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While the RIAA has backed down (but not stopped) lawsuits against those accused of file sharing in the US, it looks like the Danish anti-piracy bureau has decided to drop all of its lawsuits after it became clear that individuals were basically winning them all (Google translation of the original, found via brokep). Basically, the courts acquitted most of the individuals accused of private file sharing, with the one exception being the case where the guy confessed. And, the nature of the rulings in the acquittals made it clear that it was virtually impossible to win a lawsuit against individuals for file sharing. Of course, we have no doubt that the industry will continue to use other means, such as via regulatory capture, to continue to look for ways not to give consumers what they want.

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Home-cured olives – seasoned with chilies, lemon and North African spices – have finally made their way into our kitchen, and happily so.  Not too long ago, we received a beautiful box of freshly harvested, green-ripe barouni olives from Chaffin Family Orchards out of California.   Since then we’ve patiently waited and waited for our olives to lose their soapy bitterness and gain a saltiness spiked by hot peppers, lemon and garlic.

Olives are among our favorite foods.  They enjoy a rich heritage having been cultivated across the middle east and Mediterranean region for thousands of years.  Though olive oil has always been prized both for grooming and culinary uses, my love rests with the well-spiced and wonderfully salty fruit.  Olives are rich in mono-unsaturated fat, vitamin E and polyphenols which account for the fruit’s strong, bitter flavor.  A good soaking in brine and spices tempers the olive’s natural bitterness.

In preparing my batch of olives at home, I chose to water cure them – as it’s a relatively faster approach to olive curing and, as you can imagine, I was eager to see the results of my first adventures in olive curing.  Other methods of curing olives at home include treating the fruit with lye, brining them whole and curing them in salt.  I imagine, next season, we’ll try a different method of curing olives.  Water curing is simple and remarkably easy; just clean the olives, discarding any marred fruit, and pound them with a mallet or rolling pin until the fruit is slightly bruised.  Over a period of days or even weeks, depending on how much bitterness you prefer, soak them in clean water, changing it frequently.  You’ll notice that the olives will release some of their oils and that oil will rise to the top of the water every day.  Follow this by a heavily spiced brine, and you have home-cured olives.

We’re looking forward to serving our olives at the Thanksgiving table and throughout the year as appetizers or in lovely, rustic tapenades.  Some we seasoned with provincial herbs, others with Greek oregano and garlic, but these olives we seasoned with a savory array of North African spices.  I can’t wait to pair them with a Moroccan-spiced Roast Chicken or on fresh bread smeared with authentic labneh and a slice of preserved lemon.

Cracked Olives: Moroccan Style

Fresh olives are sold in bulk at very affordable prices.  While this recipe only makes use of a ½ gallon of olives, take advantage of larger quantities and spice them differently in order to vary the flavors in your kitchen. Incidentally, the water-curing method for preparing olives results in more oleuropein – an antioxidant thought to boost the immune system –  in the end product which is, in part, why we chose this method.

Ingredients for Home-cured, Cracked Olives

• ½ Gallon Fresh Green-ripe Olives
• 1 Whole Preserved Lemon OR 1 Whole Lemon, quartered
• 1 Small Bulb Garlic, Peeled
• 3 – 4 Fresh Red Chili Peppers
• 1 Bay Leaf
• 1 Teaspoon Peppercorns
• 1 Thin Slice Fresh Turmeric, juliennedOR ¼ Teaspoon Ground Turmeric
• 1 Thin Slice Fresh Ginger, julienned
• ½ Teaspoon Coriander Seeds
• 6 Tablespoons Unrefined Salt
• ¼ Cup Raw Vinegar

Instructions for Home-curing and Seasoning Cracked Olives

1. Rinse clean and pick over the fresh olives, discarding any obviously marred fruit. Discard any leaves or stems.
2. Gently hit each olive with a rolling pin in order to bruise it.  The olives may crack, and they’ll most likely spit out some foamy white juice.  Eventually your fingertips will turn black as the olive’s juice oxidize.
3. Once all the olives have been cracked, pour them into a container and fill it with filtered water.  Drain, rinse and fill the olive container with water again twice a day for at least a week, and up to a month.  We cured ours in this manner for two weeks.  You may taste them for bitterness throughout the process.
4. Once the olives have lost much of their bitterness – they’ll still retain quite a bit – drain and rinse them a final time.
5. Place them into a ½-gallon mason jar with spices, garlic, lemon and chilies.
6. Pour raw vinegar over the olives.
7. In a separate container, prepare a brine of 6 tablespoons unrefined sea salt to 1/2 gallon filtered water and pour over the olives and spices.
8. Shake well to combine ingredients.
9. Allow the mixture to ferment for at least ten days or until done to your liking.

