EFTA01135497.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 06/02/2013 Date: Sun, 02 Jun 2013 15:14:24 +0000 Attachments: Breeding_the_Nutrition_Out of Our_Food_Jo_Robinson_NYT_May_26,_2013.pdf; How America Became a_TTlircT World_Country_Mattea_Kramer &Jo_Comerford Tom 2013.ndf: May_25,_2013.pdf; The_Obamacare_Shock_Paul_Krugman_NYT_May_26,_2013.pdf; Thin1c_Again,_European_Decline_May-June_2013.pdf; What_Can_We_Leam_From_Denmark_Bemie_Sanders_RSN_27_May_13.pdf; Highest_paid_public_employeet-June_2,_2013.pdf; Eurozone_Unemployment_Reaches_Record_High_Of 12.2_Percent_Pan_Pylas_Huff Post_ May_31,_2013.pdf; I 968_Fun_Facts_&_Trivian June_2,2013.ashx DEAR FRIENDS.... Comedian Bill Mayer does a segment on his HBO show, Real Time With Bill Mayer that he calls Dispatches From The Bubble and no better example of this type of dumb reasoning is Tennessee Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher recent use of a passage from the Bible to justify punishing the poor. Fincher quoted from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. In recent moves by Congress to slash $4.1 billion or more from food stamps (otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) over the next 10 years. Fincher used this line to prove his point that lazy poor people shouldn't be depending on the government to feed them. Of course, Fincher and fellow conservatives are worried because SNAP rolls have swelled by 70% since the financial collapse back in 2008, causing the government to spend $80 billion* to feed poor people. But instead of curbing the bankers' economy-destroying ways or ending their corporate welfare, they seek to take it out of the stomachs of poor people. Context matters. Fincher is using a verse written for a specific time, a specific place, and specific situation in Thessalonica thousands of years ago to deprive poor families of food today. This is Bible abuse at its worst. Today's poor people are not sitting around anticipating the second coming of Jesus to occur at anytime now. Instead, they've waited for the government to grow the backbone that is required to get the bankers' hands out of the people's treasury and restore jobs and fair wages to America. To deny them food because of the government's actions and in actions that helped to put them there in the first place is outrageous—and to use the Bible to justify the theft is beyond the pale. It's actually bankers and politicians who are more dependent on government welfare than ever before, like Rep. Even worse is that Fincher's family has relied on farm subsidies to amass their wealth. There is a shame of hypocrisy when an elected official whose family has prospered due the benefit of government assistance and then uses the Bible to slash similar programs to help the poor. Another dispatchfrom The Bubble.... ****** During the Presidential campaign last year we often heard Mitt Romney and other Republican challengers warning voters that President Barack Obama was -- gasp -- turning the United States into a EFTA01135497 "European social welfare state." — suggesting that Europe has faded into irrelevance under the pressure of a rising debt, anemic growth, ongoing Eurocrisis, the complexity of its decision-making process and its social programs. Although countries like Brazil, China and India have seen their fortunes raise dramatically compared to the Old World order, the European Union remains the largest single economy in the world. It has the second-highest defense budget after the United States, with 57,000 diplomats deployed around the world compared to India's 600. And the EU's GDP per capita in purchasing power terms, is still nearly four times that of China, three times of Brazil and nearly nine times of India. If you think that Europe is on decline, for the average citizen living in Germany, France, Spain and the UK still beats living in China, India, Russia and Brazil. Power, of course, depends not just on these resources but on the ability to convert them to produce outcomes. Here too Europe delivers: Indeed, no other power apart from the United States has had such an impact on the world in the last 20 years. Since the end of the Cold War, the EU has peacefully expanded to include 15 new member states and has transformed much of its neighborhood by reducing ethnic conflicts, exporting the rule of law, and developing economies from the Baltic to the Balkans. Compare that with China, whose rise is creating fear and provoking resistance across Asia. At a global level, many of the rules and institutions that keep markets open and regulate world trade, limit carbon emissions, and prosecute human rights abusers were created by the European Union. Who was behind the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court? Not the United States or China. It's Europe that has led the way toward a future run by committees and statesmen, not soldiers and strongmen. Yes, the EU now faces an existential crisis. Even as it struggles, however, it is still contributing more than other powers to solving both regional conflicts and global problems. When the Arab revolutions erupted in 2011, the supposedly bankrupt EU pledged more money to support democracy in Egypt and Tunisia than the United States did. When Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi was about to carry out a massacre in Benghazi in March 2011, it was France and Britain that led from the front. This year, France acted to prevent a takeover of southern Mali by jihadists and drug smugglers. Europeans may not have done enough to stop the conflict in Syria, but they have done as much as anyone else in this tragic story. The EU is an entirely unprecedented phenomenon in world affairs: a project of political, economic, and above all legal integration among 27 countries with a long history of fighting each other. What has emerged is neither an intergovernmental organization nor a super-state, but a new model that pools resources and sovereignty with a continent-sized market and common legislation and budgets to address transnational threats from organized crime to climate change. Most importantly, the EU has revolutionized the