Mediterranean diet and gut bioma

After the year was over, those who had followed the Mediterranean diet saw beneficial changes to the microbiome in their digestive system. The loss of bacterial diversity was slowed, and the production of potentially harmful inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein and interleukin-17 were reduced.

At the same time, there was a growth of beneficial bacteria linked to improved memory and brain function, the study said. The diet also appeared to boost "keystone" species, critical for a stable "gut ecosystem" and which also slowed signs of frailty, such as walking speed and hand grip strength.
Previous publications from the ongoing study found those who followed the diet closely had improved episodic memory and overall cognitive ability. Higher adherence to the diet also reduced the rate of bone loss in people with osteoporosis and improved blood pressure and arterial stiffness.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/02/17/health/mediterranean-diet-microbiome-wellness/index.html

Sanders proposals' support

ny polls have documented what the public thinks about Sanders’ policy positions, and the evidence is overwhelming: From a wealth tax to minimum wage, they are extremely popular.

Last March, a CNBC/All-American poll illustrates this: support for paid maternity leave, 85%; government funding for childcare, 75%; boosting the minimum wage, 60%; free college tuition, 57%. Medicare for all came in at 54%. In October 2019, The Hill reported on an American Barometer survey that found “70% of the public supported providing ‘Medicare for All,’ also known as single-payer healthcare.”

Another key policy proposal with broad public support is a wealth tax that both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren support. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll (1/10/20), nearly two-thirds of respondents agree that the very rich should pay more. Among 4,441 respondents, 64% strongly or somewhat agreed that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs.” Support among Democrats was even stronger, at 77%, but a majority of Republicans, 53%, also agree with the idea.

https://fair.org/home/factchecking-nprs-attempted-takedown-of-bernie-sanders/

Direito a preguiça

"Lafargue escreveu O Direito à Preguiça, colocando ao centro de sua reflexão a necessidade de recuperar algo muito similar ao conceito latino de otium: para romper as grades da prisão, os subproletários deveriam reapossar-se daquele tempo que os antigos dedicavam ao estudo, ao cuidado com o espírito e à estruturação do pensamento."
https://outraspalavras.net/mercadovsdemocracia/cronofagia-o-roubo-do-tempo-do-sono-e-das-ideias/

Sinn Fein’s Victory is Ireland’s ‘Brexit Moment’

Sinn Fein’s Victory is Ireland’s ‘Brexit Moment’ When Left-Out Voters Turn on the Elite
by PATRICK COCKBURN
“People wanted to kick the government and Sinn Fein provided the shoe to do the kicking,” says Christy Parker, a journalist from the beautiful but de-industrialised town of Youghal in county Cork. He speaks of the “chasm” between the elite benefiting from Ireland’s impressive economic progress and the large part of the population that has been left behind.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/17/sinn-feins-victory-is-irelands-brexit-moment-when-left-out-voters-turn-on-the-elite/

Can Sanders Do it? Jan 31, 2020 James K. Galbraith

 As of 2019-2020, the Core Sanders has been supplemented by an “Expanded Sanders” program comprising the Green New Deal (GND), a federal job guarantee, a wealth tax, and a plan to abolish and forgive student-loan and medical debts. Of these four policies, the first two would be expansionary or stabilizing in their economic effects. The third is, in my view, impractical, and the fourth is perhaps more far-reaching than is generally appreciated.
 By boosting incomes without creating new consumption goods, the GND is similar to an industrial mobilization for war. The increase in income from GND-related activities will be partly offset by a decrease in wasteful finance, private health insurance, and excessive medical provision (somehow defined), as well as reductions in military spending consistent with ending America’s forever wars.
 But how, then, would the GND be funded? True “financing” is a matter of real resources, not scrounging for tax revenue. As noted above, those real resources would come from cutting back on finance, health insurance, unnecessary medical provision, and the military, and by mobilizing residual unemployed and underemployed workers toward more useful and necessary activities. Tax revenue would then come from these workers’ earnings, and from more effective levies on the profits of the companies that employ them.

