Friday, January 3, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News For The Day



US to answer in nun birth control suit – NBC
Maggie Fox


The U.S. government has until 10 a.m. EST Friday to respond to a last-minute Supreme Court decision to delay its birth control mandate for a nun-operated nursing service. It’s an early skirmish in a year expected to be full of battles over the so-called contraceptive mandate in the Obamacare law.

The administration may have a simple answer — the group is already exempt from the law, because their insurance is provided by Christian Brothers Services. As a church organization, it’s excused from the law’s requirements.

As of New Year’s Day, all new insurance plans, including those provided by employers, must provide free birth control as part of a list of essential benefits, including vaccinations and cancer screenings.

When some religious groups objected, the Obama administration provided exemptions.
The Denver chapter of the Little Sisters of the Poor says it cannot even sign a waiver asking for one. Supreme Court justice Sandra Sotomayor, who has responsibility for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals where the group filed its latest appeal, granted a last-minute injunction on New Year’s Eve.

She gave the administration until 10 this morning to respond.
“The question here is in order to receive that exemption, they have to fill out a form,” says Ian Millhiser, senior constitutional policy analyst at the Center For American Progress. “That form announces to the government that they have a religious exemption. Employees can use that form to get (birth control) from their insurer.” The Little Sisters say that the act of filling out the form makes them complicit to birth control, which they believe is sinful.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represents the Little Sisters. It’s the same law firm helping Hobby Lobby, other for-profit businesses and some colleges and universities that are also challenging the contraceptive mandate.

The Little Sisters case is separate from these cases, in which the owners object to birth control and argue they shouldn’t have to provide it. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Hobby Lobby's case in March. More than 80 suits have been filed against the mandate.

Right now, the Supreme Court’s involvement in the Little Sisters case is minimal. Sotomayor can send it back to the federal courts or she can ask her colleagues to consider it as a full court.

Brigitte Amiri of the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports the mandate, says she is not concerned by Sotomayor’s action.
“Justice Sotomayor wants to make a thoughtful decision,” she told NBC News. “I think this temporary holding pattern isn’t a cause for concern at this point. It allows for all briefs to be filled out.”
“It was like, ‘let’s take a deep breath’,” agreed Judy Waxman of the National Women’s Law Center.

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, notes that the White House has extended more than a few deadlines for people trying to buy health insurance on the troubled exchanges. “I understand that legal issues in these cases will ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court,” Kurtz wrote in a letter to Obama. 

“In the meantime, however, many religious employers have not obtained the temporary relief they need in time to avoid being subjected to the HHS mandate beginning January 1. I urge you, therefore, to consider offering temporary relief from this mandate, as you have for so many other individuals and groups facing other requirements under the ACA.” 


As a non-Catholic I put the need to plan how many children a family has and when, over the requirements of a religious doctrine. Overpopulation contributes to starvation due to insufficient farm production, poverty, increased air and water pollution and overly crowded housing, which are all world problems that remain during our times when birth control is considered a sin. I think the Higher Power gave us humans advanced brains for the reason of thinking issues out and managing our lives. Therefore I think the mandate to provide birth control, except when there is an exemption, is the only way to get insurance companies to comply. In getting their exemption, Catholics should be content with that decision. Their unwillingness even to sign the form is an unnecessary battle, to me, and makes everything more difficult for everybody.



­ Why Ending Malaria May Be More About Backhoes Than Bed Nets – NPR
by Jason Beaubien

­ Wiping out malaria is a top goal for many leaders in global health.
Fewer people are dying now from the mosquito-borne disease than at any other time in history. "And there's a very, very strong belief now that malaria can be eliminated," says Joy Phumaphi, who chairs the African Leaders Malaria Alliance.

But when you look at the overall numbers on malaria, eradication almost seems like a pipe dream.
In 2010, malaria was ranked as the seventh biggest killer in the developing world. More than 200 million people got malaria in 2012, and more than 600,000 of those infected died.

By comparison, the world recorded just a few hundred cases of polio last year and less than a hundred cases of guinea worm — two other diseases at the top of the eradication list.