way its members think about security, replacing the old traditions of balance-of- power politics and noninterference in internal affairs with a new model under which security for all is guaranteed by working together. This experiment is now at a pivotal moment, and it faces serious, complex challenges -- some related to its unique character and some that other major powers, particularly Japan and the United States, also face. But the EU's problems are not quite the stuff of doomsday scenarios. And it would be wise for America to emulate many of the EU's successful policies instead of cherry-picking the failed ones as a way to boaster our myth of American Exceptionalism / ego. Attached please find a compilation of resent articles on this issue, starting with - Think Again: European Decline. ****** There is an growing epidemic around the world that is receiving little notice by major media other than those families and friends affected. Today self-harm (suicides) takes more lives than war, murder and natural disasters combined. Why are we killing ourselves and how can we stop it? Last month this suicide epidemic garnered front pages and social media feeds across America led by a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which called self-harm "an increasing public health concern." Although the CDC revealed headline grabbing statics— such as the fact that there are EFTA01135498 now more deaths by suicide than by road accident— the effort prompted only a tired spasm of talk about aging baby boomers and life in a recession. And still the CDC itself, in an editorial note, suggested that the party would rock on once the economy rebounded and our Dennis Hopper—cohort rode its hog into the sunset. But suicide is not an economic problem or a generational tic. It's not a secondary concern, a sideline that will solve itself with new jobs, less access to guns, or a more tolerant society, although all would be welcome. It's a problem with a broad base and terrible momentum, a result of seismic changes in the way we live and a corresponding shift in the way we die — not only in America but around the world. We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation's greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it's among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last. The result is an accelerating paradox. Over the last five decades, millions of lives have been remade for the better. Yet within this brighter tomorrow, we suffer unprecedented despair. In a time defined by ever more social progress and astounding innovations, we have never been more burdened by sadness or more consumed by self-harm. And this may be only the beginning. If experts are right — and a landmark collection of studies suggests they are — we've reached the end of one order of human history and are at the beginning of a new order entirely, one beset by a whole lot of self-inflicted bloodshed, and a whole lot more to come. This rise of suicide in the U.S. has been slow enough to sneak up on people. There are as many intentional ways to die as there are people to imagine them, and we saw more of all of them: an almost 20 percent rise in the annual suicide rate, a 3o percent jump in the sheer number of people who died, at least 400,000 casualties in a decade — about the same toll as World War II and Korea combined. Deaths by jumping and shooting, poisoning and stabbing, drowning, and strangulation are growing in epidemic numbers, as well as death by "unspecified means," a catch-all column for the most inventive forms of self-destruction — such as swan dives into lava and encounters with farm equipment. In 2010 alone, 38,364 killed themselves in the United States -- 4,60o more than were killed in motor vehicle accidents. This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 4o,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone. We blew past an even bigger milestone last November, when suicide had become the leading cause of "injury death" in America. And the CDC says that this spring, suicide outpaces the rate of death on the road—and for that matter anywhere else people accidentally harm themselves. This development evades simple explanation. The shift in suicides began long before the recession, for example, and although the changes accelerated after 2007, when the unemployment rate began to rise, no more than a quarter of those new suicides have been tied to joblessness, according to researchers. Guns aren't all to blame either, since the suicide rate has grown even as the portion of suicides by firearm has remained stable. The fact is, self-harm has become a worldwide concern. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease 2010 2,Inline image 1 In the developed world, suicide became the leading cause of death in 2010 for people ages 15-49. Throughout the developed world, for example, self-harm is now the leading cause of death for people 15 to 49, surpassing all cancers and heart disease. That's a dizzying change, a milestone that shows just how effective we are at fighting disease, and just how haunted we remain at the same time. Around the world, in 2010 self-harm took more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters EFTA01135499 combined, stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life across all ages. In more advanced countries, only three diseases on the planet do more harm. And this assumes we can even rely on the official data. Many researchers believe it's a dramatic undercount, a function of fewer autopsies and more deaths by poison and pills, where intention is hard to detect. Ian Rockett of West Virginia University thinks the true rate is at least 3o percent higher, which would make suicide three times more common than murder. Last fall the World Health Organization estimated that "global rates"of suicide are up 60 percent since World War II. And none of this includes the pestilence of suicidal behavior, the thoughts and plans that slowly eat away at people, the corrosive social cost of 25 attempts for every one official death. But perhaps the most concerning part of these developments is that the changes behind