Congress Versus Hobbit – NYTimes.com

Gail Collins

Come back! This is going to be really interesting. Or at least I will try to trick you into feeling that it’s interesting by making copious references to popular culture.

We should begin with Representative Dave Camp, a Republican from Michigan who is the current chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Camp has been on a quest to make the tax system cleaner and simpler. In this matter we might think of him as a Hobbit, facing great danger in his search for the golden W-2 form.

“I aim to launch and fight the tax reform battle once again,” Camp announced, rather grandly. After many, many hearings and discussions, he unveiled a proposal to reduce the nation’s high corporate tax rate by eliminating loopholes that allow a number of corporations to avoid paying anything at all.

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“Eat Less, Exercise More” Isn’t The Answer For Weight Loss | TIME

By Alexandra Sifferlin (@acsifferlin}

Experts make an argument for why we should stop counting calories

You’ve heard it before: To lose weight, simply eat less and exercise more. In theory, that makes sense. Actually, it’s not just in theory—science has proven that burning more calories than you consume will result in weight loss. But the trouble is that this only has short-term results. For long-term weight loss, it simply doesn’t work, say renowned obesity experts in a recent JAMA commentary.

Ultimately their argument is this: stop counting calories. “We intuitively know that eat less exercise more doesn’t work. It’s such simple advice that if it worked, my colleagues and I would be out of job,” says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The uncomfortable fact is that an exceedingly small number of people can lose a substantial amount of weight and keep it off following that advice.”

Blaming excess weight on people simply not changing their eating habits goes back thousands of years. Sloth and gluttony are two of the seven deadly sins, after all. But Ludwig and Dr. Mark L. Friedman of the Nutrition Science Initiative in San Diego, argue that this mindset disregards decades of research on the biological factors that control body weight. And they are not just talking about the role genetics play. They say we should stop viewing weight as something separate from other biological functions—like hormones and hunger and the effects of what foods we eat, not just how much of them.

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Not Just a Book: “Legacies, a Guide for Young Black Women in Planning Their Future”

Myrdith Leon Mccormack @BrandMeBookMe

This past month proved to be the most thought provoking for me in more ways than one.

My mother turned 77 and we laughed and joked about how time flies and how it is my turn now to experience the challenges of motherhood and the blessings and rewards that come with it.

My mother was born in Haiti to Haitian parents, and I had always thought our roots were only that of African and French people. But through our conversation, I found out that Spaniard blood runs through our family bloodline as well.

This new knowledge led me to do further researcher and to contact my dear friend Dolly Turner, who gifted me a piece of literature I will cherish and pass onto my children, Legacies, A Guide For Young Black Women Planning Their Future.

The stories in this book are designed to educate and motivate our children of all colors (and even adults) on black heritage, roots and the entire black race. The book is a combination of stories told by sixteen African Queens and almost forty successful black women.

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@Wonkblog: What our reasons for moving say about the state of the economy

By Emily Badger

The decision to move is an intensely personal and revealing one. We move homes because we lost a job or found a new one, because a new child was born or an older one finally left for college. We move because we have to, following a foreclosure, or because we can afford to, in search of a nicer place.

So many of life’s milestones — good or bad, qualifying for a first mortgage, surviving a hurricane — are accompanied by a moving van. In the aggregate, this means that we can add up all of the reasons why Americans move in a given year and glean something about what’s going on in their lives, and even, by extension, the economy.

Take the the 35.9 million people who moved between 2012 and 2013, according to the Census Bureau — either just down the block, into a new county or much farther away. Data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey reveals that, among their householders, 8.4 percent moved last year in search of cheaper housing. According to the data, 1.8 percent moved because of a foreclosure or eviction. Asked to pick the one reason that most contributed to their decision to move, 1.6 percent said they moved to look for work or because they lost a job.

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David Brooks: President Obama Was Right – NYTimes.com

David Brooks

Americans don’t have a common ancestry. Therefore, we have to work hard to build national solidarity. We go in for more overt displays of patriotism than in most other countries: politicians wearing flag lapel pins, everybody singing the national anthem before games, saying the Pledge of Allegiance at big meetings, revering sacred creedal statements, like the Gettysburg Address.

