Undernews For May 26, 2010

Undernews For May 26, 2010

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WHEN THE TOP CAVES IN

What corporate America wanted was nothing less than the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing field would be leveled. Once having capitulated on economic matters, Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective will, government could then concentrate on the real business of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing selected industry, and strengthening police control over what would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate.

We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others for our loss. Worse, underneath the sturm und drang of political debate, the American establishment -- from corporate executive to media to politician -- reached a remarkable consensus that it no longer had to play by any rules but its own.

There is a phrase for this in some Latin American countries: the culture of impunity. In such places it has led to death squads, to the live bodies of dissidents being thrown out of military helicopters, to routine false imprisonment and baroque financial fraud. We are not there yet but are certainly moving in the same direction. In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition.

The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, at best practices only titular democracy, and puts itself at the service of what Hong Kong, borrowing from fascist Germany and Italy, refers to as "functional constituencies," which is mainly to say major corporations. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself. It creeps up day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism.

The intellectual achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics, and calm rationality that serves as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed and power. As Michael Douglas put it in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works."

Of course, there has always been an overabundance of greed in America's political and economic system. But a number of things have changed. As activist attorney George LaRoche points out, "Once, I think, we knew our greedy were greedy but they were obligated to justify their greed by reference to some of the other values in which all of us could participate. Thus, maybe ‘old Joe' was a crook but he was also a ‘pillar of the business community' or ‘a member of the Lodge' or a ‘good husband' and these things mattered. Now the pretense of justification is gone and greed is its own justification." The result is a stunning lack of restraint. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. - Sam Smith, Why Bother?, 2001

Sam Smith - When I wrote that, I assumed that, having ditched the First American Republic, we might well move towards some form of ordered and unpleasant tyranny. I assumed that the establishment would stick to its agenda that we would be expected to understand and obey.

After all, as I wrote at the time, "we all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." And a big part of living in a Mafia neighborhood is that you know what the rules are. But what I missed was the possibility that the forces driving the elite would not only destroy our America, but their America as well. And it wasn't until the chaos, confusion, crises, conflicts and controversies of the last year and a half that it became apparent that both victim and tyrant had lost this battle.

What has happened is that atomized ambition has created aggregated anarchy. No one controls the country any more. Yes, they are in charge of the buttons, but the buttons no longer work. The housing and stock markets have collapsed. Academics act as though they haven't gotten their GED yet. Intellectuals grasp at adjectives and metaphors that bear no contact with reality. Corporate executives speak of markets long gone. We are in wars no one can defend reasonably yet against which there is no major protest. Reporters prefer adjectives over facts and have come to think of skepticism as a form of extremism. Sanctified, sanctimonious figures in the church and the GOP are caught in gay trysts. And a hustler named Madoff easily rips off the very high society of which he was a part.

Among the most striking developments has been the impermeable inconsistency of the Obama administration. Although it has spoken repeatedly of transparency, seldom has there been an administration whose true purpose was more difficult to perceive.

Of course, it has been aided mightily by a Democratic Senate that created months of trouble for itself simply by choosing not to revert to traditional rules that could have made it the most, rather than the least, effective upper body in years. Instead, all you needed for a filibuster was to hand in a slip of paper.

The results have been unlike anything that has ever been seen on Capitol Hill. Put together the stimulus package, the health care bill and banking reform and you have a triptych of laws of uncertain purpose, volcanic confusion and concealed contradiction - one to two thousand pages making the future impenetrable until it will be too late to do much about it.

Congress used to pass legislation in order to accomplish something, whether for good or evil. Now we have major bills no one can accurately explain, no one can predict their consequences and no one can convincingly argue on their behalf save for a series of abstractions easily balanced by similar vagaries of the opposition.

We do know that the stimulus bill has so far done little worthwhile, unless you work on Wall Street. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not been significantly limited and public works are pathetic.

What the score will be for the health care measure is far harder to guess, for the legislators and Obama have simply hid some of its most important elements for years in the future.

As for the so-called bank reform measure, it was clearly a gift to Wall Street. Yet the LA Times, among others, called it "the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since the Great Depression."

In fact, the bill didn't even bring back the Glass-Steagall Act which would have been the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since, well since 1999, when Bill Clinton and Congress buried it.

