Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here.
All the best components of a classic summer clambake—potatoes, shrimp, corn on the cob—get an extra layer of flavor when grilled and brushed with gingery miso butter in this festive, large-format feast.
For the very best results, we brine the chicken before it goes on the grill; sear it over the flames; finish cooking it on the other side of the grill; then toss it in a robust vinaigrette when it’s done.
These zesty chicken fingers get their flavor from a tangy buttermilk marinade and a breading spiked with smoked paprika. Be sure to plan ahead—these chicken pieces taste best when marinated for 24 hours before they are cooked.
Served alongside boozy martinis, this is the classic cheese ball of yesteryear. A few updates make it perfect for family get-togethers and retro-chic parties alike. This recipe sneaks in a small amount of Brie to add an extra layer of creamy goodness that will make guests proclaim, “This is the best cheese ball ever!”
This moist pound cake is the most requested Swans Down recipe of all time. Whether it’s your first time trying it or a perennial favorite, the fork-tender cake is unforgettable.
Choose cherries or apricots or a mix of both for this classic French baked custard. And no special equipment needed means this is the best summer vacation rental house dessert we know.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
France falls to Nazi Germany on what becomes a day of several key events during World War II; Joe Louis knocks out Max Schmeling in their boxing rematch; Entertainers Judy Garland and Fred Astaire die.
Trump warns Iran of ‘obliteration’ in event of war
President Trump has said he does not want war but warned Iran it would face “obliteration” if conflict broke out.
Speaking to NBC on Friday, he said the US was open to talks but would not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
He also expanded on his last-minute decision to call off strikes planned in response to the shooting down of a US unmanned drone this week, saying he had been told 150 Iranians would be killed.
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was proportionate,” he said.
Tehran says the unmanned US aircraft entered Iranian airspace early on Thursday morning. The US maintains it was shot down in international airspace.
The rise of the deepfake and the threat to democracy
On 4 May 2016, Jimmy Fallon, the host of NBC’s The Tonight Show, appeared in a sketch dressed as Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee. Wearing a blond wig and three coats of bronzer, he pretended to phone Barack Obama – played by Dion Flynn – to brag about his latest primary win in Indiana. Both men appeared side by side in split screen, facing the camera. Flynn’s straight-man impression of Obama, particularly his soothing, expectant voice, was convincing, while Fallon played the exaggerated caricature that all of Trump’s mimics – and the man himself – settle into.
Three years later, on 5 March 2019, footage of the sketch was posted on the YouTube channel derpfakes under the title The Presidents. The first half of the clip shows the opening 10 seconds or so of the sketch as it originally aired. Then the footage is replayed, except the faces of Fallon and Flynn have been transformed into, seemingly, the real Trump and Obama, delivering the same lines in the same voices, but with features rendered almost indistinguishable from those of the presidents.
Missouri refuses to renew licence for state’s last abortion provider
Clinic has been existing through series of shot measure legal reprieves
Missouri’s only abortion clinic has lost its licence to perform the procedure, though it remains open at least temporarily under a judge’s order.
The state health department notified the Planned Parenthood clinic in St Louis on Friday its abortion licence will not be renewed. A letter from the state cited “serious and extensive” deficiencies.
The state’s decision came at the deadline set by St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer. During a brief hearing, Stelzer said a preliminary injunction he previously issued would remain in place, meaning the clinic can continue to perform abortions at least until he issues a final ruling outlining the next steps. He offered no timetable for that ruling.
Fashion world shaken by cultural appropriation claims
The women embroiderers of the remote Mexican mountain village of Tenango de Doria made worldwide headlines this week when their government went to war with an American designer for “plagiarising” their patterns.
Wes Gordon, the artistic director of the New York label founded by Venezuelan designer Carolina Herrera, found himself accused of cultural appropriation.
The women of the indigenous community in the east of the country told AFP how they felt cheated of their traditional motifs where “each element has a personal, family or community meaning”.
The Istanbul race is personal for Erdoğan. The result could transform Turkey
On a recent afternoon at a coffee house in the Istanbul neighborhood where Turkey’s president grew up, Güngör Saytuğ was ruminating on his old friend’s rise to power.
Decades ago, Saytuğ and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were sitting in the locker room after an amateur soccer game when Erdoğan announced out of the blue that he would someday become prime minister, and then president.
