July 16, 2015

Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common

Millions of America’s young people are really struggling financially. Around 30 percent are living with their parents, and many others are coping with stagnant wages, underemployment, and sky-high rent.

And then there are those who are doing just great—owning a house, buying a car, and consistently putting money away for retirement.

These, however, are not your run-of-the-mill Millennials. Nope. These Millennials have something very special: rich parents.

These Millennials have help paying their tuition, meaning they graduate in much better financial shape than their peers who have to self-finance college through a mix of jobs, scholarships, and loans. And then, for the very luckiest, they’ll also get some help with a down payment, making homeownership possible, while it remains mostly unattainable for the vast majority of young adults."

*“Haves are turning their riches or their wealth into bigger wealth because they are investing in the housing market by simply living in a house,” says Gudell. This advantage is one that these Millennials will carry forward as they earn more than their degree-less peers, and save more than those who were forced to throw away tens of thousands of dollars on rent due to their inability to buy. In the future, they’ll have wealth to pass down to their own kids, continuing the cycle."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/millennials-with-rich-parents/398501/

July 15, 2015

Baby's first stool can help predict future IQ score

NEW YORK: Analysis of a newborn's first stool can alert doctors whether a child is at risk of problems with intelligence and reasoning, new research shows.

In particular, high levels of fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) found in the meconium (a newborn's first stool) from a mother's alcohol use during pregnancy can alert doctors that a child may develop cognitive problems in teenage years, the findings showed.

"We wanted to see if there was a connection between FAEE level and their cognitive development during childhood and adolescence -- and there was," said one of the researchers Meeyoung Min, research assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University in the US.

For this study, researchers analysed the meconium of 216 babies for levels of FAEE. They then gave intelligence tests at ages nine, 11 and 15. The researchers found a link between those with high levels of FAEE at birth and lower IQ scores. "

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Babys-first-stool-can-help-predict-future-IQ-score/articleshow/48067193.cms

July 15, 2015

Why are so many Americans behind bars?

More people are in prison in America than anywhere else in the world, driven in part by laws with heavy sentences for non-violent drug charges.

Drug policy has had a severe impact on African-Americans in the US, who make up the largest proportion of these sentences.

President Barack Obama wants to make the country's prison system fairer, and the high cost of keeping so many people in prison has attracted both Republicans and Democrats to the cause of sentencing reform.

Rajini Vaidyanathan looks at how the US prison population got to record levels.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33511974

July 14, 2015

Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

Over the past year, video footage from around the country of law enforcement officers killing citizens, many of them black, has brought scrutiny on policing in the streets. Yet, another disturbing police problem has drawn far less attention: Use of force by cops in schools. According to news reports and data collected by advocacy groups, over the past five years at least 28 students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by so-called school resource officers—sworn, uniformed police assigned to provide security on K-12 campuses.

As with the officer-involved killings that have been thrust into the national spotlight, government data on police conduct in schools is lacking. And while serious use of force by officers against school kids appears to be rare, experts also point to a troubling lack of training and oversight, and a disproportionate impact on minority and disabled students."

*Often young police officers are on the job, according to the advocacy group Strategies for Youth, which works with police departments and school districts on training. Yet, a national survey conducted in 2013 by the group found that police academies in only one state, Tennessee, offered training specifically for officers deployed to schools. The majority of academies, the survey noted, "do not teach recruits how to recognize and respond to youth with mental health, trauma-related and special education-related disorders."

In February, Michael Reynolds, a black high school student in Detroit, testified to the task force about an interaction with a cop at his school. "Before I could explain why I did not have my [student] badge I was escorted to the office and suspended for an entire week," he said. "Many young people today have fear of the police in their communities and schools."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/police-school-resource-officers-k-12-misconduct-violence

July 14, 2015

Climate vice squeezes bumblebee habitat from north and south

Bumblebee habitat in North America and Europe is rapidly being lost. What’s more, the cool-loving insects are succumbing to rising temperatures in the south without shifting north.

The fear is that many species vital for pollinating crops and wild plants on which entire ecosystems depend may be pushed to extinction.

“We are looking at what we think is a first for global warming, that in the north, bumblebee species are failing to extend their range northward while their southern range contracts,” says Jeremy Kerr of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.

