Free this Saturday: Get Vegucated at Salem Public Library!

Vegucated is an award-winning documentary that follows a bachelor, a single mother, and a college student who agree to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. The film showcases the rapid and at times comedic journey towards creating a kinder, cleaner, greener world, one bite at a time.

Saturday, September 8, at 2:30 p.m.
Doors opening at 1:30 p.m. The audience is invited to stay after the film for an open question and answer session.

Salem Public Library’s Loucks Auditorium at 585 Liberty Street SE.

Event is free with seating available on a first-come, first-seated basis.

This event is sponsored by the Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary, a non-profit organization dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation and placement of abused and neglected farm animals, which is located in Scio, Oregon.

• More information about Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary is available at www.lighthousefarmsanctuary.org or 503-394-4486.
  
  
• More information about the documentary Vegucated is available at www.getvegucated.com.

True Dat. "Cow's milk is for suckling calves" -- Jack LaLanne

Interesting.

Yay! Pop some corn in celebration

Department of Good Stuff
Web MD - Popcorn, already known to be a good source of fiber, has higher levels of healthy antioxidants than some fruits and vegetables, according to new research.

"Based on fiber, whole grains, and antioxidant levels, popcorn is the king of snack foods," says Joe Vinson, PhD, professor of chemistry at the University of Scranton. 

Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay

The losing game

The one thing we should NOT be doing is buidling more autosprawl . . .

NY Times's Frank Bruni:

 

 What if we have it backward? What if the 310-pound man trying to jam into the middle seat and the 225-pound woman breaking into a sweat only halfway up the stairs aren't the undisciplined miscreants of modern American life but the very emblems of it? 

 

What if fatness, even obesity, is less a lurking danger than a likely destiny, and the surprise isn't how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few? . . .

Following in the heavy footsteps of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "The End of Overeating," "The End of Food" and much else, "The Weight of the Nation" makes an especially persuasive case that gluttony isn't Americans' problem. Agriculture and abundance are.

Over the last century, we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat — a positive development, for the most part.

We also became expert at feedlots for livestock and at processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap and addictive seductions. This has downsides.

Densely caloric and all too convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we're chromosomally hard-wired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it, creating plump savings accounts of excess energy, sometimes known as love handles, for an imagined future shortage that, in America today, doesn't come. . . .

John Hoffman, an executive producer of the documentary, told me: "Evolutionarily, there was no condition that existed when we were living with too much fat storage. We've only known a world of plenty for maybe 100 years. Our biological systems haven't adapted to it."

This is probably summed up best by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin in their book "The Evolution of Obesity." "We evolved on the savannahs of Africa," they write. "We now live in Candyland."

Our systems aren't just rigged to gorge. They're also rigged in many cases to rebound from weight loss and put pounds back on, as Tara Parker-Pope explained in a cover story for The Times's Sunday magazine last year. So we're fighting againstthat bit of nature, too. . . . 

 

 If we're going to wage a successful war against unhealthy weight gain and obesity, we need to understand all of that. We need to stop vilifying obese people, who aren't likely to be helped by it
And we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly than we seem poised to do.

The kind of consciousness-raising and corporate prodding being done by Michelle Obama — laudable as it is — won't be nearly enough. Neither will the extra green space for exercise that cities like Nashville have commendably created, or New York City officials' admirable exile of sugary sodas from public school vending machines.

These important steps, plus others under consideration, are just the start. Let's move, yes. But let's do it a whole lot faster, because what we may be trying to hold back is a near inevitable tide.

TUESDAY, PDX: Margaret Kripke Speaks on Environmentally Caused Cancers

Image by The Mayor of Worldwide Breast Cancer via FlickrThe Lund Report is a rare gem -- someone with a lot of knowledge about the medical-industrial complex doing the deep, hard work in the trenches to report on the whole gamut of issues that coalesce under the heading of health.

The editor, who funds this shoestring operation mainly out of her own pocket, consistently runs rings around the captive media outfits who dare not annoy advertisers, which include both the big hospitals and many polluters who would be happiest if we kept thinking that cancer is the fault of genetics or personal bad choices.  These people prefer it if we don't recognize that cancer is primarily an environmental illness.


