From Books to Art

Book lover problems.  Mine is that I've run out of bookshelves....

Legos and gender identity.

I didn't know Daily Kos was keeping track of weekly accidental gun shootings.  We are a clumsy bunch, aren't we?

Plastics cause diabetes and obesity?  How about wood?

I do believe that being bored actually does not give you the right to shoot people.

Glasses that help people with red-green color blindness.

Sperm and eggs made from skin cells.

Make good art.

It's industrial strength sugar

We could be driving our cars with it... A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

Only a few monolithic companies control our food

Does it make you wonder at all the health problems such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, food allergies that are found in abundance in the United States and not as much elsewhere? Take a look at the diagram and ask yourself if these companies have your health in mind or only your money. And then notice that food stamps tie into to this as well...

Update 6/18: From the Guardian article about obesity:

The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race. Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money. By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place.

Update 6/20:

The US long-term strategy was to dominate the global market in grain and agriculture commodities, as outlined in the early 1970s by Richard Nixon. This policy coincided with taking the dollar off the gold exchange standard in August 1971 to make US grain exports competitive in the rest of the world. However, in order for the US to become the world's most competitive agribusiness producer, it had to replace traditional American family-based farming with the now-widespread huge "factory-farm" production. In other words, traditional agriculture was systematically replaced with agribusiness production through changes in domestic policy. For example, domestic farm programs that had previously protected smaller farm incomes were phased out during Nixon's term in office. This policy was then exported to developing countries in a bid to make US agribusiness more competitive and to get a hold into foreign markets: The Nixon Administration began the process of destroying the domestic food production of developing countries as the opening shot in an undeclared war to create a vast new global market in "efficient" American food exports. Nixon also used the post-war trade regime known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to advance this new global agribusiness export agenda.[2] In Henry Kissinger's 1974 report "National Security Study Memorandum 200" (NSSM 200), he directly targeted overseas food aid as an "instrument of national power."[3] The policy shifts during the 1970s were toward increased deregulation, which meant increased private regulation by the large and powerful global corporations. This led to an increase in corporate mergers and the rise of transnational corporations (which today often have larger gross domestic products than many nation states).[4] As large corporate agribusinesses were creating their food production, storage and distribution monopoly, smaller domestic farms were going bankrupt and closing. (Although this trend was predominantly occurring within the US, it later spread to other developed nations, which were forced to "modernize" their agricultural industry to compete with global trade.) For example, between 1979 and 1998, the number of US farmers dropped by 300,000 and by the end of the 1990s, the agriculture (in the US at least) was dominated by large commercial agribusiness interests. The US also operated a foreign policy of offering financial assistance "to developing countries via the World Bank in return for these countries to open their markets up to cheap US food imports and hybridized seeds."[5] By the beginning of the 21st century, world supplies of cereal were under the control of a few US-based monopolies. Four large agrochemical/seed companies - Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical and DuPont - controlled more than 75 percent of the US's seed corn sales and 60 percent of soybean seed sales. By the merging of giant agrochemical and seed companies, livestock could be fed on a huge diet of drugs in order to stimulate increased growth. It has been estimated that in recent years the largest users of antibiotics and similar pharmaceutical products are not humans, but animals, which consumed 70 percent of all pharmaceutical antibiotics. Statistics show, quite shockingly, that the use of antibiotics by US agribusiness increased from 500,000 pounds to 40 million pounds (an 80-fold increase by weight) from 1954 to 2005. As a consequence, the Center for Disease Control in the US has reported an "epidemic" rise in food-related diseases in humans as a result of eating meat containing large quantities of antibiotics. One Harvard University researcher, Ray Goldberg, who set up a research group to examine the revolution in agribusiness (including genetically modified organisms), reported: "the genetic revolution is leading to an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber and energy business."[6]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The rights of women.

How napping could save your life.

How the Fundamentalist Mind Compels Conservative Christians to Force Their Beliefs on You: Good people are willing to subvert the U.S. Constitution and even violate human decency in their quest for converts.

 The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is fighting against the religious extremists and their agenda to take over the military.

Rush is clueless how to treat women.

ANCIENT ‘ICEMAN’ MUMMY TRACES ANCESTRY FROM ALPS TO MEDITERRANEAN

Cradle robbers... by religious creeps.

Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks

And after the Irish dinner.... corned beef hash!

Blog sprinkles

Returning to the good ol' days when men were men and races wuz pure and wimmen knew their place....

Public Option Enemy No. 1:

Rick Scott ran a hospital company guilty of epic fraud. Now he wants to tell you how to fix the health care system.

Researchers Find Possible Environmental Causes For Alzheimer's, Diabetes:

A new study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have found a substantial link between increased levels of nitrates in our environment and food, with increased deaths from diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes mellitus and Parkinson's. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (Volume 17:3 July 2009).