Not long after that, Erdoğan launched his political career as a self-styled man of the people, playing on his “Kasımpaşalı” roots to rocket from relative obscurity to mayor of Istanbul in 1994. To many voters here, he is still the local boy from Kasımpaşa, a working-class neighborhood known for its naval tradition and its top-flight soccer team. Erdoğan never made it to the pros, but the stadium now bears his name.
The Supreme Court has overturned a murder conviction for Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man who has been tried for murder six times, saying that the prosecutor violated the Constitution by excluding black potential jurors from the trial.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Friday that Doug Evans, a white prosecutor, unconstitutionally excluded eligible black jurors from Flowers’s trial for murdering four people in 1996 inside a furniture store. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
This isn’t the first time Flowers, who was featured on the second season of the In the Darkpodcast from American Public Media, has had his conviction overturned in court. In fact, Evans has tried Flowers six times — 1997, 1999, 2004, 2007, 2008, and 2010 — and, each time, the jury has either failed to reach a verdict or the conviction was thrown out on appeal. In his last trial, in 2010, the jury, made up of one black and 11 white jurors, sentenced him to death.
Summer arrived this morning on the East Coast at 11:54 AM when the Sun reached the Tropic of Cancer. People living there would have seen the sun pass directly overhead at Noon. The Solstice is the 24 hour period during the year when the most daylight hits the Northern Hemisphere. The Sun’ angle relative to the Earth’s Equator changes so gradually close to the Solstice that, without instruments, the shift s difficult to perceive for about 10 days. It appears that the sun has stopped moving, thus the origin of the word “solstice” which means “solar standstill.”
The Summer Solstice has has links to many ancient cultural practices as different cultures have celebrated it being symbolic of renewal, fertility and harvest. At Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, where the rising sun and the ancient stones align on the Solstices, hundreds of Pagans and non-Pagans gather each Summer Solstice to celebrate at dawn. Another ritual is a fire ritual to celebrate the occasion. People with unlit candles forming a circle around a large central candle and lighting theirs off it one at a time.
In Sweden, it’s traditional to eat your way through the entire day. Feasts typically involve lots of potatoes and herring. In 1982, French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, and by Maurice Fleuret created Fête de la Musique, also known as Music Day, which is celebrated on the Solsttice. citizens of a city or country are allowed and urged to play music outside in their neighborhoods or in public spaces and parks. Free concerts are also organized, where musicians play for fun and not for payment. It is now celebrated around the world in 120 countries.
ONCE, HUMANS were intimate with the cycles of nature, and never more than on the summer solstice. Vestiges of such awareness survive in White Nights and Midnight Sun festivals in far northern climes, and in neo-pagan adaptations of Midsummer celebrations, but contemporary people take little notice of the sun reaching its far point on the horizon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, the official start of the summer season, the fullest of light – yet we are apt to miss this phenomenon of Earth’s axial tilt, as we miss so much of what the natural world does in our surrounds.
In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before – earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur – as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”
Tonight light a fire, even if it’s just a candle, put your bare feet inthe warming earth and look to the sky in wonder.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
In late 2015 then-candidate Donald Trump accused Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve, of being part of a political conspiracy. Yellen, he insisted, was keeping interest rates unjustifiably low in an attempt to help Hillary Clinton win the presidency.
As it happens, there were very good reasons for the Fed to keep rates low at the time. Some measures of the job market, notably prime-age employment, were still well below precrisis levels, and business investment was going through a significant slump — a sort of mini-recession.
Fast forward to the present. The employment picture is much stronger now than it was then. There are hints of an economic slowdown, partly because of the uncertainty created by Trump’s trade war, but they’re considerably fainter than those of 2015-16. And Trump himself keeps boasting about the economy’s strength.
Yet he is openly pressuring the Fed to cut rates, and is reportedly looking for ways to demote Jay Powell, the man he himself chose to replace Yellen — declining to reappoint Yellen, according to some reports, because he didn’t think she was tall enough.
But wait, there’s more. While there are, as I said, hints of a slowdown here, there are much stronger warning signs in Europe, where manufacturing is slumping and recession worries are on the rise. Yet even as he tries to bully the Fed into cutting rates, Trump flew into a rage over reports that the European Central Bank, Europe’s counterpart to the Fed, is considering rate cuts of its own, which would weaken the euro and make U.S. industry less competitive.
One year ago, Trump outlawed family separation. It hasn’t stopped.