Hat tip to Lund Report for bringing news of this:

Margaret Kripke, PhD, a co-author of that report, speaks in Portland next Tuesday, October 11 at an event sponsored by Rachel's Friends Breast Cancer Coalition in collaboration with the Oregon Environmental Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility. This free lecture takes place at 7 p.m. at Kaiser Town Hall located at 3704 N. Interstate.

According to the report, 'The incidence of some cancers, including those most common among children, is increasing for unexplained reasons,” while environmental cancers disproportionately affect women and members of disadvantaged social groups, who are more likely to be exposed to carcinogenic materials at work or who live in polluted environments.

Not only is more research needed into environmentally caused cancer, but environmental contaminants should be better regulated, and the methods of measuring such exposures improved, the report states. Currently such research is a low priority and receives inadequate funding, resulting in an inadequate number of environmental oncologists. Instead, most research emphasizes the genetic and molecular mechanisms in cancer.
The report is also critical of existing environmental cancer research, noting that most of that research investigates the effect of specific chemicals on adolescent laboratory animals – which doesn't really mirror real-world exposures to environmental contaminants. In addition, animals in these studies are exposed to doses substantially higher than those likely to be encountered by humans.

“These data – and the exposure limits extrapolated from them – fail to take into account harmful effects that may occur only at very low doses,” according to the report. “Further, chemicals typically are administered when laboratory animals are in their adolescence, a methodology that fails to assess the impact of in utero, childhood, and lifelong exposures. In addition, agents are tested singly, rather than in combination.”

Since Americans are exposed to tens of thousands of foreign chemicals throughout their lifetimes, studies should be designed to look at the effects of specific groups on contaminants in the communities most likely to be affected.

The report also calls for stronger regulation of environmental contaminants, saying that U.S. regulation is rendered ineffective by inadequate funding, fragmented and overlapping authorities and uneven enforcement, excessive regulatory complexity, weak laws and regulations and undue industry influence: “Too often, these factors, either singly or in combination, result in agency dysfunction, and a lack of will to identify and remove hazards.”

The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation's productivity and devastate American lives.”
Kripke is currently serving her second three-year term on the President's Cancer Panel – comprised of three people including Lance Armstrong, and LaSalle D. Lefall, Jr., the report's co-author. The panel,  created by former President George W. Bush, advises the President on the status and needs of the cancer problem in America.

Kripke is a professor of immunology and executive vice president and chief academic officer to the University of Texas MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston. Her research focuses on the immunology of the skin and skin cancer, skin cancer's relationship to ultraviolet light, and how the immune system influences the development of skin cancers. She holds a PhD in immunology from the University of California at Berkeley.

When I am sad about the people I've known and lost to cancer, I give to only those groups that recognize that blaming the victims for their cancers lets the polluters off the hook.  The group that has been sounding the warning about the environmental roots of the cancer pandemic the longest:  Breast Cancer Action.

Related articles

• Pinkwashing Alert: P&G Beauty (habwwe.wordpress.com)

Sandra Steingraber speaks in Portland, October 20

Image via WikipediaSandra Steingraber is a true hero, a fearless voice on a terribly fearsome topic.

If you missed the great documentary about her work, "Living Downstream," as part of the Salem Film Festival 2010 at Salem Cinema, make sure to find it on Netflix, and you might want to go see her in October in Portland. There are only a tiny few speakers I'd post a notice about two months early, that's how good she is. Mark your calendars now.

Sandra Steingraber Speaks on Toxic Pollution

By:

Press Release

August 3, 2011 -- The Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP) is hosting a free public lecture with renowned ecologist, writer and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, PhD. The event will be held from 7 - 9 pm on Thursday, October 20 at The Old Church, 1422 S.W. 11th Avenue in Portland. This event is free and open to the public.

As an authority on the interplay between pollution and human health, Steingraber will address the link connecting toxic pollution to illnesses like cancer.