Eric Alterman came closer to the truth: "When was the last time Congress passed a bill so large that even its significant provisions resisted summarization, both for reasons of complexity and enormity? If you said 'health care,' well, perhaps you're noticing a pattern. Once again, Democrats spent the better part of a year playing three-dimensional chess with themselves, lobbyists, and Republicans to pass. . . The actual provisions of this bill are beyond the capacity of most of us to understand"

Add to all this the BP disaster, in which our leaders desperately try to spin the oil away by endless news conferences in front of a gulf they never cared about before. And the attempt to dismantle a system of public education that for a couple of centuries helped make America a place to admire.

How does one define politics in times like this? In truth, the only parties that still have a whit of purpose are the Greens, Libertarians and Socialists and they can't hardly make it on the ballot. The rest has been reduced to office politics.

We have now gone through a year and a half when either nothing has happened or nobody can tell what has happened. Yet the elite still acts like they know what they are up to and their indentured media loyally spreads the myth.

For example, Obama appoints a Supreme Court justice whom none of her social ilk can describe much except to say how smart she is. These same figures, however, then proceed to admit that her views are a "blank page."

Is the only purpose of intelligence to go through life filling out crossword puzzles correctly? Might it not help to do or say something worthwhile that someone might remember? Apparently, by today's elite standards, that is not smart.

Obama himself warned us in his memoirs that he was merely a mirror, that people would see what they wanted in him. Only now are many who voted for him beginning to realize that Barack Obama never really existed; he was only a transient reaction to things that really existed - a reaction based on what seemed to be most beneficial or safest for himself at the moment.

One leader of this kind would be a problem in any period, but when a whole elite has given up shared values, community and conscience in order to play the game solo, you have a problem that can destroy your entire culture.

And that's where we find ourselves. Vicky Ward gets close to the nub in her book on the desperate housewives of Lehman Brothers. The illusion of common purpose - taken to the extreme of precisely defined clothing, rigorously shared charities and climbing mountains together - is finally shattered by the reality that the men who were supposed to be partners in a common endeavor actually viewed each other as one more market to manipulate and beat.

Lately a strange image has been bouncing about in my head. It is a scene of urban riots, flames in the street, of aimed guns and aimless bodies. But the people in the image aren't the poor and the helpless, and they are not in Athens or Bangkok. Rather they are in Washington and they are judges and CEOs and lawyers and MBAs and cabinet officials and TV news hosts. They are looting stores, smashing statues, and lighting gasoline in a desperate last act of the greed that got them so far yet now has so little to offer. Their memories can no longer recall conscience, causes, or community. They have no friends, allies or movements. They are on their own just like the Lehman Brothers housewife to whom former friends would longer speak after the firm had died.

We have, from a young age, been trained to respect, admire and follow our leaders. Even now, you can hardly find a major op ed writer or a TV commentator who will admit that those who are supposed to show us the way have disintegrated like, say, a malfunctioning deep water well or a high rolling hedge fund.

But we're on our own now. Which was never a bad idea; it was just that we weren't meant to think about it.

If Obama has done us one favor, perhaps it is this: we now know there is no one waiting behind the curtain to save us.

But there still is an America and a good one. You just won't find it on the front pages or on the evening news. It is in our communities, our towns and our states and we have to rediscover and build this America from the bottom up.

It can happen, but the first step is to stop listening to an elite that has destroyed our land and disgraced itself, an elite that has rolled into one great cultural tar ball.

So move on, folks, nothing to see here.

From here on out, it's up to us.

BOOKSHELF: TEACHING HEDGE FUND VALUES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

This article is taken from a forthcoming book, Education and the Crisis of Public Values

Henry A. Giroux - As the Obama administration's educational reform movement increasingly adopts the interests and values of a "free-market" culture, many students graduate public schooling and higher education with an impoverished political imagination, unable to recognize injustice and unfairness. They often find themselves invested in a notion of unattached individualism that severs them from any sense of moral and social responsibility to others or to a larger notion of the common good. At the same time, those students who jeopardize the achievement of the quantifiable measures and instrumental values now used to define school success are often subjected to harsh disciplinary procedures, pushed out of schools, subjected to medical interventions or, even worse, pushed into the criminal justice system. Most of these students are poor whites and minorities of color and, increasingly, students with special needs.