Exactly one year ago on Thursday, after a national uproar, Donald Trump signed an executive order ending his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Six days later, a federal judge ordered the reunification of thousands of parents and children whom the American government had torn apart. Even though the separation policy had already been officially halted, the court issued a preliminary injunction against it. At the time, it seemed that one of the ugliest chapters of this vicious administration had ended.
But if there’s one thing this administration rarely backs down on, it’s cruelty. Family separation, it turns out, never really stopped. According to Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s National Immigrants’ Rights Project, just over 700 families were separated between last June and late May. Without legal or political intervention, he fears that the number could reach 1,000 by the end of this summer.
In New York alone, Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program for Catholic Charities, estimated that his office has seen more than 100 separated kids in the last year. “As the time between the injunction and the present increases, more and more separated youth are in fact arriving in New York shelters,” he said.
Pathos is a communication technique used most often in rhetoric (in which it is considered one of the three modes of persuasion, alongside ethos and logos), as well as in literature, film, and other narrative art.
Emotional appeal can be accomplished in many ways, such as the following:
by a metaphor or storytelling, commonly known as a hook;
by passion in the delivery of the speech or writing, as determined by the audience; and
by personal anecdote.
In other words pity me for I am pitiful. Also you must seek to understand me and grant acceptance and respect for my views that you are heretics and heathens destined to perish in eternal separation from your moral superiors.
You know, the ones who want to feel you up twice so you can get an abortion because once is not enough.
Your sympathy is misplaced. These people are deplorable.
One worked well enough, but you didn’t need much. There’s are few things that won’t blow up pretty good with a Thousand pounds of explosive provided you put it in the right place. The other was an elite illusion that required a great deal more Physics than the brute force (and more expensive and less conventional) solution.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Three civil rights workers disappear in Mississippi; John Hinckley, Jr. found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting President Ronald Reagan and three others; Britain’s Prince William born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
They say the operation was allegedly under way “in its early stages” when Mr Trump stood the US military down. The White House has so far made no comment.
This comes after Iran shot down a US spy drone.
Tehran says the unmanned US aircraft entered Iranian airspace early on Thursday morning. The US maintains it was shot down in international airspace.
Dozens injured after Georgia police fire rubber bullets at demonstrators
The unrest was sparked by the appearance of a Russian MP, who was allowed to chair a session of parliament
olice in Georgia used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to stop protesters storming the country’s parliament early on Friday, leaving dozens requiring medical treatment. Thirty-nine police officers and 30 civilians had been treated in hospital for injuries after the clashes, with the number likely to rise, said David Sergeenko, an adviser to the prime minister.
Thousands had rallied through the night outside the building in the centre of the capital, Tbilisi, after a Russian MP was allowed to chair a session of parliament on Thursday.
The outcry began after Russian MP Sergei Gavrilov took the chair’s seat during an assembly of legislators from Orthodox Christian countries being held in Tbilisi. As news of Gavrilov’s appearance began to circulate, a crowd gathered outside parliament, and by late evening, about 10,000 people were massed outside the building, waving Georgian flags, chanting and later on, attempting to breach the lines of riot police and storm the building.
The West is silent over the death of a man it once called the great hope of Arab democracy
The lack of comment from our heads of state is positive encouragement to every Middle Eastern leader who now knows their own misdeeds will go unpunished
Ye Gods, how brave was our response to the outrageous death-in-a-cage of Mohamed Morsi. It is perhaps a little tiresome to repeat all the words of regret and mourning, of revulsion and horror, of eardrum-busting condemnation pouring forth about the death of Egypt’s only elected president in his Cairo courtroom this week. From Downing Street and from the White House, from the German Chancellery to the Elysee – and let us not forget the Berlaymont – our statesmen and women did us proud. Wearying it would be indeed to dwell upon their remorse and protests at Morsi’s death.
For it was absolutely non-existent: zilch; silence; not a mutter; not a bird’s twitter – or a mad president’s Twitter, for that matter – or even the most casual, offhand word of regret. Those who claim to represent us were mute, speechless, as sound-proofed as Morsi was in his courtroom cage and as silent as he is now in his Cairo grave.
Hong Kong protesters block major highway near parliament
Protesters have gathered near Hong Kong’s main government complex, blocking most of a major city highway. They insist that a controversial law allowing extradition to the Chinese mainland, be scrapped completely.
Thousands of people filled the streets outside government headquarters in Hong Kong on Friday to demand the complete withdrawal of contentious legislation allowing extradition to China.