So why are global health leaders so optimistic about someday ending malaria? Perhaps because there has been a precedent. And it happened right here in the U.S.
The federal government drove out malaria from the American South in the early part of the 20th century. And the lessons learned from that successful campaign could help control the disease in developing countries, says Daniel Sledge, a political scientist at the University of Texas, Arlington.

"It's almost impossible for us to imagine," Sledge says. "But in the rural South, as late as the 1930s, the extent of malaria was in many ways comparable to what it is today in sub-Saharan Africa."

Sledge and his colleague recently analyzed archived public records to try to determine what factors helped to eliminate malaria in Alabama.

The findings were surprising. It wasn't getting people to sleep under insecticide-treated bed nets, or getting better medications to people who do get infected — two major tactics used to control malaria today in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Instead, the parasite left the U.S., in large part, because the government destroyed mosquito breeding grounds.

"The primary factor leading to the demise of malaria was large-scale drainage projects, which were backed up by the creation of local public health infrastructure," he says. Sledge and his colleague described their findings this September in the American Journal of Public Health.

There had been some speculation that malaria went into decline when tenant farmers started to move out of the hardest hit areas to seek jobs in factories up north, Sledge says. But that wasn't the case.

"We found that the population actually increased in highly endemic areas over the course of the 1930s," he says.
To wipe out mosquito breeding grounds, the U.S. government had to dig more than 30,000 miles of drainage ditches and canals, the Pan American Health Organization reported in 1963. So this strategy comes with its own set of problems, including damage to the environment.

Large-scale drainage projects aren't central to most malaria control programs in Africa and Asia today. But Sledge thinks the American experience with the parasite could be instructive for efforts to wipe out the disease globally.


The elimination of animal habitat would be the main problem caused by the drainage ditches, I suppose. It is worth it if that measure eliminated a disease as dangerous as malaria. The population of Florida wouldn't be rivaling that of New York if it were still a problem. I'm glad to be able to live here in a mild climate in my retirement years. The weather in Washington DC was the main reason I left. It's a trade off.



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Obamacare Brings Medicaid To Skid Row's 'Ugly Reality' – NPR
by Sarah Varney
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If you were led blindfolded a few blocks east from Los Angeles' grand City Hall, you would know instantly when you entered Skid Row.
There is the pungent smell of urine and marijuana smoke, and the sound of music and easy laughter — a carnival rising out of misery.

This is the chaos that Chris Mack plunges into on most days. Once homeless himself, Mack is an outreach worker for the JWCH Institute's Center for Community Health, a free clinic in the heart of Skid Row.

Mack is part of a concerted push to enroll the nation's homeless in Medicaid. As of January, the health insurance program that's jointly funded by federal and state governments is being opened for the first time to all poor adults, not just those with disabilities or dependent children.

The outreach is important, homeless experts say. In addition to safe permanent housing, regular medical care is a critical intervention for getting lost lives back on track.

"A person who is not feeling very well can't behave or perform very well," Mack says, "so I think health care is primary."
The Medicaid expansion was a central provision in the Affordable Care Act, the federal health care law. But after the Supreme Court declared the expansion optional for states, rather than mandatory, 26 states and the District of Columbia have chosen to do so. Even without all the states participating, some 9 million people are expected to enroll in Medicaid across the country, and 1.2 million homeless people could be newly eligible for coverage.

Homeless advocates have cheered the expansion. Men and women living on the streets and in shelters will be able to see a doctor regularly, keep prescriptions filled to treat their asthma, diabetes and schizophrenia, and get referrals to private specialists for lingering ailments.

'Ugly Reality'
Mack's journey through Skid Row is an arduous, even perilous undertaking: Some 54,000 people live on the streets in Los Angeles, and, as elsewhere in the nation, up to 80 percent are mentally ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol. That makes enrolling them in a complicated public insurance program all the more difficult.
“ A person who is not feeling very well can't behave or perform very well, so I think health care is primary.