 Among the circumstances likely to face a Sanders administration in 2021 are those left over from the 2008 financial crisis, which gave way to a decade of slow but steady growth, accompanied by a broad reduction of unemployment. The decline in the unemployment rate partly reflects an aging workforce and decreased immigration, but mainly a large increase in new service-sector jobs paying mediocre wages. As a result, an ever-growing number of US households have come to rely on multiple earners to make ends meet.Meanwhile, neglect of public investment has accelerated physical decay in many parts of the country. Mitigating and adapting to climate change demands major investments, and a large share of the available physical resources will need to be committed to carrying out a successful transition to a clean-energy economy. Obviously, this has not happened under Trump.

Sanders Can Do It

Whether an economic program as a whole succeeds or fails largely depends on how its various components add up. Based on a general evaluation of Sanders’s agenda, it appears that a reasonable answer to the question of whether he can do it if given the chance is: Yes, he can. The Sanders movement is growing, and the candidate’s program is popular. Equally important, the Sanders agenda is largely coherent as a matter of basic economics, broadly balanced between elements that boost economic growth and those that free up resources, and largely consistent with the broader conditions, domestic and international, that the next US president is likely to face.
 https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/what-if-bernie-wins-by-james-k-galbraith-2020-01

Events in Syria have Taken a Dangerous Turn

In recent days, we’ve been witnessing a noticeable deterioration of the security situation in Syria. Hostilities are being reported both the in Idlib and Aleppo governorates, where radical militants are desperately trying to regain control of sections of the M5 highway they had to surrender. Gunfights are being reported near the village of al-Rashidin to the west of Aleppo.

https://journal-neo.org/2020/02/15/events-in-syria-have-taken-a-dangerous-turn/

Some Economic and Political Factors of Coronavirus Outbreak

At present, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the global economy is potentially heading for a disaster. It would suffice to allude to various problems that are bound to arise when foreign investment and capital flow into the Chinese economy dry up. After all, the PRC has been one of the key drivers of growth of the global economy.


https://journal-neo.org/2020/02/16/some-economic-and-political-factors-of-coronavirus-outbreak/

capital cities the best places to live?

What makes capital cities the best places to live?

Capital cities, no matter the size, are centres of
economic and institutional resources, and the
quality of life they offer contributes to their
competitive advantage, especially in attracting
investment and highly qualified labour forces.Quality of life data show that in most countries, the capital city has advantages compared to the regions outside the capital. In light of the continued growth of capital city populations and the concentration of resources within them, this policy brief explores the source of the advantages of capital cities in quality of life. Are these advantages mostly related to specific demographics that these cities nurture and attract? Or do these advantages stem from opportunities that major cities provide due to their scale and economic growth?
The policy brief aims to clarify why policy should focus on both the economy and society when it comes to advancing economic, social and territorial cohesion.

In Europe, people living in the capital city generally have a better quality of life than people living in other parts of a country. On this basis, it seems that capital cities are indeed the best places to live.

Capital cities have, by and large, larger proportions of people who report feeling resilient – able to cope during times of hardship – compared to other urban centres and rural regions in the same country. Some characteristics of city populations – such as a younger age profile and higher educational attainment – contribute to resilience, while others, such as housing insecurity, erode it. The findings suggest that some other latent factor, possibly related to opportunities for economic advancement and improving one’s living standards, could underlie the extra resilience that capital cities provide.
 The findings are drawn from the European
Quality of Life Survey 2016, which monitors
different dimensions of quality of life examined
here: individual quality of life and well-being,
quality of society, and quality of public
services.

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/policy-brief/2020/what-makes-capital-cities-the-best-places-to-live?&utm_campaign=quality-of-life-and-public-services&utm_content=ef18025&utm_source=social-europe&utm_medium=banner
 Eurofound (2020), What makes capital cities the best places to live?, European Quality of Life Survey 2016 series, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.

$5.34 Ladder Defeats $2.5 Billion wall

Brilliant New $5.34 Ladder Defeats Not So Brilliant $2.5 Billion Trump Fever Dream

by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist

Now, Mexicans still determined to come here despite our national mayhem have discovered a new, cheap, go-to method of scaling Dear Leader's pesky, pointless pet project. Using two lengths of light, cubed, readily available rebar called castillo - ubiquitous in Mexican construction and LOL the wall itself - they're fashioning hook-and-ladder rigs; the rebar is fitted with steps, and connected to four thinner poles bent into a U-shape to hug the top of the wall. The rust-colored rebar is naturally, fortuitously camouflaged, barely visible against the rust brown wall. And it's dirt cheap: Six meters of castillo cost 99 pesos, about $5.34, at Juárez' Hágalo - or Do It Yourself - True Value hardware store.