Her seminal book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment compared data on toxic pollution and data from U.S. cancer registries to demonstrate a correlation. The book won praise from The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The Lancet, and The London Times, and was recently adapted as a documentary film by The People’s Picture Company of Toronto.

Steingraber’s other works, including the recent, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis have won considerable acclaim for their exploration of the challenges and responsibilities communities face in a world that is increasingly polluted.

She’s won numerous awards, including Chatham College’s biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award, the Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund, and the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. She has served as an advisor to the California Breast Cancer Research Program, provided Congressional briefings, and lectured on many college campuses.

A columnist for Orion magazine, Steingraber is a scholar in residence at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

NCAP is a non-profit organization that works to protect community health and the environment through research, organizing and advocacy to promote alternatives to pesticides. They are based in the Northwest and have been active in pesticide reform efforts for over 30 years.

Let's use our heads for a change

Image via WikipediaThe endless wars we are waging against EastAsia and EurAsia, with their long-forgotten rationales, are at least having their one usual benefit: we're learning lots about the way the human body works, as we pile up casualties.

One area that our concussive wars are educating us about is head injuries and traumatic brain injuries (TBI). And one thing we're learning as a result is that high-school sports head injuries are much more serious than we thought. Anyone who has seen Ali or other "punch drunk" boxers staggering around has seen the evidence of what shocks to the head do.

“Two studies, one of veterans and the other of former professional football players, provide new evidence that head injuries such as concussions are linked to dementia later in life and may make the brain more vulnerable to the development of symptoms characteristic of Alzheimer's disease.”

We need to start applying this knowledge here, in Salem, right now. Every single sport, starting with football and soccer, needs to be examined for its concussion rates, and those sports with above-average concussion rates need to be critically assessed with an eye to answering this one question:

Can the concussions in this sport be eliminated entirely or drastically reduced, or shall the sport be dropped?

There is no middle ground. With the mounting evidence all pointing the same way (that concussions are far more serious than we used to think), we are now on notice that we are causing kids ages 13-18, kids who cannot give informed consent, lifelong injuries, all in the name of entertainment. We have a duty to respond to these studies and to act to limit concussions to the maximum extent that is reasonably possible. Given that there are plenty of team and individual sports that teach all the same life lessons, there is no excuse for allowing kids to be exposed to high risks of suffering lifelong injuries as part of their education.

If you pay taxes here, you need to tell the S-K School Board that you want to know what they are doing to prevent concussions right now, and how they are going to avoid the huge legal bills down the road, the kinds of bills that accrue whenever institutions try to ignore evidence that what they are doing harms kids.

Open Letter to the American Red Cross

Hello,

I am writing as someone who has donated over 144 pints of O- blood to others via the Red Cross in the PNW and Great Lakes Red Cross Regions. So I am a huge Red Cross supporter, and am a registered bone marrow donor.

However, I wince whenever I see the Red Cross mobile blood draw van parked outside the Oregon State Capitol building conducting onsite blood drives using a huge diesel bus that sits with its motor idling for hours and hours at a time -- when the Capitol is just a few steps away from a fully-staffed and nicely appointed Red Cross blood donation center! [0.4 miles, 8 min. on foot at most.]

Diesel exhaust is a public health hazard. The particulate emissions are a serious problem for any person who breathes. Moreover, the NOx and SOx emissions are health threats in their own right.

I am writing to ask that you consider the harm that you are causing, reflect on how it affects your mission, and devise a policy to eliminate diesel idling as part of your operations. If that means using utility grade extension cables to bring power to your mobile collection buses, so be it. Or move the collection into the building.

See http://www.deq.state.or.us/aq/diesel/ for more on the health problems caused by diesel exhaust.

Thank you. I am posting this on my blog, LOVESalem.blogspot.com, and I will be happy to give you an opportunity to respond.

UPDATE 2:  Much better:

Thanks for taking time to provide feedback on the American Red Cross.  First of all, thank you for your commitment to the cause of blood donation.  Donating over 144 units of blood demonstrates an incredible commitment and an understanding that the need for blood is constant.  I have asked members of my organization to look into the concerns you have raised about an idling bus motor.

