Category Archives: Health
Lockerbie
Megrahi has died, three years after being released from prison in Scotland on “compassionate grounds” because he had only three months to live due to prostate cancer.
Commencement
Dana Milbank reports that our first black, Pacific, gay, woman president elbowed aside a real woman (Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the NYT) to give the commencement address at Barnard. Meanwhile a NYT/CBS poll showed Romney ahead of Obama with women voters.
Weight
Now the science is settled on food. According to a new study, “The Weight of the Nation”, to be shown on HBO, it’s largely the industrialized world’s fault you are fat. And it’s the government’s job to solve the problem. This is from the NY Times:
The films try to reorient conversations about obesity away solely from personal responsibility and toward a combination of environmental circumstances to explain why 70 percent of Americans are, according to federal statistics, either overweight or obese. While personal responsibility is an important piece, “you cannot say that all these people have lost all their willpower,” Mr. Hoffman said.
Urine Your Own
I’m warming up to federal judges on personal liberty. The Supreme Court of the United States seems skeptical that the federal government can mandate that you buy stuff (Obamacare). Justice Kennedy suggested that would fundamentally change the “relationship between an individual and the government”. He asked, “can you create commerce in order to regulate it”?
Last week, a federal judge in Florida, Ursula Ungaro, ruled that the state can’t mandate that you give stuff (your bodily fluids). She ordered Governor Rick Scott (for the second time) to keep his hands off other people’s urine. Here’s the story about the drug testing rule in Florida.
Obamacare Severance Day
If you’re going to poach a cartoon go big. This is from Join, or Die, America’s first editorial cartoon, by Ben Franklin.
Severability is a precise legal term meaning to chop up into itty bitty pieces.