- Chris Mack, clinic outreach worker
"Sometimes, on certain streets, people are following their habit, smoking or drinking or shooting up," says Mack. "That's part of the ugly reality."
Mack greets a woman perched on an upside-down plastic bucket, with a Burberry scarf covering her head. Her eyes are clouded with drink or drugs, and her cheeks are smeared with ash. She tells Mack that her name is Martha Castro, that she's slept on the streets for four years, and that she has been to the doctor just once for a lung infection.
"Do you realize that you can have health insurance?" Mack asks her.
"No, I don't want to apply for nothing else right now," Castro replies in a slur of words and confusion.

She is adamant that, at 64 years old, she's healthy enough. And anyway, she says, she doesn't have any identification or money. "So then, how we gonna have insurance for the clinic?" Castro asks.
I tell her the insurance — Medicaid — is free to her, and she doesn't need an ID card. But that doesn't matter to Castro, who is high or drunk and perhaps touched by mental illness. "That's it," she says, signaling that the conversation is over.
Mack says he can't force anyone to sign up — even someone like Castro, who he suspects has chronic asthma. "You see what I did?" he says to me. "I left the door open — 'Martha, if you need help, you can come to us.' "

Some Saying 'Yes, Please' To Insurance
George Farag is homeless and looking forward to gaining health insurance, after being unemployed for two years.

In a city crowded with chauffeur-driven, black SUVs and upscale hotels, Los Angeles' homeless are a reminder of life's cruel turns. For George Farag, an Egyptian immigrant and former security guard, that cruel turn came when he fell asleep one night on the job.

"I work in security before. I sleep on the job. Kick me out," says Farag, standing in the lobby of the John Wesley Community Clinic. As if to prove the veracity of his story, he shows me the emblem embroidered on his shirt: It's his old company's logo.
"After me lost the job, I lost everything," Farag says. "I sleep on the city two years."

One of those nights sleeping on the streets, he says, someone ran over him. A hit-and-run that crushed his right leg. He's come to the JWCH clinic before for the occasional prescription, but on this day he's signing up for Medicaid.
Through an opening at the glass enrollment window, a clinic worker hands Farag a copy of his new insurance forms, and he stuffs them into a worn plastic bag.
"God bless you," Farag says through the window. Once he is enrolled, the clinic will coordinate his medical needs, and perhaps do something about the makeshift brace on his leg.

Dr. Dennis Bleakley has been treating Skid Row patients at the clinic for more than a decade. Before, he says, uninsured homeless adults, like Farag, had little access to specialists. Fractured bones, bulging hernias, diseased hearts — all of these things went untended.

"Now, at least you have a reasonable length of time [with a patient] and access to specialists," Bleakley says. "It's going to open up a whole new world for us.
But even with new services available to them, the homeless will remain some of the toughest, most confounding patients. Disorder and addiction easily sabotage the best-laid plans, and those who work with the homeless acknowledge that few make it out.
That sobering reality doesn't stop Mack, the outreach worker, who heads back out on the street to find people who might qualify for Medicaid. He's like a rescue diver plunging into a roiling ocean to bring those who've fallen overboard back to safety — again and again.


It's good that this new law allows the homeless to get medications through Medicaid. There will still be a problem if they fail to come forward to get their medicines, or decide not to take them due to side effects. They need to be living in a safe environment and stabilized. There was an article a number of years ago about trying to get the homeless to take medications for tuberculosis, which has to be taken regularly all the time to be effective. They aren't always willing to stay in one place or follow scheduled habits. Even if they aren't schizophrenic or addicted to drugs and alcohol, there tends to be some kind of impairment if they live on the street. Those who are not impaired are more likely to go into permanent HUD housing at a reduced rent and stabilize their lives. The homeless will remain a problem, even with this change in the Medicaid law.



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Food As Punishment: Giving U.S. Inmates 'The Loaf' Persists – NPR
by Eliza Barclay
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In many prisons and jails across the U.S., punishment can come in the form of a bland, brownish lump. Known as nutraloaf, or simply "the loaf," it's fed day after day to inmates who throw food or, in some cases, get violent. Even though it meets nutritional guidelines, civil rights activists urge against the use of the brick-shaped meal.

