013-02-14T04:36:06.733-08:00<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 24pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Coconut Oil Benefits: When Fat Is Good For You.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><a href="http://huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola"><span style="color: blue;">Dr. Joseph
Mercola</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Physician and author</span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years, the majority of health
care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for
your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, including high
cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Meanwhile during this same 60 years, the American levels
of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have
skyrocketed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island
populations who get 30-60 percent of their total caloric intake from fully
saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of
cardiovascular disease? (1)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The fact is, all saturated fats are not created equal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The operative word here is "created," because
some saturated fats occur naturally, while other fats are artificially
manipulated into a saturated state through the man-made process called
hydrogenation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Hydrogenation manipulates vegetable and seed oils by
adding hydrogen atoms while heating the oil, producing a rancid, thickened substance
that really only benefits processed food shelf life and <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/08/01/oil-part-one.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">corporate profits</span></a> -- just about all experts now agree,
hydrogenation does <i>nothing</i> good for your health.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">These manipulated saturated fats are also called <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/12/24/Trans-Fats-Can-Be-Deadly.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">trans-fats</span></a> -- and you should avoid them like the plague.
But if one form of saturated fat is bad for you, does that mean <i>all</i>
saturated fat is bad for you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Absolutely not!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The Tropics' Best Kept Secret</span></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The truth about coconut oil is obvious to anyone who has
studied the health of those who live in native tropical cultures, where coconut
has been a primary dietary staple for thousands of years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Back in the 1930s, Dr. Weston Price found South Pacific
Islanders whose diets were high in coconut to be healthy and trim, despite high
dietary fat, and heart disease was virtually non-existent. Similarly, in 1981,
researchers studying two Polynesian communities for whom coconut was the
primary caloric energy source found them to have excellent cardiovascular
health and fitness. (2)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Where were all the clogged arteries and heart attacks
from eating all of this "evil" saturated fat?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Obviously, coconut oil was doing nothing to harm the
health of these islanders.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">It may be surprising for you to learn that the naturally
occurring saturated fat in coconut oil is actually good for you and provides a
number of profound health benefits, such as: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">• Improving your <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/07/28/coconut-health2.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">heart health.</span></a>(3)<br />
• Boosting your thyroid. (4) <br />
• Increasing your metabolism. <br />
• Promoting a <a href="http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2010/06/26/10-minutes-of-exercise-yields-hourlong-effects.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">lean body</span></a> and weight loss if needed.<br />
• Supporting your immune system. (5)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Coconut oil even benefits <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/01/17/the-best-foods-for-beautiful-skin.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">your skin </span></a>when applied topically and has been found to
have anti-aging, regenerative effects. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">So, what are coconut oil's secrets to success?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">How Coconut Oil Works Wonders in Your Body</span></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Nearly 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil is of a type
rarely found in nature called lauric acid, a "miracle" compound
because of its unique health promoting properties. Your body converts lauric
acid into monolaurin, which has anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-protozoa
properties. (6)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Coconut oil is also nature's richest source of
medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs), also called medium-chain triglycerides or
MCTs. By contrast, most common vegetable or seed oils are comprised of long
chain fatty acids (LCFAs), also known as long-chain triglycerides or LCTs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">LCTs are large molecules, so they are difficult for your
body to break down and are predominantly stored as fat. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">But MCTs (7) , being smaller, are easily digested and
immediately burned by your liver for energy -- like carbohydrates, but without
the<a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/04/29/calorie-restriction-not-key-to-increasing-life-lowering-insulin-level-is.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;"> insulin</span></a> spike. MCTs actually boost your metabolism and
help your body use fat for energy, as opposed to storing it, so it can actually
help you become leaner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Back in the 1940s, farmers discovered this effect
accidentally when they tried using inexpensive coconut oil to fatten their
livestock.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">It didn't work!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Instead, coconut oil made the animals lean, active and
hungry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Coconut oil has actually been shown to help optimize body
weight, which can dramatically reduce your risk of developing <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2099/12/31/diabetes-most-of-what-youve-been-told-may-be-wrong.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">Type 2 diabetes </span></a>(8). Besides weight loss, boosting your
metabolic rate will improve your energy, accelerate healing and improve your
overall immune function. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">And several studies have now shown that MCTs can enhance
physical or athletic performance.(9) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">And finally, as we have already discussed, coconut oil is
incedibly good for your heart. The truth is this: <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/02/25/saturated-fat-is-not-the-cause-of-heart-disease.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">it is <i>unsaturated</i> fats that are primarily involved in
heart disease </span></a>and <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/04/20/sugar-dangers.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">too much sugar </span></a>and processed foods, not the naturally
occurring saturated fats, as you have been led to believe. (10)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Coconut Oil in Your Kitchen</span></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Personally, I use only two oils in my food preparation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The first, extra-virgin olive oil is the best
monounsaturated fat and works great as a salad dressing. However, <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/10/30/rudi-moerck-on-cooking-oils.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">olive oil </span></a>should not be used for cooking. Due to its
chemical structure, heat makes olive oil susceptible to oxidative damage. So
for cooking, I use coconut oil exclusively.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">And polyunsaturated fats, which include common vegetable
oils such as corn, soy, safflower, sunflower and canola, are absolutely <a href="http://www.mercola.com/downloads/bonus/five-health-foods-avoid/report.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">the worst oils to cook with</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Why?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Three primary reasons:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">1) Cooking your food in omega-6 vegetable oils produces a
variety of very toxic chemicals, as well as forming trans-fats. Frying destroys
the antioxidants in oil, actually oxidizing the oil, which causes even worse
problems for your body than trans-fats.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">2) Most vegetable oils are <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/05/22/jeffrey-smith-interview-april-24.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">GM (genetically modified), </span></a>including more than 90 percent
of soy, corn and canola oils.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">3) Vegetable oils contribute to the overabundance of
damaged omega-6 fats in your diet, throwing offyour <a href="http://www.mercola.com/beef/omega3_oil.htm" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">omega-6 to
omega-3 ratio</span></a>. Nearly everyone in Western society consumes far too many
omega-6 fats -- about 100 times more than a century ago -- and insufficient
omega 3 fats, which contributes to numerous chronic degenerative diseases.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">There is only one oil that is stable enough to withstand
the heat of cooking, and that's coconut oil. So, do yourself a favor and ditch
all those "healthy oil wannabes," and replace them with a large jar
of fresh, organic, heart-supporting coconut oil. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder and director of <a href="http://www.mercola.com/" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">Mercola.com</span></a>. <a href="http://www.facebook.com/doctor.health" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">Become a fan of
Dr. Mercola on Facebook</span></a>, follow him on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/mercola" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">Twitter</span></a>, and check
out <a href="http://www.mercola.com/Downloads/bonus/benefits-of-sun-exposure/report.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">Dr. Mercola's report on sun exposure</span></a>! </span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Follow Dr. Joseph Mercola on Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/mercola" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">www.twitter.com/mercola </span></a></span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">----------------------------<br />
(1) Kaunitz H, Dayrit CS. Coconut oil consumption and coronary heart disease.
Philippine Journal of Internal Medicine, 1992;30:165-171<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(2) Prior IA, Davidson F, Salmond CE, Czochanska Z.
Cholesterol, coconuts, and diet on Polynesian atolls: a natural experiment: The
Pukapuka and Tokelau Island studies, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
1981;34:1552-1561<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(3) Raymond Peat Newsletter, Coconut Oil, reprinted at <a href="http://www.heall.com/"><span style="color: blue;">www.heall.com</span></a>. <a href="http://www.heall.com/body/healthupdates/food/coconutoil.html"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.heall.com/body/healthupdates/food/coconutoil.html</span></a>
An Interview With Dr. Raymond Peat, A Renowned Nutritional Counselor Offers His
Thoughts About Thyroid Disease<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(4) Baba, N 1982.Enhanced thermogenesis and diminished
deposition of fat in response to overfeeding with diet containing medium-chain
triglycerides, Am. J. Clin. Nutr., 35:379<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(5) Dr. Mary G. Enig, Ph.D., F.A.C.N. Source: <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/07/28/coconut-health2.aspx" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">Coconut: In Support of Good Health in the 21st Century</span></a><br />
(6) Isaacs CE, Litov RE, Marie P, Thormar H. Addition of lipases to infant
formulas produces antiviral and antibacterial activity, Journal of Nutritional
Biochemistry, 1992;3:304-308.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Isaacs CE, Schneidman K. Enveloped Viruses in Human and
Bovine Milk are Inactivated by Added Fatty Acids(FAs) and Monoglycerides(MGs),
FASEB Journal, 1991;5: Abstract 5325, p.A1288.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Mitsuto Matsumoto, Takeru Kobayashi, Akio Takenakaand
Hisao Itabashi. Defaunation Effects of Medium Chain Fatty Acids and Their
Derivatives on Goat Rumen Protozoa, The Journal of General Applied Microbiology,
Vol. 37, No. 5 (1991) pp.439-445.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(7) St-Onge MP, Jones PJ. Greater rise in fat oxidation
with medium-chain triglyceride consumption relative to long-chain triglyceride
is associated with lower initial body weight and greater loss of subcutaneous adipose
tissue, International Journal of Obesity & Related Metabolic Disorders,
2003 Dec;27(12):1565-71. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12975635"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12975635</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(8) Geliebter, A 1980. Overfeeding with a diet of
medium-chain triglycerides impedes accumulation of body fat, Clinical
Nutrition, 28:595<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">(9) Fushiki, T and Matsumoto, K Swimming endurance
capacity of mice is increased by consumption of medium-chain triglycerides,
Journal of Nutrition, 1995;125:531. <a href="http://www.coconut-connections.com/hypothyroidism.htm" target="_hplink"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.coconut-connections.com/hypothyroidism.htm</span></a><br />
(10) Barry Groves, PhD. Second Opinions: Exposing Dietary Misinformation: The
Cholesterol Myth, parts 1 and 2<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-50455665572537519322013-02-05T17:33:00.004-08:002013-02-05T17:36:36.980-08:00<h1 class="title">
The Surprising Connection Between Food and Fracking.</h1>
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In a recent <em>Nation</em> <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/171504/fracking-our-food-supply#">piece</a>, the wonderful <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/authors/elizabeth-royte" target="_blank">Elizabeth Royte</a> teased out the direct links between hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the food supply. In short, extracting natural gas from rock formations by bombarding them with chemical-spiked fluid leaves behind fouled water—and that fouled water can make it into the crops and animals we eat.<br />
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But there's another, emerging food/fracking connection that few are aware of. US agriculture is highly reliant on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized in a process fueled by natural gas. As <a href="http://www.api.org/policy-and-issues/policy-items/exploration/facts_about_shale_gas.aspx">more and more of the US natural gas supply comes from fracking,</a> more and more of the nitrogen fertilizer farmers use will come from fracked natural gas. If Big Ag becomes hooked on cheap fracked gas to meet its fertilizer needs, then the fossil fuel industry will have gained a powerful ally in its effort to <a href="http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2012/11/20/fracking-regulations-back-on-the-agenda-in-illinois/">steamroll regulation and fight back opposition to fracking projects.</a></div>
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The potential for the growth of fracked nitrogen (known as "N") fertilizer is immense. During the 2000s, when conventional US natural gas sources were drying up and prices were spiking, the US fertilizer industry largely went offshore, moving operations to places like Trinidad and Tobago, where conventional natural gas was still relatively plentiful. (I told that story in a <a href="http://grist.org/article/2010-02-11-tracking-u-s-farmers-supply-nitrogen-fertilizer/">2010</a><em><a href="http://grist.org/article/2010-02-11-tracking-u-s-farmers-supply-nitrogen-fertilizer/"> Grist</a></em><a href="http://grist.org/article/2010-02-11-tracking-u-s-farmers-supply-nitrogen-fertilizer/"> piece</a>.) This chart from a <a href="http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ar33-feb2009.pdf" target="_blank">2009 USDA doc</a> illustrates how rapidly the US shifted away from domestically produced nitrogen in the 2000s.<br />
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<strong>It was the N of the era: In the 2000s, nitrogen production moved offshore as US natural gas prices rose. </strong>Source: USDA</div>
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Today, Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation off the coast of Venezuela and our leading source of imported N, is in the same position the US found itself in the early 2000s: Its supply of conventional, easy-to-harvest natural gas is wearing thin. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12128.pdf">estimated</a> (PDF) that at current rates of extraction, the nation had sufficient natural gas reserves to last until just 2019.<br />
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Meanwhile, the fracking boom has made US natural gas suddenly abundant—and driven prices into the ground. A Btu of US natural gas now now costs 75 percent less than it did in 2008, the<em> New York Times</em> recently <a href="http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/would-exporting-the-natural-gas-surplus-help-the-economy-or-hurt/">reported</a>. Meanwhile, nitrogen fertilizer prices <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_22437106/colorado-farmers-fret-that-fertilizer-prices-are-being">remain stubbornly high,</a> propped up by strong demand driven by high crop prices. Those conditions—low input prices plus elevated prices for the final product—mean a potential profit bonanza for companies that use cheap US natural gas to make pricy N fertilizer for the booming US market.<br />
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Not surprisingly, as Kay McDonald of the excellent blog <a href="http://www.bigpictureagriculture.com/2013/01/u-s-will-again-produce-more-nitrogen-fertilizer-for-agriculture-311.html">Big Picture Agriculture</a> shows, the industry is starting to move back to the United States to take advantage of the fracking boom. McDonald points to a $1.4 billion project announced in September by the Egyptian company Orascom Construction Industries to build a large new nitrogen fertilizer plant in Iowa close to a natural gas pipeline. According to the<em> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443589304577633932086598096.html">Wall Street Journal</a>,</em> "cheap U.S. natural-gas supplies and the nation's role as the world's most important food exporter" drew the Egyptian giant into the US market.<br />
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Fertilizer giant CF Industries won more than $70 million in tax incentives from the the state, and $161 million in property taxes over 20 years from the county that houses the plant.</div>
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That same month, US-owned agribusiness cooperative CHS announced it was investing $1.2 billion to build a nitrogen plant in North Dakota. An <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-09-13/1-dot-2b-fertilizer-plant-planned-for-eastern-nd" target="_blank">Associated Press article</a> gave a taste of the potential profits in such an operation: "Natural gas prices are now at about $2.50 per thousand cubic feet. At those prices, it takes about $82 worth of natural gas to make a ton of anhydrous ammonia, which is selling for about $800 per ton."<br />
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And then there's US fertilizer giant CF Industries, which in November announced a $3.8 billion expansion of existing nitrogen fertilizer plants in Louisiana and Iowa, a move designed to "take advantage of low natural gas costs and high grain prices," <em>MarketWatch</em> <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cf-industries-plans-38-bln-fertilizer-expansion-2012-11-01">reported</a>.<br />
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Now, it should be noted that it isn't just the promise of windfall profits that are driving these investments. Energy prices are highly volatile, and the industry is wary of the risk involved with plunking down billions in hopes of future gain. Enter the taxpayer: These projects are being underwritten by public money at the national, state, and local levels. As a reward for expanding its Iowa plant, CF Industries won more than $70 million in tax incentives from the the state, and $161 million in property taxes over 20 years from Woodbury County, which houses the plant, the <em>Sioux City Journal</em> <a href="http://siouxcityjournal.com/news/local/state-and-regional/mega-project-billion-expansion-planned-in-port-neal/article_21c32a1c-c3e6-5586-9ced-47d86fb126f7.html">reports</a>. Louisiana will chip in <a href="http://www.louisianaeconomicdevelopment.com/led-news/news-releases/cf-industries-announces-$21-billion-expansion-in-donaldsonville.aspx">several million dollars</a> in tax breaks for the company's expansion there, too.<br />
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As for Orascom Construction's Iowa plant, it's<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323854904578262091395916974.html"> being financed through a federal loan program designed to help states recover economically from disasters</a>—in this case, Iowa's 2008 floods. The loan program, which gives Orascom access to an interest rate much lower than it would find in the commercial market, is a de facto subsidy—it will likely save the company $360 million in interest payments on the construction, the<em> Des Moines Register</em> <a href="http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2012/11/16/state-board-approved-bond-financing-for-orascoms-iowa-fertilizer-project">reported</a>. And that's on top of $100 million in tax breaks the state of Iowa has <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-05/egypt-s-oci-to-build-1-dot-4-billion-fertilizer-plant-in-iowa">committed</a> to the project.<br />