them are likely to intensify amid the galloping progress of developing nations. Where people lack basic services, they live unsanitary, impoverished lives, and death comes to visit long before it's invited. Where conditions improve, life expectancy does too, and somewhere in this transition there is a tipping point, a Rubicon beyond which death is no longer a bone-fingered stranger but the man in the mirror. That's scary in a world of constant (and welcome) improvement, but there's an even bigger reason to fear the burden of suicide in the new millennium: it's a charge being led by people in middle age. In America in the last decade, the suicide rate has declined among teens and people in their early 20s, and it's also down or stable for the elderly. Almost the entire rise — as both the new CDC and GBD numbers show—is driven by changes in a single band of people, a demographic once living a happy life atop the human ziggurat: men and women 45 to 64, essentially baby boomers and their international peers in the developed world. The suicide rate for Americans 45 to 64 has jumped more than 30 percent in the last decade, according to the new CDC report, and it's possible to slice the data even more finely than they did. Among white, middle-aged men, the rate has jumped by more than 50 percent, according to a Newsweek analysis of the public data. If these guys were to create a breakaway territory, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world. In wealthy countries, suicide is the leading cause of death for men in their 4os, a top-five killer of men in their 5os, and the burden of suicide has increased by double digits in both groups since 1990. The situation is even more dramatic for white, middle-aged women, who experienced a 60 percent rise in suicide in that same period, a shift accompanied by a comparable increase in emergency-room visits for drug-related (usually prescription-drug-related) attempts to die. In a sad twist, they often make a bid for death using the same medicine that was supposed to turn them back toward life. And the picture is equally grim for women in high-income countries, where self-harm trails only breast cancer as a killer of women in their early 4os — and has become the leading killer of women in their 3os. "In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood," begins Dante's epic tour of hell. He wouldn't have to change the line today. Baby boomers have the highest suicide rate right now, but everyone born after 1945 shows a higher rate than expected. When teen suicide was on the rise in the 1970s and 1980s, society was stung by the conclusion that something must be wrong with the way we live, because our children don't want to join us. The question today is different, but just as unsettling. With people relinquishing life at its supposed peak, what does that say about the prize itself? What's gone so rotten in the modern world? Experts are trying to pinpoint the massive, steam-rolling social change that matters most for self-harm. The list of suspects: the astounding rise in people living alone, or else feeling alone; the rise in the number of people living in sickness and pain; the fact that church involvement no longer increases with age, while bankruptcy rates, health-care costs, and long-term unemployment certainly do. Sociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise. They are all descendants of Emile Durkheim, who helped found the field in the late-19th century, choosing to study suicide so he could prove that "socialfacts" explain even this "most personal act." But when someone's son dies by suicide and the family cries out for an answer, "socialfacts"don't begin to assuage the pain or solve the mystery. When a government EFTA01135500 health official considers how he might slow down the suicide problem, "society" is a phantom he can't fight without another kind of theory entirely. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease 2010 IJInline image 2 In 2010 worldwide deaths from suicide outnumbered deaths from war (17,670), natural disasters (196,018), and murder (456,268). Having gone no farther than Sociology and Psychology 101 at NYU, I definitely do not have the expertise to offer informed solutions for this suicide epidemic. But I do believe that it won't be addressed by cutting taxes and reducing social programs (austerity) or ignoring the fact millions of people are in need of help and support. And like all many things, unless our elected officials and the nation as a whole first admit that depression and suicides are a problem which needs everyone working together to reverse this phenomenon this suicide epidemic will continue to grow. Web Link: Please download the above TEDTalk story by JD Schramm as a way of starting a conversation on how best to support the many people who attempt suicide but fail and seek to return to life — as well as demystify suicide so that we can create a net of understanding so strong and willing to intervene imbued with such resolve, that people can no longer fall through the cracks. The economy is holding up surprisingly well in a year of austerity as all of the economic indicators are moving further and further in positive territory , to the point that economist are suggesting that the economy is looking surprisingly robust. Housing prices rose faster over the past year than they have in the past seven, according to data out Tuesday. Consumer confidence hit its highest level in five years. The stock market rallied another o.6 percent as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500, leaving it just short of an all-time high reached last week. And the national retail price of gasoline fell for six days straight through Monday and is down 16 cents a gallon since late February. Also, Detroit is having a banner year, with the industry forecasting that more than 14 million cars will be sold this year and US automakers are now selling more cars than their Japanese competitors. So for all of the President critics who have said that he is an ineffective leader who is hell bent on destroying the country. Oops How wrong you are.... Since President Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the major financial markets have doubled in value, housing values are up almost 25% since their 2009 lows and the country has enjoyed 39 months of sustained job growth, while at the same time the deficit is the lowest that it has been since 2007. Not bad numbers for a "Community Leaderfrom Chicago." And more importantly, finally some good news for the country. IJInline image 3 The economy is definitely on the upswing. The country has created almost 7 million new jobs in the past 38 months, with more than 500,000 of these new jobs are in manufacturing. The U.S. is now producing more energy than ever, while we are consuming less and less energy -- and we are inporting less energy from other countries and on track to become a net exporting energy country. The housing market is definitely coming back as prices rose 1196 in the past year. And although the stock markets had a smaill correction this past week, they are still twice what they were at their lows four years ago. The U.S.'s GDP growth was a respectable 2.5% in the 1st quarter of 2013 and the country's deficit is shrinking at the fastest pace in 5o years. Again: FINALLYSOME GOOD NEWS... EFTA01135501  THIS WEEK's READINGS Last Sunday I ran across an interesting article in the New York Times by Jo Robinson titled — Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food. As the author explains, most people like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won't need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health. But this isn't true because of the lack of variety and that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modem scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers. These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling. Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a "superfood." A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets. Each fruit and vegetable in our stores has a unique history of nutrient loss, I've discovered, but there are two common themes. Throughout the ages, our farming ancestors have chosen the least bitter plants to grow in their gardens. It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste. Second, early farmers favored plants that were relatively low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil. These energy-dense plants were pleasurable to eat and provided the calories needed to fuel a strenuous lifestyle. The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health. The sweet corn that we serve at summer dinners illustrates both of these trends. The wild ancestor of our present- day corn is a grassy plant called teosinte. It is hard to see the family resemblance. Teosinte is a bushy plant with short s.iSof grain instead of ears, and each spike has only 5 to 12 kernels. The kernels are encased in shells so dense I= need a hammer to crack them open. Once you extract the kernels, you wonder why you bothered. The dry tidbit of food is a lot of starch and little sugar. Teosinte has 10 times more protein than the corn we eat today, but it was not soft or sweet enough to tempt our ancestors. Over several thousand years, teosinte underwent several spontaneous mutations. Nature's rewriting of the genome freed the kernels of their cases and turned a spike of grain into a cob with kernels of many colors. Our ancestors decided that this transformed corn was tasty enough to plant in their gardens. By the 1400s, corn was central to the diet of people living throughout Mexico and the Americas. When European colonists first arrived in North America, they came upon what they called "Indian corn." John Winthrop Jr., governor of the colony of Connecticut in the mid-1600s, observed that American Indians grew "come with great variety of colours," citing "red, yellow, blew, olive colour, and greenish, and some very black and some of intermediate degrees." A few centuries later, we would learn that black, red and blue corn is rich in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have the potential to fight cancer, calm inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, protect the aging brain, and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. EUROPEAN settlers were content with this colorful corn until the summer of 1779 when they found something more delectable — a yellow variety with sweeter and more tender kernels. This unusual variety came to light that year after George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against Iroquois tribes. While the militia was destroying the food caches of the Iroquois and burning their crops, soldiers came across a field of extra- sweet yellow corn. According to one account, a lieutenant named Richard Bagnal took home some seeds to share with others. Our old-fashioned sweet corn is a direct descendant of these spoils of war. Up until this time, nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn. Farmers began to play a more active role in the 19th century. In 1836, Noyes Darling, a onetime mayor of New Haven, and a gentleman farmer, was the first to use scientific methods to breed a new variety of corn. His goal was to create a sweet, all-white variety that was "fit EFTA01135502 for boiling" by mid-July. He succeeded, noting with pride that he had rid sweet corn of "the disadvantage of being yellow." The disadvantage of being yellow, we now know, had been an advantage to human health. Corn with deep yellow kernels, including the yellow corn available in our grocery stores, has nearly 60 times more beta-carotene than white corn, valuable because it turns to Vitamin A in the body, which helps vision and the immune system. SUPERSWEET corn, which now outsells all other kinds of corn, was born in a cloud of radiation. Beginning in the 1920s, geneticists exposed corn seeds to radiation to learn more about the normal arrangement of plant genes. They mutated the seeds by exposing them to X-rays, toxic compounds, cobalt radiation and then, in the 1940s, to blasts of atomic radiation. All the kernels were stored in a seed bank and made available for research. In 1959, a geneticist named John Laughnan was studying a handful of mutant kernels and popped a few into his mouth. (The corn was no longer radioactive.) He was startled by their intense sweetness. Lab tests showed that they were up to 10 times sweeter than ordinary sweet corn. A blast of radiation had turned the corn into a sugar factory! Mr. Laughnan was not a plant breeder, but he realized at once that this mutant corn would revolutionize the sweet corn industry. He became an entrepreneur overnight and spent years developing commercial varieties of supersweet corn. His first hybrids began to be sold in 1961. This appears to be the first genetically modified food to enter the United States food supply, an event that has received scant attention. Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet, and all of it can be traced back to the radiation experiments. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words "candy corn." Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food. We've reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses? Here are some suggestions to get you started. Select corn with deep yellow kernels. To recapture the lost anthocyanins and beta-carotene, cook with blue, red or purple cornmeal, which is available in some supermarkets and on the Internet. Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup. In the lettuce section, look for arugula. Arugula, also called salad rocket, is very similar to its wild ancestor. Some varieties were domesticated as recently as the 1970s, thousands of years after most fruits and vegetables had come under our sway. The greens are rich in cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates and higher in antioxidant activity than many green lettuces. Scallions, or green onions, are jewels of nutrition hiding in plain sight. They resemble wild onions and are just as good for you. Remarkably, they have more than five times more phytonutrients than many common onions do. The green portions of scallions are more nutritious than the white bulbs, so use the entire plant. Herbs are wild plants incognito. We've long valued them for their intense flavors and aroma, which is why they've not been given a flavor makeover. Because we've left them well enough alone, their phytonutrient content has remained intact. Experiment with using large quantities of mild-tasting fresh herbs. Add one cup of mixed chopped Italian parsley and basil to a pound of ground grass-fed beef or poultry to make "herb-burgers." Herbs bring back missing phytonutrients and a touch of wild flavor as well. The United States Department of Agriculture exerts far more effort developing disease-resistant fruits and ve etables than creating new varieties to enhance the disease resistance of consumers. In fact, I've interviewed plant breeders who have spent a decade or more developing a new variety of pear or carrot without once measuring its nutritional content. We can't increase the health benefits of our produce if we don't know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health. Look below to see the difference.... 2Inline image 4 "Modern wheat is a `peffect, chronic poison,"according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world's most popular grain. EFTA01135503 Web Link: http://xrepublic.tv/node/3430 Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had: "It's an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '6os and '70s," he said on "CBS This Morning." "This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thin called gliadin. It's not gluten. IMI not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. El talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 44o more calories per day, 365 days per year." (CBS News) Approximately boo million tons of wheat are now cultivated worldwide making it the second most- produced grain after maize. It is grown on more land area than any other commerical crop and is considered a staple food for humans. At some point in our history, this ancient grain was nutritious in some respects, however modern wheat really isn't wheat at all. Once agribusiness took over to develop a higher-yielding crop, wheat became hybridized to such an extent that it has been completely transformed from it's prehistorical genetic configuration. All nutrient content of modern wheat depreciated more than 30% in its natural unrefined state compared to its ancestral genetic line. The balance and ratio that mother nature created for wheat was also modified and human digestion and physiology could simply could not adapt quick enough to the changes. Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had: "It's an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '6os and '70s," he said on "CBS This Morning." "This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thin called gliadin. It's not gluten. El not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. IMI talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 44o more calories per day, 365 days per year." Asked if the farming industry could change back to the grain it formerly produced, Davis said it could, but it would not be economically feasible because it yields less per acre. However, Davis said a movement has begun with people turning away from wheat — and dropping substantial weight. Last week in an article in , Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford wrote — How America Became a Third World Country — suggesting that if the US keeps on its current course ten years from now its future will be one of rolling electrical brown outs, crumbling infrastructure, extreme environmental problem causing a myriad of health issues and diseases due to unclean air and contaminated water, because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won't graduate from high school. The authors paint this picture saying that a decade of austerity, that doesn't address the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and under-funds programs vital to the health, welfare and education will turn the U.S. into a Third World Country. Obviously this story of doom and gloom is an extreme but we are already experiencing the decay of our country's infrastructure