Toon: Losing our Religious Freedom

The Speed of Hypocrisy: How America Got Hooked on Legal Meth

A terrible number of words have been written about Breaking Bad, yet none have struck upon the irony at its core. For all of the cult hit’s vaunted fine-brush realism and sly cultural references, the show never even winked at the real world “blue” that grew up alongside it.

During the five years Heisenberg spent as a blue-meth cook, the nation experienced a nonfictional explosion in the manufacture and sale of sapphire pills and azure capsules containing amphetamine. This other “blue,” known by its trade names Adderall and Vyvanse, found its biggest market in classrooms like Walter White’s. As this blue speed is made and sold in anodyne corporate environments, the drama understandably focused on blue meth and its buyers, usually depicted as jittery tweakers picking at lesions and wearing rags on loan from the cannibal gangs of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

For presenting such a compelling one-sided cartoon of speed in America, Breaking Bad deserves recognition as a modern day Reefer Madness. That 1937 film immortalized the selective attentions of the first drug war, in which hysteria was stoked over Mexican marijuana but nothing was said about that era’s brisk drugstore trade in Benzedrine, the patented speed of the Great Depression.

To understand why the “edgy” AMC drama fits so snug in the Reefer Madness mold, it helps to see the show from the perspective of pharmaceutical executives, whom I suspect held some rowdy Breaking Bad viewing parties.

Because here’s the thing about hide-the-children caricatures of street speed and the class stigmas they weave: Without them, the needle starts to skip on pharma’s marketing lullabies about the safety and expanding therapeutic application of their purer product. Take away Goofus and Gallant-style contrasts between backwoods Crank Zombies and suburban Adderall Aspirationals, and suddenly we’re having some very awkward conversations about the periodic table, addiction, and the experience of getting high.

more

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-speed-of-hypocrisy-how-america-got-hooked-on-legal-meth

Get ready for an even bigger threat to Obamacare

Now that the Supreme Court has issued its ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, the legal fight over the Affordable Care Act will shift a few blocks away to another Washington courtroom, where a far more fundamental challenge to Obamacare is about to be decided by the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Indeed, if Hobby Lobby will create complications for Obamacare, Halbig vs. Burwell could trigger a full cardiac arrest.

The Halbig case challenges the massive federal subsidies in the form of tax credits made available to people with financial need who enroll in the program. In crafting the act, Congress created incentives for states to set up health insurance exchanges and disincentives for them to opt out. The law, for example, made the subsidies available only to those enrolled in insurance plans through exchanges "established by the state."

But despite that carrot — and to the great surprise of the administration — some 34 states opted not to establish their own exchanges, leaving it to the federal government to do so. This left the White House with a dilemma: If only those enrollees in states that created exchanges were eligible for subsidies, a huge pool of people would be unable to afford coverage, and the entire program would be in danger of collapse.

Indeed, the Halbig plaintiffs — individuals and small businesses in six states that didn't establish state exchanges — objected that, without the tax credits, they could have claimed exemption from the individual mandate penalty because they would be deemed unable to pay for the coverage. If the courts agree with them, the costs would go up in all 34 states that didn't establish state exchanges, and the resulting exemptions could lead to a mass exodus from Obamacare.

more

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0701-turley-obamacare-subsidy-halbig-20140701-story.html

The tea party would rather burn than submit to Washington

by RICHARD COHEN

A friend of mine worked for a small-town newspaper years ago and had to write the weather report. The county fair was approaching, but the prediction was for rain. So the editors, fearing the wrath of local merchants, ordered my friend to change “rainy” to “sunny.” That was the newspaper’s policy. It has since been adopted by much of the Republican Party.

It is a stunning thing, when you think about it: GOP conservatives adopting a position of studied ignorance or, to put it more humorously, a version of what Chico Marx said in “Duck Soup”: “Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

My own eyes show rising ocean levels. They show the Arctic ice cap shrinking. They show massive beach erosion, homes toppling into the sea and meteorological records indicating steadily increasing temperatures. The Earth, our dear little planet, just had the hottest May on record.