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What are taxpayers getting in exchange for these goodies? In my view, not much. Industrial agriculture's reliance on plentiful synthetic nitrogen brings with it a whole bevy of environmental liabilities: excess nitrogen that seeps into streams and eventually into the Mississippi River, <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dead-zone-pollutant-grows-despite-decades-work">feeding a massive annual algae bloom that blots out sea life</a>; <a href="http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/04/02/fertilizer-use-responsible-for-increase-in-nitrous-oxide-in-atmosphere/">emissions of nitrous oxide</a>, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon; and the <a href="http://grist.org/article/2010-02-23-new-research-synthetic-nitrogen-destroys-soil-carbon-undermines/">destruction of organic matter in soil</a>.<br />
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By adding a "small grain" (oats or wheat) plus nitrogen-fixing cover crops, farmers can reduce their nitrogen needs by upwards of 80 percent.</div>
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Rather than prop up nitrogen use by subsidizing new megaprojects, public policy could be seeking encouraging farming practices that demand less nitrogen. One obvious strategy is diversification. The most prolific US crop, corn, is<a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2011-september/nitrogen-footprint.aspx" target="_blank"> also the most nitrogen-intensive</a> among major field crops. In a 2012 <a href="http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/sites/default/files/pubs-and-papers/2012-07-diversifying-corn-soybean-rotations.pdf">paper</a>, researchers from Iowa State University's Leopold Center showed that by extending the typical Midwestern corn-soy crop rotation by adding a "small grain" (e.g., oats or wheat) plus nitrogen-fixing cover crops, farmers can reduce their nitrogen needs by upwards of 80 percent. Investing in policies that encourage such changes would likely, in the long run, be much smarter than subsidizing the fertilizer industry's move toward relying on fracked gas.<br />
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As they fight the expansion of fracking and push for tighter regulations on it, concerned citizens can count on an opponent nearly as powerful and monied as Big Oil: <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/07/agribiz-bought-farm-bill">Big Ag</a>. Already, the American Farm Bureau Federation, which <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/168913/q-whose-side-american-farm-bureau#" target="_blank">essentially acts as a lobbyist for Big Ag firms</a>, supports the controversial energy source: "Farm Bureau supports additional access for exploration and production of oil and natural gas, including the use of hydraulic fracturing," the group declared in an October 2012 <a href="http://www.fb.org/issues/docs/energy12.pdf">policy statement</a> (PDF). But the Farm Bureau and its agribiz allies haven't played much of a role in the fight over regulating fracking, yet. As the fertilizer industry becomes reliant on cheap US natural gas, that will likely change.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-20235545284403619672013-01-30T09:31:00.001-08:002013-01-30T09:37:53.467-08:00<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">by Piper Hoffman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The season for cruise
ship vacations has arrived. I just got back from my very first cruise, and I
brought with me a troubling question: just how much environmental damage did
that ship cause? How much marine life did we kill?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My boat carried 2,800
passengers and 1,100 staff people and crew. It was 965 feet long. It is hard to
fathom how big this thing was. You would not want to see it coming at you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Periodically we would
feel the ship hit something. I fervently hoped that we had hit a swell in
choppy waters and not a dolphin or something.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ship Strikes, Or Death
by Pleasure Cruise</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The <a href="http://iwc.int/ship-strikes" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">International
Whaling Commission</span></a> reports that “Many species of whales and dolphins
can be vulnerable to collisions with vessels, or”<a href="http://iwc.int/ship-strikes" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">ship
strike</span></a>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“<a href="http://www.spearboard.com/showthread.php?t=12257" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Collision with a ship</span></a> usually results in injury
or death for the whale. Records show that as many as five blue whales are
killed by ships every year, and many more deaths likely go unrecorded because
blue whales are negatively buoyant and sink when they die. The annual mortality
could be as high as dozens of whales, which constitutes a significant threat to
this subpopulation and possibly to the entire species.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <a href="http://www.spearboard.com/showthread.php?t=12257" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">one incident</span></a>, a ship impaled a whale on its bow
unbeknownst to the crew, who discovered its body only two days later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sometimes ships hit
endangered animals like <a href="http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/shipstrike/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">North Atlantic Right Whales</span></a>,
whose numbers are down to 300-400. This species is particularly vulnerable
because of “their slow movements, time spent at the surface, and time spent
near the coast.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Water Pollution</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Environmental
Protection Agency issued a <a href="http://water.epa.gov/polwaste/vwd/disch_assess.cfm" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Cruise Ship Discharge Assessment Report</span></a> that <a href="http://action.foe.org/t/3866/content.jsp?content_KEY=4942&key=0" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Friends of the Earth</span></a>
summarized: “cruise ships produce an average of 21,000 gallons per day of
sewage and 170,000 gallons per day of raw graywater (which can contain as much
bacteria as sewage [plus<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2009/09/a_supposedly_green_thing_i_might_do_again.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"> oil and grease</span></a>]).” They
are dumping this crap into “some of our most pristine and wild places,” which
of course is where people want to go on cruises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://news.travel.aol.com/2010/05/20/cruise-line-environmental-impact-report/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Friends of the Earth</span></a> also
produces its own scorecard for cruise lines. They measure “sewage treatment,
air pollution reduction, water quality compliance and accessibility of
environmental information.” Their conclusion: “cruise lines are doing less than
they can to limit the environmental impacts of their ships.” A company called
Crystal Cruises earned an F “due to the absence of advanced sewage treatment
systems on their ships and the inability to utilize shoreside power via
plug-ins at equipped ports.” No advanced sewage treatment systems means they
are dumping foul things straight into the water. Eww. Not using shoreside power
means they are burning low-grade diesel even when electricity is available.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The crud cruise ships
dump into the water includes bacteria and viruses, which “can sicken and kill
marine life, including corals.” I feel disproportionately guilty about that
one, since I had a nasty upper respiratory infection for the first few days of
the cruise. I was careful to isolate myself from people who could catch it but
never considered that my germs could do damage after they went down the drain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Air Pollution</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On a typical seven-day
cruise to the Caribbean, the ship emits the equivalent of<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2009/09/a_supposedly_green_thing_i_might_do_again.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"> one ton of carbon dioxide per
passenger</span></a>, which is about what that individual would produce in 18
days on land.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The massive QE2, which
is no longer operating, had mileage that would send shoppers into conniptions
if they saw it on a car they were considering buying: <a href="http://www.talking-naturally.co.uk/cruise-ships-very-bad-environment-birdlife-partner-nabu/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">49 feet per gallon</span></a>. Yes, <i>feet</i>.
According to the <a href="http://www.talking-naturally.co.uk/cruise-ships-very-bad-environment-birdlife-partner-nabu/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Nature and Biodiversity Conservation
Union</span></a>, cruise ships “emit particle pollution equivalent to 5 million
cars driving the same distance as the cruise ship travels, and that the 15
largest cruise ships emit as much sulfur dioxide pollution annually as all 760
million cars in the world.” (<a href="http://www.talking-naturally.co.uk/cruise-ships-very-bad-environment-birdlife-partner-nabu/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Other sources</span></a> say there are
more like one billion cars on the road than 760 million.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Am I A Whale Killer?</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Given statistics like
the annual whale strike number of between five and dozens, it is unlikely that
my boat hit multiple whales a day. It is much more likely that what we
encountered was the maritime equivalent of air turbulence. But I certainly did
my part to pollute that beautiful blue water.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-89967449847637315862013-01-29T12:26:00.002-08:002013-01-29T12:26:40.983-08:00
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 24pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Why Doctors Can't Make You Well.<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<br />
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 24pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">By Deepak Chopra<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">For many people, keeping well doesn't involve taking good
advice. After decades of public health campaigns in favor of low-fat diets,
moderate exercise, and stress management, it's still hard to get Americans to
comply. As a society, we are so sold on drugs and surgery as the answer
to illness that many of us only register two states of health: Either you are
sick, or you're not sick. In the first case, you go to the doctor, who is
expected to fix you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The choice should be broader than being sick or not.
"I am well" means much more than the absence of active disease. What
the public -- and most doctors -- hasn't found out is that the cause of illness
is becoming more and more murky. It's not just germs and genes. The germ
theory of disease held sway for over a century after the discovery of microbes
and the arrival of antibiotics to combat them. Gene therapy, long promised as
the answer to almost any disease, hasn't actually achieved much success,
although in certain cases, such as cancers that are caused by a simple genetic
mutation, targeted drug therapies have been successful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The bigger picture is that genetics has led us into a
much more complicated view of the disease process, so complicated that it is
beyond the skill of doctors. Too many factors are at work when illness
arises, and the disease model itself sometimes breaks down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">A startling article in <a href="http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=2196"><i><span style="color: blue;">The Wilson
Quarterly</span></i></a> covered the current explanations for schizophrenia, which has
moved from being a psychiatric disorder to a disorder of the brain. And yet, to
quote the article:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">It is now clear that the simple biomedical approach to
serious psychiatric illnesses has failed in turn. At least, the bold dream that
these maladies would be understood as brain disorders with clearly identifiable
genetic causes ... has faded into the mist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">All simple approaches, from talking to a psychiatrist to
taking a pill or holding out for a genetic silver bullet, don't match reality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">To quote once more:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">... schizophrenia now appears to be a complex outcome of
many unrelated causes -- the genes you inherit, but also whether your mother
fell ill during her pregnancy, whether you got beaten up as a child or were
stressed as an adolescent, even how much sun your skin has seen. It's not just
about the brain. It's not just about genes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The fact is that many diseases are turning out to have
multiple causes that change from person to person. Depression, which is much
more widespread than schizophrenia, is now known to involve many brain centers,
to the extent that no two people are exactly alike in their depression.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Therefore, the conclusion that applies to schizophrenia
may be announcing a massive trend:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">... schizophrenia looks more and more like diabetes. A
messy array of risk factors predisposes someone to develop diabetes: smoking,
being overweight, collecting fat around the middle rather than on the hips,
high blood pressure, and yes, family history. These risk factors are not
intrinsically linked. Some of them have something to do with genes, but most do
not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">What are we left with when clear, defined causes don't
work? A term even more vague than risk factors: susceptibility.
Susceptibility covers so many things that quite literally everything in
life becomes a contributing factor. A doctor can't make you well because
susceptibility goes back all the way to birth. A wide range of mental
disorders, including schizophrenia, depression, autism, and Alzheimer's, are
now traceable to slight changes in the brain that appear many years or even
decades before the first symptoms arise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Much of this evidence has been gained through brain scans
and genetic typing, yet these indicators aren't causes. We now know that gene
output is highly flexible and always changing, while the brain alters its
"soft wiring" constantly. Both are highly influenced by behavior,
beliefs, lifestyle choices, diet, and so on. Despite all the new
information gained through new technologies, treatment hasn't generally kept
up, and sometimes, as in early signs of a predisposition for cancer, autism,
and Alzheimer's, finding a suitable drug therapy, should one even exist, is
years or decades away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">In the next post, we'll discuss what this tremendous
shift in explaining illness means for you today, trying to find ways to reduce
your susceptibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><a href="http://www.deepakchopra.com/"><span style="color: blue;">deepakchopra com</span></a></span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">For more by Deepak Chopra, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra"><span style="color: blue;">click here</span></a>.</span></i><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-79867466415525803402013-01-19T06:47:00.000-08:002013-01-19T06:47:49.824-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">VANISHING OF THE BEES - video trailer.</span></strong></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-62200716655978250242013-01-10T05:58:00.002-08:002013-01-10T05:58:47.710-08:00<br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">How to Inspire Your Brain
(Part 2).</span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: medium;">By Deepak
Chopra</span> - </span></strong> Co-author, 'Super Brain: Unleashing the
Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual
Well-Being'; founder, The Chopra Foundation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><br /></span></div>
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<em>By <strong>Deepak Chopra</strong>, MD, FACP and <strong>Rudolph E.
Tanzi</strong>, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at
Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), co-authors of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Super-Brain-Unleashing-Explosive-Well-Being/dp/0307956822/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351652231&sr=8-1&keywords=superbrain/deepakchcom07-20">Super
Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health,
Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being</a>. (Harmony)</em><br />
<em><br /></em>
Evidence is gathering by the day that the brain isn't really an object but a
continuous and active process. Thoughts and experiences create new pathways in
the brain. They even affect the output of genes. What this means for the
individual is extremely important. The control center for the brain's constant
shaping and reshaping is you, the person who is using the brain. Although there
are many brain processes that run on automatic, they too are highly influenced
by experiences -- that's why, for instance, the automatic rise and fall of blood
pressure during the day is highly <a href="http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/anxiety/AN01086" target="_hplink">responsive</a> to all the things that happened to you during the
day.<br />
Brain health comes down to a simple-seeming formula: maximize the positive
input and minimize the negative input. The result will be positive rather than
negative output. To some extent the difference between positive and negative
input isn't hard to define:<br />
<br />
It's positive to maintain balanced diet, negative to eat an imbalanced
one.<br />
<br />It's positive to take regular exercise; it's negative to be
sedentary.<br />
<br />It's positive to have good relationships, negative to have
stressful ones.<br />
<br />
Anyone who has kept pace with the public campaign in prevention can make the
list longer; the risk factors for a healthy lifestyle are well known. But this
is where the difference between positive and negative get trickier. Information
isn't the same as compliance. That Americans are getting more obese and
sedentary while consuming massive quantities of sugar and fatty junk food isn't
due to lack of information. Non-compliance is about inspiring your brain to
function in a better way. This is a role assigned to the mind; the brain can't
inspire itself.<br />
<br />
In our book <em>Super Brain</em>, we focus on how to you can best relate to
your brain on the basis of more positive thinking, emotions, attitudes, and
beliefs. In that regard we are running counter to the prevailing trend, which
sees the brain as an organ that needs to be maintained the way one would
maintain the heart of stomach. Of course the brain is an organ, but far more
importantly, it serves the mind. Therefore, everything you think, say, and do
depends on aligning the brain with your desires, intentions, and the vision you
have of your life. The brain keeps a constant feedback loop going with the mind
and body; if you were to fall into a coma, it can sustain life.<br />
<br />
But only you can sustain meaning and purpose. For all of its brilliant
discoveries, neuroscience can't give your brain meaning, and if you feel that
you lack purpose, there is no drug or surgery that will bring it back. At
present, the main breakthroughs in neuroscience are medical. Curing organic
disorders like Alzheimer's and depression are urgent goals since they undermine
anyone's chance to find meaning and purpose.<br />
But our emphasis is to raise the everyday functioning of the brain to a
higher level. The baseline brain, as we call it, passively handles everyone's
life given the input that is provided. Super brain, on the other hand, goes
beyond the baseline brain to actively optimize what the brain can do -- it
brings to life hidden potential that exists in everyone's brain. To give a sense
of what we mean, here's a quiz to test how much of your brain's potential you
are presently using.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Quiz: Baseline Brain versus Super Brain</strong><br />
Look at the following list and place a check beside each sentence that
describes your behavior at least some of the time. Don't be judgmental or hard
on yourself. Simply mark the items that honestly seem to apply to you.<br />
I don't ask myself to behave very differently today than I did
yesterday.<br />I am a creature of habit.<br />I don't stimulate my mind with new
challenges very often.<br />I like familiarity. It's the most comfortable way to
live.<br />I'm not that excited with the work I do.<br />My relationships follow
pretty set patterns.<br />I should pay more attention to my weight.<br />I don't
exercise regularly.<br />I can be impulsive and then regret it later.<br />I have
certain habits I just can't seem to break.<br />I look at my past and see major
regrets.<br />I know that I have missed some major opportunities.<br />I'm only fair
at making decisions.<br />I'm aware of having inner conflicts.<br />I worry about
aging, particularly memory loss.<br />I've had much better times in my life than
now.<br />The future fills me with uncertainty.<br />I need to be in better control
of my life.<br />I wonder what my purpose in life is.<br />I wish that my emotions
were more valued.<br />I rarely read inspirational stories, poetry, or
scriptures.<br />I feel that I deserve more appreciation.<br />I don't see my life
really getting better.<br />I have a hard time getting a good night's sleep every
night.<br />I don't feel that great about my body.<br />
<br />Total Score __________<br />
<br />
<br />
Analyzing your score: Every item on the list describes the baseline brain.
