No more fillings? Gel regenerates teeth

Say “good night” to neck pain

Manipulating Microbes in the Gut May Remedy Disease and Enhance Health

Impulsive, Weak-Willed or Just Too Much Dopamine?

Plus lots more.

Public Transit Systems Contribute to Weight Loss and Improved Health, Study Finds

A Little Biking May Help Premenopausal Women Stay Slim

Beauty salons show promise as nutrition promoters

Dark Chocolate Lowers Blood Pressure, Research Finds

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Do I have a constitutional right to own a Howitzer? An aircraft carrier?

Washington Post:

The Supreme Court ruled for the first time Monday that the Second Amendment provides all Americans a fundamental right to bear arms, a long-sought victory for gun rights advocates who have chafed at federal, state and local efforts to restrict gun ownership.

The court was considering a restrictive handgun law in Chicago and one of its suburbs that was similar to the District law that it ruled against in 2008. The 5 to 4 decision does not strike any other gun control measures currently in place, but it provides a legal basis for challenges across the country where gun owners think that government has been too restrictive.

Paul Krugman:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression…

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world … governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending…

Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around … Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. …

It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

But Prof. Krugman, those aren’t the people who MATTER.

Bob Somerby:

Krugman must be read: In this morning’s column, Paul Krugman makes a gloomy semi-prediction about where we may be heading… [See above.].) He describes the global “failure of policy” which is leading us there.

“Why the wrong turn in policy?” he asks. At least in the American sphere, we’ll suggest two major answers:

The Infection of Dumb
The Triumph of Power

And I would say, the Abdication of Power. As long as we the people let the foxes run the henhouse, they’ll keep on eating us for lunch.

The Best Walk on Earth

Dogs, owners go to boot camp

Eat These 3 Fruits for Great Summer Skin

5 New Ways to Deal With Food Cravings

Plus lots more.

. . . they keep on stealing from us.

Ian Welsh:

G20 Confers on how to make you pay for the rich’s blunders

It’s really, really simple.  The rich crashed the world economy.  They were bailed out, with their wealth having almost entirely recovered and corporate profits likewise have pretty much recovered.  Now, at the G10, the world’s leaders are discussing how to make regular people pay for the rich’s follies…

This is your future being decided, and no, they don’t think you have a say in it.

Chris Floyd, right as always:

For the last 50 years, in country after country, ruling elites — those factions which hold a disproportionate and thus illegitimate sway over society — have fostered the growth of religious extremism for two main reasons: to distract the populace from the way their lives are unjustly diminished by the elitist agenda — and to throttle and demonize any popular movement that might threaten the elite’s hegemony.

This happened throughout the Middle East, for example, as tyrants of every stripe (often clients of the West) turned to hitherto marginal fundamentalist religious groups to dilute and drive back secular challenges to their rule…

And it is most palpably happening on many levels in the United States, as Chris Hedges and many others have documented.

In most cases, this dynamic involves a strong fusion of religious extremism with a strident, exclusionary nationalism. Indeed, religious nationalism is one of the hallmarks of our age. At various times, and in various quarters, one element — the religious or the nationalist — might predominate over the other. We can see this in, say, the Tea Party movement, where exclusionary nationalism — the self-defined “Real Americans” vs. the strange, traitorous Others — is now in ascendance, occluding somewhat the sex-obsessed, church-based “Focus on the Family”-style religious nationalism that was somewhat more prevalent earlier in the decade…

The result has been poisonous rancor, social division, economic ruin, vast anxiety, endless war and the relentless, systematic degradation of the quality of life for working people, the poor, the sick, the vulnerable — indeed, for everyone outside the small circle of the elite, and their sycophants and servants in the media-political class…

And as long as the imperial system keeps churning its way around the globe, this murderous, retrograde, life-strangling dynamic will continue to accelerate.

Why are people such suckers for this nonsense? What can bring them to their senses?

Healthday News:

In experiments, holding hard, heavy objects tied to tougher attitudes, scientists say

Let’s start sending hard objects to our legislators, shall we?

Can exercise slow stress-induced aging?

Shaping how Americans eat: the debate rages

Food-Drug Interactions: Chicken or Egg?

Native Americans embrace tradition to defeat diabetes

Plus lots more.