Last spring, the new ladders started turning up near the El Paso section of wall, where the number of single male migrants who mostly use them has nearly doubled in recent months; border agents say the level of "evading activity" has likewise soared. Last week, they found 9 ladders in one spot. Meanwhile, the whole stretch of border is littered with rusted rebar - waiting on the Mexican side, yanked down on the U.S. side, poking from dumpsters, their users long gone. Outwitted and conscripted into ludicrous service, agents say all they can do is pull abandoned ladders off the wall, cut them up, and hope they can't be used again. "It's a very powerful, very powerful wall," Trump brayed at a September rally there, "the likes of which, probably, to this extent, has not been built before."

"A wise man lets a fool build a wall before choosing the height of his ladder.” - Socrates

Think the US is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

February 14, 2020 5.23pm ESIt has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past.
As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century.
Between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army at Appomattox in April 1865, the nation literally broke apart.
More than 3 million men took up arms, and hundreds of thousands of black and white civilians in the Confederacy became refugees. Four million enslaved African Americans were freed from bondage.https://theconversation.com/think-the-us-is-more-polarized-than-ever-you-dont-know-history-131600

Facial expressions don't tell the whole story of emotion

by Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University

"Some claim they can detect whether someone is guilty of a crime or not, or whether a student is paying attention in class, or whether a customer is satisfied after a purchase," he said. "What our research showed is that those claims are complete baloney. There's no way you can determine those things. And worse, it can be dangerous."...
After analyzing data about facial expressions and emotion, the research team—which included scientists from Northeastern University, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin—concluded that it takes more than expressions to correctly detect emotion.
Facial color, for example, can help provide clues.
"What we showed is that when you experience emotion, your brain releases peptides—mostly hormones—that change the blood flow and blood composition, and because the face is inundated with these peptides, it changes color," Martinez said.
The human body offers other hints, too, he said: body posture, for example. And context plays a crucial role as well.,,,,https://techxplore.com/news/2020-02-facial-dont-story-emotion.html

Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk

Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk

February 14, 2020

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg misleadingly stated that he “cut” the police practice of stop-and-frisk — a policy that he “inherited” — by “95%” by the time he left office as mayor of New York. There were nearly twice as many stops in his last year as mayor compared with the year before he took office.

impossible to fight for socialism from within the Democratic Party

Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America say it is possible to fight for socialism from within the Democratic Party. Such a political program is not real socialism and can lead only to disaster.

...
 What the ruling class does fear, however, is that the growing opposition to capitalism will develop on an independent, revolutionary basis in the working class. Sanders serves to contain this opposition and, in his words, take discontented youth and “bring them into the Democratic Party.”
...

The Democratic Party is the oldest capitalist political party in the world. Founded in 1828, it carries in its political DNA all of the American ruling class’s great crimes.


This was the party of the southern slaveowners before the Civil War, of the forced removal and massacre of Native Americans, of Jim Crow segregation and of the anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese restrictions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is the party that jailed socialists and immigrants during World War I and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II.
The Democratic Party launched and sustained the Korean War and Vietnam War, ended “welfare as we know it,” supported the hyper-criminalization of nonviolent drug use, voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed the PATRIOT Act, kept Guantanamo Bay open, and bailed out the banks after the market crash of 2007-08.

Instead of helping Sanders save the Democratic Party, the IYSSE and SEP appeal to you: take action by supporting real socialist candidates in the 2020 elections, Joseph Kishore for president and Norissa Santa Cruz for vice president.
Our campaign recognizes that the fight for socialism means turning toward the working class, the chief progressive social force under capitalism. This class, comprised of billions of people in every country, has the power to transform the world.
Awakening the tremendous political energy of this social force requires educating workers and dispelling the lies of the corporate media. Fighting for socialism means making workers aware of their common class interests, giving them an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, and explaining the role of the state, the police, the courts and the political parties of the different factions of the capitalist class.

