This is incredible news. I wonder how much they’ll rob people for it:
Original copy of Magna Carta discovered in England
Why butter and cheese aren’t bad for you
Black eyes
My best friend, who is sometimes even more of a klutz than me, had a little accident when she was helping someone move this weekend. What happened was, a dozen 2x4s fell on her head. She has a big goose egg on her forehead, and yesterday, she woke up with two black eyes.
She told me that a friend at work tactfully approached her about whether her husband was beating her.
“You missed your moment,” I said. “You could have told him you took up MMA steel cage fighting.
“Or you could have looked him in the eye and said, ‘You know the first rule of Fight Club, right?'”
NYPD office who killed Brooklyn man indicted
It’s about time
As I recall, the whole dietary cholesterol-restriction thing was completely discredited some 15 or so years ago. So that was a long time for people to be derived of a cheap, healthy source of protein. Why does it take doctors so damned long to come around to the research?
Dietary cholesterol, one of the most closely monitored and regulated ingredients on American plates because of its believed link to heart disease, is making a comeback. When the federal government updates the guidelines of what we should be eating every day for good health — if it takes the advice of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee— cholesterol will no longer be listed as a “nutrient of concern.”
That means adults will no longer be advised to limit cholesterol in the diet to 300 milligrams a day because it is not associated with increased risk of heart disease.
The federal government’s new guidelines, which are expected in the next few weeks, don’t mean we can eat unlimited amounts of liver, shrimp or other cholesterol-rich foods. Moderation is still encouraged, but it does mean you can enjoy whole eggs in an omelet, instead of only egg whites.
The advice on dietary cholesterol is one of the most anticipated, surprising changes in the U.S. nutrition guidelines. Every 5 years a massive effort is made by the federal government to update recommendations for what makes up a nutritious and healthful diet.
Developing the guidelines is a daunting task which starts with expert scientific panels convening in small subcommittees to discuss the newest research in a particular area. They provide recommendations to the DGAC committee; the committee’s job is submit a report on the best scientific information available, and any changes reflected in the new science.
It’s quite a turnaround on cholesterol advice, but after reviewing new scientific papers, the DGAC committee, the major advisory panel to the U.S. government, did not find a health reason to restrict or limit intake to 300 mg a day for most people (a large egg has about 200 mg, all in the yolk).
Insured, but not covered
Let me put it this way: I’m not at all surprised. I continue to be infuriated, confused, and angered by the additional charges and co-pays through my Obamacare policy, all of it grounded in the long-disproven zombie idea that just will not die among elite policy circles: That healthcare users “need to have skin in the game,” because God knows, everyone will be running off to the doctor and scheduling unnecessary surgeries and treatment just because they can!
I have said all along that a substantial number of voters were pissed off about this, and the Democratic candidates bragging about Obamacare without acknowledging its problems didn’t help. The Dems should have run as “the party that’s going to fix the Obamacare problems.” But they didn’t.
Read the whole piece, because it details why so many people who love Obamacare also hate it. Elizabeth Rosenthal, in the New York Times:
The Affordable Care Act has ushered in an era of complex new health insurance products featuring legions of out-of-pocket coinsurance fees, high deductibles and narrow provider networks. Though commercial insurers had already begun to shift toward such policies, the health care law gave them added legitimacy and has vastly accelerated the trend, experts say.
The theory behind the policies is that patients should bear more financial risk so they will be more conscious and cautious about health care spending. But some experts say the new policies have also left many Americans scrambling to track expenses from a multitude of sources — such as separate deductibles for network and non-network care, or payments for drugs on an insurer’s ever-changing list of drugs that require high co-pays or are not covered at all.
For some, like Ms. Pineman, narrow networks can necessitate footing bills privately. For others, the constant changes in policy guidelines — annual shifts in what’s covered and what’s not, monthly shifts in which doctors are in and out of network — can produce surprise bills for services they assumed would be covered. For still others, the new fees are so confusing and unsupportable that they just avoid seeing doctors.
It is true that the Affordable Care Act has erased some of the more egregious practices of the American health insurance system that left patients bankrupt or losing homes to pay bills. Insurers can no longer deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, for example. And the new policies cap out-of-pocket spending so long as the patient receives care within the plan. Most important, the act has offered health insurance to an estimated 10 million Americans who did not have any, often by expanding Medicaid or providing subsidies.
Continue reading “Insured, but not covered”
Oh, who cares?
In England, they call them “newsreaders,” not journalists. Kind of puts things in perspective, huh?
Over time, I’ve come to think there’s a lot of wisdom in what I refer to as the GLAAD model. Rather than insisting that celebrities who have said homophobic things come to a meeting with the organization’s leaders, kiss the ring, and return to Hollywood cleansed of their sins, GLAAD tends to ask stars who have erred to do something of substance. After Brett Ratner used an anti-gay slur during a question-and-answer session, he bowed out of a job producing the Oscars. But he also agreed to donate his time to put together a series of public service announcements for GLAAD. Comcast and NBC Universal put up airtime to broadcast the ads. The organization — and the fight against homophobia — got something material out of the exchange, beyond the perception that they had the power to compel Ratner to say he was sorry.
