Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Keeping your cholesterol and blood pressure in check, exercising, and eating a well-balanced diet are common tips your physician recommends to prevent heart disease. Now, doctors have a new one to add to the list, avoiding canned soup. Most canned foods and baby formulas, along with cash-register receipts and certain plastics, contain bisphenol A, or BPA, a hormone-disrupting chemical linked to a growing list of health problems.
A new study published in the journal Circulation is the first of its kind to find a direct link between higher BPA exposure in healthy adults and a greater risk of developing heart disease in the future. "This study takes a lot of the question out of, 'Does BPA really affect heart disease risk? Is this is a real effect?'" says BPA expert Laura Vandenberg, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow of biology at the Center for Developmental and Regenerative Biology at Tufts University in Massachusetts. "This research suggests so, and it shouldn't be ignored.".....
Can it: BPA is one of the most heavily produced chemicals in the world, so it's impossible to completely avoid it. To make a big dent in your consumption, however, cut out as much canned food as possible. The linings in most commercial canned products contain an epoxy BPA resin that leaches into canned soups, baby formulas, and vegetables. For example, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found people who ate a can of Progresso soup for lunch experienced a 1,000 percent jump in bodily BPA levels, compared to those who can-free soup.
Whole article is well worth reading, even includes how we get BPAcontamination by the register receipts from store.
The harsh criticism sounded by former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of Iran on Friday were only the tip of the iceberg.
During the same speech in the “Majdi Forum” in Kfar Saba, Diskin blamed Netanyahu, not Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, for the freeze in the peace process.
By Richard S. Ryan and William S. Ryan, New York Times Sunday Review, April 27/29, 2012
WHY are political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights so often implicated in sexual encounters with same-sex partners? [...]
[...] One theory is that homosexual urges, when repressed out of shame or fear, can be expressed as homophobia. Freud famously called this process a “reaction formation” — the angry battle against the outward symbol of feelings that are inwardly being stifled. [...]
It’s a compelling theory — and now there is scientific reason to believe it. In this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we and our fellow researchers provide empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire [...]
Posted in an effort to do my part in making sure a link to this hits all the email inboxes where it could have some effect.
Guest op-ed by Amy Greene, New York Times, April 27/28, 2012
[....] Our governor, like many of our state’s political leaders past and present — from Estes Kefauver and Cordell Hull to Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander — was born and raised here in East Tennessee, and he knows well how deep-rooted our spirituality is in Appalachia.
But he seems to have forgotten where it comes from.
The first Scots-Irish settlers to move into these mountains, the ones who saw the fog lying thick between the trees and called them the Smokies, were religious dissenters. They refused to live under the Penal Laws that forced them to accept Christianity as the English defined it. The churches they established rejected formalized, state-sanctioned religion and embraced diversity and individualism [....]
Ex-IMF chief tells investigative author Edward Jay Epstein that he thinks furore over sex attack case was created by opponents
By Edward J. Epstein, guardian.co.uk, April 27, 2011
[....] That he took such breathtaking risks – knowing that he was about to put himself forward as a French presidential candidate, and suspecting as he did that he was under surveillance from his opponents – speaks of a certain sense of invulnerability. The party at the W hotel took place on 12 May – a day before he checked in at the Sofitel. That makes one wonder about his mindset. Was it that, as a man of huge international renown used to being courted around the world, he perhaps felt he was invincible, a Master of the Universe? [....]
My summary: I coulda been king of the world if not for the petit bourgeois plotting with les femmes (i.e. material) who don't know their place in the world. I woulda had Merkl begging for it.
A few cents more and a liter of super unleaded gasoline will cost German drivers €1.80 (around $9 a gallon). That means that someone driving a BMW 3 Series will have to pay over €110 ($150) to fill up the tank, with its 63 liter (17 gallon) capacity.
But Norbert Reithofer, the CEO of BMW, seems surprisingly relaxed for an executive whose company's products depend on gasoline and diesel. "One could see this as a threat," Reithofer says. But the auto executive actually views the rising price of fuel as "an opportunity." He is convinced that his company will in fact "derive a benefit from this."