It is not our standard practice to idle the motor on buses during blood drives.  In most settings we do have to rely on generators to power the buses.  I expect that it was the generator you have heard outside the Oregon State Capitol building and not the motor. 

As to your point that the capitol is a few steps away from one of our donor centers, we value having a center so close to the capitol and that center sees a great many employees and visitors from the capitol.  But, it is our experience that the convenience of having an established blood drive on capitol grounds attracts people to donate who may feel they are too busy or otherwise unable to get over to our donor center.  The capitol blood drives are generally very successful.  Given that the need for blood is constant, we attempt to accommodate donors in the best and most convenient ways possible.

We have conducted blood drives inside the capitol building in the past.  Unfortunately, those inside blood drives were subject to cancellation on short notice when senate or house business took priority for the space. 

As a result of your feedback, our Salem representatives are investigating the possibility of plugging in to electrical power at the capitol.  And, as we replace buses and generators, we will have particulate traps installed to mitigate the effects of the generators on the environment.  Thanks again for your feedback and past support.

Steve Stegeman | Chief Executive Officer
Pacific Northwest Blood Services Region - American Red Cross

Does auto exhaust cause brain damage? Study suggests it might

Image by Simone Ramella via FlickrThis is an example of where the precautionary principle would be helpful -- there's some evidence of the possibility of serious harm from an industrial activity, but what will happen now is that it will take a long time for the evidence to solidify, particularly in light of the typical denial-evasion-obfuscation-retaliation cycle from the affected intere$t$.

What ought to happen, in these legacy cases where the activity got underway well before the science of risk assessment developed, is that the developing mosaic of suggestive studies should cause the onus to shift onto the activity ... in other words, instead of having to prove to the satisfaction of the affected industry that there is a sufficient quantum of proof to justify a serious response (which typically only happens after decades of the profit-making companies fighting against science like trapped rats), the industry ought to now have the burden of producing, within say five years, solid and valid disconfirming evidence or face a regulatory action aimed at eliminating the chance that the hazard is there.

Prepare for Industry Backlash Hysteria in 3 . . 2 . .

But we didn't EAT THEM then. Image by Chemical Heritage Foundation via Flickr

Wow. The Feds might commit some truthtelling. Monsanto and Dow aren't going to be happy.

UPDATE: Sad, but no surprise that industry is having its favorite sock-puppet organization mouth the attacks on the report. The American Cancer Society is the epitome of the co-opted group that learns to lick and never to bite the generous corporations that feed its ravenous budgetary maw. ACS is the tip of the spear in the ongoing campaign to blame cancer on the victims, never on the polluters.

Sunday horror hat-trick complete

Image by ice.bluess via Flickr

Are we drugging ourselves into disability?

Levine: So mental illness disability rates have doubled since 1987 and increased six-fold since 1955. And at the same time, psychiatric drug use greatly increased in the 1950s and 1960s, then skyrocketed after 1988 when Prozac hit the market, so now antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs alone gross more than $25 billion annually in the U.S. But as you know, correlation isn’t causation. What makes you feel that the increase in psychiatric drug use is a big part of the reason for the increase in mental illness?

Whitaker: The rise in the disability rate due to mental illness is simply the starting point for the book. The disability numbers don’t prove anything, but, given that this astonishing increase has occurred in lockstep with our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications, the numbers do raise an obvious question. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling the increase in disability rates? And in order to investigate that question, you need to look at two things. First, do psychiatric medications alter the long-term course of mental disorders for the better, or for the worse? Do they increase the likelihood that a person will be able to function well over the long-term, or do they increase the likelihood that a person will end up on disability? Second, is it possible that a person with a mild disorder may have a bad reaction to an initial drug, and that puts the person onto a path that can lead to long-term disability. For instance, a person with a mild bout of depression may have a manic reaction to an antidepressant, and then is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a cocktail of medications. Does that happen with any frequency? Could that be an iatrogenic [physician-caused illness] pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability rates?