We need to do this because national solidarity is essential to the health of the country. This feeling of solidarity means that we do pull together and not apart in times of crisis, like after the attacks on 9/11. Despite all our polarization, we do accept the election results, even when the other party wins. People in New York do uncomplainingly send tax dollars to help people in New Mexico. We are able to assimilate waves of immigration.

National solidarity is especially important for the national defense. Men and women serve in the armed forces for a variety of reasons, but one of them is the awareness that it is an extraordinary privilege to be an American, that it is a debt that needs to be repaid with service.

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Timothy Egan: Tea Party Dead-Enders – NYTimes.com

Timothy Egan

The Tea Party is five years old this election season, which means it’s done teething and spitting up on itself, but still prone to temper tantrums, irrational outbursts and threats to take its toys and storm off if it doesn’t get its way.

As a movement, it is down to a couple of former talk-radio hosts running for office in two states of the old Confederacy, Texas and Mississippi. And in the latter, the Senate candidate, Chris McDaniel, has given a keynote to a group that considers Abraham Lincoln a war criminal. It’s not hard to make the case that the Tea Party has been distilled down to it logical essence.

“They don’t want to go to the moon,” said the comedian Bill Maher. “They want to howl at it.” Still, the Tea Party has also been around long enough to have a record, of sorts. Let’s look at the legacy:

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Paul Krugman: The Climate Domino – NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman

Maybe it’s me, but the predictable right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose at least some pain on some people. Where are the eye-catching fake horror stories?

For what it’s worth, however, the attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three C’s: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right-wingers claim that there isn’t any global warming, that it’s all a hoax promulgated by thousands of scientists around the world; that taking action to limit greenhouse gas emissions would devastate the economy; and that, anyway, U.S. policy can’t accomplish anything because China will just go on spewing stuff into the atmosphere.

I don’t want to say much about the conspiracy theorizing, except to point out that any attempt to make sense of current American politics must take into account this particular indicator of the Republican Party’s descent into madness. There is, however, a lot to say about both the cost and China issues.


Rima NYT Comment SmallI’m all for protecting the environment, whether it is the particles that are sent up into the air we breathe, the methane emissions into our air from the waste of millions of animals, the coal sludge stuff that careless companies allow to seep into our waters or chemicals that are released in various ways near population centers. 

Does the environment merit yet another op-ed, Professor? In normal times, I would enthusiastically say yes! Today, however, is far from normal and while the air we breathe is still important in the here and now and the future, what comes first for me is making sure that there is a safety net and work for those millions among us who can’t meet their most basic obligations.

To read the rest of my comment, click here.

 

Curated from www.nytimes.com

This Pen Can Draw Every Single Color In The World – Huff Post #Tech

By Kate Bratskeir

Imagine, instead of being forced to resort to “Forest Green” for the grass in your next masterpiece, you could take Photoshop’s “eyedropper” tool to extract the color from a single, blade of grass and turn that color into ink.

Scribble is a new device that lets you do just that. The pen matches hues from the world around you and transfers them onto paper or a mobile device. For the latter, the tool works in conjunction with a stylus and a mobile app to sync the colors that attract you onto your phone or tablet. Pretty cool.

The pen is armed with a 16-bit RGB color sensor that stores the colors you tell it to. Hold the device up to your friend’s gorgeous blonde hair, a vibrant flower or the pizza crust on your plate and Scribble will analyze the color and reproduce it with ink from its refillable cartridges.

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Ex-Inmate’s Court Fees Surged 1,000% While He Was In Prison. Now He Struggles To Buy Food

By Robbie Couch

When he was convicted of three drug charges in Washington state and sentenced to prison, he owed $1,800 in court fees — $600 for each charge. Shaw told HuffPost Live on Wednesday that the judge had stated those charges could be paid after he became a free man once again.

Upon his release from prison 14 years later, however, that number had skyrocketed to $21,000 — about a 1,066 percent increase. Shaw had been told during his 10th year behind bars that while he was serving the rules had changed — those charges had been collecting interest at Washington’s staggering rate of 12 percent.

“When I go to apply for a job, when I go to try to get a vehicle, or when I try to do anything where I need to run credit, they see I owe $21,000, and that makes it hard,” Shaw said, also noting he frequently has to choose between basic everyday purchases, like food and gas, or paying off his legal financial obligations (LFOs).

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