“Their distribution has run up against a kind of wall, because they’re not establishing new territory fast enough to track the rapid changes in temperature.”

Kerr says that many other species including fish and butterflies have successfully managed to shift their ranges northward, but bumblebee ranges across Europe and North America have receded by 300 kilometres in the south in the past three decades without a corresponding increase to the north.

“It’s crushing bumblebee species in a kind of climate vice,” says Kerr.

Kerr and his colleagues say that the situation is so dire that governments and conservation agencies should consider artificially creating colonies to the north to help them spread, a process called assisted migration. “We need governments to lead strongly on this, and we need it immediately,” says Kerr."

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27871-climate-vice-squeezes-bumblebee-habitat-from-north-and-south/

July 11, 2015

Heroin Use Skyrockets in U.S.

Heroin-related overdose deaths in the U.S. have increased by nearly 300 percent in recent years, and a new report from the federal government shows people who use the drug are not confined to a particular income level or age group.



From 2002 to 2013, heroin overdose deaths in the country increased by 286 percent, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration. Most deaths involve the use of multiple drugs, and more than 8,200 people died of a heroin-related overdose in 2013 alone. The annual average rate of past-year heroin use in the U.S. also increased by more than 62 percent in roughly the past decade. "

Health officials say the trend stems in part from doctors prescribing opioids to treat chronic pain. The report found those who are addicted to prescription opioid painkillers – which can include Vicodin, OxyContin and morphine – are 40 times more likely to be addicted to or abuse heroin, and that 45 percent of people who used heroin were also addicted to painkillers. Because heroin, also an opioid, is cheaper than these drugs, those who begin with prescription painkillers often turn to it

"The chemical is essentially the same between prescription drugs and heroin," CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said Tuesday in a call with reporters. "It's cheaper and widely available – it's driving this trend."

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/07/07/heroin-use-skyrockets-in-us-cdc-says?int=a14709&int=9b7c08

July 10, 2015

We've Met the Doofus. And He is Jeb

IT goes without saying that it's probably not good politics to say your plan to move the country forward is that everyone needs to work longer hours. It approaches 47% level toxicity. Even more damning is that it makes zero sense in policy terms. Indeed, Jeb's 'work harder' prescription provides harrowing look at the level of derp that can be produced when you take a guy who isn't all that bright and push him to the head of the national leadership line without ever having put in an honest day's work or support himself in his life.

Let's look at what Bush said. In order to get to 4% economic growth forever, people need to work longer hours.

As our piece here notes, American workers already log dramatically more hours a week than they did a generation ago. They also work more hours a week than workers in any other industrialized economy. It's sort of a judgment call whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But unless American workers are part of a different species than people everywhere else in the world there are obviously limits to how many hours people can work every week without severe adverse effects on health, basic perceptions of quality of life and the quality of the work they do. The whole point 'growth' in the economic sense is that it is real and something that can be built upon in compounded terms over time, providing ever expanding levels of prosperity without limit. But there are only 16 hours between 8 hours and 24. Eventually you will simply run out. Whatever other countries are doing better than we are can't be hours worked a week since no one else works as many hours as Americans."

*It's unclear to me whether Bush doesn't even fully understand the policies his advisors are trying to explain to him or whether this is just standard patrician work ethic morality. Whichever it is, the real structural problem in our economy is stagnant wages for more than a generation for most of the population."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/weve-met-the-doofus-and-he-is-jeb

July 9, 2015

There’s Always Money for the Boss

Businesses always find big bucks for the boss. He wants a raise; he gets it. No problem. For workers whose sweat of the brow produces profits, well, somehow there’s never a cent for them.

In fact, last week when President Obama proposed making more workers eligible for overtime pay, fat cats and CEO sycophants expressed abject horror that companies may have to pay employees more when they work more.

No way could they pay, they protested! The proposed rule would bankrupt America, they raged. It’s not humanly possible, they fumed, for corporations that pad CEO paychecks with millions in bonuses to also manage to pay time and a half when workers labor more than 40 hours a week. Can’t be done, they cried! "

*Still, highly profitable corporations are complaining. The National Retail Federation, the group that opposes all minimum wage increases, said “there’s no magic pot of money,” from which to pay overtime.