Tasteless food as punishment is nothing new: Back in the 19th century, prisoners were given bread and water until they'd earned with good behavior the right to eat meat and cheese.

But the loaf is something above and beyond. Prisons and jails are allowed to come up with their own version, so some resort to grinding up leftovers into a dense mass that's reheated. Other institutions make loaves from scratch out of shredded and mashed vegetables, beans and starches. They're rendered even more unappetizing by being served in a small paper sack, with no seasoning.

Prisoners who've had the loaf hate it. Johnnie Walton had to eat it in the Tamms Supermax in Illinois. He describes it as "bland, like cardboard." Aaron Fraser got the loaf while he was serving time from 2004 to 2007 in several different institutions for a counterfeit-check scheme. He loathed it.

"They take a bunch of guck, like whatever they have available, and they put it in some machine," Fraser says. "I would have to be on the point of dizziness when I know I have no choice [to eat it]."

No one knows exactly how many institutions use it, but Benson Li, the former president of the Association of Correctional Food Service Affiliates, estimates that the number is over 100. At least 12 states — including California, Texas and New York — serve it in state-run institutions, as do dozens of municipal and county jails across the country.

In Pennsylvania state prisons, "food loaf" is made with milk, rice, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, oatmeal, beans and margarine. The Clark County Jail in Washington state serves a version with most of those ingredients, plus ground beef or chicken, apples and tomatoes.

Law enforcement says the loaf isn't so bad. "It's a food source; it contains all the vitamins and nutrients and minerals that a human being needs," says Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who has used the loaf in his jail for five years. "It's been approved by the courts. I've had it myself — it's like eating meatloaf. "
But prisoners who misbehave don't just get it once. They have to eat it at every meal, for days or weeks at a time. That's why it works as a deterrent, says Sheriff Clarke.

"If you're up on a first-degree murder charge, or some serious sexual assault of a child, you don't have much to lose in jail," says Clarke.
"But when we started to use this in the disciplinary pods, all of a sudden the incidence of fights, disorder, of attacks against our staff started to drop tremendously. The word got around — we knew it would. And we'll often hear from inmates, 'Please, please, I won't do that anymore. Don't put me in the disciplinary pod. I don't want to eat nutraloaf.' "

Scientists say it's the monotony of eating the loaf that's the real punishment. Marcia Pelchat, a physiological psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says humans have evolved to crave a variety of food.
"Having to eat the loaf over and over again probably makes people miserable. They might be a little nauseated by it, they're craving other foods," says Pelchat.
And it can sometimes stop prisoners from eating altogether. "It's very difficult to consume enough calories to keep your weight up if you're on a boring diet," says Pelchat.

That's why human rights advocates say it's unethical to use food as punishment in this way.

"Given that food is clearly recognized as a basic human need to which prisoners are constitutionally entitled, restrictions on food, taking away food has always been sort of legally right on the line," says David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project for the American Civil Liberties Union.

There's no guidance from the government on using the loaf, but the American Correctional Association, which accredits prisons and sets best practices for the industry, discourages using food as a disciplinary measure.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons says it has never used the loaf in its facilities. Still, the loaf persists in other parts of the corrections system, and no agencies or organizations are keeping track of where and how often it's used.

So Benson Li, the former president of the Association of Correctional Food Service Affiliates and the food service director at the Los Angeles County Jail, offered to help us find that out.

At a recent meeting of the association, Li conducted an informal survey at the request of NPR. About 40 percent of the prisons and jails that responded said their use of the loaf is diminishing, 30 percent said they do not use nutraloaf, and about 20 percent said their use was about the same or slightly growing.
Li says that, overall, the results suggest that the loaf is gradually being phased out.

"[Prisons and jails] are using less or some of them are using sparingly — maybe just two to three times in the last year," he says.
Li says he thinks one of the reasons for this is that prisoners have been challenging the loaf in the courts.