Its attitudes, beliefs, and habits are self-limiting. They aren't bad or wrong
-- this quiz isn't about judging yourself. It's about the habitual way that you
relate to your brain. The point is to assess where you stand in relation to your
hidden potential.<br />
18 - 25 points. You are not sufficiently proactive as you relate to your
brain. Much of the time you allow inertia to creep into your daily life. You let
old habits and beliefs hold power over you. When something goes wrong, you tend
to let it slide. You don't believe that you can change your life at every
moment, significantly. It's good that you see yourself realistically, because
each item that you checked off can be improved, as you will discover reading
Super Brain.<br />
<br />
11 - 17 points. You know that your life could be better and have a good
appreciation of your limitations. You have spent some time trying to change,
either through therapy, self-help, or spiritual pursuits. You may consider
yourself a seeker. Even if you don't, you would welcome positive change. Looking
back at your past, you know that you had more potential than you have fulfilled
so far. It's good that you are so ready to change. Every page of Super Brain
will speak to you personally and help you to get on the path to fulfillment.<br />
5 - 10 points. You are a self-aware person who has been interested in
fulfilling your potential for a long time. It's likely that you are very
familiar with therapy or the spiritual path. You value yourself and don't easily
accept limitations. You are ready to turn the rest of your life into a rising
arc. You are already so proactive that Super Brain offers fulfillment at an
unusually high level. The possibility of reaching higher consciousness and
calling on the higher brain to get you there is very real.<br />
<br />
0 - 4 points. Either you are astonishingly self-aware or you didn't take the
quiz seriously. Please take it again without fearing that you will make yourself
look bad. The quiz is about an objective assessment, not about judging against
yourself.<br />
<br />
In the next post we'll discuss the implications of turning baseline
functioning into higher functioning.<br />
Read Part 1 of <a href="http://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/952/how_to_inspire_your_brain">How
to Inspire Your Brain</a><br />
<br />
(To be cont.)<br />
<a href="http://www.deepakchopra.com/">deepakchopra
com</a></div>
</div>
</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-10736164835952736402013-01-04T17:04:00.001-08:002013-01-04T17:06:37.353-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>The Story of Stuff.</b></span></div>
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<b>From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.</b></div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-75849210037114470852013-01-03T07:03:00.001-08:002013-01-03T07:03:59.354-08:00<br />
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<h1 class="title">
Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?</h1>
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Factory animals are pumped full of antibiotics to make them gain
weight. What does that mean for our waistlines?</h3>
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—By <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/authors/tom-philpott" rel="author">Tom
Philpott</a></div>
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Like hospital patients, US farm animals tend to be confined to tight spaces
and dosed with antibiotics. But that's where the similarities end. Hospitals
dole out antibiotics to save lives. On America's factory-scale meat farms, the
goal is to fatten animals for their date at the slaughterhouse.<br />
<br />
And it turns out that <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/04/fda-factory-farms-antibiotics" target="_blank">antibiotics help with the fattening process</a>. Back in the
1940s, scientists discovered that regular low doses of antibiotics increased
"feed efficiency"—that is, they caused animals to put on more weight per pound
of feed. No one understood why, but farmers seized on this unexpected benefit.
By the 1980s, feed laced with small amounts of the drugs became de rigueur as US
meat production shifted increasingly to factory farms. In 2009, an estimated <a href="http://www.livablefutureblog.com/2010/12/new-fda-numbers-reveal-food-animals-consume-lion%E2%80%99s-share-of-antibiotics" target="_blank">80 percent of the antibiotics sold</a> in the United States went
to livestock.<br />
<br />
This year, scientists may have finally figured out why small doses of
antibiotics "promote growth," as the industry puts it: They make subtle changes
to what's known as the "gut microbiome," the teeming universe populated by
billions of microbes that live within the digestive tracts of animals. In recent
research, the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/science/studies-of-human-microbiome-yield-new-insights.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">microbiome has been emerging as a key regulator of health</a>,
from immune-related disorders like allergies and asthma to the ability to fight
off pathogens.<br />
<br />
In an August <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7413/full/nature11400.html" target="_blank">study published in <em>Nature</em></a>, a team of New York
University researchers subjected mice to regular low doses of antibiotics—just
like cows, pigs, and chickens get on factory farms. The result: After seven
weeks, the drugged mice had a different composition of microbiota in their guts
than the control group—and they had gained 10 to 15 percent more fat mass.<br />
<br />
Why? "Microbes in our gut are able to digest certain carbohydrates that we're
not able to," says NYU researcher and study coauthor Ilseung Cho. Antibiotics
seem to increase those bugs' ability to break down carbs—and ultimately convert
them to body fat. As a result, the antibiotic-fed mice "actually extracted more
energy from the same diet" as the control mice, he says. That's great if you're
trying to fatten a giant barn full of hogs. But what about that two-legged
species that's often exposed to antibiotics?<br />
<br />
Interestingly, the NYU team has produced <a href="http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ijo2012132a.html" target="_blank">another recent paper</a> looking at just that question. They
analyzed data from a UK study in the early '90s to see if they could find a
correlation between antibiotic exposure and kids' weight. The study involved
more than 11,000 kids, about a third of whom had been prescribed antibiotics to
treat an infection before the age of six months. The results: The babies who had
been exposed to antibiotics had a 22 percent higher chance of being overweight
at age three than those who hadn't (though by age seven the effect had worn
off).<br />
<br />
The connection raises another obvious question: Are we being exposed to tiny
levels of antibiotics through residues in the meat we eat—and are they altering
our gut flora? It turns out that the Food and Drug Administration maintains
tolerance limits for antibiotic residue levels, above which meat isn't supposed
to be released to the public <a href="http://www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/PHVt-Residue_Detection_Program.pdf" target="_blank">(PDF)</a>. But Keeve Nachman, who researches antibiotic use in the
meat industry for the <a href="http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-a-livable-future/" target="_blank">Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future</a>, told me that the
FDA sets these limits based solely on research financed and conducted by
industry—and it refuses to release the complete data to the public or consider
independent research.<br />
<br />
"We may not understand the biological relevance of exposures through
consuming meat at those levels," he says. Indeed, a <a href="http://mbio.asm.org/content/3/5/e00190-12.full" target="_blank">recent
European study</a> showed that tiny levels of antibiotics could have an effect
on microorganisms. The researchers took some meat, subjected it to antibiotic
residues near the US limit, and used a traditional technique to turn it into
sausage, inoculating it with lactic-acid-producing bacteria. In normal sausage
making, the lactic acid from the starter bacteria spreads through the meat and
kills pathogens like <em>E. coli</em>. The researchers found, though, that the
antibiotic traces were strong enough to impede the starter bacteria, while still
letting the <em>E. coli </em>flourish. In other words, even at very low levels,
antibiotics can blast "good" bacteria—and promote deadly germs.<br />
<br />
Nachman stressed that we simply don't have sufficient information to tell
whether the meat we eat is messing with our gut microbiome. But, he adds, "It's
not an unreasonable suspicion." If that's not enough to churn your stomach,
there's also the fact that drug-resistant bugs—which often emerge in
antibiotic-dosed livestock on factory farms—are increasingly common: Remember
the super-salmonella that caused Cargill to <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/cargill-recall-turkey-salmonella" target="_blank">recall 36 million pounds of ground turkey</a> last year? Luckily
for me, it's unlikely that drug-laced meat will mess with my gut. I think I've
lost my appetite.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-16010211143966134012012-12-31T04:01:00.003-08:002012-12-31T04:01:49.282-08:00<br />
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<h1>
Shipping Primates for Research Slowly Becoming Taboo.</h1>
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<li>by <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/author/amgraef" rel="author" title="Posts by Alicia Graef">Alicia
Graef</a></li>
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In a victory for animals, the Canadian Transport Authority (CTA) has
announced that it will uphold Air Canada’s decision to stop shipping primates
who are destined for experimentation.<br />
<br />
“This landmark ruling confirms the right of Air Canada to refuse shipment of
primates to laboratories, which is an important stimulus for more human-relevant
biomedical research as well as the replacement or reduction of animal use,” <a href="http://www.hsi.org/world/canada/news/releases/2012/12/aircanada_animal_shipment_ban_confirmed_122012.html" target="_blank">said</a> Gabriel Wildgen, campaigner for HSI/Canada. “We are very
grateful to Air Canada for adopting such a progressive policy, and to the CTA
for reinforcing Air Canada’s right to take a stand in favour of animal welfare
and ethical science.”<br />
<br />
The move was supported by a number of groups, including the <a href="http://www.buav.org/" target="_blank">British Union for the Abolition of
Vivisection</a> (BUAV), <a href="http://www.hsi.org/world/canada/" target="_blank">Humane Society International/Canada</a>, <a href="http://www.animalalliance.ca/" target="_blank">Animal Alliance of Canada</a>
and <a href="http://justiceforanimals.net/" target="_blank">Justice for
Animals</a>.<br />
Air Canada had previously refused to ship primates destined for research, but
a 1998 ruling by the CTA forced the airline back into the monkey business.
Animal Justice Canada advised the airline to change the wording of its cargo
tariff in a manner that would allow it to revert back to its original
policy.<br />
<br />
Air Canada petitioned the agency last year to get out of the primate trade
and stated that it was “a decision taken both to align our policies with those
of many other major international carriers and in response to widespread public
concern.”<br />
<br />
According to the <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1305445--air-canada-can-get-out-of-monkey-business-transport-agency-rules" target="_blank">Toronto Star</a>, a day before the new change was supposed to take
effect, industry groups, including Queen’s University and the Public Health
Agency of Canada, challenged the move arguing that it would negatively impact
research.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, the CTA dismissed the objections and issued a <a href="http://www.cta-otc.gc.ca/eng/agency-dismisses-complaints-against-air-canadas-proposed-tariff-revisions-stop-transporting-non-hum" target="_blank">statement</a> concluding that Air Canada’s decision to stop
transporting non-human primates for research constitutes a “rational business
decision” and that the move is not discriminatory.<br />
<br />
The airline will be re-filing its amendment, which “will require shippers to
sign a declaration that non-human primates are not destined for research or
experiments.”<br />
<br />
“We are delighted that the Canadian Transportation Authority has upheld the
decision by Air Canada to discontinue its involvement in the cruel
transportation of primates for research. Air Canada now joins the increasing
number of airlines that have taken the decision to dissociate themselves from
the cruelty and suffering that are intrinsic to this industry. This is an issue
of strong public concern and it is only right that Air Canada should be allowed
to respond to that concern,” <a href="http://www.buav.org/article/1168/buav-welcomes-decision-that-air-canada-can-stop-transporting-primates-for-research" target="_blank">said</a> Michelle Thew, the BUAV’s Chief Executive.<br />
Every year, thousands of primates are transported around the globe to meet
the demand for research subjects. They’re kidnapped from the wild, separated
from their family groups, caged and bred on the equivalent of factory farms
before undergoing the trauma of international transport in the cargo hold of a
plane. The ones who survive the journey continue on to research facilities where
they’ll be used in unnecessary, unreliable and redundant experiments.<br />
<br />
Thanks to public pressure and the work of animal advocacy groups, many
airlines have changed their policies and no longer participate in the
international trade of primates for research, and in some cases refuse to ship
any species of animal destined for a lab.<br />
<br />
Now, United/Continental is the last remaining major airline that ships
primates to North America.<br />
<br />
For more information about which airlines do and do not ship animals for
research, visit the BUAV’s <a href="http://www.buav.org/our-campaigns/primate-campaign/primate-cargo-cruelty/" target="_blank">Cargo Cruelty</a> campaign.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-43196589224151185302012-12-31T04:00:00.001-08:002012-12-31T04:00:19.969-08:00<br />
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<h1>
Plastic Shopping Bags Laced with Dangerous Levels of Toxic Lead.</h1>
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<br />
<br />
by <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/author/bethb" rel="author" title="Posts by Beth Buczynski">Beth
Buczynski</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Did you go shopping for holiday presents at a big box retailer or shopping
mall this season? Chances are you carried home at least one <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/tag/plastic-bags" target="_blank">plastic
shopping bag</a> that could be a danger to your health.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.toxicsinpackaging.org/docs/press_release_inks_colorants" target="_blank">New research suggests</a> that clogging up our gutters, and
poisoning our soil and water aren’t the only risks associated with rampant
plastic bag use. According to a report by the Toxics in Packaging Clearinghouse
[<a href="http://www.toxicsinpackaging.org/docs/inks_colorants_results_bulletin.pdf" target="_blank">PDF</a>], some vibrant solid-colored plastic shopping bags contain
high concentrations of lead, a clear violation of state laws.<br />
<br />
The Clearinghouse screened 132 single-use bags for the presence of <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/tag/lead" target="_blank">lead</a>, cadmium,
mercury and hexavalent chromium. These toxic metals are in the inks used to
print or color the bags, despite being regulated by 19 U.S. states. These laws
prohibit the intentional use of any amount of these four metals in any packaging
or packaging component, such as inks and colorants. If the metals are
incidentally present (defined as an unintended or undesired ingredient) in the
packaging component or material, the laws restrict the sum total concentration
of these four metals to less than 100 parts per million.<br />
<br />
The good news is that only three bags, two yellow and one red, failed the
screening test for lead. The bad news is that the concentration of lead was
approximately 10,000 ppm, or 1 percent by weight, in the bags that failed.<br />
<br />
These results mean that “for every 100 pounds of these shopping bags, we’re
introducing about 1 pound of lead into commerce,” said Alex Stone with the State
of Washington’s Department of Ecology, which performed the screening with TPCH.