The demonstrators, mostly students wearing black, staged a sit-in on the major traffic artery of Harcourt Road, which runs through the busy commercial district. Video footage appeared to show they had left one lane open for vehicles.
IRAN CRISIS: HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING FROM THE IRAQ WAR?
CALLS FOR MILITARY ACTION against Iran grew louder this week in response to the Trump administration’s claims that the Islamic Republic was responsible for attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Many analysts and politicians, both in the U.S. and abroad, expressed skepticism of those claims. But the U.S. media appears to be falling into a familiar pattern, providing a sympathetic platform for the administration without fundamentally questioning its premises. What can we learn from the last push for a war in the Middle East 17 years ago? Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell during the run-up to the Iraq War, joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss the lessons of recent history.
Ebola has spread for nearly a year in Congo. Officials are scrambling to ‘reset’ the response.
A dozen young men revved their motorcycle engines in front of the wooden gate of a makeshift checkpoint — too impatient to have their temperatures checked or to wash their hands with chlorinated water. Health workers manning the post had little choice but to let them pass.
Every day, thousands of people travel this road through the epicenter of Congo’s ongoing Ebola outbreak, where they are supposed to comply with field nurses toting gun-shaped thermometers testing for fevers. But that operation is far from perfect, and extinguishing the nearly year-old outbreak is months away at best. Days with a dozen new cases are normal.
Look, it didn’t just stop with Slavery, or the Civil Rights Movement. Economically disadvantaged populations are that way in part due to decades and centuries of exploitation and discrimination. Jews are routinely stereotyped for their prevalence in certain professions, this is usually a response to the fact they were barred from pursuing other, “nobler” occupations. You want a non-Western example? Untouchables in India.
So it’s pervasive and systemic and rapacious Capital preys first on the weakest. It is a damning statistic how little wealth the median citizen (half above, half below) has- a mere $170,000 (house, car, clothes, computers, everything). It is screaming Racism that the median Hispanic has but a third of that, and the Median African-American 10%- $17,000.
Class Justice is Social Justice.
This is an interview with Bill Black, White Collar Criminologist and Economist about a report titled The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on The Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts. who brought the paper by the Samuel Dubois Cooke Center for Social Equity to The Real News Network’s attention.
Redlining may have begun in Baltimore, but it was a nationwide phenomenon. It was introduced by the US government. It gets its name because literally they would draw with a red pen on a map and not loan, or not provide a federal mortgage protection to any mortgages issued in that portion of the city. What it was particularly aimed at was not neighborhoods that were already majority or almost exclusively black, but any change from an area that used to be overwhelmingly white to an area that was desegregated.
The theory of this was, oh my god, prices will collapse because of white racism. If somebody who is black moves into the neighborhood and we, the federal government, are guaranteeing the lenders against losses, the lenders will suffer significant losses, they’ll pass them on to us. And so, you know, we don’t have anything against blacks. We just don’t want to lose money, and we realize that many whites are racist, so this is how we’re going to protect ourselves.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Hell essentially broke loose from there. Dictionaries were referenced, with Merriam-Webster helpfully offering that a concentration camp is “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard—used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.” The Auschwitz Museum weighed in. Yad Vashem weighed in. The Wiesenthal Center weighed in. And once again, a fight about whether families should be held in overcrowded freezing cages without access to sanitation or adequate health care was reduced to an argument, via Twitter, over word choice.
It is America’s responsibility to undo the trauma it has inflicted upon black people for hundreds of years.
This week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked his opinion on the paying of reparations to the descendants of slavery in America, and he came down solidly on the side of “no” and on the side of being intentionally obtuse.
Here is his answer in full:
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently are responsible, is a good idea. We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African-American president. I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that.
“And, I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it. First of all, it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate. We’ve had waves of immigrants as well who come to the country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another. So no, I don’t think reparations are a good idea.”
Everything McConnell said was fundamentally wrong — factually and morally.
Let’s start at the beginning: Chattel slavery in America is not merely “something that happened” 150 years ago. This year happens to be the 400th anniversary of when the first enslaved African arrived on our shores, and slavery became an indescribably horrific institution that thrived for nearly 250 years.
And the unpaid, unrewarded labor of those enslaved Africans is in large part what made America an economic powerhouse, and now one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And yet, the enslaved reaped none of the benefits of the wealth they created.
Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