So that’s the starting point for the book. What I then did was look at what the scientific literature -- a literature that now extends over 50 years -- has to say about those questions. And the literature is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Although psychiatric medications may be effective over the short term, they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. I was startled to see this picture emerge over and over again as I traced the long-term outcomes literature for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar illness. In addition, the scientific literature shows that many patients treated for a milder problem will worsen in response to a drug-- say have a manic episode after taking an antidepressant -- and that can lead to a new and more severe diagnosis like bipolar disorder. That is a well-documented iatrogenic pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability numbers.

Now there may be various cultural factors contributing to the increase in the number of disabled mentally ill in our society. But the outcomes literature -- and this really is a tragic story -- clearly shows that our drug-based paradigm of care is a primary cause.

Levine: I have a clinical practice and I have seen several examples of what you are talking about, and I had previously read several of the scientific studies that you detail in Anatomy of an Epidemic, so I am not exactly a naïve reader. However, in reading your book and seeing the enormity of the problem and just how much overwhelming evidence there is for a horrible crisis, I started getting a little sick to my stomach. I wonder, as you got into the research, did you start drawing comparisons to Rachel Carson and Silent Spring? Specifically, this is such a huge unnecessary tragedy, affecting several million people including children, yet there is virtually no discussion of it in the mass media.

Whitaker: A journalist friend of mine, who was a long-time reporter at the Washington Post and Newsday, said that he too was reminded of Silent Spring when he read Anatomy of an Epidemic. And, in fact, I was stunned by much of what I found when I was researching the book, and I did at times become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tragedy. Let me give a specific example. When you research the rise of juvenile bipolar illness in this country, you see that it appears in lockstep with the prescribing of stimulants for ADHD and antidepressants for depression. Prior to the use of those medications, you find that researchers reported that manic-depressive illness, which is what bipolar illness was called at the time, virtually never occurred in prepubertal children. But once psychiatrists started putting “hyperactive” children on Ritalin, they started to see prepubertal children with manic symptoms. Same thing happened when psychiatrists started prescribing antidepressants to children and teenagers. A significant percentage had manic or hypomanic reactions to the antidepressants. Thus, we see these two iatrogenic pathways to a juvenile bipolar diagnosis documented in the medical literature. And then what happens to the children and teenagers who end up with this diagnosis? They are now put on heavier-duty drugs and often on a drug cocktail, and you find that they do poorly on that treatment. You find that a high percentage end up “rapid cyclers,” which means they have severe “bipolar” symptoms, and that they can now be expected to be chronically ill throughout their lives. We also know that the atypical antipsychotics [such as Risperdal and Zyprexa] prescribed to bipolar children cause a host of physical problems, and there is pretty good evidence that they cause cognitive decline over the long term. When you add up all this information, you end up documenting a story of how the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in the United States have been destroyed in this way. In fact, I think that the number of children and teenagers that have ended up “bipolar” after being treated with a stimulant or an antidepressant is now well over one million. This is a story of harm done on an unimaginable scale.

So why hasn’t the media reported on this? The answer is that the media, when it covers medicine, basically repeats the narrative fashioned by the academic doctors who are leaders in the particular discipline, and in this case, academic psychiatrists have told a story of new illnesses -- like juvenile bipolar illness -- being “discovered,” and of drugs for those treatments that are safe, effective and necessary. They tell this story to the public even as their own studies find that their juvenile bipolar patients -- who when they first came to a psychiatrist might simply have been “hyperactive” or struggling with a momentary bout of depression -- are ending up with severe bipolar symptoms and can now expect to be chronically ill for life. The problem is that our society trusts academic doctors to tell an honest story, and in this corner of medicine, it's quite easy to document -- and I did document this in Anatomy of an Epidemic -- that academic psychiatry has belied that trust.

Yikes, a fungus among us

. . . A rare and dangerous fungal infection named Cryptococcus gattii has been quietly spreading from British Columbia southward to the U.S. Pacific Northwest. And it's changing as it goes.

Researchers have discovered that a unique strain of the bug has emerged recently in Oregon and already spread widely there, sickening humans and animals.