There is, however, always a big fat magic pot load of money to pay CEOs.

In 1965, CEOs at the nation’s 350 largest public firms made 20 times the pay of a typical worker employed by those companies. After the 1970s, however, worker pay stalled while CEO pay supersized. Since 1979, the compensation of the top 1 percent grew 138 percent while the wages of the bottom 90 percent rose just 15 percent. Now those CEOs get 300 times the typical worker’s pay. CEOs at the top 350 companies in 2013 pulled down an average of $15.2 million a year, up 21.7 percent since 2010.

CEOs have long argued that they are so great and so valuable and so special that they deserve to get in a day what a worker earns in a year. But a 2013 report by the Institute for Policy Studies smacks that down. The researchers found that nearly 40 percent of the highest paid CEOs over the past 20 years were eventually bailed out, booted or busted.

That is, taxpayers came to the rescue of their companies, corporate boards fired the CEOs or investigators charged them."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=26&v=hWY9xD6rxnE

http://ourfuture.org/20150707/theres-always-money-for-the-boss

July 8, 2015

Parents of man fatally shot by Pleasanton police question use of force in son's death

PLEASANTON, Calif. (KGO) --
John Deming Junior was shot and killed by police early Sunday morning. The incident happened as police responded to an alarm at a Pleasanton car dealership and new details about what led up to the shooting are emerging.

The 19-year-old's parents are wondering whether excessive force was used by the Pleasanton police when they shot and killed their son. They are having a difficult time dealing with his death and they are wondering how hard it will be to get to the truth. Police are defending their actions.

The shooting has been hardest on John Deming's mother, Linda Stasi. Pleasanton police showed up at her San Jose home with a search warrant and put her in handcuffs. They didn't tell her until later that her son was dead."

The case is also tearing up the teen's father, a reserve police officer, who is critical of the force used against his son, known as Bubba to his friends.

"They don't need to do things like deploy a dog to a teenager that's obviously unarmed. They confirmed that," Deming Senior said. John Deming Senior. "He had a bandana. He was not a threat. He was not the aggressor and there's absolutely no reason to shoot and kill my son."

http://abc7news.com/news/parents-of-man-killed-by-pleasanton-police-question-use-of-force/833835/

July 8, 2015

So Gay Marriage Biblically Offends You? Then You Should Read This...

I want to start by saying that I am a Christian. I always have been and always will be... and I'm also a gay woman who is happily married to a beautiful British Woman named Megan. Since the recent Supreme Court ruling of legalizing same-sex marriages in the United States, I have seen the ugly and the uglier come out in people I never expected. Having moved to live with my wife in the UK, I find myself in awe at the complete and utter ignorance that has been clogging up my news feed and other social medial outlets in the past few days from my so-called American friends back in the South. It's important to state that I'm not generalizing all, as I've also seen a positive response from those Christian in the South; even including support from an amazing pastor. However, it saddens me that amongst the many rainbow-colored pictures on my feed, there is also a great deal of hatred."

What I don't understand is quite simply, this: why does gay marriage bother people so much? If you are making an unnecessary palava because you're offended by gay marriage then you seriously need to look at your own life and educate yourselves a bit. If the sole reason you feel that gay marriage is wrong because it's a sin, and the Bible tells you this is wrong, then I sure as hell hope you don't have bacon with your eggs or indulge in shrimp. Oh, or better yet, do you have any tattoos? Ever been drunk, told a white lie or been divorced? Yep, whoops. Those are all sins, too. And all sins are equal, right? I don't see anyone going off the handle because of any of these 'sins' and I most certainly don't see protests or hurtful propaganda against those. Just because you disagree with something -- and we all have the right to do so -- it is an absolute disgrace to treat the LGBT community the way you do. What if we treated all sins in this way? Bacon eaters would be doomed.

Therefore, if gay marriage or 'homosexuality' doesn't affect you personally in the way you live your life in any way, why do you feel the need to even get involved? Why worry about something that is, frankly, none of your business? "

*So, my dear fellow Christians, from one Christian to another, please mind your own business and PLEASE make sure that your hands are clean before you point your finger at me and my community. Amen."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/whitney-kay-bacon/so-gay-marriage-biblicall_b_7717502.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592