To be sure, the empirical emphasis of conservative school policy has been in place for decades. In keeping with this trend, the Obama administration's educational policy under the leadership of Arne Duncan lacks a democratic vision and sense of moral direction. Consequently, it reproduces rather than diminishes many of these problems. In addition, these policies bear the trace of the ideological remnants of a second Gilded Age that repudiated civic education and schooling as a public good. Rather than arguing for educational reforms and a value shift away from the ethically deadening demands of an egocentric, consumerist society that can only respond to the lure of goods, profits and "rational investments," Obama and Duncan are pushing the same pernicious set of values that redefine citizens as stockholders, customers and clients.

Similarly, they have pushed for modes of teaching and learning that promote a formative culture that in effect produces and legitimates a culture of illiteracy and moral indifference that too closely correlates with what journalist Matt Taibbi rightly calls a "world of greed without limits."

Almost all of Duncan's polices are indebted to the codes of a market-driven business culture, legitimated through discourses of measurement, efficiency and utility. This is a discourse that values hedge fund managers over teachers, privatization over the public good, management over leadership and training over education. Duncan's fervent support of neoliberal values are well-known and are evident in his support for high-stakes testing, charter schools, school-business alliances, merit pay, linking teacher pay to higher test scores, offering students monetary rewards for higher grades, CEO-type management, abolishing tenure, defining the purpose of schooling as largely job training, the weakening of teacher unions and blaming teachers exclusively for the failure of public schooling.

His support of the firing of the entire faculty of a Central Falls High School in Rhode Island is indicative of his disdain for public school teachers and teacher unions. Although teachers and administrators have to accept responsibility for the academic performance of their students, there are often many other factors that have to be taken into consideration such as a parent's involvement, the socio-economic status of the students, the existence of support services for students and the challenges that emerge when students do not speak English as a first language. Many of the Central Falls students did not speak English well, came from families that were poor, worked after school and had few support services and specialists at their disposal. Obama and Duncan ignored all of these factors because they have little sense of the larger socio-economic forces that bear down on schools, putting many students at a decided disadvantage when compared to their well-resourced, middle-class counterparts.

Duncan's collusion with the growing corporatization and militarizing of public schools, along with the increased use of harsh disciplinary modes of punishment, surveillance, control and containment, especially in schools inhabited largely by poor minorities of color, reveals his unwillingness to address the degree to which many schools are dominated by a politics of fear, containment and authoritarianism, even as he advances reform as a civil rights issue.

Schools are not merely places where potential workers learn the marketable skills and abilities necessary to secure a decent job, they are also, as Martha C. Nussbaum pointed out, key institutions of the public good and are "crucial to both the health of democracy and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship."

Curriculum in this instance is not simply knowledge to be consumed or valued for its measurable utility, it should be rooted in the best that has been produced by human beings and designed to both stir the imagination and empower young people with a sense of integrity, justice and hope for the future.

When educational reform neglects matters of politics, critical thinking, creativity and the power of the imagination, it loses its hold on preparing young people for a democratic future and condemns them to a world where the only values that matter are individual acquisition, unchecked materialism, economic growth and a winner-take-all mentality.

WHY RAND PAUL IS FULL OF IT

Benjamin Todd, NAACP - The Civil Rights Act heralded the modern era of our nation's history; one in which race-based discrimination, on paper at least, was relegated to our history texts. It is a law that also doubles as a calling to our better nature.

In one sense I have got to hand it to Rand Paul. It takes some serious guts to publicly challenge such a cherished pillar of the modern American identity. Unfortunately, in the political arena, guts need to be tempered with brains as well.

Mr. Paul says that he supports all efforts to fight government-sponsored discrimination. He has no quibble with the end of segregation in public schools, for example, or in public-sector hiring. His only dispute is with desegregation of the private sector - the local merchants and lunch-counter operators whose speech rights were apparently encroached on by an overzealous federal government. In Mr. Paul's worldview, the free hand of the marketplace would have eventually forced most of those businesses to serve black folk anyway, because it was in their economic interest to do so.