The Munich-based automaker has invested billions of euros in fuel-saving technologies, such as efficient engines, brake energy recovery and ultra-lightweight carbon fiber car bodies. BMW is now considered a leader in the field, and the company's record sales in 2011 suggest that this is something its customers are willing to pay for. And that, Reithofer believes, is why the company will ultimately benefit from high prices at the pump.
His bloody watch sits on the table, but there isn't much to say about it. The war is always there between the father and the son, sometimes in the form of silence and sometimes as an argument. They spend hours talking about the same questions over and over again, about why wars are necessary in the first place and why they never seem to end.
The father ends up saying: "I am in favor of peace." To which Jeff responds: "But someone has to achieve that peace." The father repeats: "I am in favor of peace."
This only upsets Jeff. Normally he tends to be quiet and calm. But now he raises his voice, his body tenses up and his words become deliberately hurtful: "And what are you doing so that we can have peace? How much longer do you think you'd be sitting around drinking coffee in fancy Berlin cafés if people like me didn't exist? If there was nobody to make sure you could live in peace? If there was nobody to fight terrorism?"
Driving the new electric Ford Focus spurs competition among green drivers
For starters, Ford isn't planning to sell very many Focus BEVs (for "battery electric vehicles"). With a price about $2,500 higher than the Nissan Leaf, Ford is only planning on selling about 2,000 a year, once the car is up to full production. And that's assuming nationwide sales. Right now, the $39,200 car is available only in California, New Jersey, and New York. By comparison, Nissan sold 7,800 Leafs last year, missing its sales target by more than 20 percent. ...
To help drivers get the most out of this EV battery, Ford has gone over the top with some of the features integrated into the MyFord Touch instrument-panel screens. With a standard navigation system, once you program a route, the Focus will calculate your trip buffer, advising whether you have enough energy to make a side trip to the grocery store, for example. The new driver aids include a regenerative braking gauge that will show how much energy you've recaptured after every stop, minus the amount lost to the regular hydraulic brakes. It's not uncommon to see 100 percent on this gauge. It is worth noting that the pedal feels surprisingly linear for an electric car.
Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid - Charged up about our latest test car
... Now, at last, Toyota is offering its own, bona fide in-house plug-in version.
Prices start at $32,000 for the factory-built plug in, as opposed to $25,565 for a comparable regular Prius. The Advanced trim line model we bought featured a pre-collision system, navigation, and a power driver seat. The sticker price came to $40,285—a $9,720 premium over the highest trim conventional Prius. That's comparable to what you'd pay for a Chevrolet Volt, but the federal tax credit for the Prius plug-in is only $2,500, as opposed to $7,500 for the Volt and other pure EVs. It does qualify for driving in HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes, as do other hybrids, in some areas. So far, it's available only in 14 mostly Northeastern and West Coast states.
The plug-in version uses a lithium-ion battery in place of the Prius's regular nickel-metal hydride battery. The plug-in is designed to run as a pure electric for 11 miles and then revert to regular Prius operation, which combines electric and gas operation. But if you thought you'd be using electricity exclusively for 11 miles, you'd soon discover that's not the case. As soon as you press the throttle farther than about a third of its travel, the internal combustion engine kicks in and you're using fuel. So, unlike the Volt, the Prius plug-in is never an unequivocal EV, even for the portion that's supposed to be gas-free.
I am watching Rachel and sure enough, Ron Paul actually wins a majority of delegates from Iowa?
Who'd a thunk!
Idiot repubs in my Minnesota also elected Ron Paul?
How is it that The Huffington Post, at turns celebrated as the savior of its parent company and decried as a glitzy thief of journalism produced by others, has come to matter?
In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.
This article is a must-read...
By Nicholas Confessore and Derek Willis, New York Times, April 20/21, 2012
President Obama’s re-election campaign is straining to raise the huge sums it is counting on to run against Mitt Romney, with sharp dropoffs in donations from nearly every major industry forcing it to rely more than ever on small contributions and a relative handful of major donors.
