The ground is shifting in American politics, and including in the US-Israel relationship

Check out the latest New Republic.

Interesting report from a carnivore

And I don’t use “carnivore” and “omnivore” as synonyms. I mean “carnivore,” as the blog title will indicate: “Meat Heals.” The post from Charlene Andersen begins:

As per interest and requests I thought I would sit down and talk about my story of approaching and reaching my carnivore diet. Even though I like to never look back or put any focus on my previous ill health, I know that by doing so it may help others. Warning… I’m a number of things, but not a writer. So, read on at your own risk!🤪

I was born March 22, 1973 to an engineer and a physical therapist. My mom’s dad was an M.D. with an emphasis on OB/GYN. He was a great man, but followed the norm of doctoring. He suggested the healthy diet of “cereal and low-fat milk” to snack on in between the standard low fat meals. She was a good little girl and gained just the right amount of weight, ate her “good foods” and prepared for her new baby in a “June Cleaver” kind of way.

I was born quickly without any complications. Things went the way they typically do with hospital births. She nursed me, with the intention of weaning me off breastmilk completely by the 3 month mark so she and my dad could go to FL and leave me with my grandparents. I reacted to every formula and every food they gave me. I guess they ended with the least reactive combination for me.

Growing up, I always had rashes, asthma and allergies. I was allergy tested at 4 after having a scary breathing situation at nursery school. I was sensitive to almost everything. But my diet was never looked at as an option to cure it all. Instead, I got shots for years. I hated every single one. Never got used it. It always seemed wrong to me.

Because I was an only child, my parents wanted me to have opportunities to do things with other kids as much as possible. So, I went to a lot of camps – which I absolutely loved. However, one of the many camp trips is most likely when I was bitten by a deer tick. I remember tick checks every night and removing them with tweezers when found. I don’t remember having a specific rash or period of flu-like symptoms. I had my share of colds, strep and flu every year and would always catch whatever was “going around”, so nothing stood out when I contracted Lyme.

Because my grandpa was a doctor, medications were easy to access and antibiotics were FREELY given to me. I was destined for constant, health failure.

Because of my tendency toward asthma, my parents didn’t enroll me in what I would have loved the most – dance. Instead, homework and optimal grades were pushed (especially by my mom).

And I did succeed in that. I was always top of my class, getting straight A’s and extra credit whenever it was available.

In the meantime, my health kept deteriorating. Beginning at age 8 I developed trichotillomania. Sores on my eyelids and eyebrow lines made me want to rub/pull at the lashes. I had times when I had no eyelashes or eyebrows. My parents saw it as a bad habit that I wasn’t “strong enough” to overcome. This lasted all the way through grade school, middle school, high school, college and my first couple years working.

Whenever I went over to my friends’ houses (everyone had pets), it wasn’t long before my parents would get a call to come and get me because I was wheezing or developing hives.

Once I started to mature around age 13, the acne I developed was cyst-like and extremely ugly and painful. They would look like craters. I had them all over my face, neck, inside my ears, shoulders, back, chest and arms. Between hardly having eyelashes/eyebrows and having this acne, I was very self-conscious. I was not obese as a kid, but I was always heavier than the norm and carried my weight in a weird sort of way in my hips and butt. I remember having cellulite at age 12.

By age 16 my periods slowed and stopped completely. None of the OB/GYN doctors had any answers. My diet was the typical low fat, high complex carbs, high vegetation and low sugar. So, OBVIOUSLY my diet wasn’t causing it.

College days were fun (time away from my parents), but continued my downward health spiral. The extreme fatigue really set in at this point. I started out having a double major of Mathematics (to please my dad) and Studio Art (to please me). My mom didn’t care as long as my grades were as perfect as possible. What kept me from successfully majoring in Mathematics is I could not stay awake in class. I would fall asleep after a couple minutes of class starting and wake up when it was over. I needed naps throughout the day and I would always be the first one to sleep in the dorm by hours. Depression and darkness started overcoming me. I pushed friends away more and more due to my fatigue and depression.

I started working out hoping that would make me feel better about myself (and my floppy physique), but it just made me more tired and angry. I didn’t give up working out until years later. (I even became a PT on the side of my professional job.)

I ended up graduating cum laude with math and psychology minors, and studio art major.

After graduating college, I got a job working in the Industrial Design department at Navistar, which was a dream as an Art major, loving automotive design and working at the same company as my dad, cousin and uncles.

The most dramatic downturn in my health happened next. The stress of working and being around clay modeling, paint spraying and all sorts of chemicals quickly sent me downhill fast. Honestly, at this point life is a blur to me still.

My lifesaver was . . .

Continue reading.

Not really my cup of tea, since I like veggies, and would rebel against being told not to eat any.

7334 steps in Nordic walk

68 minutes: 108 steps/minute (107.9, more precisely). I was somewhat sluggish today.