Led by Suzanne de la Monte, MD, MPH, of Rhode Island Hospital, researchers studied the trends in mortality rates due to diseases that are associated with aging, such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and cerebrovascular disease, as well as HIV. They found strong parallels between age adjusted increases in death rate from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and diabetes and the progressive increases in human exposure to nitrates, nitrites and nitrosamines through processed and preserved foods as well as fertilizers. Other diseases including HIV-AIDS, cerebrovascular disease, and leukemia did not exhibit those trends. De la Monte and the authors propose that the increase in exposure plays a critical role in the cause, development and effects of the pandemic of these insulin-resistant diseases.

Here's an unbelievable headline:

Michael Jackson to be buried without his brain

Oh noooooo! Will they have a funeral for this, too?

Iraq suffers more terrorist attacks.

Even when it's proved the detainees weren't the worst of the worst, some still say they should be locked up because it's obvious they were the worst of the worst or why were they locked up in the first place and besides they might become terrorists when they get out because they were locked up as if they were the worst of the worst... or even worse, tell everybody what happened while in the hands of the government while they were being treated like they were the worst of the worst. So there.

Left a really nasty scar: New Mexico Teen Girl Tasered In The Head By Police Chief

A Cat-erpillar:



Are men now extraneous?

LONDON (AFP) – A team of British scientists claimed Wednesday to have created human sperm using embryonic stem cells, in a medical first that they say will lead to a better understanding of fertility.

Researchers led by Professor Karim Nayernia at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) developed a new technique that allows the creation of human sperm in the laboratory.

Arctic ice is thinning:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thick older ice shrinking by the equivalent of Alaska's land area, a study using data from a NASA satellite showed.

Coleman for governor?

Sign of the end of days: Peeps get their own store.

Mouth agape

Digby:

I assume the right will find ways to insult the new Supreme Court nominee's gender and ethnicity in a thousand different ways. But Glenn Beck, always in the vanguard, goes after her in a unexpectedly creative way:


"Does the nominee still have Diabetes? Could the Messiah heal her, or does she just not want to ask?"

Dear god.

But it adds so much flavor...

ScienceDaily (May 22, 2009) — A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles -- the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles -- showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA). Exposure to BPA, used in the manufacture of polycarbonate and other plastics, has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans.

The study is the first to show that drinking from polycarbonate bottles increased the level of urinary BPA, and thus suggests that drinking containers made with BPA release the chemical into the liquid that people drink in sufficient amounts to increase the level of BPA excreted in human urine.

In addition to polycarbonate bottles, which are refillable and a popular container among students, campers and others and are also used as baby bottles, BPA is also found in dentistry composites and sealants and in the lining of aluminum food and beverage cans. (In bottles, polycarbonate can be identified by the recycling number 7.) Numerous studies have shown that it acts as an endocrine-disruptor in animals, including early onset of sexual maturation, altered development and tissue organization of the mammary gland and decreased sperm production in offspring. It may be most harmful in the stages of early development.

Seems that everything we eat has come into contact with plastic somewhere in its lifespan. Back to eating homegrown twigs and leaves... and storing them in ... glass? Stainless steel? Foil? Paper bags and newspapers?

Plastic is such a part of our lives. It's going to be hard to stop using it.

You need to eat fish/not eat fish

If you can get any....

Munich­ Taking vitamin D during pregnancy can help prevent the development of diseases later in the unborn child's life, according to Armin Malter of Germany's Professional Association of Gynaecologists. "The latest studies show that vitamin D can aid the immune system and help prevent autoimmune conditions such as diabetes and thyroid problems," says Malter.

Malter says pregnant women are likely to have a deficiency of vitamin D as their unborn child develops in the womb.

Pregnant women should eat foods high in vitamin D such as fatty fish like salmon and tuna. Milk and eggs also contain high levels of the vitamin.

But....

New York, April 14 Eating fish polluted by manmade toxic chemicals and industrial effluents in sea and soil could increase your diabetes risk, a new study shows.

Until now, obesity was thought to be the most important factor in the development of type 2 diabetes - a disorder in which the body does not produce enough insulin - necessary for the body to be able to use sugar.

But new study by South Korean researchers has shown that people whose bodies are polluted by high levels of chemicals including the pesticide DDT and industrial coolants called PCBs are more likely to have diabetes than those with lower amounts in their bodies.

And California restricts fishing:

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., April 14 California is banning or restricting fishing in 29 areas off its Central Coast.

Friday's unanimous vote by the California Fish and Game Commission establishes the largest network of marine reserves in the continental United States. The move will protect about 200 square miles of water from Santa Barbara to Santa Cruz in an effort to replenish depleted marine populations, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.