The problem is that it never quite worked that way. Even after Jim Crow laws were overturned, those business establishments that bucked the system and served an integrated clientele faced threats, coercion and violence from a ruling class - a group made up not merely of local thugs, but of fellow business owners and, far too often, the local police force itself.

This was the point of federal intervention in the first place. The states and municipalities on the front lines of the desegregation movements were themselves the most likely to be institutionally corrupted by the cancer of racism. A relatively more objective outside party - the federal government - would have to serve as a mediating force.

Of course the story went far beyond potential corruption. Let's assume that we are dealing with a completely race-neutral local political environment. Society still relies on government enforcement - a police force - to enforce its laws. In Mr. Paul's world, a white gas station owner would be completely within his rights to deny service to a black family traveling on a holiday road trip. But say the family took a stand - refusing to leave the station until they were allowed to fill their tank or buy a snack. Do we honestly accept that it is the role of the municipal police force to step in and protect the owner's "right" to discriminate based on race? That they should arrest and charge the offending family for trespass?

The fact is that the world is far more complex than Mr. Paul's college dorm theoretical exercises would suggest.

Does Rand Paul defend, for example, the right of banks to not extend mortgages to people of color? Even in communities without other banks to compete? Should the government never be allowed regulate private business. Even for health and safety reasons?

WHY EVEN NEW GREEN BUILDINGS MAY NOT BE ENERGY EFFICIENT

Sarah Wolpow, Times Record - Many of us would be surprised to discover that fully 40 percent of climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases in the United States come from the buildings in which we live and work.

This figure was put forth by Gaius Hennin, president of the Shelter Institute. . . The mission of the Shelter Institute, based in Woolwich, is to help people create "durable, adaptable, energy-conscious buildings, worthy of the timber from which they are built."

Hennin outlined two different types of energy used by a building during its life cycle. Operating energy, the energy required to heat, cool and light the building, is the easiest to understand, and often garners the most attention from homeowners. After operating energy is expended, it cannot be recovered.

Embodied energy is the energy required to harvest and manufacture all the raw materials, transport them to the building site, and assemble them into a structure. The energy needed to maintain, upgrade or replace components of the building during its lifetime is also included.

Hennin cited data from the Athena Institute, a Canadian nonprofit group working to conduct life cycle assessments of buildings, indicating that a quarter of the energy used during the life span of a typical building occurs in the form of embodied energy.

The longer a building stands, the more energy goes into maintenance and restoration, thus driving up the total embodied energy of the building. Older, historic structures, therefore, have a higher percentage of embodied energy than newer buildings.

When a building is demolished and another built in its place, even a highly energy-efficient new building will have a hard time ever recouping the lost embodied energy of the old structure, plus all the energy involved in demolition, land-filling, harvesting new materials and finally rebuilding.

According to Hennin, taking down a typical home and replacing it with a new 3,000-square-foot one (making sure to add in the lost embodied energy of the old building), uses the equivalent of 36,600 gallons of gas - enough to fuel a 20-mile daily commute in a Prius hybrid for 169 years. That’s before you even turn on the lights.

THE NEW GREAT GAME OF CENTRAL ASIA

Proposed Central Asian Gas Pipelines

This is an excerpt from a much longer report in the Journal of Energy Security.

John Foster, Journal of Energy Security - As Western powers look for an end game in Afghanistan, that country’s role as a planned transit route for natural gas from Turkmenistan deserves scrutiny. The long-planned pipeline, named TAPI after the initials of the four participating countries (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India), has been prominently discussed in the Asian press but rarely mentioned in the West. . . .

Participating countries have held numerous high-level planning meetings during the past eight years, with Asian Development Bank sponsorship and multilateral support. When construction will start is uncertain because security in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan remains a problem. . .

TAPI is expected to boost the economies of all four countries. In 2008, Pakistan's Prime Minister described the pipeline as a vital project for the development and progress of the region. Further, pipelines are potentially good for peace. As President Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan said: "The pipeline between Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India will be a weighty contribution to the positive cooperation on this continent."