with the New Orleans levies faltering during Katrina, the collapse of the bridge last week outside of Mount Vernon, Washington and the expected rolling electrical brown outs in Southern California this summer. At the same time a set of manufactured arguments for "austerity," which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination, leading to Congress passing trillions of dollars of what was then called "deficit reduction." Still unable to pass a budget, Congress passed across-the-board cuts in August 2011 and set to kick in January 2, 2013, that everyone believed would force lawmakers to listen to reason, as the alternative was a certain disaster. EFTA01135504 They didn't come to their senses and sequestration did go into effect. Still Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment And still can It isn't that cutting federal spending across the board will be devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks will hurt. But, sequestration is proving particularly corrosive because all types of public spending — from grants for renewable energy research and disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing — are to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for possible natural disasters like river flooding or an imminent volcanic eruption are beginning to be shut down. Over time the cuts will be vast: $85 billion in the first year and $no billion in each year after that, for more than $1 trillion in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place. March 1st came and went, so the budgetary ax began to fall. At first, it didn't seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren't quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow its production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. But meat production aside, there was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all. They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85 billion in reductions in 2013, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president's budget proposal for the following year, an annual milestone that typically included detailed information about federal spending in the current year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn't say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment across the country. HERE IS THE FUTURE: They didn't have to wait long to find out. The first ripples of impact began to spread quickly indeed. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access to the program entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need. Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people — people who had access to members of Congress. In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements. And then, of course, the Pentagon asked for an exemption, too. We're talking about the military behemoth of planet Earth, which in 2013 accounted for 4o percent of military spending globally, its outlays exceeding the next 13 largest militaries combined. It, too wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks. Meat inspectors, the FAA and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was, as the history books will recount, not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school, dosing doors of opportunity. The young, old and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources such as health care or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to lowly streetlights. And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breathed 400 parts per million. (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 35o for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the Internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental EFTA01135505 protection, general research and basic infrastructure meant that the U.S. government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives. Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it's clear that a Rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board budget cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans — with too little influence — spoke up, and Washington didn't listen. The rest of the story, as you well know, is history. And according to the authors, this could be 2023 if we don't come to our senses and change course. In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama urged repairs of "the nearly moot) structurally deficient bridges across the country." He proposed a plan called "Fix it First," which would have invested $50 billion in repairing transportation infrastructure, starting with the most urgent repairs. Instead, Congress failed to avoid the sequester and transportation repair spending faces a $1.9 billion cut. The collapse of the Interstate 5 Bridge over the Skagit River in Washington State on Thursday once again sounded alarms over our nation's aging infrastructure. While this incident had no fatalities, there are hundreds of other bridges in Washington with worse sufficiency scores and more than 150,000 structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges across the nation. 2,Inline image 5 If you don't believe austerity can kill you. Then you should feel totally safe driving over our nation's crumbling bridges. An epic government spending squeeze in the past two years has curbed economic growth, cost millions of jobs, damaged public health and raised the suicide rate. It has also caused a dramatic slowdown in infrastructure spending, raising the threat of many more incidents like last week collapse of the Interstate-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington. Fortunately, nobody died in that collapse. Nor has anyone died in any of the six major U.S. bridge failures since the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis killed 13 people in August 2007. But this is something of a miracle, considering there are thousands of potentially unsound bridges in the U.S. and a rapidly dwindling amount of money being spent to fix them. The Skagit River bridge was not even the shakiest bridge in Washington state — a recent report card of the state's bridges by the American Society of Civil Engineers rated it merely 'functionally obsolete," not "structurally deficient," as many other of the state's bridges were rated. More than 750 other bridges in Washington are in worse shape, The Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson reports. 