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Now comes the really hard part.

After a brief celebration of House passage of landmark health legislation, House and Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama face weeks, if not months, of difficult negotiations in constructing a final package that will win congressional approval.

Their challenge: Despite months of debate, disputes remain between liberal and moderate Democrats and between the House and the Senate on a raft of core issues. They include how much to spend on an overhaul; how to pay for it; how to deal with a government-run insurance option, and the scope of coverage and subsidies for the uninsured.

One thing is clear: The House-passed bill is almost certainly the high-water mark of liberal aspirations. On most issues, Democrats will likely have to tack to the right to win the support of Senate moderates. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s acquiescence on more-restrictive abortion language showed just how far party leaders are prepared to go to push through the legislation.

The House bill, which would cost $1.1 trillion over a decade, passed late Saturday on a vote of 220 to 215. Like the $829 billion Senate Finance Committee bill, which is likely to be the template for that chamber’s legislation, the House legislation requires, for the first time, that most people have health insurance.

But compared to the Senate Finance bill, the House bill would cover more uninsured (eventually 36 million versus 29 million); offer bigger subsidies for individuals and families to buy coverage on new exchanges, or marketplaces; provide for a bigger Medicaid expansion, and use a markedly different financing scheme for a big chunk of the cost (a tax on wealthy Americans versus a levy on high-cost insurance plans.)

Now, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., cobbles together legislation, he must maintain liberal support while winning over a handful of wavering moderates — including Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and independent Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut – to rack up the 60 votes needed to thwart a Republican filibuster.

Ultimately, because of the struggle to get those 60 votes, any bill passed by the Senate will enter House-Senate negotiations with a leg up, and perhaps form the foundation of a final Capitol Hill deal. “I don’t see it any other way,” said Nelson.

Forks in the Road

Among the outstanding questions in putting together a House-Senate bill: 

• Will the Democratic leadership try to hold the bill’s price tag to $900 billion over 10 years, as requested by Obama, or adjust the cost up or down to address the sometimes-conflicting demands of the party’s rank and file?
• Will Democrats feel compelled to go with the House’s more ambitious coverage proposals, or endorse the Senate’s more modest ones?
• Will liberal Democrats prevail in including the House version of the public option, or bow to Reid’s idea that states should be allowed to opt out? It’s also possible a final bill would go in another direction, and trigger a public option only under certain conditions.

“They’ve (the House and Senate) really kind of taken two different forks in the road on health reform,” said Republican Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan. “This is very complicated, it’s a long way from being over and many of these provisions are integrated with one another. You can’t just pick and choose off a list and slap it together.”

Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, predicted the House and Senate eventually would reach agreement, but added, “I have trouble visualizing what it will look like.”

“The entire revenue structure of both bills is different,” he said. “The way they approach Medicare Advantage is different, and that has a lot of regional implications…There are a lot of substantive differences.” Medicare Advantage is the part of Medicare where private insurers provide benefits to seniors.

Some political observers say recent Republican victories in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections might make it more difficult for moderate-to-conservative Democrats from swing states to back ambitious health care legislation.

Feeling Conflicted

But at the same time, some senators admit to feeling conflicted about the size of the bill. While they want to contain overall spending, they also want to make sure that low- and middle-income constituents will be able to afford the mandatory insurance.

“Affordability is important, very important,” said Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. “We have to balance what’s the total cost of the bill, number one, then…keep premium costs low, keep out-of-pocket costs low and coverage high…It depends at least in a significant part on the total cost of the bill.”

Drew Altman, president and chief executive officer of the Kaiser Family Foundation, predicted there would be renewed attention to the affordability issue as the legislative process moves ahead. “What will be the deal for middle-class voters – which is always politically sensitive – who have to buy insurance in the exchange?” he said.

Concerns about that question, he added, are “going to create some upward pressure” on the cost of the legislation. “Policy makers have been in the unenviable position of having to struggle with the tradeoff between the cost of the legislation and the generosity of both the subsidy and the adequacy of the underlying [insurance] coverage.” KHN is a part of the foundation.)