US policy recognizes the importance of Central Asia’s energy resources and the economic possibilities they offer in world markets and in the region itself. Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, said in 2007: "One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan," and to link South and Central Asia "so that energy can flow to the south." In December 2009, George Krol, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, told Congress that one US priority in Central Asia is "to increase development and diversification of the region’s energy resources and supply routes." He said, "Central Asia plays a vital role in our Afghanistan strategy.". . .

Understanding the significance of the TAPI pipeline requires shining the spotlight on Turkmenistan, the source of the gas. Turkmenistan is one of five Central Asian states that became independent in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up.

Disagreement exists on how much gas the country actually holds. According to the BP Statistical Review 2009, Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth largest reserves of natural gas, 7.94 trillion cubic meters, exceeded only by Russia, Iran and Qatar. . . . The new estimate follows the 2008 audit of the huge South Yolotan-Osman field in western Turkmenistan, conducted by the UK auditing firm Gaffney, Cline & Associates. The audit estimated the reserves of this field alone to be between 4 and 14 TCM of gas, making it the world's fourth or fifth largest field.

Other fields remain to be audited, and Turkmen officials predicted in 2008 that the final results would be much higher. Since then, two publications have cast doubt on the audit results, relying on information obtained from unnamed Russian and Turkmen sources who suggest that Turkmen officials may have provided false data to exaggerate the size of the reserves. . .

Turkmenistan is far from the world’s oceans, so it must rely on pipelines to get its gas to market. Like railway lines in the 19th century, pipeline routes are important because they connect trading partners and influence the regional balance of power. Until recently, Turkmenistan’s gas flowed only north through Russia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, competing world powers have vied to move the gas in other directions. The rivalry is sometimes called the New Great Game, an update of the 19th century Great Game in Central Asia between the Russian and British Empires. . . .

Russia remains a key player today. In 2007, it signed an agreement with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to build a new gas pipeline that would parallel an older one and add to its pipeline network. Russia is the world’s largest producer of natural gas and is a major supplier of gas to Europe. Currently, Russia is building pipelines (South Stream and North Stream) that would link its network to various points in Europe. From Russia’s viewpoint, they provide diversity, adding to the existing pipeline through Ukraine.

In December 2009, China tapped into Turkmenistan’s gas reserves, opening a new pipeline from Turkmenistan that travels 1,833 km through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to reach western China. There it connects with the Chinese line east to Shanghai. Pipelines allow Turkmenistan’s gas to flow all the way to western Europe via Russia and east across China to Shanghai-enormous distances.

The US and European Union support Turkmenistan’s policy of multiple export routes. They promote a pipeline project under the Caspian Sea to bring Turkmen gas west to Azerbaijan, where it would connect with the recently-built South Caucasus pipeline to Turkey. In Turkey, it would link with Nabucco, a planned pipeline to Austria. Russia, a littoral country on the Caspian Sea, objects to construction of the trans-Caspian link. Since Azerbaijan doesn’t have enough gas to fill the Nabucco pipeline, Turkey is exploring alternatives, including gas from Iran. The US objects to supplies from Iran.

Iran has its own interest in gas from Turkmenistan. It imports Turkmen gas into northern Iran to supply local markets that are far from its own gas fields. . .

In Western countries, official comments on the TAPI pipeline are few. One exception is Canada. In June 2008, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report entitled "A Pipeline Through a Troubled Land: Afghanistan, Canada and the New Great Game." The report received widespread attention, including front-page headlines in the Globe and Mail newspaper. Reporters followed up by asking questions about the role of Canadian forces in Afghanistan. A senior government official-who spoke on the condition of anonymity-told The Globe and Mail that Canada broadly supports the Afghan effort to build a legitimate and stable economy, including projects like the TAPI pipeline, but "Canada has not been promoting the pipeline as part of a broader geopolitical agenda, as the Americans have.". . .

In January 2009, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO Secretary General, said, "Protecting pipelines is first and foremost a national responsibility. And it should stay like that. NATO is not in the business of protecting pipelines. But when there's a crisis, or if a certain nation asks for assistance, NATO could, I think, be instrumental in protecting pipelines on land." These comments suggest that NATO troops could be called upon to assist Afghanistan in protecting the pipeline. Since pipelines last 50 years or more, this could auger a very long commitment in Afghanistan. . .