A Pivotal Moment for Hungry Americans

Sarah Jones writes in the New Republic:

There are few bright spots in the landscape of American inequality. Wages remain stagnant, the racial wealth gap persists, and student loan debt hit a cumulative $1.5 trillion this year. But food insecurity has been on a steady decline. A new USDA report, published on Wednesday, revealed a statistically significant drop last year in rates of both food insecurity and very low food security. “An estimated 11.8 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2017, down from 2016 and continuing a decline from a high of 14.9 percent in 2011, while still above the pre-recession (2007) level of 11.1 percent,” researchers wrote. Food insecurity outside metropolitan locations declined sharply, and food insecurity among children remained relatively static, hovering around 8 percent of households with children.

Experts typically associate rates of food insecurity, which the USDA defines as reports of “reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet,” and very low food security, which indicates reduced and disrupted food intake, as markers of economic inequality. On its own, declining food insecurity doesn’t necessarily indicate progress in addressing inequality overall, but it’s a positive sign—for now.

Congress could soon reverse this slow progress. House and Senate officials begin meeting this week to reconcile two different versions of the farm bill, which gets renewed every five years or so. If the compromise bill resembles the version passed by the House, low-income families may find themselves in desperate circumstances. The House farm bill raises the eligibility threshold for households seeking access to the Supplemental Assistance for Needy Families Program—also known as food stamps—and would hike allowable household resources from $2,250 to $7,000 for families without an elderly or disabled member. (The Senate version of the bill omits those hikes.)

Raising eligibility standards in this manner would cut SNAP benefits for two million households, according to an analysis published Thursday by Mathematica Policy Research and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That’s higher than an earlier estimate by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found that the bill would cut or reduce assistance for 1 million low-income households. According to Mathematica, 34 percent of the affected households include a senior, 23 percent include children, and 11 percent include a person with a disability.

Mathematica only examined the impact of the House bill’s eligibility hikes. But that isn’t the only way the bill would reduce access to benefits. It also expands work requirements. While the Senate rejected that particular notion of reform in its version of the same legislation, advocates for work requirements find support in other corners. President Donald Trump enthusiastically tweeted on Tuesday that forcing families to work a certain number of hours in order to qualify for food aid would “bolster farmers and get America back to work.”

In fact, work requirements, as the impact of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program shows, amount to welfare cuts. After then-President Bill Clinton signed TANF in 1996, as part of welfare reform, benefits fell steadily over time, leaving low-income families worse off than they had been before TANF came into force; the program requires most adult recipients to work a certain number of hours in order to qualify for assistance. “[Work requirements] end up having a very large number of people who lose benefits and have nothing as a replacement. So our expectation is if we have very large numbers of people subject to those requirements, we will have lots of people who have no resources to put food on the table,” LaDonna Pavetti of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities told Marketplace in April.

Whether Congress cuts SNAP through stricter work requirements, or by raising eligibility standards, or both, the end result likely will be the same. Food insecurity will rise. The conditions are already present. Hunger’s decline is a tenuous one, and for some communities it remains a major problem. As the USDA report showed, food insecurity has yet to drop below pre-recession rates, and both food insecurity and very low food security remain concentrated in black and Hispanic households, mostly in the South. The states of Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana suffer from the highest rates of food insecurity; at least 17 percent of each state’s population reports having inadequate access to food. According to USDA data from 2015, at least two of those states, Arizona and Arkansas, also had lower rates of SNAP participation than two-thirds of all states.

There’s a correlation here. “SNAP is incredibly effective at reducing food insecurity,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress. She added, “SNAP keeps millions of people out of poverty. It’s one of the most effective programs in protecting children from experiencing experiencing hunger. We know that it’s associated with better long term health outcomes and education outcomes for kids, and it’s a very important form of support for people.”

Without those programs in place, or with access to those programs suddenly more difficult to obtain, more families will struggle to eat. “Given what we know, which is that SNAP and the school meals program are enormously important for children’s health and education, you would see a rise in food insecurity,” Boteach said.

Outside the United States, the consequences of austerity—a reduction in welfare spending, ostensibly to reduce national debt—have demonstrably resulted in increased food insecurity. In the U.K., . . .

Continue reading.

Spearmint and a smooth shave

The Vie-Long brush shown has always seemed like a horsehair brush to me, though it was identified as boar in the description. Still, in either case I soak it before use. I do like it and the octagonal handle is particularly nice—plus it easily made a terrific lather from Wickham’s Super Smooth Garden Mint. Again I will say I like the large-diameter pucks that have been used by some vendors.

The Fatip Testina Gentile, my choice for my son’s three sons, did its usual excellent job, and a splash of “Refined” from Saint Charles Shave finished job. And good news: my Excel Nordic walking poles have now been shipped.

And Aaron Blake nails it

Read his column.

And, even more so, read Jennifer Rubin’s column. Spot on: it’s a coup. Trump isn’t running things, his (unelected) aides have taken over and are running things.

And one more, another must-read. The pace is quickening. This are documenting decisive days for the US as they happen.

Kevin Drum has a good take on all the leaks and backstabbing

I think you’ll find it interesting.