Only one of the bags was marked with the country of origin, and in that case it
was manufactured in the U.S. “It was a surprise to find a packaging sample
manufactured in the U.S. that violated our state laws,” said Kathleen Hennings
of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “In the past we’ve typically only
found lead and cadmium in <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/40-of-dollar-store-packaging-contains-illegal-levels-of-toxins.html" target="_blank">packaging manufactured overseas</a>.”<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, the report doesn’t name the companies caught using the toxic
shopping bags. It does, however, tell us that 95 percent of the packaging
samples (125) were shopping or mailing bags. Seven samples (5 percent) were food
packaging. Similarly, 95 percent of the samples were inks or colorants on
plastic, and 5 percent were inks on paper-based packaging.<br />
<br />
Of course, an easy answer to this problem is to simply bring your own: cloth
or mesh bags can be used many times, and can be made from recycled or organic
materials. There’s a caveat, however. Most colored plastic shopping bags are
distributed by non-food retailers, like clothing and electronics stores. While
bringing a bag is common in grocery stores, it’s often viewed with suspicion at
other types of retailers, and this can stop the public from attempting to bring
them in. Still, with an increasing number of cities enacting <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/tag/plastic-bag-ban" target="_blank">plastic bag
bans</a>, consumers and retailers may be forced to alter their
perspective.</div>
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<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-67365139588000310022012-12-24T07:47:00.004-08:002012-12-24T07:47:58.409-08:00<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>The 7 Worst Things About
McDonald's.</b></span><br />
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<cite>Photo Credit: Jason Patrick Ross / Shutterstock.com</cite><br />
<cite><br /></cite>
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<cite><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/">AlterNet</a></span></span></span> / By <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/lauren-kelley">Lauren
Kelley</a></cite><br />
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<strong>Forcing employees to work on Christmas
without overtime pay is just the
beginning.</strong></div>
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McDonald’s has become synonymous with food that’s
terrible for you, low-wage jobs and overzealous marketing to children. Largely
that’s because of<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-facts-mcdonalds-2010-12?op=1">McDonald’s
scale</a>; the company serves more customers each day than the entire population
of Great Britain, and it hires some one million workers each year (reportedly
one in eight Americans have been employed by
McDonald’s).</div>
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This is all to say that there’s a lot to hate about McDonald’s. As such, here
is a not-comprehensive list of some of the more outrageous facts about
McDonald’s, past and present.<br />
<br />
<strong>1.</strong><strong>It wants employees to work Thanksgiving and
Christmas without overtime pay.</strong><br />
McDonald’s has a long history of terrible labor practices, but this is
especially Scroogey: this holiday season the company urged franchisees to stay
open on Thanksgiving and Christmas (McDonald’s restaurants are usually closed on
those holidays). Worse, employees who work those days don’t get paid overtime.
According to a company spokesperson, “When our company-owned restaurants are
open on the holidays, the staff voluntarily sign up to work. There is no regular
overtime pay.”<br />
<br />
Mark E. Andersen at the Daily Kos<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/18/1171325/-McDonald-s-urges-franchises-to-open-on-Christmas-day-without-overtime-pay">crunched
the numbers</a> and figured out that McDonald’s made about $36 million in extra
sales by staying open this Thanksgiving. Andersen notes, “It is bad enough that
McDonald’s pays crap wages but then they turn around and refuse to pay overtime
for employees who volunteer to give up their holidays so that McDonald’s can
make several million dollars.” Yup.<br />
<br />
<strong>2. Workers don’t get fair pay in general.</strong><br />
Not getting overtime pay on major holidays is bad, but unfair wages is a
widespread problem for McDonald’s workers year-round. As Sarah Jaffe wrote at
the<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-should-pay-too-its-time-for-fast-food-workers-to-get-living-wages/265714/">Atlantic</a>
recently, “[t]he term ‘McJob’ has come to epitomize all that's wrong with the
low-wage service industry jobs that are a growing part of the U.S economy”
because “no matter what your job might be, it's assumed to be better than
working in a fast-food restaurant.” And of course, McDonald’s is the biggest
fast-food restaurant chain there is.<br />
<br />
There have been many examinations of McDonald’s pay structure, but this fact
sums up the problem best: the average McDonald’s employee would need to work<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/12/12/1322231/mcdonalds-worker-one-million-hours/">one
million hours</a> – or more than a century – to make as much as the company's
CEO makes in one year ($8.75 million).<br />
<br />
The good news is that fast-food workers, including a number of McDonald’s
employees, have been<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-should-pay-too-its-time-for-fast-food-workers-to-get-living-wages/265714/">organizing
for better treatment</a> and fair wages in recent weeks.<br />
<br />
<strong>3. Its marketing for kids is “creepy and predatory.”</strong><br />
Two years ago the watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest<a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/mcdonalds-accused-of-creepy-and-predatory-practices.html">threatened
to sue</a> McDonald’s over its “creepy and predatory” marketing practices aimed
at children. In its letter of intent to the company, CSPI likened McDonald’s to
“the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children” and said the
company uses “unfair and deceptive marketing” to “lure small children into
McDonald’s.”<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
McDonald’s duplicitous approach to marketing
directed to children can be seen in a recent press release that boasts that the
company’s Shrek-based promotion will “encourage kids to ‘Shrek Out’ their Happy
Meals around the world with menu options like fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy
and fruit juices.” In reality, though, the whole point of the Shrek promotion is
to get kids into McDonald’s where they most likely will end up being served
unhealthy default options and eating unhealthy meals.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
That wasn’t the first time McDonald’s had come under fire for its use of
Happy Meal toys to rope in children as customers, and given that the company is
the<a href="http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/mcdonalds-backs-online-viral-marketing-kids-144716">number-one
toy distributor in the world</a>, it surely it won’t be the last.<br />
<br />
<strong>4. It has a salad with a higher calorie count than a burger and
fries, and about the unhealthiest oatmeal on the planet.</strong><br />
McDonald’s once introduced a Caesar salad that was more fattening than a
hamburger -- with fries. The<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-299645/McDs-salad-fattening-hamburger.html">Daily
Mail</a> reported that “with dressing and croutons [the salad] contains 425
calories and 21.4g of fat, compared with the 253 calories and 7.7g of fat in the
standard burger.” What’s more, “Adding a portion of fries to your burger brings
the calorie count to 459 -- still less fatty than the salad at 16.7g.” That is
downright impressive.<br />
<br />
More recently, McDonald’s oatmeal -- another purportedly “healthy” option on
the Micky D menu -- has been criticized for being anything but good for you.
Mark Bittman<a href="http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/how-to-make-oatmeal-wrong">wrote
in the<em>Times</em></a> that the company’s oatmeal is nothing but “expensive
junk food” (you can make real, healthy oatmeal at home for very little money).
He went on: “A more accurate description than ‘100 percent natural whole-grain
oats,’ ‘plump raisins,’ ‘sweet cranberries’ and ‘crisp fresh apples’ would be
‘oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would
never keep in your kitchen.’”<br />
<br />
<strong>5. Its burgers won’t decompose.</strong><br />
Who can forget the time a woman let a McDonald’s burger and fries sit out for
six months, only to find they<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319562/McDonalds-Happy-Meal-bought-Sally-Davies-shows-sign-mould-6-months.html">wouldn’t
decompose</a>?<br />
<br />
Here’s the meal on day one:<br />
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319562/McDonalds-Happy-Meal-bought-Sally-Davies-shows-sign-mould-6-months.html"><img alt="day1" height="253" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/10/21/article-1319562-0B90CBF6000005DC-535_634x422.jpg" width="381" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
And here it is one day 94:<br />
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319562/McDonalds-Happy-Meal-bought-Sally-Davies-shows-sign-mould-6-months.html"><img alt="day94" height="283" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/10/21/article-1319562-0B90CC81000005DC-452_634x473.jpg" width="381" /></a><br />
<br />
In case you think this is just a myth, a<a href="http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html?ref=carousel">researcher</a>
found that McDonald’s burgers<em>can</em>rot under certain circumstances, but
that in general they won’t decompose on their own. The researcher found it’s
likely that “the burger doesn't rot because it's [sic] small size and relatively
large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast. Without moisture, there's
no mold or bacterial growth.”<br />
<br />
Basically, the burger will turn into beef jerky before it can decompose. So
it may not be a matter of nasty chemicals in the burger keeping it intact, but
it’s still grody.<br />
<br />
<strong>6. McDonald’s used “pink slime” for years.</strong><br />
By now we’ve all seen, and been horrified by<a href="http://gizmodo.com/5654066/chicken-nuggets-are-made-from-this-pink-chicken-goop">this
image</a>:<br />
<br />
<br />
<img alt="slime" src="http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2011/11/medium_754011b5f3009a0576f631cddc0f503e.jpg" /><br />
<br />
That is so-called “pink slime,” a substance derived from mechanically
separated chicken parts that for years was used to make McDonald’s chicken
nuggets. At least, it was used in the U.S.; the substance has long been illegal
for human consumption in the UK.<br />
<br />
The good news is that, once this image started circulating, McDonald’s was
forced to<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/02/01/mcdonalds-announces-end-to-pink-slime-in-burgers/">discontinue
use of pink slime.</a> (The company claims public outcry had nothing to do with
its decision.)<br />
<br />
<strong>7. McDonald’s is everywhere.</strong><br />
Try as you might, you can’t escape McDonald’s. In the continental U.S., the
only place you can go to be more than 100 miles from a McDonald’s restaurant <a href="http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/cities/only-place-in-america-more-than-100-miles-from-a-mcdonalds-video/1185">is
a desert on the Oregon/Nevada border</a>.<br />
<br />
<img alt="map" height="280" src="http://i.bnet.com/blogs/von_worley_mcdonalds_map.jpg" width="386" /><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-54683461845565368782012-12-20T06:17:00.000-08:002012-12-20T06:17:15.327-08:00<br />
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Catastrophe in the Making:
Mining for Uranium Could Begin on the East Coast.</h1>
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<i>This article was published in partnership with </i><a href="http://globalpossibilities.org/"><span class="s1"><i>GlobalPossibilities.org</i></span></a><i>.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
We know many of our tragedies by name; in recent years we have met Andrew,
Katrina, Ike, Irene, and most recently, Sandy. They defied our expectations —
the lost lives, ruined homes, ransacked communities. There is little comfort
looking forward. We’re told to expect more storms, and worse ones. It’s hard to
imagine how bad things could get, but then, not everyone has to imagine. Some
people may remember Camille.<br />
<br />
Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi Gulf coast on Aug. 17,1969, thrashing
communities with a tidal storm surge nearly three stories high and winds of up
to 200 miles an hour. Or so experts think — it’s hard to say, since the storm
destroyed all of the wind recording instruments in the region. When the storm
had moved on, many homes were underwater or on fire, and 143 people in Alabama,
Mississippi and Louisiana were dead. But Camille wasn’t done.<br />
<br />
As the storm moved north, it grew weaker until August 19, when what was left
of Camille collided with another system of wet air by the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The result was a storm of immense magnitude that took rural Nelson County,
Virginia, completely by surprise. Stefan Bechtel explains in his book <em>Roar
of the Heavens</em>, small communities in the mountains of central Virginia were
inundated with “one of the heaviest rainfalls ever recorded on earth” — in some
areas an estimated 31 inches of rain fell in less than eight hours.<br />
“Humans, animals, trees, boulders, houses, cars, barns, and everything else
were swept away in a fast-moving slurry, a kind of deadly earth-lava that buried
everything in its path,” Bechtel writes. Birds drowned in the trees, people
struggling to stay alive had to cover their mouths from the rain to breathe,
homes floated away or were crushed by debris. An estimated 2,000 years of
erosion of the mountains took place in one night. As rivers rose, flash-flooding
occurred all over Virginia, and in Nelson County alone 153 people died, many of
their bodies never recovered.<br />
<br />
This storm event was known as “probable maximum precipitation.” Thomas Leahy
has recently come to learn a lot about PMP storms, and he’s read all about
Camille’s wrath on Nelson County. Leahy is director of Public Utilities for the
city of Virginia Beach. His interest was piqued in 2007 when he heard about
plans to build a uranium mine and mill just south of Nelson County in
Pittsylvania County, Virginia. An intake valve for one of Virginia Beach’s main
sources of drinking water sits downstream from Pittsylvania County. What would
happen to our water, he wondered, if there was a uranium mine and mill in the
path of a PMP storm?<br />
Using computer modeling, Virginia Beach spent $400,000 to <a href="http://www.vbgov.com/government/departments/public-utilities/pages/uranium-mining.aspx">find
out</a>. After all, we’re living in a world of extreme weather and it turns out
these massive rain and flooding events aren’t 1,000-year storms but have been
mapped by the USGS over the last 100 years across the U.S. Their findings reveal
a cluster of PMP storms along the Appalachian mountain range, including in the
mid-Atlantic region where three of the five most intense storms took place. Two
in Virginia, the 1969 storm in Nelson County, and a 1995 storm in Madison County
-- just north of Nelson – where 30 inches of rain fell in 14 hours. Smethport,
Pennsylvania was hit in 1942.<br />
<br />
<strong>Extreme Energy</strong><br />
It’s not just weather that’s gotten extreme. So has extraction for fossil
fuels. The battle over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for shale gas has
gripped the East Coast. Due to the state's geology, fracking has had minimal
impacts in Virginia, but those in nearby West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio
can’t say the same. New York and North Carolina are both mulling decisions on
whether to allow fracking. Appalachian states like West Virginia have also long
endured coal mining, but in recent decades have faced increasing threats from an
even more extreme form of mining -— mountaintop removal mining, in which the
tops of mountains are blown to bits by explosives and the “waste” rock dumped
into mountain streams and valleys.<br />
<br />
As extractive industries grow in the East, Virginians have realized their
state may be the bullseye of yet another energy industry — nuclear power. Large
deposits of uranium were discovered in the state in 1979. Throughout the 1970s,
employees of the Canadian company Marline Uranium drove all over Virginia with
Geiger counters, hoping to hit a uranium jackpot. They struck nuclear gold by
Coles Hill, just outside the town of Chatham, Virginia — an area of the state
known as Southside, less than 25 miles from the North Carolina border.<br />
<br />
But just as they made their big discovery, nuclear energy was thrust into
national headlines as a partial meltdown occurred at Three Mile Island. Growing
public concern about nuclear energy, plummeting prices for uranium and a
moratorium on uranium mining in Virginia, enacted by the state’s General
Assembly in 1982, ultimately sent Marline packing.<br />
<br />
What Marline walked away from was indeed mammoth — the Coles Hill deposit is
estimated at 119 million pounds of uranium worth about $10 billion. It may be
the largest find in the U.S. and one of the 10 biggest globally. But uranium
mining is all about economics and in 2005 the price of uranium rose high enough
that there was renewed interest in Coles Hill; this time from the owner of the
land himself, Walter Coles, whose family owns a 750-acre farm where the uranium
was found. In 2007 Coles announced the formation of Virginia Uranium Inc. (VUI)
and set off to persuade the Virginia Assembly to lift the uranium moratorium so
his company could begin mining.<br />
<br />
<strong>Public Concern</strong><br />
Chatham, Virginia is a rural town struggling to thrive in the post-tobacco
and post-textile heyday. The downtown is a modest collection of a few
intersecting roads, brick and stone storefronts, a library, and a courthouse.