Something similar happened to the young adult author Daniel Handler after, in the course of presenting an award to an African-American author, he told a watermelon joke. Handler doesn’t work at a day job that could fire him. And given the sales for his books, written under the pen name Lemony Snicket, his publishers seemed unlikely to drop him. But in any case, what happened after the awards ceremony was better for the cause of diversity in fiction than shunning Handler would have been. He donated $100,000 to a campaign to bring new voices into young adult literature.
In this context, it’s worth discussing what we’d really like from Williams, beyond a clear explanation and forthright apology. If accuracy is foremost in our concerns, should he have to serve a stint in NBC fact-checking? If the most worrisome thing about the incident is Williams’ attempt to grab a war hero’s credit for himself, maybe he should make recompense by taking time off from the anchor’s chair and reporting an in-depth series about American service-members.
Whatever answer we arrive at, it’s worth remembering something: forgiveness may ask more of us than calling for someone to be fired. But in cases where forgiveness is possible, we might get a whole lot more out of it than the ephemeral satisfaction of having cost our targets their jobs.
Did Bill O’Reilly cover up a war crime in El Salvador?
Before Bill O’Reilly was, well, Bill O’Reilly, he worked for a time as a foreign correspondent forCBS Nightly News, anchored by Dan Rather. O’Reilly talks about that period of his career in two of his books, and in both mentions that in early 1982 he reported from northeastern El Salvador, just after the infamous El Mozote Massacre. “When the CBS News bureau chief asked for volunteers to check out an alleged massacre in the dangerous Morazán Territory, a mountainous region bordering Nicaragua, I willingly went.”
El Mozote is a small, hard-to-reach hamlet. The massacre took place on December 11, 1981, carried out by US-trained Atlacatl Battalion, which was not just trained but created by the United States as a rapid response unit to fight El Salvador’s fast-spreading FMLN insurgency. The killing was savage beyond belief: between 733 and 900 villagers were slaughtered, decapitated, impaled and burned alive.
The story of the massacre was broken on the front page of The New York Timesby the journalist Raymond Bonner and in The Washington Post by Alma Guillermoprieto; both stories were published on January 27, 1982, and accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas. Bonner and Meiselas got to El Mozote, after hearing about the massacre, by walkingfor days in from Honduras. Guillermoprieto wrote about seeing “countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column” poking “out of the rubble.” Bonner noted the “charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles.” Later, Mark Danner reported on the massacre in detail, first in a lengthy New Yorker essay and then in a book.
Continue reading “Did Bill O’Reilly cover up a war crime in El Salvador?”
Another voice of sanity is leaving
Losing Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert before the election? Voters will be a lot less informed as a result. Maybe they’ll give the show to John Oliver:
Stewart was different. His humor was underscored by earnestness; his “moment of zen”—which started in Kilborn’s era—seemed to ask the viewer not to forget their troubles with humor, but instead to examine them more closely. And in an era that felt like rapidly unfolding chaos, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” became not just a weeknight check-in but a rallying point for like-minded liberals—a refuge, really. As the rest of the world went into incomprehensible patriotic overdrive—every 24-hour network adopted a news ticker, every politician started wearing a flag pin, and the armed forces started preparing for war against someone—“The Daily Show” appealed to the viewer’s sanity, to their humanity, to their sense of reason.
The show was unabashedly liberal—specifically because, as longtime writer and correspondent Stephen Colbert said to the White House Correspondents’ Association, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” And unlike the shtick of most other late-night comedians, Stewart’s thing is that he was, quite simply, a well-intentioned good guy.
There were missteps and mistakes, of course. But Stewart has the distinction of being one of the most trusted people in America—earning it episode by episode over the past 16 years. It’s not easy to have an audience support you wholeheartedly; it’s not easy to do that as a comedian that deals largely in politics on a network known mostly for stand-up specials and fringe sketch shows. Stewart did it, and continues to do it; he’s extended that brand to Colbert, Larry Wilmore, Steve Carell, John Oliver, Rob Corddry, and more.
If the voice of the people is the voice of God—if comedy is the second, far more critical draft of history, following the news—then Jon Stewart is one of the most influential political figures of our era, despite having never run for public office, written a word of policy, or strategically donated millions and millions to a special-interest group. But his show, and his perspective, and his steadfast commitment to liberal-minded sanity got a lot of us through eight years with a crappy president and eight election cycles in a country that is increasingly polarized on the most basic civil rights, on the most essential responsibilities of government. Stewart was the liberal organizer and rallying point before Obama’s presidency was a twinkle in David Axelrod’s eye; as difficult as it has been to advance a progressive agenda over the last 16 years, it would likely have been impossible without Stewart’s ability to connect to millions of viewers and remind them that they weren’t alone in hoping for something better—better from government, better from media, better from each other.
I realize I’ve made it sound like Stewart is an evangelical preacher, or a crusading politician, or a peerless investigative journalist, instead of what he essentially is: a comedian with a late-night talk show. But perhaps that is the last and most crucial thing to remember about Stewart’s time with “The Daily Show,” which has touched on three different presidents’ tenures over five different terms and run well over 2,000 episodes, from 1999 to tonight. Stewart has privileged compassion and honesty in his comedy; he has spoken truth to power, and been unafraid to critique both world leaders and his own friends. He’s been a good person—and like all good people, whether they are leaders or followers or somewhere in the middle, he used what he had to do the right thing. What he happens to have—what he deploys with stunning effect—is the ability to make people laugh. I can only hope that Stewart will make us laugh many times more, even once he’s parted ways with “The Daily Show.”