Ian Welsh:

The Court Eunuch Standard of Blogging Exposed by Dave Weigel’s Resignation

As many may be aware, Dave Weigel, a reporter for the resigned after emails to a private listserv called Journolist were publicly released…

I’ve spent some time reading around the web, and the main criticism of Weigel seems to be that he wasn’t impartial: not only didn’t he like the right wing folks he was covering, he despised them.

This is exactly what is wrong with US journalism.  The responsibility of reporters is not to be “impartial”, their responsibility is to tell the truth.  Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that America was torturing people?  Should that not bother them as people?  S Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?…

This standard, the “court eunuch” standard, is exactly why you have a press corp that is worthless for holding those in power responsible.  People with no strong beliefs, or whose ambition or fear is so great they never express those standards strongly, are the sort of people who know that bucking a President isn’t good for your career, and so who cares of hundreds of thousands of people die because you’re a gutless careerist?

Eunuchs? No strong beliefs? Careerists? Hard to tell whether you’re talking about the media or our political so-called leaders, Ian.

At The Confluence, bostonboomer brought up the fact that Kos is a member of Journolist. I left this comment:

Kos was a member of another secret mailing list when his friend Jerome Armstrong was copping a plea for his involvement in the pump and dump craze on the internet in the 90s, and Kos actually asked people on the list not to write about Armstrong’s troubles. They didn’t.

I don’t see much difference between the behavior of the lamestream media tribe or the so-called progressive blogger/journalist tribe. Just different targets, different protected groups.

Other commenters brought up the likeliehood that secret lists like this were used to coordinate the vicious attacks on Hillary during the 2008 primary.

Reuters:

Radical cuts in social welfare spending by governments intent on reducing budget deficits can cost lives as well as cause economic pain, according to a study published on Friday.

For years, I’ve been saying that we have only three choices when it comes to seeing that our fellow humans have a way to live a decent life: We can force businesses to pay a living wage—and include that in the prices we pay for products and services, or we can subsidize those who aren’t paid enough by helping them with tax money (the Wal-Mart model), or we can let them die in the streets and step over the bodies.

Looks like we’ve chosen door #3.

Applying Sunscreen: Are You Doing It the Wrong Way?

Smart Snacks for Traveling

Chef: Outdoor cooking needs safety

Ingredient in Red Wine May Prevent Some Blinding Diseases

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Get Happy Quickly by Writing One of These

Lose Weight: Eat Every Four Hours

Compound Found in Red Wine Neutralizes Toxicity of Proteins Related to Alzheimer’s

Using foods to prevent cancer a trend

Plus lots more.

Political Wire:

Congressional Approval Stuck at Near Lows
A new Gallup poll finds that just 20% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing.

GOP Grabs Lead in Generic Ballot
The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Republicans leading the generic congressional ballot by 45% to 43%.

Confidence Waning in Obama
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds Americans “are more pessimistic about the state of the country and less confident in President Obama’s leadership than at any point since Mr. Obama entered the White House.”

Tanner (via email):

Here are some of my thoughts on the Democrats versus the Republicans.

The Democrats have been an extreme disappointment and, at times, seem no better than the Republicans when it comes to taking corporate and/ or lobbyist money to weaken good legislation or strengthen bad legislation.

But, the Republicans are bat crazy.

Republicans were not always the sick group they are today. The Republican Party has been home to many great and near-great statesmen, beginning with Abraham Lincoln. But, today, there is not a Republican on the national scene worth a bucket of warm spit.

In any election, we have two choices: vote for the Democrat or vote for the Republican.

I do NOT believe in token votes for third parties; third-party voting is an empty gesture and sends no message to anyone — but helps the Party you like even less than the other one.

We have to make choices in life and sometimes they are hard choices — but choose we must (even if we have to hold our noses to do it).

As legendary Hollywood movie maker Sam Goldwyn once said when asked why he didn’t make movies with a message: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Let’s do all we can to encourage Barack Obama to NOT run again; and then let’s do all we can to encourage Hillary to run for the presidency in 2012.

Than we won’t have to hold our noses to vote.

. . . how to encourage courage in our political so-called leaders.

HealthDay News:

Scientists have uncovered new details about brain mechanisms associated with courage.

Israeli researchers used functional MRI to scan brain activity in volunteers as they decided whether to move either a toy bear or a live corn snake closer or farther away from them. Prior to the study, the participants had been classified as “fearful” or “fearless” based on a questionnaire about snake fears.

The scans showed that activity increased in an area of the brain called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) when participants chose to act courageously.