Key Differences 

Here are some key differences between the main bills pending in Congress:

The Price Tag: With an overall cost of $1.1 trillion over the next decade, the House-passed bill is more expensive than either the legislation approved by Senate Finance or by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Some health care analysts and lawmakers say a final House-Senate conference package would have to come closer to the $829 billion Finance bill to survive a final vote in the Senate. In a speech to a joint session of Congress in September, Obama “said first, he wanted a bipartisan bill. Second, he wanted a $900 billion bill or at about that level,” Baucus said. “That level is important.”

How to Pay for the Bill: The House bill would impose a 5.4 percent income surtax on individuals earning more than $500,000 and couples earning more than $1 million. That idea is unpopular in the Senate. The Finance plan, meanwhile, would slap a $6.7 billion annual fee on health insurers, based on their market share, and place a 40 percent excise tax on the highest-cost health insurance plans—a move economists say could help curb demand for such plans and for overused health services. That proposal has been rejected by House Democrats because of vociferous opposition from labor unions, which argue many workers made wage concessions in order to obtain or keep their health care coverage.

The bottom line: Democrats “are on different planets when it comes to payfors,” said Camp.

The Public Plan: While House progressives pushed for a robust public plan with payments tied to Medicare rates, party members from rural areas balked, saying their doctors and hospitals already are underpaid by Medicare and wouldn’t survive. The upshot: The House included a public plan that calls on the government to negotiate rates with health care providers.

The Finance bill doesn’t include a public plan of any sort, but Reid has said he would include one in any Senate measure, and give states the right to opt out if they didn’t want to take part. But ultimately, some analysts say, the Senate might take another route, approving a proposal touted by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine that would create a public plan only in states where affordable private insurance wasn’t available to 95% of a state’s residents. Progressives in both chambers will push back hard against that approach, but might have to live with it to get legislation to Obama’s desk.

Coverage and Subsidies: Both the House and Senate Finance bills would require most people to have insurance. And both would provide subsidies to buy coverage to people with incomes of up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $88,000 for a family of four. But they would do it in different ways.

For example, under the House Democrats’ plan, a family of four earning $54,000 a year would pay $6,200 or 11 percent of their income on premiums and out-of-pocket costs, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. Under the Finance bill, that same family would pay $9,900 or 18 percent of income. As income levels increase the subsidy levels of the bills become more similar. For a family of four with income of $90,100, both bills would require the family to spend $16,600 or 18 percent of their income.

In another difference, the Finance Committee’s penalties for individuals who don’t carry coverage are weaker than those in the Senate health or House bills. Health insurers fear that would mean that some people would wait to buy health insurance until they got sick, driving up costs and premiums.

My first reaction – when I saw today on Thanko’s web site that the notoriously silly gadget maker from Tokyo is selling USB-powered gloves with built-in heaters [JP] – was: Who actually buys this kind of stuff? I mean Thanko is a real company, they have brick-and-mortar stores in Tokyo (two of them), they have employees etc. But they have been surviving for years now, even though they closed their English online store last month.

You can connect the gloves (black is for men, white is for women) to your computer’s USB port and expect them to keep your fingers warm while you type. Again: Who in god’s name would do that? And it’s not even Thanko’s only USB gloves, they have models that are shaped like teddy bears, too.

People living outside Japan can order the new USB gloves for $27.75 per pair plus shipping over at Geek Stuff 4 U.

Health policy experts hold different views on Saturday’s House overhaul vote. Here are their responses.

Jonathan Cohn: The House Bill Is A Great Start


The House health overhaul bill is a great start. It should just be faster, stronger and–really–bigger.

 

Doug Holtz-Eakin: The House Bill Could Have Been Avoided


With the right leadership, a bi-partisan merger of the Republican alternative and the coverage expansions in the bill itself could have been augmented with real delivery system reforms.

 

Robert Laszewski: Loading More People Onto the Titanic


Neither fiscal conservatives nor liberals are left with much reason to believe the House-passed bill has much chance of bending any cost curves.

 

Karen Pollitz: From Now On, We’re All In It Together


The House vote signals that we may be ready to listen to our better angels, and include all Americans in our coverage system.