2,Inline image 6 Throughout the U.S. there were more than 150,000 structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges in 2012, according to the latest ASCE report card for the nation. The good news is that the number of deficient bridges has actually fallen in recent years. The bad news is that the bridges still in need of repair tend to be bigger bridges that carry more people, according to the ASCE. 'Those bridges that remain classified as structurally deficient are significant in size and length, while the bridges that are being repaired are smaller in scale," the ASCE wrote. And bridges are probably not even the worst aspect of American infrastructure: The ASCE report card gives U.S. bridges a "C+" grade. Our aviation system, dams, levees, drinking water, waste water disposal, hazardous waste disposal, roads, mass transit, schools and energy systems all received "D" grades. Maybe we'll get lucky and suffer no deadly disasters as a result of these rotting pillars of our infrastructure. But they are slowly draining the economy of its productivity and vigor. The ASCE estimates that under-spending on infrastructure will cut $3.1 trillion from our gross domestic product by 2020. EFTA01135506 America has dropped in the World Economic Forum's global rankings of economic competitiveness for each of the past four years, falling from first in the world to seventh, in part because of its sagging infrastructure. Its global ranking in terms of "quality of overall infrastructure" has dropped from ninth to 25th in the world. The ASCE estimates that we are spending $157 billion less per year on infrastructure than we need to. And instead of ramping-up that spending, we are slashing it. As The Atlantic's Philip Bump points out, infrastructure spending as a percentage of GDP has tumbled to its lowest level in at least 20 years. (Story continues below chart.) It's still not entirely clear what caused I-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington to collapse Thursday night. Nor is it clear, despite media reports, how strong the bridge was before it broke. What is clear is that, had the state needed to repair it, getting federal money to do so would be an uphill climb. A 2010 inspection apparently found that the bridge was "functionally obsolete" with a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100. In raw dollars, the decline is obvious. From a peak of about $325 billion in March 2009, the monthly amount has plummeted to $258 billion — a big number to upgrade your house, but less so for the entire country. But when you compare spending to the entire economic output of the country — how much of what we make that's spent on public construction — the picture becomes more stark. We haven't spent this little of our economic output on public construction since before 1993. Percent of annual GDP on public construction has dropped considerably over the last decade. For more information please take a look at the Huffmgton Post's article — Bridge Collapses And Structurally Deficient Bridges Across The Country. ****** As Paul Krugman pointed out this week in the New York Times - The Obamacare Shock — that although critics of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) have been predicting disaster when it goes in effect at the beginning of next year, they might be in for a terrible shock. First of all, people who are already receiving health insurance from their employers, Medicare or Medicaid will see almost no changes when the law goes into effect. While for the millions of Americans who don't receive insurance either from their employer or from government programs they will now be able to get insurance as Obamacare's three-part approach makes it easier. First, community rating everywhere — no more exclusion based on pre-existing conditions. Second, the "mandate" — you must buy insurance even if you're currently healthy. Third, subsidies to make insurance affordable for those with lower incomes. Massachusetts has had essentially this system since 2006; as a result, nearly all residents have health insurance, and the program remains very popular. So we know that Obamacare — or, as Paul Krugman call it, ObamaRomneyCare — can work. Skeptics are already arguing that Massachusetts was special as it had relatively few uninsured residents even before the reform, and it already had community rating. They cite administrative issues and other things that will drive up costs, as well as the fact that there are millions of Americans who are too poor to afford coverage even with subsidies. But Americans are already embracing other parts of Obamacare that have been enacted, such as the provision that allows a parent to keep their children on their insurance programs until the age of 26 and that people can no longer be denied insurance coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Still, here's what it seems is about to happen: millions of Americans will suddenly gain health coverage, and millions more will feel much more secure knowing that such coverage is available if they lose their jobs or suffer other misfortunes. Well, the California bids are in — that is, insurers have submitted the prices at which they are willing to offer coverage on the state's newly created Obamacare exchange. And the prices, it turns out, are surprisingly low. And although a handful of healthy people may find themselves paying more for coverage, it looks as if Obamacare's first year in California is going to be an overwhelmingly positive experience. EFTA01135507 Only a relative handful of people will be hurt at all. And as contrasts emerge between the experience of states like California that are malting the most of the new policy and that of states like Texas whose politicians are doing their best to undermine it, the sheer meanspiritedness of the Obamacare opponents will become ever more obvious. As a result, Paul K