 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/14/lett-f14.html

Warmer climate and mass migration

Warmer climate leads to current trends of social unrest and mass migration: study

 

Research by an international team of scientists led by University of New Mexico Professor Yemane Asmerom suggests contraction of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) during a warming Earth, leading in turn to drying of the Neotropics, including Central America, and aggravating current trends of social unrest and mass migration.

Positioned near the equator where the trade winds of the northern and southern hemisphere converge, the ITCZ is the world's most important rainfall belt affecting the livelihood of billions of people around the globe. Globally, seasonal shifts in the location of the ITCZ across the equator dictate the initiation and duration of the tropical rainy season. The behavior of the ITCZ in response to the warming of the Earth is of vital scientific and societal interest.

 "What we found was that in fact during the Medieval Climate Anomaly Southern Belize was very dry, similar to modern central Mexico. In contrast, during the Little Ice Age cool period, when it should have been dry by the standard old model, it was the wettest interval over the last 2000 years," said Asmerom. "The pattern that emerges when all the data across the full transect of ITCZ excursion is supportive of the expansion-contraction model." The implication of this that regions currently in the margins of the ITCZ are likely to experience aridity with increased warming, consistent with modeling data from Central America. These data have important implications for rainfall-dependent agriculture system on which millions of people depend for food security.

Co-author and UNM Professor of Anthropology Keith Prufer is an environmental archaeologist, who has been conducting research in Belize for 25 years. "In the last five years there have been mass migrations of people in Guatemala and Honduras—partially driven by political instability, but also driven by drought-related conditions and changes in seasonality. This is creating enormous problems for agricultural production and feeding a growing population. There is growing evidence that these changes are a direct consequence of climate change."
"This work highlights the convergence of good science with policy relevancy. It also illustrates the strength of cross-disciplinary collaborative work, in this case international," said Asmerom.

 

 

by University of New Mexico

seniors looking for assisted living

 For more than a decade, “assisted living” residences grew faster than any other segment of the long-term care industry. Typically more home-like than a full-care nursing facility, assisted living is often favored by people who are generally independent, but still need support with daily activities. In general, providers offer fewer medical services, though many provide health and memory care for residents with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.

 

 We and our colleagues track the ever-changing circumstances of long-term care in the U.S. As we study policies and practices, we have observed that the expansion of assisted living is clearly a game-changer, creating new challenges in the industry. Many states have increased assisted living regulation in recent years. Some consumer advocates have called for nursing-home style federal rules, though others oppose this, saying assisted living should remain flexible enough to serve residents with a range of needs, from personal care only to end-of-life comfort.

Using criteria formulated from prior research, along with information provided by some states, we examined 39 key elements of each website. Those elements included the size of the facility, cost, license status, the insurance it accepts, and any special services offered, such as memory care. We also looked at each website’s usability – the ease in finding critical information.

more and more people are choosing assisted living. The government is now funding many residences to provide care for low-income disabled citizens. Their needs – and vulnerability – are significant, enough for states to reassess their roles in protecting assisted living residents. Adding accurate and detailed content to their websites would be a great first step. 

https://theconversation.com/incomplete-and-inadequate-information-lacking-for-seniors-looking-for-assisted-living-129426

career and technical education

My research has found that the best investment in career and technical education is when it’s targeted toward schools that design all instruction around developing career paths, say, as an electrician or as a nurse’s assistant. Career and technical education can also improve high school graduation and employment when it is integrated with core subjects and offers work-based learning.
The proposal also calls for allocating $83 million to competitive grants to states. Proposing competitive grants suggests that the administration will look to fund states with the most innovative proposals. This is in contrast to just giving out money based on how many students a state may serve, which is how most of the federal funds for technical education are allocated.
Trump also wants to double fees associated with H1-B visas – visas that allow for the hiring temporary workers from abroad with high skills that are in short supply in the U.S. This hike could raise an additional $100 million or more. The idea here seems to be to use revenue collected from programs that use talent from abroad to invest in educating students here in the United States.

.., the only technical education programs that research has shown lead to improved graduation rates and higher wages are whole-school models.
 https://theconversation.com/trumps-big-bet-on-career-and-technical-education-131558

read more
https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-we-know-about-career-and-technical-education-in-high-school/