So far, over the past 11 years there have been about 220 cases reported in British Columbia. Since 2004, doctors in Washington and Oregon have reported about 50 cases. Among the total 270 cases, 40 people have died from overwhelming infections of the lungs and brain.

Public health officials aren't calling it a public health emergency. The fungus can't be spread from person to person, and there doesn't seem to be any prospect of an explosive epidemic. But they do want doctors to be on the lookout for cases, because early diagnosis and proper treatment is vital to prevent deaths.

Tropical Origin

The most striking thing about this fungus is that it's popping up and establishing itself far afield from its usual range — possibly because of climate change.

"The disease was almost exclusively seen in tropical and subtropical areas of the world," says Dr. Julie Harris, a specialist in fungal diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The hot spots were Australia and Papua New Guinea, along with Egypt and parts of South America. . . .

(The map shows human and animal cases of Cryptococcus gattii infection from 2005 to 2009.)

Documentary on environmental causes of breast cancer

Image via Wikipedia

Given the huge spike in breast cancer since WWII and the fact that human genetics haven't changed in that time, perhaps it has some other cause . . . hmmm, what could that be? Hmmm . . . must ponder that.

Response to Dean Baker's "The Deficit and Our Children"

Long-term oil prices (yellow line is inflation-adjusted) 1861-2007. The recent price spikes will soon be recalled as "the good old days." Image via Wikipedia

I really like and admire Dean Baker and have greatly valued his sharp insights over the years. I put no stock in anything the shysters in the Concord Coalition are selling, and despise the transparent efforts by them and others to repeal the New Deal in the name of deficit reduction (while leaving the military and Wall St. riding high on the hog, naturally). His article (linked below), "The Deficit and Our Children" is a fair attempt to counter the faux hysteria of the right over deficits (now that a Democrat is in the White House).

However, I fear that, like most economists, Baker has entirely missed something that will have a profound effect on his rosy projections of great future wealth thanks to the magic of growth: the end of cheap energy, often referred to in shorthand as "peak oil."

I like to summarize it for people this way:

(1) essentially all our great wealth in the US reflects not our industry or ingenuity or Providential favor but rather our dumb luck at conquering a land richly endowed with abundant and essentially free energy. Our economic growth parallels exactly our increased consumption of these fossil fuels.

(2) Coal is a health disaster, not only in miners killed directly but in catastrophic direct and indirect environmental consequences of coal use, particularly in climate change. We must stop using coal, leaving nearly all of what remains in the ground or else be doomed by our own poisons.

(3) Oil has reached or is just past its point of maximum abundance now -- meaning that, from here on out, it will inexorably decrease in availability, forcing prices up to bring supply and demand into equilibrium.

(4) The relentless increase in oil prices -- even aside from the great price volatility we can expect, which is very destructive to our complex economic systems -- make Baker's growth projections absurd. We are going to learn that ultimately economic wealth depends on natural resources, and that tying everything in our economy to an assumption of endlessly available cheap energy was a disastrous (albeit easily explained) blunder.

(5) Because our entire economic system is based on continual growth and because our economy is very unlikely to grow and is instead highly likely to shrink relentlessly to reflect the steady decrease in the availability of energy and the total absence of the kind of cheap energy we've come to expect (and upon which we've set up everything in America, from suburbia to health care), we can expect a wrenching change in the next decade. When we're facing persistent and ineradicable unemployment at 40-50%, we're going to find out that arguments about the health of the social security trust fund in 2043 are about as relevant as the price of tea in Lilliput.

(6) To bring this back to health, the point is this: Just as our public health demands are going to be climbing --- thanks to climate disruption, the huge "baked in" amount of obesity-related diseases, and collapsing civil infrastructure (clean water) and peoples' inability to afford the medicines we've taught them to expect --- our resources are going to be shrinking steadily.