From Wall Street to Hollywood, from doctors and lawyers, the traditional big sources of campaign cash are not delivering for the Obama campaign as they did four years ago. The falloff has left his fund-raising totals running behind where they were at the same point in 2008 — though well ahead of Mr. Romney’s [....]
By Steven Erlanger, New York Times, April 21/22, 2012
PARIS — Arthur Muller, Vincent Pons and Guillaume Liegey, young Frenchmen who met in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and M.I.T., are working hard to get out the vote, American-style, for the Socialist challenger for the French presidency, François Hollande.
For the last few months, they have been working to recruit and train 70,000 volunteers to knock on almost 3.5 million doors. Having witnessed the successful campaign of President Obama, they are back in France, using American models of canvassing to get left-leaning voters who would normally abstain to instead cast ballots. Their work, said Mr. Liegey, 31, is concentrated in the banlieues, poorer suburbs heavily populated with ethnic minorities, where alienation and abstention are high.
Their efforts are being put to the test on Sunday [....]
Afghan security officials say they have foiled a huge attack in the capital Kabul, as they gave details of the seizure of 10 tonnes of explosives.
The explosives were found in a truck seized along with five militants in an operation last Sunday, a National Directorate of Security spokesman said. The group was planning to attack crowded areas in the capital, he said.....three of the captured militants are Pakistani citizens, and two are Afghans....The five suspects had confessed that the planned attack was coordinated by two Taliban commanders with links to Pakistan's main intelligence organisation the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), according to the spokesman.
The arrests, which came during a wave of insurgent attacks around the country, was kept quiet at the time because of the ongoing security operation, he said.
Afghanistan has often accused the ISI of involvement in supporting anti-government insurgents in Afghanistan....
What's nearly the same thing as cutting taxes? Taking the money, because it belongs in private hands where it can create jobs and wealthy job creator lifestyles! An 8 figure swindle from the heartland of Illinois:
The comptroller of a small city in Illinois is accused of misappropriating more than $30 million in city funds and using the money to support a "lavish lifestyle," including a large farm with over 150 horses, over $339,000 in jewelry, and numerous vehicles.
Rita Crundwell, 58, of Dixon, Ill. was arrested on Tuesday by the FBI on a federal charge for stealing more than $3.2 million in public funds since last fall. Authorities, however, believe she had been helping herself to the public funds since 2006.
FBI agents used seizure warrants at Crundwell's home, office, and her champion horse farm in Beloit, Wisc. as well as another farm in Dixon, and seized contents of two bank accounts she controlled......As the town's comptroller since the early 1980s, Crundwell earned an annual salary of $80,000....Dixon has a population of 16,000...
The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.
Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.
Make no mistake. We had some ugly anti-labor mischief of our own during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where union organizers, political radicals, suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks were blackballed, beaten, imprisoned, deported, murdered, and state-executed—all in the name of “law and order.” But while many of these men (and women, too….they deported Emma Goldman to Russia) were clearly railroaded, at least the high-profile figures were given the semblance of a jury trial.
This is an opinion piece, not exactly news.
But, the first article linked to within the piece is news. The Nuge will be getting a call.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2012/0417/Ted-Nugen...
From the linked article:
Ted Nugent, political surrogate? We’re not even sure Ted Nugent is a Ted Nugent surrogate. Twitter is swarming with comments on this uproar at the moment. Generally, they can be broken down into three categories:
1. Ted Nugent is still alive?
2. Ted Nugent is more of a threat to music than politics.
3. This doesn’t even make the list of Top Ten Crazy Ted Nugent Moments.
At his sentencing hearing last week in federal court, Mehanna delivered a scathing condemnation of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole stated, “I am frankly concerned by the defendant’s apparent lack of remorse, notwithstanding the jury’s verdict” and then proceeded to sentence the 29-year-old Islamic pharmacist to serve the next 17 years of his life in a federal penitentiary.