Homebrew coder Iain Price has released the final build of his homebrew game HaloDS / Renegade project. According to the dev, the game is still on it’…

(NaturalNews) Many popular brands of personal care products use words like “organic” on their product labels or company names, but the products they’re selling don’t meet organic standards. So the Organic Consumers Association (www.organicconsumers.org) has been waging a public campaign to expose “organic cheaters” and encourage consumers to boycott those brands.

Late last week, a significant victory was achieved for organic consumers: the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted 12 to 1 to require personal care products touting the word “organic” to actually meet organic standards. (Previously, this was not required.)

This is big news because it means the USDA will now start cracking down on non-compliant brands that inappropriately use the word “organic” on their product labels.

“Brands that are using the word organic improperly should be on notice that USDA enforcement is imminent. Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan has said that she is going to get ‘tough on crime’ in the organic industry,” said Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of the OCA. “I expect them to make organic cosmetics fraud a top priority. In the meantime, retailers should start cleaning up their body care isles. Whole Foods Market, for one, was a big supporter of the NOSB recommendation.”

Boycott these “organic cheater” brands
NaturalNews encourages readers to join the Organic Consumers Association in its boycott of these brands of personal care products:

• Desert Essence Organics Body Care
• Organics by Noah’s Naturals
• Giovanni Organic Cosmetics
• Nature’s Gate Organics
• Amazon Organics
• JASON Pure Natural and Organic
• Avalon Organic

Until these companies clean up their labels and achieve full compliance with new USDA organic standards, this boycott will remain in effect. It’s all part of the OCA’s “Coming Clean” campaign that seeks to end labeling fraud in the personal care products marketplace.

Read more about the “Coming Clean” campaign at: http://www.organicconsumers.org/bodycare/index.cfm

NaturalNews encourages readers to keep personal care product manufacturers honest by avoiding the purchase of any product labeled in a false or misleading way. Stay up to date by following the news on organic products at www.OrganicConsumers.org

(NaturalNews) For years, baby formula manufacturers have been fortifying and reformulating their blends in an effort to poise their products as equal or superior to natural breast milk. Beginning in 2002, many producers began supplementing their mixtures with synthetic forms of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA), the long-chain fatty acids naturally present in breast milk. Evidence is now showing that the synthetic versions are detrimental to the health of children, despite their continued usage in almost every available brand of infant formula.

The idea behind fortifying infant formula with DHA/ARA was substantiated based upon the fact that a mother’s breast milk naturally contains these polyunsaturated omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. They are vital components to human eye and brain development, particularly in the formative infant years. The primary distinction is that the form of DHA/ARA being used in infant formula is structurally incompatible with the form found in human milk.

Martek Biosciences Corporation, the company who produces synthetic DHA/ARA, extracts the oils from laboratory-grown fermented algae and fungus using hexane, a demonstrated neurotoxic chemical. Identified as a hazardous air pollutant by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), hexane resides in the same category as other serious toxins that are linked to causing cancer and other serious health problems.

Developed primarily as a marketing tool, Martek’s 1996 DHA/ARA investment promotional material states that even if the additive had no demonstrable benefit, it would nevertheless allow manufacturers to market their formulas as being the “closest to human milk”. Formula manufacturers quickly jumped on the bandwagon despite definitive evidence proving the additive’s safety.

Recently implicated in causing severe reactions in some babies, including breathing problems, gastrointestinal upset, and other illnesses, synthetic DHA/ARA is on the hot seat. Parents and professionals alike are questioning why the additive is still being used in almost every available brand of infant formula and why the companies using the additive are being allowed to claim that their product is superior to human breast milk, despite the hundreds of mounting FDA adverse event reports indicating its dangers.

Whether the culprit is the DHA/ARA itself, the hexane extraction residue, or both, it is anyone’s guess since no formidable scientific safety studies were conducted prior to the additive’s introduction into the formula market. Prior to hitting the market, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expressed concern to Martek about the safety of the new additive, indicating that the agency desired to convene a formal meeting to address the issue. Martek denied this request and, shortly thereafter, the FDA reversed its previous stance and approved the additive’s use despite the lack of any independent scientific safety review.

Since that time, Freedom of Information Act requests have revealed hundreds of FDA adverse event reports that have gone unnoticed by the FDA who has failed to act in conducting an investigation. Typically, a few well-documented adverse event reports are reason enough to conduct a product investigation; several hundred would indicate an immediate need for scrutiny.

Many empirical reports indicate that sick babies who were taken off formula containing synthetic DHA/ARA almost immediately recover from any ailments induced since starting the formula. This indicates a practical connection that deserves further investigation by the agency appointed to perform such analysis, the FDA.