For a good menu of stories exploring the connection between health and the end of cheap energy, you can go here

http://energybulletin.net/taxonomy/term/67

For a concise explanation of the mechanics of peak oil and a good introduction to other resources, try here: http://energybulletin.net/primer

For a good attempt to explore the health consequences of trying to use coal to maintain the high-energy lifestyle, see here:

Climate Chaos: Your Health at Risk What You Can Do to Protect Yourself and Your Family (Public Health)

http://www.powells.com/biblio/71-9780275998585-0

Baker's column is here.

Awesome Matt Taibbi: Sick and Wrong

An American rates Obama and Congress's performance on reforming health care financing. Image by IntangibleArts via Flickr

Matt Taibbi is on fire lately:

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad. . . . (much more here).

League of Women Voters meeting on health care issues for action, 10/8

All-Member Meeting: Health Care Issues for Action

What should a health care system in the U.S. look like? In the national debate there has been much misinformation, so the League of Women Voters of Marion and Polk Counties (LWVMPC) Health Care interest group has put together a public meeting on the topic to be held on Thursday, October 8, at 7 p.m. in the First Congregational Church, 700 Marion St. NE.

The program will combine education with action, beginning with education.

• Since the League already has a position in support of health care availability to all U.S. citizens, the program will begin with excerpts of that position from the LWV of the U.S. (LWVUS) Impact on Issues. Hand-out materials will be provided.

• Two films will offer information about the current way that Americans receive health care: a video of Wendell Potter interviewed by Bill Moyers about why he left Cigna Corporation and Sicko, a documentary by Michael Moore about the variable availability of health care in the U.S. Dr. Andy Harris will answer questions.

The evening will end with action--an explanation of what LWVMPC is doing locally, including plans for a Guest Opinion in the Statesman Journal and possible future forums. This action is based on the LWVUS position in support of a national health care system. Attendees will be encouraged to do individual action, such as contacting their members of Congress and writing personal letters to the editor (letters that do not mention the League, since only the president or her designate can speak for the League).

The Health Care interest group is composed of Anita Owen, Jan Markee, Sandra Gangle, Cindy Burgess, Roz Shirack, Jean Sherbeck, Diana Bodtker, Kathy Pugh, and Rose Lewis.

We Can't Afford to Wait Vigil

Boy, if only we had a Democrat in teh White House and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress . . . Image by seiuhealthcare775nw via Flickr

VIGIL for Public Option NOW
Riverfront Park, Salem, OR 97303
Wednesday, 2 Sep 2009, 7:30 PM
To sign up for this event.

Got antibiotic-resistant superbugs?

Image via Wikipedia

Yup, and our industrial phactory phood "pharmers" are making more all the time. That's why we need this bill, NOW.

With their feedlots and confined-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), phactory pharmers create conditions that approximate hell on earth as well as anything this side of a battlefield. Then, because of the conditions in which they keep these animals, the pharmers have to keep them all hopped up on continuous dosages of antibiotics, giving the bugs all the time needed to undergo a mutation that neutralizes the antibiotics. This is exactly what you'd do if you were a terrorist and wanted to destroy the usefulness of an antibiotic and render the country vulnerable to a pandemic infection.

The phactory pharmers have already succeeded in wiping out scores of useful medicines and turning our waterways into chemical and excrement-filled sewers. We need to act now. The war on drugs we should be waging is to keep farm animals off drugs.

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Also, more info here and here.

The Issue that Surrounds Everything

One of the things we're going to need in the future is a lot more entrepreneurial activity. The old economy, based on gigantic and ever-increasing flows of energy and materials (and wastes) is grinding to a halt, and won't be coming back. In the future, there will be a lot fewer massive institutions employing hundreds of thousands of people in big bureaucratic kingdoms, with benefits. People will have to make a lot more of their own livelihood, and they will have to do so much more locally.

One of the big barriers to the kind of innovation and entrepreneurial behavior we need is our weird system of health insurance that's tied to employment rather than citizenship. By tying access to health insurance to working for someone else -- and typically, that means a very big someone else -- we discourage people from creating precisely the kind of ventures that we will need the most of in the future: small, local services that are aimed at meeting each others' basic needs.