"You have seen a lot of different inmate claims and lawsuits against the Eighth Amendment in different states," he says.
One of the provisions of the Eighth Amendment is that "cruel and unusual punishment" not be inflicted on prisoners. So the prisoners who are filing these suits are hoping the courts will rule that chewing on loaf day after day is unconstitutional. And, believe it or not, there is precedent: In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that a potato-y prison paste called grue should be outlawed under the Eighth Amendment.
The loaf has held up better than grue. Of the 22 cases brought since the beginning of 2012 alone, none have succeeded. But Li's informal survey suggests that the court cases are making the corrections industry increasingly squeamish about serving it.
And Fathi of the ACLU says this is part of a bigger transformation happening in the industry.

"The fading of the use of nutraloaf is part of a larger long-term trend toward professionalization and, in most respects, more humane conditions of confinement," he says.


I have never seen any information on prison food, but this surprises me. I do hope the use of Nutraloaf is made unconstitutional. The conditions described here sound like something from the 1800's. It's more cruelty on the part of prison management, like long term solitary confinement, and continues because it is hidden from the view of the public. Thanks to NPR for researching and airing this.



­ A Bet, Five Metals And The Future Of The Planet – NPR
by David Kestenbaum
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This famous bet — between a biologist and an economist — was over population growth. It started three decades ago, but it helped set the tone for environmental debates that are still happening today.

The biologist at the heart of this bet was Paul Ehrlich at Stanford. He wrote a best-selling book in 1968 called The Population Bomb. It was so popular he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

He told Carson, "There are 3.6 billion people in the world today, and we are adding about 70 million a year. And that's too many. The very delicate life support systems of the planet, the things that supply us with all of our food, with ultimately with all of our oxygen, all of our waste disposal are now severely threatened."

Despite Ehrlich's sobering message, Carson had him on 20 times.
The guy on the other side of the bet, the economist Julian Simon, didn't buy Ehrlich's argument. Simon didn't see the growing population as a catastrophic problem. He explained that we are not like any other species. We have an economy and markets. So, according to Simon, if the world demands more oil, the price of oil will go up, and there will be an incentive to find more, or find an alternative.
Both Ehrlich and Simon enjoyed being provocative. Ehrlich started a movement called "Zero Population Growth." He got a vasectomy to set an example. And he proposed a tax on diapers to keep population in check.

Simon took to wearing devil horns on his head when giving talks.
Paul Sabin, a historian at Yale, told the story of this famous bet in his new book The Bet. And Sabin says Simon's side never really got as much notice as Ehrlich's — and that, it seems, is why he proposed the bet.

Simon proposed that they bet on what would happen to the price of five metals — copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten — over a decade.
And the logic was that these metals were essential for all kinds of stuff — electronics, cars, buildings. So, if Ehrlich was right, more people on the planet would mean we would start running out of stuff, and the price of these things should go up. But, if Simon was right, the markets and human ingenuity would sort things out, and the prices would stay the same or even go down.

And before we get to how the bet turned out, it's worth remembering the context for all this.
The 1970s felt like a time of shortages. TV news showed famines in Africa. And here at home in 1974, there were long lines at gas stations because of conflict in the Middle East.

President Richard Nixon went on television. He asked people to drive more slowly to conserve fuel. And to kill outdoor Christmas lights.
Those next 10 years, from 1980 to 1990, crept by. The world population grew by 800 million people. Then it was 1990. And they tallied it up. Simon, the economist, decisively won. Prices for the five metals went down by an average of 50 percent.
One of the reasons the prices dropped was just what Simon said. The catastrophe Ehrlich was predicting just did not happen. People invented substitutes, like companies switching from aluminum to plastic for packaging.

But Paul Sabin at Yale says, personally, he worries a lot about the environment. And he wonders if the bet actually poisoned the waters, helping to set the stage for a world where environmental debates are framed by the extremes — one side warning of certain catastrophe, and the other saying everything is going to be great.
In October 1990, the economist Julian Simon was going through the mail at his house. And he found a small envelope from California. Inside was a check from Paul Ehrlich for $576.07. There was no note.


I still think there is an upper limit to how many mouths can be fed on the land available for agriculture. The cutting of the rain forests for farms is symptomatic of the need for more land. People do better with smaller families, anyway. They have more money to take care of their families and can provide more per child, and they can give each one more “quality time” and personal attention. That makes for better parenting and family life. I think two to three children is the most that lower income or even middle class people can afford, and maybe the most that parents can give of love, discipline and education. The need for college educations keeps going up in our society.