Not only is Martek’s DHA/ARA supplement being used in baby formulas, it is now being added to a whole host of foods and nutritional supplements for adults, lauded as a great vegetarian alternative to animal-based oils of the same variety. Since the extraction method involves a known chemical neurotoxin, it is best to avoid this additive anyway.

With or without synthetic additives, no baby formula can replace the amazing nourishing properties of a mother’s breast milk. It is the perfect, natural blend of immune-building, brain-developing goodness that cannot be matched or replicated. While some natural formulas may seem to come close, breast-feeding continues to be the superior method of nourishing a baby and should be utilized whenever possible.

Sources:

Replacing Mother – Imitating Human Breast Milk in the Laboratory – The Cornucopia Institute

Dangerous Hype: Infant Formula Companies Claim They Can Make Babies ‘Smarter’ – AlterNet

Products containing life’s DHA – Martek Biosciences

About the author
Ethan Huff is a freelance writer and health enthusiast who loves exploring the vast world of natural foods and health, digging deep to get to the truth. He runs an online health publication of his own at http://wholesomeherald.blogspot.com.

(NaturalNews) Genetic analysis is essentially useless in predicting a person’s risk of cancer, heart attack or other common diseases, according to a set of commentaries published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The decoding of the human genome in 2003 led to a flood of research into the contributions that genetic variation might make to the risk of various chronic diseases that tend to develop late in life, such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer. Since then, a number of for-profit companies have begun offering genetic screenings and disease risk assessments.

“With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” said David B. Goldstein of Duke University, author of one of the commentaries. “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”

A few diseases, such as sickle cell anemia or Tay Sachs disease, can be caused by a mutation on a single gene. Most diseases, however, are much more complex, and develop due to an interaction between environmental factors and the contributions of a variety of genes.

In order to calculate the genetic contribution to these diseases, geneticists developed the technique known as genomewide association study, in which the genomes of groups of healthy people are compared with the genomes of those with a certain disease. The hope among researchers has been that this analysis could point out genetic differences between the groups that might be linked to disease risk.

While genomewide analysis has successfully identified some differences between the genetic codes of healthy and diseased patients, these differences provide little information about disease risk. Researchers expected to find a small number of common genetic variations that were responsible for each disease. Instead, common gene variants appear to contribute to disease risk only very marginally.

Goldstein suggests that the genetic component of chronic disease risk might arise from a large number of rare genetic variants, making genetic screening far less helpful in predicting risk. If only a small number of variants are involved, they might provide information on the biological pathways that lead to the development of the disease. If many different variations are implicated, however, this would tell researchers nothing except that an error in the functioning of nearly any bodily system can contribute to disease risk.

“In pointing at everything,” Goldstein wrote, “genetics would point at nothing.”

Based on the failure of more than 100 genomewide studies — carried out on thousands of patients in a number of different countries — to deliver useful results, Goldstein suggests that the approach should be abandoned as a waste of resources. Genomewide analysis is only effective at uncovering common variations with large effects, Goldstein says. Discovering rare variants with smaller effects is “beyond the grasp of the genomewide association studies.”

A single genomewide analysis study costs several million dollars to carry out.

In addition, as more such studies are carried out, each one will deliver less new information on gene-related disease risk — a problem of diminishing returns.

Also writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers Peter Kraft and David J. Hunter of the Harvard School of Public Health disagree with Goldstein that the studies are incapable of providing useful data. They agree, however, that they have provided no clinically useful information to date.

Kraft and Hunter warned that any risk estimate based on genetic analysis is likely either too low or too high, because researchers simply do not have enough information on genetic contribution to disease. Risks that are calculated as lower than they actually are will likely never be reported to patients. This means that any genetic risk a patient actually gets told about is probably an overestimate, and only likely to cause unnecessary alarm.

Sources for this story include: www.nytimes.com.

(NaturalNews) Given that the massive health care reform bill just passed by the House was one of the largest pieces of legislation in U.S. history, you might wonder why you didn’t get to vote on it. When it comes to federal legislation, your vote doesn’t count in America, didn’t you know? You are dictated to by a small band of the political elite who may or may not represent your interests (or even the interests of your fellow citizens).