Since the TAPI route passes through areas with major insurgencies, security is clearly an issue. In both Afghanistan and the tribal area of Pakistan, people along the route have long histories of independence from central and foreign powers. Unless their cooperation is sought and the benefits to them are clear, pipeline security will be an expensive nightmare for years to come.

WHY IS AFGHANISTAN SO IMPORTANT?

PETRAEUS PREPARES FOR ANOTHER WAR

Anti War - Officials have admitted that Gen. David Petraeus signed a secret order months ago to dramatically escalate the number of covert military operations taking place in the Middle East. Special focus was said to have been given to Somalia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Gen. Petraeus

Though officials spun the operation as aimed primarily at al-Qaeda, some sources have conceded that the Iran operations were aimed at "paving the way" for an eventual US invasion of Iran, should President Obama order one in the near future.

The US has been openly funding opposition figures in Iran in an attempt at forcing "regime change," and in the past it has also funded terrorist outfit Jundallah, but little is known about its direct on-the-ground operations in the region, except that they are growing at a serious clip.

The overall results of the US escalation have yet to be seen, but the numerous attacks against targets in Yemen in December, including the failed Christmas Eve assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, appear to have been at least partially related to the Petraeus order.

But while the attacks are the most visible result of the order, officials report it primarily focuses on spying across the region. Some analysts are expressing concerns that the military's spying, particularly in allied nations, could do serious harm to US diplomatic goals in the region.

DOES OBAMA KNOW ABOUT IT?

Robert Dreyfuss, Nation - If President Obama knew about this, authorized it and still supports it, then Obama has crossed a red line, and the president will stand revealed as an aggressive, militaristic liberal interventionist who bears a closer resemblance to the president he succeeded than to the ephemeral reformer that he pretended to be in 2008, when he ran for office. If he didn't know, if he didn't understand the order, and if he's unwilling to cancel it now that it's been publicized, then Obama is a feckless incompetent. Take your pick.

If Congress has any guts at all, it will convene immediate investigative hearings into a power grab by Petraeus, a politically ambitious general, and the Pentagon's arrogant Special Operations team, led by Admiral Eric T. Olson, who collaborated with Petraeus. And Congress needs to ask the White House, What did you know, and when did you know it?

STUDY: YOUNGER PEOPLE'S WEIGHT DOES NOT AFFECT THEIR HEALTH

Scientific Blogging - A Body Mass Index of 30 or above, a standard indicator of obesity, is not associated with poorer health among adults under age 40, according to a new study.

In addition, researchers found that across all age groups studied, from 25 to 70 years, there was little difference in the current health status in normal-weight vs. overweight people based on the medications they took.

The study was published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The researchers acknowledge that health problems in older adults with BMIs of 30 or higher might be traced back to carrying extra weight in young adulthood. Among people age 40 or older, use of medication was significantly higher among adults considered to be obese compared to adults with a normal weight.

However, the large population study suggested that people with a BMI in the overweight range are generally not at a higher risk for current health problems compared to people of normal weight, regardless of age.

"A lot of people make a big deal about those overweight BMIs, but we didn't see a difference between overweight and normal-weight adults across all age groups in the percentage of people medicated, or in the number of medications taken," said Brant Jarrett, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in neuroscience at Ohio State University.

"For college-age adults, this should help them realize that they don't have to worry so much if they have a BMI of 27 or 28. Some young people with these BMIs feel like, 'I'm going to have all these problems, I need to try 50 different diets.' And what is all that stress and dieting doing to your body? Probably more damage than the extra 15 pounds is," Jarrett said.

Jarrett noticed during his studies on stress that many people, especially college students, said being overweight was one of their main stressors.

U.S. RANKS 42ND IN CHILD MORTALITY

Green Change - The number of children younger than 5 who die this year will fall to 7.7 million, down from 11.9 million two decades ago, according to new estimates by population health experts.

But as much of the world makes strides in reducing child mortality, the U.S. is increasingly lagging and ranks 42nd globally, behind much of Europe as well as the United Arab Emirates, Cuba and Chile.

Twenty years ago, the U.S. ranked 29th in the child mortality rate, according to data analyzed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The U.S., which is projected to have 6.7 deaths per 1,000 children this year, saw a 42% decline in child mortality, a pace that is on par with Kazakhstan, Sierra Leone and Angola.