My eyes read projections that are even more dire — drought, stifling heat, massive and more frequent storms, parts of coastal cities underwater and, in the American Southeast, an additional 11,000 to 36,000 people dying per year from the extreme heat. These and other ghoulish statistics are taken from a report on global warming funded by former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and hedge fund manager Tom Steyer.

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-on-climate-the-tea-party-would-rather-burn-than-submit-to-washington/2014/06/30/35166398-007d-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html

The 49-page Supreme Court Hobby Lobby ruling mentioned women just 13 times

snip:

The difference between the majority opinion of five of the court's men and the dissent of its three women (plus Justice Stephen Breyer) is instructive. The majority opinion is largely about the rights of corporations, employers and those with religious beliefs; the dissent is very much about women — about their health, the sums they spend to access care and the costs they pay when none is available.

The 49-page majority opinion mentions "women" or "woman" a mere 13 times (I've excluded footnotes and URLs here). It does not mention women's well-being once.

Ginsburg's dissent, at 35 pages, mentions women (singular or plural) 43 times, their well-being four times.

An opinion on this case, in short, looks very different when it's written by a woman. Of course, all three of the court's sitting female justices were appointed by Democratic presidents, and so their gender is not the only thing that unites them. But what's so compelling about Ginsburg's dissent is not merely the legal interpretations she reaches, but the facts she brings on board to get there.

the rest
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/30/the-49-page-supreme-court-hobby-lobby-ruling-mentioned-women-just-13-times/?tid=rssfeed

Tuesday Toon Roundup 3: The Rest

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GOP







Penn


Drones



World Cup





War

Tuesday Toon Roundup 2: Losing my Religion

Tuesday Toon Roundup 1: Discriminating Court

Taking aspirin regularly may reduce a person’s risk of developing pancreatic cancer in half

Taking aspirin regularly may reduce a person’s risk of developing pancreatic cancer in half—and the degree of protection could increase the longer the aspirin is taken.

Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest cancers, with the five-year survival rate at less than 5 percent. By the time it is diagnosed, it is usually too late to treat successfully.

For a new study, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers collected data from a Connecticut population study of 362 newly diagnosed pancreatic cancer patients and a control group of 690 disease-free people. They analyzed associations between risk of pancreatic cancer and past aspirin use.

The study, which took place from 2005 to 2009, looked at regular use of both low-dose aspirin (75 to 325 mg. per day, taken for heart disease prevention) and regular-dose aspirin (325 to 1,200 mg. taken for pain or anti-inflammation purposes).

Overall, both low-dose and regular-dose aspirin reduced the risk for developing pancreatic cancer by half. Significantly, among those who took aspirin for more than 10 years, the risk reduction was even higher—60 percent.

more

http://www.futurity.org/aspirin-can-cut-pancreatic-cancer-risk-much-60-724202/

Ninety-nine percent of the ocean's plastic is missing

Millions of tons. That’s how much plastic should be floating in the world’s oceans, given our ubiquitous use of the stuff. But a new study finds that 99% of this plastic is missing. One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it.

If that’s the case, “there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web,” says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. “And we are part of this food web.”

Humans produce almost 300 million tons of plastic each year. Most of this ends up in landfills or waste pits, but a 1970s National Academy of Sciences study estimated that 0.1% of all plastic washes into the oceans from land, carried by rivers, floods, or storms, or dumped by maritime vessels. Some of this material becomes trapped in Arctic ice and some, landing on beaches, can even turn into rocks made of plastic. But the vast majority should still be floating out there in the sea, trapped in midocean gyres—large eddies in the center of oceans, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

To figure out how much refuse is floating in those garbage patches, four ships of the Malaspina expedition, a global research project studying the oceans, fished for plastic across all five major ocean gyres in 2010 and 2011. After months of trailing fine mesh nets around the world, the vessels came up light—by a lot. Instead of the millions of tons scientists had expected, the researchers calculated the global load of ocean plastic to be about only 40,000 tons at the most, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We can’t account for 99% of the plastic that we have in the ocean,” says Duarte, the team’s leader.

more

http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/06/ninety-nine-percent-oceans-plastic-missing