The government seat for Pittsylvania County, the economy is kept afloat by two
boarding schools, the all-girls Chatham Hall and the all-boys Hargrave Military
Academy. Agriculture continues to dominate in the adjacent bucolic
countryside.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div alt="" class="media-image" height="231" width="350">
<img alt="" class="media-image" height="231" src="http://www.alternet.org/files/chatham.jpg" typeof="foaf:Image" width="350" /></div>
<em>Downtown Chatham, Virginia. (Photo by Tara Lohan</em>)<br />
<br />
The town is not down and out, but it is in the early stages of economic
re-invention. As such, it's the kind of place where someone offering jobs is
likely to be pretty popular. But Chatham residents are no fools, either. The
folks who live there and in surrounding communities in the Roanoke River
watershed have been doing their homework on uranium mining. Even though VUI has
promised jobs, residents have found ample reason to be concerned.<br />
<br />
Our country’s history of uranium mining has been something of a horror story.
The first boom in uranium mining came in the '50s in response to our growing
nuclear weapons arsenal. A second boom happened in the '70s when many nuclear
power plants came online. These booms were followed by busts as uranium prices
dropped; when the market bottomed out, mining companies took off, creating an
epidemic of abandoned mines. Poor or non-existent regulations, including
allowing radioactive waste to be dumped into unlined pits, has left a legacy of
toxic pollution and poisoned communities in the West, many on tribal and federal
lands. (There are 520 abandoned uranium mines on <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=abandoned-uranium-mines-a">Navajo
land alone</a>.) American taxpayers have been stuck with cleanup bills in the
billions of dollars.<br />
<br />
Today, uranium mining proponents say regulations are better and new
technology makes the work safer. But it is still a massive industrial process
that leaves behind radioactive waste forever. You can’t see uranium in the rock
the way you can see a coal seam — to get to the good stuff, the rock needs to be
pulled from the earth by underground or open pit mines and then crushed. After
the mining comes the milling process, in which chemicals are used to separate
the uranium. The uranium is then dried and becomes the valuable commodity known
as “yellowcake.”<br />
<br />
But the waste or "tailings" of crushed rock, water and chemicals is
problematic, still containing 85 percent of its radioactivity, including radium
and thorium. Tailings are usually put in lined impoundments that are stored
above or below ground (also known as below grade) for, well, all of eternity. In
that time, the liners are not supposed to rip.<br />
<br />
Rose Ellen O’Connor <a href="http://www.dcbureau.org/201111186500/natural-resources-news-service/uranium-mining-%D0-the-virginia-battleground-%D0-environmental-concerns-vs-corporate-interests.html">reported</a>
for DC Bureau that Virginia Uranium plans to store some of the waste underground
and put the rest back in the mine. “Virginia Uranium spokesman Patrick Wales has
said the holding compartments will be state-of-the-art, lined with rock, clay
and tough synthetic strong enough to prevent leaching,” O’Connor <a href="http://www.dcbureau.org/201111186500/natural-resources-news-service/uranium-mining-%D0-the-virginia-battleground-%D0-environmental-concerns-vs-corporate-interests.html">wrote</a>.<br />
<br />
Cale Jaffe, an attorney for the <a href="http://www.southernenvironment.org/">Southern Environmental Law
Center</a>, isn't convinced that the waste can be stored below grade because of
the area’s high water table. Another concern is that the tailings impoundments
aren’t capped until they are filled (they can be up to 40 acres in size), a
process that could take months or even years, so if heavy rains or storms occur
beforehand, there is opportunity for a catastrophic spill.<br />
Before a tailings impoundment can be capped, all the water needs to be
drained from it and it needs to be completely dry, so there is no chance that
water could eventually leak out of the impoundment. “It seems to me it would be
impossible to dry out a tailings impoundment in Virginia where you have more
precipitation than evaporation,” said Sarah Fields, program director of the
Utah-based organization <a href="http://uraniumwatch.org/">Uranium Watch</a>. “I
don’t know how Virginia Uranium could get around that technical detail.”<br />
<br />
The amount of waste will also be massive. “This mine site is a large deposit
but they don’t mention that while the size of ore body is large, the grade of
ore is poor,” Jaffe said. “The average grade is 0.06 percent, which means that
99.94 percent is other stuff. To get the 63 million <em>pounds</em> of
yellowcake they want to get out they have to manage 28.9 million <em>tons</em>
of waste. VUI talks about energy independence for Virginia, but yellowcake will
get shipped to an out-of-state enrichment facility. Our prize is the waste. It
is really a question of Virginia being the uranium waste disposal capital of the
East Coast.”<br />
<br />
Where will all the waste go? An <a href="http://www.virginiaenergyresources.com/i/pdf/2012-06_CH_NI43-101_PEAU.pdf">economic
assessment</a> prepared for Virginia Uranium by two engineering firms in June
2012 said, “Tailings planned for surface disposal, employing regulatory
guidelines, shows that there is currently inadequate surface disposal acreage
within the current surface land control area.”<br />
<br />
<strong>Significant Hurdles</strong><br />
After VUI began pushing for the moratorium to be lifted, the public pushed
back. The resulting compromise was that the Virginia Coal and Energy Commission
authorized a <a href="http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13266&page=1">study</a>
(paid for by VUI to the tune of $1.4 million) from the National Academy of
Sciences. “It had buy-in from all sides,” said Jaffe. “There were experts from
all sides and public comments and an independent peer review committee.” The
intention of the study wasn’t to provide a recommendation for whether the
moratorium should be lifted, but to offer evidence for the public and for
legislators to draw their own conclusions.<br />
<br />
One of the biggest red flags point out that almost all uranium mining has
taken place in arid parts of the country, but in rainy Virginia, the report
found, “federal agencies have limited experience applying laws and regulations
in positive water balance situations.”<br />
<br />
Again, an issue of more rain than evaporation. There are also other concerns;
the Southern Environmental Law Center found that in the last century, Virginia
“has been hit by at least 78 category-strength hurricanes ... In 2011, at least
37 tornadoes were recorded in Virginia, including one in Halifax County about 20
miles from the Coles Hill site. And in August 2011, an earthquake of 5.8 rocked
Virginia; its epicenter was just 125 miles from Coles Hill.”<br />
<br />
Then there is the issue of the tailings that will remain after the milling
process and pose a contamination hazard for thousands of years, even with modern
technological improvements. The “long-term risks remain poorly defined” the
report said, and failings “could lead to significant human health and
environmental effects.”<br />
<br />
The report noted that there are some serious health risks from silica dust,
diesel exhaust and radon decay that have been linked to cancer. Workers are most
at risk, but the surrounding public could be exposed to cancer-causing chemicals
as dust blows from the site or wastewater leaks. And it is possible for the
contaminants to enter the food chain, too.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the study concluded that if Virginia does decide to lift the
moratorium it will face "steep hurdles" to ensure that the environment, public
health, and workers are safe. <br />
<br />
<strong>Focus on Water</strong><br />
Coles Hill sits on the Bannister River, a tributary of the Roanoke River,
which travels over 400 miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains through Virginia,
dipping into North Carolina, and finally reaching the ocean at the Outer Banks.
In 2011, the proposed uranium mine earned the Roanoke a spot on American Rivers’
annual list of the <a href="http://www.americanrivers.org/newsroom/press-releases/2011/roanoke-river-among-americas-most-endangered-rivers-5-17-2011.html">most
endangered</a> waterways in the country. "The potential health impacts of
exposure to uranium and mining chemicals are well-documented, and include
cancer, birth defects, hormone disruption, and damage to vital organs," the
organization said. "Developing a uranium industry in Virginia is considered
especially risky because of the region’s high rainfall and frequently severe
hurricanes and storms." <br />
<br />
While the Roanoke doesn’t flow through Virginia Beach, it is impounded in
Lake Gaston, from which the city pumps water — and that water is mixed with
other sources to supply Virginia Beach and neighboring communities like Norfolk
and Chesapeake. Virginia Beach found through its computer modeling that a major
failure of even just one above-ground waste impoundment would be bad news for
their community — even though they’re hundreds of miles downstream.<br />
<br />
The water column will eventually clear, said Public Utilities director Thomas
Leahy, although Virginia Beach would have to stop pumping water from one of its
main sources for up to two years. The toxic sediments that fall out of the water
column could affect plants and bottom-dwelling fish for perhaps hundreds of
years. If the city had to stop pumping, Leahy says it would be “a bad time for a
year or two with severe economic issues” as well as a public relations
nightmare.<br />
<br />
If the impoundments are put below grade he says, and there is a failure the
effects would be more in the immediate environment. “Surface water would be
protected at the expense of groundwater.” But Leahy says there is no guarantee
that below grade impoundments will be feasible. “The Marline company said the
water table was too high for below grade impoundments and so did the engineering
study,” Leahy said. “In Virginia, all landfills are above ground because of
water contamination.”<br />
<br />
As a result of the study, the Virginia Beach City Council opposes lifting the
moratorium. The AP <a href="http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/ap/final-uranium-meeting-is-today/article_93b63226-3850-11e2-a06a-0019bb30f31a.html">reported</a>
that, “The Virginia Association of Counties and the Virginia Municipal League
have endorsed legislative positions seeking to keep the ban” as well.<br />
<br />
“Regardless of what anyone says, if you run a mining operation there will be
releases,” Leahy said. “Most of that would be a local issue. Our concern is more
of the catastrophic accident.”<br />
<br />
But there are many close to Coles Hill who are concerned about the local
impacts, as well as the 1.2 million people who get their drinking water from the
Roanoke and Bannister rivers.<br />
<br />
Olga Kolotushkina's family owns a home 12 miles from the Coles Hill site. She
said, “There is a small risk but huge consequence if there is a catastrophic
event of rain and flooding — everything will be washed down. But another risk is
the long-term chronic degradation of water. What is going to be the cumulative
impact?”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.uwg.vi.virginia.gov/pdf/moran%20report.pdf">A
site-specific study</a> commissioned last year by the Roanoke River Basin
Association found that 250 private wells could be at risk in just a two-mile
radius from the Coles Hills site. Water contamination could result from leaking
mill tailings, but could also come from water that would need to be drained from
the mine and stored on-site before being treated and released. “Such a project
would cause long-term, chronic degradation of water quality and increase water
competition in the region,” the report found.<br />
<br />
"Virginia Uranium says it will mine safely, just as BP said it would drill
safely," attorney Cale Jaffe <a href="http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/286782">told</a> the <em>Roanoke
Times</em>. "The lesson here is that things do not always go according to plan,
and we should not be playing high-stakes roulette with a waterway.”<br />
<br />
But sometimes it isn't the catastrophic accident that is most damaging, but
slow leaks from cracks in impoundments, said Jaffe. <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2012/jan/18/tdopin02-jaffe-leave-the-ban-on-uranium-mining-in--ar-1618472/">Writing</a>
for the <em>Richmond Times Dispatch</em>, Jaffe elaborated:<br />
<blockquote>
In Colorado, a Cotter Corp. mill has been leaking for years, despite repeated
efforts to address the problem. The mill was declared a Superfund site in the
1980s, but a 2004 report found it continued to release "millions of gallons of
leachate into the environment each year." Cleanup was estimated to cost up to
$500 million.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Accidents continue to this day. As recently as 2006, flooding overwhelmed a
uranium mine site in Saskatchewan, Canada. According to a nuclear-industry
publication, that flood raised "questions for some analysts about whether [the
mining company] could devise plans to prevent future floods."</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Closer to home, uranium was extracted in Florida as a byproduct of phosphate
mining. In 1997, a spill at one Florida phosphate mine released 50 million
gallons of wastewater, poisoning 35 miles of the Alafia River and killing up to
3 million fish. The cleanup of a second spill from the same company cost state
taxpayers $144 million.</blockquote>
Robert G. Burnely, a former director of Virginia’s Department of
Environmental Quality, says the state doesn’t have the experience or the
know-how to effectively regulate uranium mining. Not only that, it simply
doesn't have the money. "Virginia consistently spends less than 1 percent of its
total annual budget on environmental protection," he wrote in an <a href="http://www.newsadvance.com/go_dan_river/newsgo_dan_river/opinion/article_d795bf2f-ede4-59fd-a7ae-c83d0af091e3.html">op-ed</a>
for the <em>Danville Register & Bee</em>. "A fair conclusion to be drawn
from this statistic is that the environment has not been a high priority for the
legislature ...The forced triage of regulatory duties means that agencies must
often rely on industry self-reporting — a prospect that should be unthinkable
for an industry as risky as uranium mining and waste disposal."<br />
<br />
<strong>Political Climate</strong><br />
Whether Virginia embraces uranium mining will likely be decided in the next
year by the General Assembly. Most people thought it would come to a vote during
the beginning of 2012; the National Academy of Sciences study was completed in
December 2011 and it was thought to hold all the information legislators would
need to make educated decisions about whether to vote yes or no on lifting the
moratorium. But instead, Virginia’s governor Bob McDonnell asked the legislature
to wait until he could form a task force to examine the issue. Proponents of
keeping the ban cried foul, believing that the governor’s handpicked Uranium
Working Group and the private consulting firm he hired were tasked with drafting
uranium-mining regulations for the General Assembly and not fact-finding about
the potential hazards — which were already well documented.<br />
<br />
The governor has <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303592404577364330063107046.html">declared</a>
his intentions to make “Virginia the energy capital of the East Coast.” He has
said, “Energy is the lifeblood of our nation's economic growth. More energy
means more jobs and we need to use all of our domestic energy resources.”<br />
<br />
Does this mean Gov. McDonnell is willing to use his political muscle to lift
the ban? It’s not clear, but Virginia Uranium and its lobbyists are working hard
— and may be seeking an alternate strategy instead of a straight vote on the
ban. O’Connor <a href="http://www.dcbureau.org/201211198092/natural-resources-news-service/end-run-supporters-of-uranium-mining-in-virginia-push-bill-to-effectively-lift-the-ban-without-an-up-or-down-vote.html">reported
</a>for DC Bureau, "Whitt Clement, head of the state government relations team
at Hunton & Williams and one of 19 lobbyists employed by Virginia Uranium,
told a closed-door meeting of Virginia business leaders in Williamsburg last
month that the company is working on legislation that would authorize state
agencies to draft regulations to govern mining rather than voting directly on
the project."<br />
<br />
The Uranium Working Group’s findings were <a href="http://www.uwg.vi.virginia.gov/pdf/UWG%20Report%20-%20FINAL%2030Nov2012.pdf">released</a>
just this week and it was news that State Senator John Watkins would be
introducing legislation during the 2013 session to lift the moratorium. In a
news release on December 3 he said, “I have made a request to Legislative
Services for legislation that adheres to the principles outlined by the UWG
(Uranium Working Group) and intend to be the patron of such a bill.”<br />
If Virginia does vote to lift the moratorium it would only be for uranium
mining – the milling would be overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Committee,
unless Virginia applies to be an “agreement state” and take over the monitoring
of milling. In either case, Virginia Uranium would have many more hoops to jump
through before its project could be approved by state and federal
regulators.<br />
<br />
<strong>A Matter of Economics</strong><br />
At a public meeting convened by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the
Uranium Working Group in Chatham during August, longtime resident Eloise Nenon
told the audience she’s been fighting uranium mining in Virginia for 52 years.