People in the health insurance industry are, no doubt, occasionally wonderful people -- just like some of the people who sell guns and drugs in the black market are sometimes wonderful people. But their industry is a parasite, consuming 30% of our sky-high health care costs and producing exactly no health benefit. In fact, our insurance system is one of the root causes of our insanely poor overall rankings on national health indices: we are far and away #1 in spending but about 35th in health results. A good deal of that is due to the fact that we treat health care like a non-essential, and we allow other people do without access to it (so long as we ourselves have access). Thus, people don't follow good health maintenance and illness-prevention strategies and the giant money-sucking leeches in the health insurance biz don't want to pay for prevention because there's no guarantee that the eventual savings will accrue to them instead of their competitor.

Truly an insane system, but one that is so fantastically profitable for a few that it will not die easily, despite the huge amount of suffering and needless waste that it inflicts on us.

Socialist Health Plan? In Norway, Obama's Plan Not Even Close

If Michael Steele and the Republicans really believe that President Obama is proposing a socialist health plan, they need to get out more.

I've just returned from a research trip to Norway, where their universal health system really is socialist. It's also much less expensive than the current U.S. system, so maybe the Republicans would like it if they checked it out. The non-socialists in Norway support it because it works so well, especially compared with "the bad old days" of private medicine, when even the doctors' association advocated for socialized medicine as the only affordable way to make quality care available to all Norwegians.

One reason Norwegians like their system is that it's pro- economic innovation because it's not tied to the employer. Norwegians are free to change jobs for more challenging opportunities, or try their wings as entrepreneurs, because they don't have to worry about insurance - it's with them wherever they go. Economist Jonathan Gruber of MIT is one of many economists who believe that U.S. employer-tied health insurance is a drag on progress. But Obama's plan accepts the status quo even though it might not be affordable.

Norwegians like their system because it cuts red tape. The patient-doctor relationship isn't complicated by multiple insurances; if you need care, you get it as a matter of right. No bills to pay, no plans to juggle, no worry about your dependents, and no worry about your becoming a burden to your children.

Because Norwegians are practical, they enjoy saving money for quality health care. On a per capita basis, Norwegians spend $4,763 per year, and cover everyone, while U.S.'ers spend $7,290. By various standards of health quality, like life expectancy or rate of preventable deaths, Norway does better than the U.S. One key measure is physicians per capita: the U.S. has 2.43 physicians compared with Norway's 4 doctors per 1,000 population, even though Norway spends a third less of its Gross Domestic Product on health care than the U.S. does. (These numbers are from Bruce Bartlett, Forbes magazine columnist who was a former U.S. Treasury Department economist.)

While in Norway I did hear complaints - Norwegians famously believe everything can work better than it does - but I didn't interview anyone, from left wing to right wing, who would change the basic system. Maybe it's time for U.S. politicians to learn from what other countries are doing right.

We're killing each other with cars

InvestigateWest has a concise piece that sums it up:

We’re killing our neighbors with our cars

We are literally killing people with air pollution.

It’s a simple fact that tends to get forgotten in the everyday bustle of our lives. And it’s that bustle itself – specifically, zipping to and fro courtesy the internal-combustion engine – that is proving most difficult for air-pollution regulators to fight.

Photo/Flickr and icewaterdog

These points are brought out nicely in a story by Keith Matheny that ran Sunday in The Desert Sun, the newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif. Thousands of people die from air pollution each year there in the Coachella Valley alone.

Now, it’s true that Palm Springs is cursed with unfortunate geography of being just over a low pass from Los Angeles, and located in a bowl of a valley. So the gunk in the air from LA and western Riverside County becomes a problem for Palm Springs.

But it’s also true that you could find many places in this country where air pollution peaks to levels considered too high for breathing. Matheny explains:

It’s the mobile pollution sources — diesel trucks, construction equipment, cars, trains and planes — that pose the biggest air quality challenges.

He goes on to point out, though, that the California Air Resources Board has just 50 inspectors to target a state’s worth of vehicles. . . .

Another reminder that we've got to get Oregon-ized to put the needs of people ahead of cars. It's a matter of life and death.