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Editing Your Life's Stories Can Create Happier Endings --NPR
by Lulu Miller
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It was a rainy night in October when my nephew Lewis passed the Frankenstein statue standing in front of a toy store. The 2 1/2-year-old boy didn't see the monster at first, and when he turned around, he was only inches from Frankenstein's green face, bloodshot eyes and stitched-up skin.

The 4-foot-tall monster terrified my nephew so much that he ran deep into the toy store. And on the way back out, he simply couldn't face the statue. He jumped into his mother's arms and had to bury his head in her shoulder.

For hours after the incident, Lewis was stuck. He kept replaying the image of Frankenstein's face in his mind. "Mom, remember Frankenstein?" he asked over and over again. He and his mom talked about how scary the statue was, how Lewis had to jump into her arms. It was "like a record loop," my sister said.

But then, suddenly, Lewis' story completely changed. My sister was recounting the tale to the family: how they left the store, how they had to walk by Frankenstein. And then — "I peed on him!!" Lewis blurted out triumphantly, with a glint in his eyes.
In that instant, Lewis had overpowered Frankenstein — if only in his mind.

"Well, your nephew is a brilliant story editor,'" says psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia.
Wilson has been studying how small changes in a person's own stories and memories can help with emotional health. He calls the process "story editing." And he says small tweaks in the interpretation of life events can reap huge benefits.

This process is essentially what happens during months, or years, of therapy. But Wilson has discovered ways you can change your story in only about 45 minutes.
Wilson first stumbled on the technique back in the early 1980s, when he found that a revised story helped college students who were struggling academically. "I'm bad at school" was the old story many of them were telling themselves. That story leads to a self-defeating cycle that keeps them struggling, Wilson says.

The new story Wilson gave them was: "Everyone fails at first." He introduced the students to this idea by having them read accounts from other students who had struggled with grades at first and then improved. It was a 40-minute intervention that had effects three years later.

"The ones who got our little story-editing nudge improved their grades, whereas the others didn't," Wilson says. "And to our surprise ... those who got our story-editing intervention were more likely to stay in college. The people in the control group were more likely to drop out."

Similar interventions have also helped students feel like they fit in socially at college and have helped parents to stop abusing their kids.
The idea is that if you believe you are something else — perhaps smarter, more socially at ease — you can allow for profound changes to occur.

You can even try story-editing yourself at home with these writing exercises. Simply pick a troubling event. And write about it for 15 minutes each day for four days. That's it.
These exercises have been shown to help relieve mental anguish, improve health and increase attendance at work.

No one is sure why the approach works. But Wilson's theory is that trying to understand why a painful event happened is mentally consuming. People get stuck in thinking, "Why did he leave me?" or "Why was she so disappointed in me?" Or for Lewis, "Where did that scary Frankenstein face come from?"

As you write about the troubling, confusing event again and again, eventually you begin to make sense of it. You can put those consuming thoughts to rest.
So as you look forward to changing yourself this year, consider looking back on whatever your Frankensteins may be. And if you squint your eyes a little and turn your head just a bit, you may see that your leg was lifted. That maybe you did pee on him after all.


The importance of “self talk” is stressed in therapy. It won't change the past, but it will change our acceptance of stressful events and our expectations for the future and guide us in such ways as controlling the factors of our life more fully. If negative actions from “toxic” family members or friends are depressing, we can reduce the amount of time we spend with those people and find newer more positive influences.

From my own experience, I have managed to “live beyond” the past in the real conditions of my life, making negativity a less important force on me as my life improved. I also did two years of talk therapy when I was in my thirties with a practically oriented therapist who did add her helpful comments to my talking with the goal of trying new things, rather than passively waiting for me to stumble upon new insights on my own like a Freudian therapist. It was very valuable in my improvement. I also was given antidepressants to battle my mood swings. I now take antidepressants, but I don't do talk therapy. When I am free of depression I can think my way through things. It's all important to a happy life.