She started the first area organization with six women sitting around her dining
room table. She believes that most of what would be mined in Virginia would be
headed overseas; she said China is the primary market for Virginia’s
uranium.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div alt="" class="media-image" height="232" width="350">
<img alt="" class="media-image" height="232" src="http://www.alternet.org/files/protest_pics.jpg" typeof="foaf:Image" width="350" /></div>
<em>Signs displayed at the August UWG meeting in Chatham, Virginia. (Photo by
Tara Lohan)</em><br />
<em><br /></em>
<em><br /></em>
The U.S. imports about 90 percent of the uranium that is used in nuclear
reactors, leaving many people to point to uranium mining in Virginia as a key to
energy independence. But, as with fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil, just
because they are mined or drilled in the U.S., doesn’t mean they’ll be burned
here. The energy industry operates on the global market, as Scott Harper <a href="http://hamptonroads.com/node/358121?cid=srch">reported</a> for the
<em>Virginia Pilot</em>:<br />
<blockquote>
Dominion Virginia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, operates the
North Anna and Surry stations. Asked about possible uranium mining in the state,
a corporate spokesman was ambivalent.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
“We are trading in the world market for fuel and able to secure uranium at
competitive prices to help keep our costs down for our customers,” Jim Norvelle,
a Dominion spokesman, said in a statement. “It’s hard to know right now whether
having a uranium mine in Virginia would be economic for us.”</blockquote>
During the Chatham meeting, resident Ian Kelly said he believes it’s best to
know where one’s energy comes from, even if it’s eventually shipped overseas,
and he likened it to the farm-to-table movement of local foods. It’s a sentiment
similar to what Walter Coles himself has offered. He <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/business/energy-environment/coles-hill-uranium-mine-proposal-divides-virginia-residents.html?pagewanted=all">told</a>
the <em>New York Times</em>, “The country needs uranium. We need it for our
ships, we need it for our nuclear power utilities. It’s better that we exploit
our own natural resources as opposed to importing it.”<br />
<br />
Virginia Uranium has hoped the “local” aspect of the operation will gain
support for the project and the company, which despite being founded by Coles
and another area resident is not really a mom-and-pop business, but a
Canadian-owned corporation now part of <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/virginia-energy-provides-plan-arrangement-133111941.html">Anthem
Resources Incorporated</a>. “Behind Virginia Uranium Inc. is a complex web of
Canadian corporations, including an executive from the former Canadian company
that failed in the 1980s to win approval for uranium mining,” O’Connor <a href="http://www.dcbureau.org/201111186500/natural-resources-news-service/uranium-mining-%E2%80%93-the-virginia-battleground-%E2%80%93-environmental-concerns-vs-corporate-interests.html">reported</a>
at DC Bureau.<br />
VUI (which did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story) says
that “a full-scale mining and milling operation at Coles Hill will support over
1,000 jobs for the 35-year life span of the mine, generate $5 billion in revenue
for Virginia companies, and generate $112 million in state and local taxes.”
<em>Virginia Business</em> puts the number at 325 full-time jobs with salaries
between $50,000 to $70,000.<br />
<br />
The jobs angle has gained the company some support in the region, but not
from everyone. Other business leaders have a different vision for jumpstarting
the area’s economy, including the <a href="http://allianceforprogressinsouthernva.com/">Alliance for Progress in
Southern Virginia</a>, a “pro-economic development coalition of businesses
farmers, community leaders, property owners” that is against lifting the
ban.<br />
<br />
<em>Virginia Business</em> <a href="http://www.virginiabusiness.com/index.php/news/article/solon-of-southern-virgini">interviewed</a>
Chatham business owner Ben Davenport Jr., a group member who is also past rector
of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and a past chairman of the Virginia
Chamber of Commerce. Davenport believes the uranium mine would threaten area
businesses, particularly the boarding schools. <br />
<br />
“I guess we’re being asked to take the risk not knowing the outcome [of
uranium mining] while knowing on the other hand the penalty if one or both
[schools] were to fail,” he said. “I’m on the board of Hargrave, and we say, ‘If
you’ve got to explain that [uranium mining is] not a problem, you’ve already
lost.’ All at once we’re no longer this quiet little Southern town … now it’s a
town that is a mining town… [We also] have a vibrant agricultural economy that’s
actually on the upswing. Do the farmers feel threatened? Yes. If, in fact,
somehow their product gets stigmatized, it could be devastating to them.”<br />
<br />
The <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-11-29/apnewsbreak-va-dot-farm-bureau-backs-uranium-ban">Virginia
Farm Bureau</a> has recently come out in support of keeping the moratorium and
Olga Kolotushkina says she believes the schools don’t stand a chance if uranium
mining and milling is green-lighted. “The main concern is the stigma — for
agriculture and for Chatham Hall and Hargrave Academy,” she said. “There is no
doubt — no one would risk their children’s health. I have two little kids. I’ve
invested so much money, blood, sweat, and time in this house that I wouldn’t be
able to sell, but I also wouldn’t want to bring my girls there.”<br />
<br />
Kolotushkina said in recent years there has been a growth in organic farming
and wineries, and further downstream in North Carolina the region is dependent
on tourism from the Roanoke River.<br />
Some wonder if the economy will be sacrificed for an unstable industry. In
April 2003 the price of <a href="http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=uranium&months=120">uranium
was selling</a> for $10 a pound. By June 2007 the price had skyrocketed to $136
a pound, but two years later it had fallen to less than $42. It has gone up and
down since and is now around $45. At what point does it no longer become a
profitable enterprise for VUI?<br />
<br />
In the larger economic picture, is it ever profitable for the American
people? “All such large-scale uranium projects involve trade-offs, usually some
short-term jobs, etc. in exchange for long-term impacts (environmental,
socioeconomic, etc.), most of which are paid by future generations,” concluded
Robert Moran in his <a href="http://www.uwg.vi.virginia.gov/pdf/moran%20report.pdf">site-specific
assessment</a> of Coles Hill. “Thus, many of the long-term costs will be
subsidized by the public.”<br />
<br />
Ultimately, it will fall on the American taxpayers. “You have mining there
and those tailings impoundments will be there <em>forever </em>and have to be
under government control <em>forever,” </em>Uranium Watch's Sarah Fields
said.<br />
<br />
And for what gain?<br />
<br />
The fate of nuclear energy still seems in limbo as countries like Germany and
Japan are swearing off it. In the U.S. the story is more complicated. The
average age of our reactors is an elderly 32 years, but in February the OK was
given to build the first new nuclear reactor in the country in 30 years. The
nuclear industry generally seems one catastrophe away from collapse, and yet the
industry clings to life in the U.S. only because of the generous will of
taxpayers. What happens if the nuclear lobby falls out of favor in Washington
due to public pressure or shifting economics?<br />
<br />
<strong>Crossroads</strong><br />
In many ways, Virginia may be indicative of where our country’s energy future
is headed. The state has dabbled in wind energy, but its attempts thus far are
dwarfed by gas drilling, neighboring states’ fracking operations and mountaintop
removal coal mines. If Governor McDonnell has his way, residents will also begin
to see drilling in their coastal waters. Despite the best science indicating
that the ramifications of climate change mean our energy policies are paving a
road to a dead-end, we continue to drive full speed ahead. Proponents of the
uranium mine echo similar sentiments as the pro-fracking and coal contingents —
it’s about jobs and energy independence, they say.<br />
<br />
But opponents see rural towns being turned into industrial zones. They fear
not just for existing jobs, but are concerned for the air, water, food, quality
of life, their health, and their homes. They worry about what will be sacrificed
at the expense of an industry that will take what it wants, sell it for the
highest price wherever that may be, and move on.<br />
<br />
As fracking has spread throughout the East, some worry that the Coles Hill
mine could be the first of many uranium mines in the East Coast.<br />
<br />
“Geologists suspect that the Coles Hill deposit is not isolated,” <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/world/nuclear-standoff?page=0,1">writes</a>
Andrew Rice for the <em>New Republic</em>. “Scientists argue about the origins
of the ore, but it’s most likely a remnant of the same ancient tectonic
processes that created the Triassic Basins--meaning that there could be similar
deposits up and down the East Coast. Robert Bodnar, a geochemistry professor at
Virginia Tech, has spent the last two years studying how the uranium got to
Coles Hill. ‘I think there’s a very high probability that there are other
deposits of the same size, same grade, as Coles Hill located in the eastern
United States,’ he told me.”<br />
<br />
In an email to the <a href="http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/article_4e5538ed-f852-527d-bc6c-cb9ff9ecf56a.html">Associated
Press</a>, Susan Hall of the U.S Geologic Survey wrote, “A common scenario in
mineral exploration is that a large discovery such as Coles Hill is followed by
an influx of exploration companies who comb the countryside and discover
additional deposits.”<br />
<br />
In the coming months, Virginia legislators will decide the fate of uranium
mining in their state, but the vote may well be a harbinger for our energy
future.<br />
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="bio-new body_environment">
<div class="author-bio">
<!--smart_paging_filter--><!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Tara
Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book <a href="https://www.alternet.org/alternetbooks/21/Water+Matters+Why+We+Need+to+Act+Now+to+Save+Our+Most+Critical+Resource/">Water
Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical
Resource</a>.</div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-15361244290491929732012-12-14T04:53:00.002-08:002012-12-14T04:53:55.974-08:00<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>6 Ways Retailers Trick You
Into Buying More Sh*t.</b></span><br />
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/">AlterNet</a></span></span></span> / <em>By</em>
<em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/lauren-kelley">Lauren
Kelley</a></em></div>
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<strong>Even the savviest shoppers can be tricked
into buying things they don't want or
need.</strong></div>
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Happy holidays! Tis the season for family togetherness, holiday parties, cold
weather, and for the majority of us, shopping. So this is a good time of year to
take a look at why we buy what we buy, and how stores manipulate us in order to
get every dollar they can out of our pockets.<br />
<br />
Even the savviest shoppers can be tricked into buying things they don’t want
or need. There’s no need to feel foolish; the retail industry spends an
inordinate amount of time and money figuring out the science (yes, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684849143/ref=nosim/getrichslo-20/">it
is a science</a>) of how to sell the most stuff. But it is a good idea for
consumers to know what they're going into, especially around the holiday season,
when stress levels are running high and stores are packed with shoppers spending
money left and right.<br />
<br />
Though far from a comprehensive list, here are six tactics retailers use to
get you to part with your hard-earned dough.<br />
<br />
<strong>1. Holiday ploys: The scents and sounds of the season.</strong><br />
Journalist and author Oliver Burkeman recently wrote <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/suffer-spend-repeat.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1355429144-NEVWhZCIJjsF5NRcvTiP3A">a
piece for the <em>New York Times</em></a> on retailer manipulation around the
holidays. Burkeman writes that music and scent choices can have a huge effect on
shoppers. Stores play the same Christmas songs over and over again, at high
volume, not because anyone likes them, but because such conditions can cause “a
momentary loss of self-control, thus enhancing the likelihood of impulse
purchase,” according to researchers from Penn State and the National University
of Singapore.<br />
<br />
Smells are just as important. You know how grocery stores often pump the
scent of fresh-baked bread through the aisles to boost shoppers’ appetite?
Burkeman writes that “Like music, smells are selected to encourage spending, not
to make your shopping experience more comfortable.” Even if you don’t like that
fake cinnamon holiday-candle smell, it’s still effective at making shoppers feel
festive and generous – and therefore spendy – because of its strong associations
with the season.<br />
<br />
<strong>2. They trick us into staying inside as long as
possible.</strong><br />
This is another classic retail maneuver Burkeman brings up in his piece:
stash the most in-demand items at opposite ends of the store. So even if a
shopper just came in for milk and bread, she has to walk past thousands of
other, more expensive items, increasing the likelihood that she’ll toss some of
them in her basket.<br />
<br />
Anyone who’s ever been to an IKEA has experienced an extreme implementation
of this principle. Once you enter IKEA’s labyrinthine layout, time seems to
stop, and you emerge hours later with hundreds of dollars worth of furniture you
didn’t even come in for. It turns out the Swedish furniture stores are <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1349831/Ikea-design-stores-mazes-stop-shoppers-leaving-end-buying-more.html">literally
designed to be mazes</a> to keep shoppers in the store for as long as possible
and maximize the number of items people will buy on impulse.<br />
<br />
<strong>3. Lighting matters.</strong><br />
Just as holiday songs and smells can entice shoppers to buy more gifts, the
lighting of a store can boost profits year-round. This <em><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3634141/They-have-ways-of-making-you-spend.html">Telegraph</a></em>
report sums up some of the tricks retailers have figured out over the years:
avoiding bulbs that change the color of the merchandise in unappealing ways and
dimming the lights in the lingerie department to make it feel more discreet, for
instance.<br />
<br />
Ever wonder why fruit is near the front door of most grocery stores?
According to the <em>Telegraph</em>, “Fruit and vegetables look healthier and
fresher in natural light. In contrast, meat and fish need a clean white light,
otherwise they look tired.”<br />
<br />
<strong>4. “Triangular balance” and shelf manipulation</strong>.<br />
“Triangular balance” sounds like some sort of architectural principle, but
it’s actually a psychological tool retailers use to maximize profits.<br />
<br />
"Triangular balance is used everywhere and it's very effective,” visual
merchandising consultant Karl McKeever told the<em> Telegraph</em>. “It works on
the idea that your eye will always go to the center of a picture. Here, they put
the biggest, tallest products with the highest profit margin in the center of
each shelf and arrange the other sizes around them to make it look attractive.
When you look at the triangle on the shelf, your eye goes straight to the middle
and the most expensive box."<br />
<br />
Another basic trick to boost sales is to toss it on an end cap – those areas
at the end of each aisle. The most profitable items are often kept there
(McKeever calls them the “monthly engines of the business”), and shoppers are
encouraged to pass by as many end caps as possible (see #2).<br />
<br />
<strong>5. “Just toss everything in a pile. People like that.”</strong><br />
While many of these retailer tricks seem intuitive, this is a relatively
weird one: Some stores create intentionally messy displays and pile crap in the
aisles to boost sales.<br />
<br />
Last year <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/business/08clutter.html?_r=1&ref=stephanieclifford">the
<em>New York Times </em>reported</a> that “After the recessionary years of
shedding inventory and clearing store lanes for a cleaner, appealing look,
retailers are reversing course and redesigning their spaces to add clutter.”<br />
What the what? The piece explains:<br />
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
As it turns out, the messier and more confusing a
store looks, the better the deals it projects. </div>
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
“Historically, the more a store is packed, the
more people think of it as value — just as when you walk into a store and there
are fewer things on the floor, you tend to think they’re expensive,” said Paco
Underhill, founder and chief executive of Envirosell, who studies shopper
behavior. </div>
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
It’s also not unheard of for clothing stores to intentionally let tables of
pants and sweaters get a little disheveled, because it makes the merchandise
seem in-demand. (<em>If other people are checking out these jeans, they must be
a good deal</em>.)<br />
<br />
<strong>6. Analyzing our every move.</strong><br />
Retailers and analysts didn’t conjure up these quirks of human psychology in
a dream. No, they’ve closely studied shopper behavior, treating customers “like
laboratory rats,” <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story/2012-03-01/retailers-analyze-psychology-of-shopping/53323984/1">according
to USA Today</a>.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
Just as some lab rats get only a placebo,
retailers typically test new strategies by giving shoppers in certain areas a
promotion — or fixed-up store — while others are the control group. Growing
pressure to improve profit margins means retailers' decisions must get results.