Those people are called members of Congress. And as you’ll read here, they are essentially obsolete. Society no longer has any need for them. Here’s why…

Why Congress was created
Consider why the U.S. Congress was created in the first place: Back in the 1700s, there was no internet. There weren’t even telephones. Heck, this was pre-telegraph! Long-distance communication was simply impossible, so the people had a very practical need to send a representative to Washington to represent their wishes on the legislative front.

And so the idea of the U.S. Congress was born. Senators and Congresspeople would be representatives of the People from their home states and districts, and they would vote according to the wishes, desires and best interests of the people back home. They would essentially be proxy voters. Sounds good in theory, right?

Fast forward 230 years or so…

Now, instant communication is available to almost everyone. A new law being proposed in Washington could be instantly read — and voted on — by the People all across America. The internet has made the whole purpose behind the U.S. Congress obsolete… irrelevant. Why do Americans need someone else to represent them when we can all just read and vote on the bills ourselves? In an age of instant communications, Congress is no longer needed.

But of course, the current members of Congress would heartily disagree with that assessment. If there’s one rule about power, it’s that those in power always seek more power. And because only members of Congress can vote federal laws into existence — not the actual citizens of the country — they hold a tremendous amount of concentrated power… and they’re not about to let it go.

Corporations love the current system, too, because they can simply bypass the People and lobby Congress to pass the laws that favor their own interests. This is how the U.S. Congress has become a legislative auction house where new laws are passed to appease whoever raises more money for reelection campaigns. Meanwhile, the People have been abandoned in this equation, and the interests of the People that were supposed to be “represented” in Washington have been long forgotten.

Did you realize that 237 members of Congress are millionaires? (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29235.html) And seven of them have a net worth greater than $100 million. When lawmakers are rolling in that kind of cash, how can they possibly represent the interests of the People, of which 99% earn far less?

Further demonstrating detachment from the people they claim to represent, one new Congressman — just sworn in yesterday — managed to break four campaign promises in his first hour of office (http://www.gouverneurtimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7623:owens-to-break-campaign-promises&catid=60:st-lawrence-news&Itemid=175).

It’s time for Direct Democracy
In a Direct Democracy, the People directly participate in the debate and passage of new laws. All laws are publicly published for debate and discussion — unlike the current situation where 1,000-page laws like the Patriot Act or the new health care reform bill are covertly written, then often deposited in the federal register just minutes before a scheduled vote.

Today, we have a system of “ambush lawmaking” going on in Congress where even the members of Congress voting on the laws have little time to read the bills (much less understand them). In a Direct Democracy, however, all proposed laws are posted publicly so that the People can read them, debate them and vote on them.

After all, if the whole point of the U.S. Congress was to represent the votes of the People, in an age where people can now vote directly thanks to internet technology, shouldn’t the U.S. Congress step aside and just let the People vote for themseles?

How to disband Congress and give power back to the People
Disbanding the U.S. Congress would, of course, require a Constitutional amendment. That is extremely unlikely to happen, given that such an amendment requires an approval of the majority of U.S. states (and existing members of Congress happen to be quite influential in their home states). So to disband Congress, you’d have to convince hundreds of power-hungry people to vote themselves out of power. The odds against that happening are astronomical.

The other option is to just wait for the current U.S. system to collapse, and then replace it with a form of Direct Democracy that makes more sense. This is the more likely scenario, and it may be closer than you think: The financial blowout of America is well under way, and it’s only a matter of time before unbridled debt spending leads to runaway inflation and the disastrous demise of the dollar. The passage of the $1 trillion health care bill, in fact, will accelerate America towards financial collapse.

Within a few short years, there may be an opportunity to “reboot America” and create a smarter society to replace the corrupt, outmoded system of government that’s failing the American people right now. I support the idea of a Direct Democracy that eliminates the entire U.S. Congress. Of course, there would need to be some sort of process for deciding which proposed laws get put on the public website for discussion and voting, but even that process can be crowdsourced to some degree.

It’s time to decentralize power in Washington and distribute it back to the People. In one sense, it’s the most politically progressive idea yet proposed, but at the same time, it’s also about preserving personal freedom, liberty and responsibility. So it appeals both to progressives and conservatives (Libertarians, too).

The point is, it’s time to give back to the American people the power they once granted to their representatives out of practical necessity. Besides, the People can do a far better job debating and voting on proposed laws than the U.S. Congress ever did. Many of the comments I’ve read about the health care bill on discussions boards are far more intelligent than the debate that took place in the House. The People deserve the right to directly vote on laws that deeply impact their lives and finances.