"There are an awful lot of people who think we have the best medical system in the world," said Dr. Christopher Murray, who directs the institute and is an author of the study. "The data is so contrary to that."
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MARYLAND MAN CHARGED FOR TAKING PIX OF PLAINCLOTHES COP STOP

CHUCK SCHUMER: A ROLLING CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Timothy P. Carney, DC Examiner - Three years ago, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., leaned on hedge funds to lobby more. The funds soon hired his banking staffer as a lobbyist. She began raising money for Schumer. Now he's championing financial regulation that would benefit these hedge funds. Racket might be the right word here.

In January 2007, the month Democrats took control of Congress, Schumer invited hedge funds executives to dinner, where, the New York Times reported, he "had some simple advice for the billionaires in his midst: If you want Washington to work with you, you had better work better with one another."

Until then, hedge funds had largely minded their own business. But in the 2008 elections, they tripled their previous contributions to politicians, with Schumer and Barack Obama as their favorites, along with other Senate Democrats (Schumer was head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee).

But more to Schumer's point, the hedge funds shifted their lobbying into high gear. After spending less than half a million in 2006, they spent more than $6 million in 2007.

In a June 2007 banking committee hearing, Schumer used his chairman privileges to praise a staffer: "This is the last hearing for somebody who has served this committee and me and the people of New York and America extremely well, and that's Carmencita Whonder, my banking person, who's going on to other things."

Those "other things," included (1) lobbying Congress on behalf of hedge funds, and (2) raising money for Schumer from hedge funds. . .

Within days of Whonder's hire, she registered three private equity firms as clients. By the time Obama came to office, her clients included the Private Equity Council and seven private equity or hedge fund firms.

Then, in March 2009, with financial overhaul looming, the hedge funds' main lobby group, the Managed Funds Association, retained Whonder. . .

LEGAL DANGERS IN CONFRONTING A GRIZZLY BEAR

Jackson Hole News, WY - A jury last week found 41-year-old Stephen Westmoreland guilty of a misdemeanor charge of illegally taking a grizzly bear stemming from an incident in September when he shot a bear in Ditch Creek. He claimed self-defense in a trial that hinged on the behavior of the bear, among other things.

Mark Bruscino, bear management program supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, testified at the trial about how bears act before they attack a person and told jurors that most often bruins will retreat during an encounter.

"This whole thing adds up to that people need to make sure they are in a self-defense situation," Bruscino said in an interview after the trial. "You can’t kill wildlife based on an undemonstrated fear of an unrealistic threat."

Westmoreland shot the animal at 40 yards after he encountered it feeding on a moose carcass. The animal died on the other side of the moose from Westmoreland and without charging.

In their verdict, jurors seemed to acknowledge that Westmoreland had no malicious intent when he killed the animal. But they were convinced he was not defending himself from a real threat.

"Under the circumstances, we feel the defendant acted out of fear instead of self-defense," the verdict said.

The case shows we need to understand the best ways to avoid conflicts with and defend ourselves from grizzly bears," Weichman said. "We need to understand when we’re in danger and when we’re not. What we need to do, especially if we’re carrying firearms, is understand grizzly bears if we’re in grizzly country."

"Just killing a grizzly bear because it scares you is not going to fly," he said. "That’s the message of this case."

During the trial, Bruscino described a continuum of bear behavior. A grizzly that encounters a human will flee 99 percent of the time, he said. After that, bear behavior might include disinterest in a human, curiosity followed by a retreat, stress behaviors such as excessive salivation and panting, bluff behavior such as false charges and finally an attack.

[Defens counsel] DeFazio said hunters, hikers and other backcountry users are not going to engage in "some sort of scientific calculation based on their observations" before deciding whether to pull the trigger.
Some conflicting opinions remain about what certain signs mean, he said.

"Whether or not upright ears indicates aggressive behavior is still in question, and whether or not to fire a warning shot seems to still be in question within the Game and Fish Department - as was exhibited within the trial," he said.

POWER WE DIDN'T KNOW WE HAD

From a news report on Lindsay Lohan:

Earlier Beverly Hills Court judge Marsha Revel had ordered the actress to attend the progressive review in person, failing that she will be arrested.

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