People can't just buy something they wouldn't have otherwise, they need to spend
more.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
These analyses can be simple, like counting shoppers in a specific
demographic at a specific timeframe, or they can err on the creepy side, like
implementing “digital signs with cameras that can detect where people's eyes
move and direct promotions to that part of the screen.” Digital signs can also
“determine that the person walking through is a man, put up an image of a car or
something else likely to attract his attention and then slip in an ad for a
men's cologne,” according to someone who designs that technology.<br />
<br />
“Store loyalty cards” – you know, those little doohickeys you keep on your
key chain, ostensibly to save money – also help store owners figure out who is
shopping and when, so they can squeeze the most money possible out of each
demographic of shopper. So they may cost you more money than they save you in
the long run.<br />
<br />
Collecting data about shopper habits isn’t inherently evil; it can be used to
improve customer satisfaction. But increasingly these tools are used for one
purpose: to boost profits at the expense of shoppers who may not even want the
sh*t they’re buying.<br />
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="bio-new body_story">
<div class="author-bio">
<!--smart_paging_filter--><!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Lauren
Kelley is the activism and gender editor at AlterNet and a freelance journalist
based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Salon, Time Out New York, the L
Magazine, and other publications.</div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-74177107238151991782012-12-14T04:45:00.002-08:002012-12-14T04:45:54.867-08:00<br />
<h1>
5 Reasons Not to Buy a Puppy for Christmas.</h1>
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<strong></strong> <br />
by <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/author/joelb" rel="author" title="Posts by Joel Boyce">Joel Boyce</a><br />
<strong></strong> <br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>1) Family members should be adopted, not “bought”: </strong>There are
enough animals looking for homes in shelters that the idea of encouraging the
demand for <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/79-dogs-seized-from-illegal-manitoba-breeding-operation.html">backyard-bred
puppies </a>is difficult to justify. Here’s a cute animal shelter commercial
encouraging viewers to adopt:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BI_K-Wpzj_M" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I’ll also add that some people purchase their animals, particularly dogs,
because they are looking for a particular breed. In reality, just abut any mix
or breed will come through your local shelter at one time or another. They
likely will not come with pedigree papers, but the people for whom that is a
priority are probably not my audience here.<br />
<br />
One of the things I like about my local shelter is that they treat their
animals as individuals, carefully informing prospective owners about energy
levels, interests and attitudes. Finding the perfect match is not just about
finding a specific breed, but the quirks and particularities of each individual.
Mixed breeds are an excellent choice no matter what you’re looking for: you just
have to find the one that’s just right for you.<br />
<br />
<strong>2) Buying animals makes it okay to throw animals away:</strong> I
believe the commoditization of animals is a huge root cause of animal cruelty.
Putting animals on shelves and selling them like cheap, plastic toys makes them
a part of our disposable culture. What does disposable mean for an animal? It
means that rather than raising and teaching them, as we would our human family
members, we play with them until they break or get boring, and then throw them
away.<br />
<br />
It’s not that I think a lot of people are purchasing pets whom actively abuse
their animals (though such sickos exist). Rather, I think this is the type of
attitude that makes it okay to buy puppies because they’re cute, not bother
training them, and then get rid of them. It’s the animal shelters who now need
to find homes for adult, poorly-socialized dogs. Purchasing a pet means tacitly
endorsing the idea that companion animals are disposable (and sub-consciously
affirming it).<br />
<br />
<strong>3) Buying animals keeps puppy mills in business:</strong> <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/think-global-work-local-pet-ownership-as-social-justice.html">We
vote most effectively with our wallets</a>, and if we don’t like the
mistreatment and neglect puppies experience in those horrible facilities, we
have to stop buying from them. Puppy millers don’t get into it because they
actively hate animals. They do it because they’re lazy and greedy. If there’s no
money in it, puppy mills will cease to exist.<br />
<br />
<strong>4) You can’t play matchmaker for someone else:</strong> Dogs are as
individual as people. Some are couch potatoes; some need to run. Some need a lot
of attention; some need their space. And maybe you think you know someone well
enough to pick the right dog for them, but even if that’s true, there’s that
indefinable, je ne sais quoi, that you just can’t force.<br />
<br />
<strong>5) You can’t make that kind of commitment for someone else:</strong>
Adopting an animal is a huge commitment, and nobody can make that choice but the
person who will be taking care of it. Even a lifelong animal-lover has to be in
the right frame of mind and at the right moment in their lives to take someone
new into their home.<br />
<br />
Giving someone the wrong animal, or even the right animal at the wrong time,
is much less likely to result in a forever home than a person making that
decision themselves. As cute as it may seem to wrap up a little puppy or kitten
in a bow and surprise someone on Christmas morning, it’s a guilt-ridden and
heart-rending experience to be returning that same animal to a shelter in
January.<br />
<br />
I wonder how much of the income that supports puppy millers comes from
well-intentioned but thoughtless individuals buying eight-hundred dollar pet
store puppies that end up in a shelter a few weeks or months later. It’s no skin
off the breeder’s nose, nor the pet shop owners.’<br />
<br />
<strong>Having said all that…</strong> is there a right way to give someone a
pet as a gift? Perhaps. If somebody has already expressed a very clear intention
to adopt a pet in the near future, you might take them to a shelter and pay for
part or all of the adoption fee. Some shelters also sell adoption certificates
for use as gifts. This would probably work best with one’s spouse or (maybe) an
older, responsible child.<br />
<br />
But if you’re not absolutely sure, you should probably let someone choose
their own time and place to adopt, and knit them a scarf
instead.</div>
</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-91686391878029358132012-12-07T04:49:00.001-08:002012-12-07T04:49:12.905-08:00<br />
<h1>
There are Probably Toxins in Your Clothes and How to Make It Stop.</h1>
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<em></em><br />
<em>NOTE: This is a guest post by Laura Kenyon from Greenpeace
International.</em><br />
<em><br /></em>
You’ve probably never heard of halogenated anilines and perfluorinated
chemicals. In addition to being mouthfuls to pronounce, both are toxic chemicals
that are harmful to the environment and life, both in water and on land. Some
anilines can become carcinogenic, or cancer-causing, and several perfluorinated
chemicals are known to be toxic for the reproductive and nervous systems of
mammals.<br />
Scary.<br />
<br />
Even though these chemicals might be unfamiliar, there is a chance you are
already in a close relationship with them, as they may have been used in the
manufacturing of the clothes you are wearing.<br />
<br />
These hazardous chemicals were both found in water samples taken in the
textile heartland of China, in the coastal Zhejiang Province. That’s where the
connection to your clothes comes in. Many popular global fashion labels,
including Levi’s, Calvin Klein and GAP, source textiles from the manufacturing
facilities in the area where the samples were taken, as shown in the Greenpeace
International report “<a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Toxics-reports/Putting-Pollution-on-Parade/" target="_blank">Toxic Threads: Putting Pollution on Parade.</a>” And that means
that many of us are wearing toxic fashion.<br />
<br />
Even though China has a large and thriving textile industry that supplies
both the domestic and the international market with clothes, there is a severe
lack of information about the kinds of chemicals being used and released into
the environment there. There is also very little information about how the
hazardous chemicals used to make our clothes are dealt with. At the moment,
China relies heavily on wastewater treatment plants to deal with discharges from
textile manufacturing facilities in Zhejiang Province.<br />
<br />
While these may be effective for certain kinds of pollution, like sewage or
biological waste, toxic chemicals such as many PFCs are especially dangerous
because they can survive the treatment system meant to clean the water and pass
directly out into the environment. Pollution of water is happening on a massive
scale, with almost 70% of Chinese lakes, rivers, waterways and reservoirs
affected by some kind of water pollution.<br />
The water samples containing toxic chemicals were taken at the discharge pipe
of a wastewater treatment plant being used by factories in a large industrial
estate, most of which are textile manufacturing facilities. So we know that
these chemicals are entering the environment in discharges from the treatment
facility.<br />
The problem is tracking down the culprits.<br />
<br />
All industrial facilities in the area put their discharges through the same
wastewater treatment plants. When they are all pooled together, it is impossible
to know which toxic chemical is coming from what facility. Effectively, they
hide in the crowd. And it is easy for suppliers and brands that are buying
products from these facilities to plead ignorance when there is no way to
connect a particular discharge of a hazardous chemical to an individual
facility. But it is no excuse for toxic pollution to continue.<br />
<br />
Our clothes don’t need to come with these toxic accessories: hazardous
chemicals that enter the environment both as discharges from the manufacturing
facilities, but also potentially as residue that is washed out when we clean our
clothes at home. There are alternatives, but first the manufacturing facilities,
suppliers and fashion brands have to commit to transparency. The real challenge
is the complete lack of public information available at the moment.<br />
<br />
<strong>A change is coming</strong><br />
Just last week – <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/Zara-commits-to-go-toxic-free/" target="_blank">thanks to people power</a> — Zara, the world’s largest fashion
retailer, committed to detox its supply chain and products and to eliminate all
uses and releases of hazardous chemicals by 2020. What’s more, the brand also
committed to publicly disclose pollution data from at least 100 of its suppliers
in the Global South, including at least 40 in China, by the end of 2013. This
transparency is a real breakthrough in the way clothing is manufactured and is
an important step in providing local communities, journalists and officials with
the information they need to ensure that local water supplies are not turned
into public sewers for industry.<br />
<br />
It is also the start of something bigger.<br />
<br />
For too long, global brands have been able to hide behind industrial
smokescreens and continue to make their products against a backdrop of toxic
water pollution. Even labels that have been around for over a century and who
make some of the most popular clothing items on the planet have put more effort
into revitalizing their brand image in recent years than they have into taking
care of the negative impacts their products are having on our environment.<br />
<br />
<strong>Enough is enough</strong><br />
Around the world, consumers, activists and fashionistas are uniting behind
the idea that the clothes we buy should carry a story we can be proud of, not
the residues of hazardous chemicals. These people are looking for action from
brands, <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/fashion-without-pollution-so-hot-right-now/blog/43128/" target="_blank">and are taking action themselves</a>. Brands that want to keep
their customers therefore need to do more than make a positive statement or
write a policy — they need to wear this problem on their sleeves. This means
publicly talking about the problem and solutions, publicly disclosing
information about exactly what chemicals are being released throughout their
supply chains, and becoming active pioneers for toxic-free fashion.<br />
<br />
<strong>Take action today</strong><br />
<a href="http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/125/632/534//" target="_blank">Sign on to support Fashion Without Pollution!</a><br />
<br />
Help get our new video “<a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/water/detox/detox-fashion/" target="_blank">Detox Fashion,</a>” which reveals the toxic truth behind the
clothes we buy, on as many screens as possible.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XxFWo4sCzCs?fs=1&feature=oembed" width="500"></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
We know these clothing brands monitor social media as closely as they monitor
traditional media, and every time you like, share, comment on, or promote this
video, it increases the pressure on the companies to change their ways: to stop
poisoning rivers in the countries where their products are made, and stop
shipping hazardous chemicals all over the world in their clothes.<br />
<br />
This past week, we’ve shown the fashion industry <strong>what we’re capable
of together.</strong> Unfortunately, the toxic discharges from clothing
factories continue, and while Zara is the biggest, more companies must recognize
and act upon the urgency of the situation to detox our
water.</div>
</div>
<br /><br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-6133266599528873062012-12-06T02:58:00.000-08:002012-12-06T02:58:41.816-08:00<br />
<div class="article-body copy-style-b push-3" data-section="{"title":"main-col"}">
<h1 class="heading heading-style-i size-30" property="dc:title">
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Hitler’s Strange
Afterlife in India.</span></h1>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
By Dilip D'Souza</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<time class="timestamp" datetime="2012-11-30T09:45:00.000Z" property="dc:created" pubdate="pubdate"></time>
<div class="dek-body">
<div class="parsys updated-dek">
</div>
<h2 class="dek">
Hated and mocked in much of the world, the Nazi leader has developed a
strange following among schoolchildren and readers of <i>Mein Kampf</i> in
India. Dilip D’Souza on how political leader Bal Thackeray influenced Indians to
admire Hitler and despise Gandhi.
<br />
<br />
<div class="page-number" style="display: none;">
<span style="font-size: small;"></span> </div>
<br />
<div class="page-number" style="display: none;">
<span style="font-size: small;">By Dilip
D'Souza</span></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text0" style="visibility: hidden;"></a></h2>
</div>
<div class="text parbase section">
My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in
Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids
to complete the sentence “J'admire …” with the name of the historical figure
they most admired.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_inlineimage" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><br />
<figure class="multimedia section">
<div class="body parsys">
<img alt="Hitler" class="cq-dd-image" src="http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2012/11/30/hitler-s-strange-afterlife-in-india/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.503.jpg/1354268712058.cached.jpg" title="hitler-in-india-dsouza-tease" /></div>
<div class="body parsys">
Adolf Hitler speaks in 1936. (AP
Photo)</div>
</figure><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text1" style="visibility: hidden;"></a></div>
<div class="text parbase section">
<br />
To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction.
Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the
highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was
the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other
students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. “He was
a coward!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the <em>Times of India</em> <a href="http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2002-12-26/edit-page/27298496_1_adolf-hitler-indian-students-nationalism" target="_blank">reported a survey</a> that found that 17 percent of students in
elite Indian colleges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to
have.”<br />
<br /></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text2" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
In a place where Gandhi becomes a coward, perhaps Hitler becomes a
hero.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text3" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
Still, why Hitler? “He was a fantastic orator,” said the 10th-grade kids. “He
loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of
pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles,” they said.</div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text4" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
"And what about the millions he murdered?” asked my wife. “Oh, yes, that was
bad,” said the kids. “But you know what, some of them were
traitors.”<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text5" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
Admiring Hitler for his oratorical skills? Surreal enough. Add to that the
easy condemnation of his millions of victims as traitors. Add to that the
characterization of this man as a patriot. I mean, in a short dozen years,
Hitler led Germany through a scarcely believable orgy of blood to utter shame
and wholesale destruction. Even the mere thought of calling such a man a patriot
profoundly corrupts—is violently antithetical to—the idea of
patriotism.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text6" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darndest things. Except this
is no easily written-off experience. The evidence is that Hitler has plenty of
admirers in India, plenty of whom are by no means kids.</div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text7" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
Consider <i>Mein Kampf</i>, Hitler’s autobiography. Reviled it might be in
the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month. As
a recent paper in the journal <em>EPW</em> tells us (<a href="http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2012_47/46/On_the_Indian_Readers_of_Hitlers_Mein_Kampf.pdf" target="_blank">PDF</a>), there are over a dozen Indian publishers who have
editions of the book on the market. Jaico, for example, printed its 55th edition
in 2010, claiming to have sold 100,000 copies in the previous seven years.