After all, if the United States is supposed to be a government of the People, by the People and for the People, then why not let the laws be directly voted on by the People?

We the People don’t need Senators and Congresspeople to make our decisions for us. What we need is the freedom to vote for ourselves. If we continue to allow Congress to make our decisions for us, they will drive America into the dirt, leaving us all penniless, diseased and neck-deep in debt. (Actually, we’re sort of there already…)

Congress promises freedom but delivers financial slavery. It promises to take care of us but then it sells us out to the corporations. Congress puts the corporations first and the people last, and it’s time to advance to a better form of Democracy where individual participation in our democratic lawmaking process is the norm.

Now, I know what the main critics of this idea will say: “The People aren’t qualified to vote on legislation!” It’s a fair question. But I answer, “Are the members of Congress any better qualified?” I’m willing to bet that not 1 out of 5 members of Congress can even cite the Bill of Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights). They are nutritionally illiterate. They almost universally have little or no knowledge of the banking system or how the Federal Reserve really works. How are they any more qualified to vote on health care than you or I?

Truth is, they aren’t. The hard-working, tax-paying people of the United States of America could do a much better job voting on legislative bills than members of Congress.

Congress has become a big part of what’s wrong with America today. Disbanding Congress and invoking a Direct Democracy might be the only remaining way to save America from destruction at the hands of greedy corporations, powerful lobbyists and contemptible Congresspeople.

Democrats have little time to savor the narrow passage of their historic heath care overhaul in the House of Representatives as attention turns to the deeply divided U.S. Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s challenge is to corral enough votes to bring a companion bill to the floor of his chamber before a White House-imposed Christmas deadline.

The Nevada Democrat, facing a tough re-election back home, threw Senate negotiations into turmoil recently when he embraced a public insurance option.

The option is a key component of the newly minted House bill, but is opposed by a handful of moderate Senate Democrats, as well as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent.

And Reid needs the support of all 58 Senate Democrats, as well as Lieberman and fellow independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to secure the 60 votes necessary to block a Republican filibuster.

Reid has said that the public insurance option he supports would allow states to opt out of the program. An analysis of the cost of the proposed Senate plans by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is expected later this week.

The House has proposed paying for its plan by increasing taxes on wealthy Americans. The Senate versions have favored taxing generous insurance benefit plans — anathema to union members, and opposed by House leaders.

Reid must first reconcile two competing Senate health care bills in the weeks ahead before moving to a vote. Then the House bill and any health care legislation from the Senate would have to be merged by a joint congressional committee before being sent to President Obama for his signature.

Reid avoided any promises about Senate action. In a statement released after the House vote, he said, “We realize the strong will for reform that exists, and we are energized that we stand closer than ever to reforming our broken health insurance system.”

Democrats Celebrate

On the House floor, announcement of the 220-215 vote was greeted by wild applause from the Democratic side of the aisle. Afterward, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat from Rhode Island, invoked his recently deceased father. During his four decades in the Senate, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy made health care reform his life’s work.

“My dad was a senator,” Kennedy said, “but tonight his spirit was in the House.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to preside over the House, managed to overcome the defection of 39 Democrats to the “no” column and attract a lone Republican to give her just two more votes than the 218 she needed to get the overhaul legislation passed — and to hand the president a big win for his top domestic priority.

“I thank the president for his tremendous leadership, because without President Obama in the White House, this victory would not have been possible,” Pelosi said at a press conference immediately after the vote.

“He provided the vision and the momentum for us to get the job done for the American people,” she said.

In a brief appearance Sunday afternoon at the White House, Obama said he was grateful for “courageous” legislators who voted for the House overhaul given “the heated and often misleading rhetoric around this legislation.”

“Now it falls on the United States Senate,” he said, to deliver the “change we promised to the American people.”

“I am absolutely confident it will,” he said in an earlier statement, “and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year.”

Victory Came With A Cost

But the struggle for passage in the House, after a full day of rhetorical scuffles and contentious debate, came at some cost to Democrats who support a woman’s right to have access to legal abortion — presaging what will likely be a topic of considerable debate in the Senate.

To win the votes of conservative party members who oppose abortion, House Democratic leaders endorsed an amendment to their legislation that bars the use of government subsidies to buy any insurance plan that covers the procedure. The move angered many in the party’s 190-member House pro-choice caucus, who said they viewed it as an invasion of women’s medical privacy. The amendment, however, ensured the politically necessary support of some Roman Catholic lawmakers and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Conservative Democrats won the hard-fought chance to offer the abortion restriction amendment during debate, and with the support of all but one House Republican, it passed by a vote of 240 to 194. Arizona Republican John Shadegg voted “present” to the amendment.

With such close margins and the struggle over the abortion issue, it had been uncertain if Pelosi could gather the votes needed to pass the bill — even though Democrats enjoy an 81-vote edge in the House. But with passage secured, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer joked, “For all of my friends in the press who’ve been assaulting me in the hallways, asking if we have the votes, the answer is yes.”

Earlier Saturday, President Obama, in an unusual weekend visit to the Capitol, personally urged lawmakers to “rise to the moment” and “finish the job.”

The House Democrats’ plan would cost close to a trillion dollars over the next decade, and would mandate that most employers cover their workers. It also requires people who are not insured through their employers to buy coverage, and it expands government programs to help them pay for that. The bill bars insurance companies from denying coverage to people based on pre-existing conditions, and includes other insurance industry reforms.

Freshman Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana was the lone Republican to vote for the bill. He represents a heavily Democratic district, and faces an uphill re-election battle next year. His fellow Republicans were united in the reasons for their opposition. “The American people need to understand this is about a government takeover of the whole health care system,” said Georgia Rep. Paul Broun.

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The reviewed article is ‘Depression: An important comorbidity with metabolic syndrome in a general population’ by Dunbar and colleagues from 2008 and freely available here. In the abstract the authors conclude that

‘Metabolic syndrome was associated with depression but not psychological distress or anxiety‘

So is it possible on the basis of this study to draw the above conclusions. The researchers completed three cross-sectional studies in rural Australia. The first thing to say is that as the study was conducted in rural Australia the findings might be specific for this population. It seems more likely that this should be generalisable. However if we consider urban versus rural settings for instance a number of other factors come into play ranging from the structure of health service provision through to social networks and lifestyle which might influence either metabolic syndrome or depression or both. Men and women ‘aged 25 to 84 years were selected from the electoral roll’ by a random sampling method. I couldn’t find a reference to the type of random sampling method that was used but it is reasonable to suppose that there was no obvious selection bias as a result other than the self-selection that results from participation. The authors do note however that the study did not include those that had left the region and this is relevant in the context of the above point about urban versus rural settings. The researchers identify a number of outcome measures including psychosocial factors and factors relevant to the diagnosis of metabolic syndrome such as fasting glucose and waist and hip circumference. The criteria for metabolic syndrome were clearly identified. The researchers also used the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, a commonly used scale which aids the assessment of depression in the hospital population. However the authors also used the ‘Kessler 10 measure’ which I wasn’t familiar with and describe it as a five-point likert scale where cumulative scores result in categorisation into low and moderate-high levels of ‘psychological distress’ in the last 4-weeks. The internal consistency values for K10 and the HADS subcomponents were provided ranging from 0.79 to 0.87. The primary outcome measures (or at least I presume they were the primary outcome measures) were clearly stated and the author examined the relationship between anxiety, depression and the metabolic syndrome. The statistical analysis of other relationships between the many variables that were used in the study was also clearly stated. 409 subjects met the criteria for the metabolic syndrome and a comparison was then made between those with and without the metabolic syndrome. I didn’t particularly understand the following within the results section

‘Participants with the metabolic syndrome were more likely to have moderate to severe depression (10 vs 6.9%, p = 0.069)‘

In the remainder of the sentence the authors write that with regards to another measure there was no statistical significance. However the p value above would not be significant either (at the 5% level). However the researchers did find a significant difference between metabolic syndrome and the diagnosis of depression (i.e. without reference to specific subtypes such as moderate or severe) and this time the difference reached a significance of 0.013 and depression scores were 3.41 versus 2.95. Thus there is a mean difference of roughly 1.5 points on the HADS depression subscale (I presume that it was this subscale although not stated explicitly in the sentence) at the group level.

So the relationship appears significant but the direction of this relationship is unclear as it was a cross-sectional study. A longitudinal study might be able to shed light on the directionality of the relationship. The authors speculate that an inflammatory pathway might mediate the link between depression and the metabolic syndrome.

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