(Contrast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, <em>Roadrunner,</em> has
sold). In a country where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a bestseller, these
are significant numbers.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text8" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
And the approval goes beyond just sales. <i>Mein Kampf</i> is <a href="http://www.flipkart.com/mein-kampf-817224164x/p/itmdyu4dqgtdafrq?gclid=CPSL-IrD6rMCFc8c6wodx2MA7g&semcmpid=sem_4171916357_books_goog" target="_blank">available for sale</a> on flipkart.com, India’s Amazon. As I write
this, 51 customers have rated the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rating.
What’s more, there’s a steady trickle of reports that say it has become a <a href="http://digitaljournal.com/article/271936" target="_blank">must-read for
business-school students</a>; a management guide much like Spencer Johnson’s
<i>Who Moved My Cheese</i> or Edward de Bono’s <i>Lateral Thinking</i>. If this
undistinguished artist could take an entire country with him, I imagine the
reasoning goes, surely his book has some lessons for future captains of
industry?<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text9" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
Much of Hitler’s Indian afterlife is the legacy of Bal Thackeray, chief of
the Shiv Sena party who <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/16/mumbai-on-edge-with-shiv-sena-founder-bal-thackeray-ill.html">died
on Nov. 17</a>.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text10" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
Thackeray freely, openly, and often admitted his admiration for Hitler, his
book, the Nazis, and their methods. In 1993, for example, he gave an interview
to <em>Time </em>magazine. “There is nothing wrong,” he said then, “if [Indian]
Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.”</div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_pullquote" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<blockquote class="blockquote section">
It’s no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage
and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghastly crime is forgotten so
long as we can pretend that he ‘loved’ his country.</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text11" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
This interview came only months after the December 1992 and January 1993
riots in Mumbai, which left about a thousand Indians slaughtered, the majority
of them Muslim. Thackeray was active right through those weeks, writing
editorial after editorial in his party mouthpiece, “Saamna” (“Confrontation”)
about how to “treat” Muslims.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text12" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
On Dec. 9, 1992, for example, his editorial contained these lines: “Pakistan
need not cross the borders and attack India. 250 million Muslims in India will
stage an armed insurrection. They form one of Pakistan’s seven atomic
bombs.”<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text13" style="visibility: hidden;"></a>
<div class="text parbase section">
A month later, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: “Muslims of Bhendi Bazar,
Null Bazar, Dongri and Pydhonie, the areas [of Mumbai] we call Mini Pakistan …
must be shot on the spot.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="body parsys">
<div class="text parbase section">
There was plenty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany’s führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupted, Thackeray <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Sunday_TOI/Its_hardly_a_struggle_selling_Hitlers_story_in_India/rssarticleshow/4058227.cms" target="_blank">said this</a> about the führer’s famous autobiography: “If you take <i>Mein Kampf</i> and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in.”</div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text15" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><br />
<div class="text parbase section">
With rhetoric like that, it’s no wonder the streets of my city saw the slaughter of 1992-93. It’s no wonder kids come to admire a mass-murderer, to rationalize away his massacres. It’s no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghastly crime is forgotten so long as we can pretend that he “loved” his country.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text16" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><br />
<div class="text parbase section">
In his acclaimed 1997 book <i>Hitler’s Willing Executioners</i>, Daniel Goldhagen writes: “Hitler, in possession of great oratorical skills, was the [Nazi] Party’s most forceful public speaker. Like Hitler, the party from its earliest days was devoted to the destruction of … democracy [and to] most especially and relentlessly, anti-Semitism. … The Nazi Party became Hitler’s Party, obsessively anti-Semitic and apocalyptic in its rhetoric about its enemies.”<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text17" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><br />
<div class="text parbase section">
Do some substitutions in those sentences along the lines Thackeray wanted to do with <i>Mein Kampf</i>. Indeed, what you get is a more than adequate description of … no surprise, Thackeray himself.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4656177220366228081" name="body_text18" style="visibility: hidden;"></a><br />
<div class="text parbase section">
Yes, it’s no wonder. Thackeray too was revered as an orator. Cremated, on Nov. 18, as a patriot.</div>
</div>
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<br />
<br />
For ten years in the US, DD was a computer scientist. After returning to India he started writing for his suppers, winning awards (most recently the Newsweek/Daily Beast Award for South Asia Commentary) and publishing books (most recently "Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America" and "The Curious Case of Binayak Sen"). He lives in Bombay with his wife, two children, and two cats.</div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-13959048777622810582012-12-04T06:42:00.000-08:002012-12-04T06:42:26.694-08:00<br />
<div>
<h1>
Organic Milk: Better for You and for the Economy, Too.</h1>
<div class="image_share contain_floats">
<div class="image">
<ul>
<li>by <a href="http://www.care2.com/causes/author/janc" rel="author" title="Posts by Jan Cho">Jan Cho</a></li>
</ul>
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<img alt="Organic Milk: Better for You and for the Economy, Too" height="267" src="http://dingo.care2.com/pictures/causes/2991/2990462.large.jpg" width="431" /></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/advance-sustainable-agriculture/economic-benefits-of-organic-dairy.html" target="_blank">A new report</a> makes the case that organic milk is not only
better than conventional milk for the health of the earth, the cows and anyone
who drinks it, it’s also better for the economy.</div>
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To begin with, organic dairy farming has provided an alternative to many
small dairy farmers who have refused to “get big or get out.” By making the
conversion to organic, they have been able to stay in business and make a
reasonable living. “The organic dairy sector, virtually nonexistent just two
decades ago, has become the most prominent market opportunity for smaller
pasture-based dairies to remain in production,” reads <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_agriculture/cream-of-the-crop-report.pdf" target="_blank">the report</a> issued by the <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/" target="_blank">Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)</a>. While sales of organic
milk have slowed significantly since the start of the recession in 2008, they
are still at $750 million annually.<br />
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The UCS report draws on financial data from Vermont and Minnesota — two
states in which organic dairy is big business, though not as big as in some
other states. In 2008, <a href="http://www.agmrc.org/commodities__products/livestock/dairy/organic-dairy-profile/" target="_blank">according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center</a>,
Wisconsin had the greatest number of organic dairy farms (479), followed by New
York (316) and Pennsylvania (225).<br />
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Economic performance of the organic dairy industry in Vermont and Minnesota
was assessed by UCS based on 4 metrics: output, gross state product (output
minus input), labor income and increase in employment. (<a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_agriculture/cream-of-the-crop-report.pdf" target="_blank">See the report</a> for a detailed explanation of each metric.)<br />
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The report found that Vermont’s 180 organic dairy farms contribute $76
million in output, 1,009 jobs, $34 million in gross state product and $26
million in labor income to the state economy. Minnesota’s 114 organic dairy
farms contribute $78 million in output, 660 jobs, $32 million in gross state
product and $21 million in labor income.<br />
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UCS also forecast the impact on the state’s economy that an increase in dairy
sales would have, comparing the impacts of the organic and conventional dairy
industries given an equivalent hypothetical increase in sales of $5 million. In
Vermont, the scenario would result in a 3 percent increase in the state’s
output, a 39 percent increase in labor income, a 33 percent increase in gross
state product, and an 83 percent increase in employment relative to conventional
dairy farms. In Minnesota, the increases would be 4 percent, 9 percent, 11
percent and 14 percent, respectively.<br />
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According to UCS, this “report is the first to calculate the economic value
associated with organic dairy farming, and it reveals the potential for that
sector to create opportunities and jobs in rural economies… [O]rganic dairies
offer greater regional economic impacts than conventional dairies.” Federal
policies, however, provide far more support to conventional dairy operations,
and UCS believes that has to change. At the very least, revisions should be made
to level the playing field, though, really, organic dairy farming should be
conceded the advantage, given how much better it is for our health, the
environment and now, apparently, the economy as well.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4656177220366228081.post-39387623631866211482012-11-30T04:46:00.002-08:002012-11-30T04:46:47.779-08:00<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">7 Highly Disturbing Trends
in Junk Food Advertising to Children.</span></b><br />
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/">AlterNet</a></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> / <em>By</em>
<em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/laura-gottesdiener">Laura
Gottesdiener</a></em></span></h1>
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<strong>From bribing children with toys to
convincing them to eat a “fourth meal,” the industry is glutted with perverse,
profit-chasing schemes.</strong></div>
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<i>This article was published in partnership with </i><a href="http://globalpossibilities.org/"><span class="s1"><i>GlobalPossibilities.org</i></span></a><i>.</i></div>
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Ever wonder why one-third of all children in the United States are
overweight, if not dangerously obese? According to a slew of recent reports, the
cornucopia of junk food advertising to children plays a substantial role in
creating this public health crisis. From bribing children with toys and
sweepstakes to convincing them to eat a “fourth meal,” the industry is glutted
with examples of perverse, profit-chasing schemes to capitalize on children’s
appetites at the expense of their long-term health. Here are 7 most perverse
trends in junk food advertising to children. <br />
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<strong>1. Bombarded! </strong><br />
Junk food marketing to children and adolescents has become billion-dollar
industry. According to 2006 data, the most recent numbers available, kids
experience at least $1.6 billion worth of food advertising a year--the vast
majority of the ads geared toward pushing high-calorie and low-nutrition snacks
down kids’ throat. <br />
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<a href="http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/FoodWaterWatchReportFoodMktgKids.pdf">According
to data </a>compiled by the nonprofit health organization Food & Water
Watch, children see more nearly 5,000 TV food ads every year, and teenagers get
bombarded by almost 6,000 annually. </div>
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The vast majority of these ads are specifically geared towards children,
using tricks like cartoon characters and sweepstakes prizes to make the sugary
cereals and fatty hamburgers all the more attractive. As children’s online
activity has risen, massive corporations like McDonald’s have also designed
child-focused websites, complete with video games that teach children brand
recognition, that are getting hundreds of thousands of young visitors a month.
In the month of February 2011, for example, 350,000 children under the age of 12
visited McDonald’s two main websites, HappyMeal.com and McWorld.com. </div>
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Most disturbingly, the amount of this advertising is steadily increasing.
According to a report from Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy &
Obesity, the advertising increased dramatically in only two years, between 2007
and 2009. Children between the ages of 6 and 11 saw a <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/08/news/la-heb-fast-food-20101108">staggering
56 percent more ads for Subway </a>, and 26 percent more ads for McDonald’s.
African American children were disproportionately targeted by this advertising,
seeing 50 percent more advertisements for fast food than white children of the
same age. </div>
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<strong>2. The ads, not the TV, are what's making kids fat </strong></div>
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While many have complained that sedentary television culture is causing the
childhood obesity crisis, new studies suggest that the real culprit may be the
constant ads for junk food that children are viewing during commercial
break--not the television programs themselves. </div>
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A 2006 <a href="http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/FoodWaterWatchReportFoodMktgKids.pdf">Institute
of Medicine government report stated, </a>“It can be concluded that television
advertising influences children to prefer and request high-calorie and
low-nutrient foods and beverages.” </div>
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Even clearer evidence comes from a long-term study in Quebec, where fast
food advertising geared specifically toward children has been banned both online
and in-print for the last 32 years. There, researchers discovered that the
province has the least childhood obesity of anywhere in Canada, and that the ban
decreased children’s consumption by an estimated <a href="http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/ban-on-advertising-to-children-linked-to-lower-obesity-rates/">two
to four billion calories. </a></div>
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In Britain, the president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child
Heath, has also a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9521993/Adverts-for-junk-food-should-be-banned-before-9pm-says-childrens-doctor.html">dvocated
for the state to ban junk food advertisements </a>on television until after 9
pm, when the majority of children are already asleep. </div>
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<strong>3. Ten extra pounds--a year </strong></div>
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How fat are these television advertisements making kids? According to one
recent study, their effects are surprisingly heavy. T <a href="http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/FoodWaterWatchReportFoodMktgKids.pdf">he
experiment compared </a>children’s food consumption while watching television
programs with food commercials, versus programs that ran straight through
without any ads. It concluded that kids consumed almost 50 percent more calories
while watching the 30-minute program with commercials--a total of almost 100
calories in only a half an hour. Over the course of a year, that would lead to a
10-pound weight gain. </div>
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<strong>4. Children clueless while industry cashes In </strong></div>
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One of the biggest problems with child-specific advertising is that young
kids aren’t even able to recognize the commercials for what they are: short
segments intended to sell them things. <a href="http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/FoodWaterWatchReportFoodMktgKids.pdf">As
the Food and Water Watch Report explains </a>, children under the age of four
can’t even recognize the difference between a television show and the
commercials--the line between content and advertising is completely invisible to
them. Children between four and eight may understand that advertisements are
different from the T.V. program, but they still don’t recognize that ads are
paid commercials intended to convince them to buy something. </div>
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However, just because children can’t recognize the ads for what they are
doesn’t mean that these commercials don’t affect them. Studies show toddlers are
able to accurately identify brand logos and that young children prefer food
wrapped in McDonald’s packaging. </div>
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<strong>5. A fourth meal? </strong></div>
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A study of one child-geared advertising campaign, launched by Taco Bell,
demonstrates how perverse this marketing really is. In 2006, Taco Bell launched
a campaign to convince children to eat a “Fourth Meal,” which is after dinner
and before breakfast. (Essentially, the fourth meal is at the time of night when
children should be sleeping or doing their homework.) </div>
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<a href="http://www.thefix.com/content/marketing-munchies-stoner-foods-taco-bell-rob-dyrdek7677">The
campaign kicked off </a>with a website showing children in their pajamas
wandering around outside and eating nachos, tacos and other late-night snacks
offered by Taco Bell. The foods being marketed often had more than 400 calories,
placing them squarely in the meal category. But the goal isn’t just to sell more
tacos; it’s actually to carve out an entire new post-dinner market where the
consumer base is young children. </div>
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<strong>6. Holding schools hostage </strong></div>
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Increasingly, these types of ads aren’t only on television and online; they
are also in schools where the child-marking focus is even more obvious. As
budget cuts and austerity measures have swept the nation, schools are
increasingly relying on money from vending machine contracts and corporate
partnerships. These revenue streams rely on how much food the students buy,
meaning that the school earns more money if it stocks these machines with junk
food. </div>
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<strong>7. Industry’s idea of self-regulation: happy meals with apple
slices </strong></div>
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Due to increasing criticism from the public health community and the
federal government, the fast food industry undertook the ambitious task of
self-regulation in 2006, launching the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising
Initiative. Under this initiative, companies pledged to market “better-for-you”
foods to children. </div>
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Here are selections from the menu they came up with: </div>
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Burger King Kids Meals with “Fresh Apple Slices” and fat-free milk or apple
juice </div>
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<em>Assuming the meal is a plain hamburger, the offering has nearly 400
calories. </em></div>
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McDonald’s Happy Meals with fries, apple slices and fat-free chocolate milk
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<em>Assuming the meal is a plain hamburger, the offering has more than 550
calories </em></div>
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Kid Cuisine Meals Primo Pepperoni Double Stuffed Pizza </div>
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<em>480 calories, with 15 grams of fat </em></div>
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Chef Boyardee Pepperoni Pizza Ravioli </div>
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<em>290 calories </em></div>
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Sometimes the industry’s definition of regulation, is the best argument for
government intervention. </div>
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</div>
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Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and
activist in New York City.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08307543417674955466noreply@blogger.com0