The Daily Drift

Happy Turkey Day!

Some of our readers today have been in:

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Athens, Greece

Ampang, Malaysia

Cape Town South Africa

Djibouti, Djibouti

Caracas, Venezuela

Manila, Philippines

Portsmouth, England

Dhaka, Bangladesh

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Kandy, Sri Lanka

Makati, Philippines

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Johannesburg, South Africa

Skopje, Macedonia

Abuja, Nigeria

Sampaloc, Philippines

Gaborone, Botswana

Kiev, Ukraine

Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Jakarta, Indonesia

Saint Peter Port, Guernsey

Cairo, Egypt

Lima, Peru

Davao, Philippines

Bangkok, Thailand

We would like to welcome our newest readers in: Guernsey

 

Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

Today in History

1220		After promising to go to the aid of the Fifth Crusade within nine months, Frederick II is crowned emperor by Pope Honorius III.
1542		New laws are passed in Spain giving Indians in America protection against enslavement.
1757		The Austrian army defeats the Prussians at Breslau in the Seven Years War.
1847		In New York, the Astor Place Opera House, the city's first operatic theater, is opened.
1902		A fire causes considerable damage to the unfinished Williamsburg bridge in New York.
1915		The Anglo-Indian army, led by British General Sir Charles Townshend, attacks a larger Turkish force under General Nur-ud-Din at Ctesiphon, Iraq, but is repulsed.
1919		A Labor conference committee in the United States urges an eight-hour workday and a 48-hour week.
1928		British King George is confined to bed with a congested lung; the queen is to take over duties.
1935		Pan Am inaugurates the first transpacific airmail service from San Francisco to Manila.
1936		1,200 soldiers are killed in a battle between the Japanese and Mongolians in China.
1942		Soviet troops complete the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
1948		Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam requests admittance to the UN.
1963		Lee Harvey Oswald assassinates President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president.
1964		Almost 40,000 people pay tribute to John F. Kennedy at Arlington Cemetery on the first anniversary of his death.
1973		Great Britain announces a plan for moderate Protestants and Catholics to share power in Northern Ireland.
1980		Eighteen Communist Party secretaries in 49 provinces are ousted from Poland.
1982		President Ronald Reagan calls for defense-pact deployment of the MX missile.
1986		Justice Department finds memo in Lt. Col. Oliver North's office on the transfer of $12 million to Contras of Nicaragua from Iranian arms sale.

Non Sequitur

Does Anyone Really Believe in the Mayan Apocalypse?

While Mayan apocalypse believers have been painted as misguided doomsday prophets, the reality is not quite so simple.  

Read more

 

The truth hurts

Wal-Mart Workers Plan Walkout

Workers, protesting low wages and benefit cuts, are threatening to walk off the job on Black Friday. Read more

Target, Walmart, and Other Big-Box Stores Abolish Thanksgiving

By Josh Harkinson

 

People who work in America's big-box stores don't have much to be thankful for, so maybe it's for the best that many of them can no longer celebrate Thanksgiving.
At Walmart, Target, and numerous other large retailers, Black Friday has become Black Thursday—a day that's much darker because it puts corporate profits ahead of, well, pretty much everything else that our country is supposed to care about.
This sad trend began last year at (where else?) Walmart, which announced that it would begin offering Black Friday specials at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Not to be outdone this year, Target announced a 9 p.m. Thanksgiving opening. But Walmart responded by pushing up the start of this year's Black Thursday to 8 p.m.
You don't have to be a marketing expert to see where our labor standards are going: retro. Like pre-1621 retro.
Thanksgiving is "one of the three days us retail workers get off a year: a day most of us spend with family we only get to see on that day," says Renee C, the author of a widely circulated petition to get Target to say no to "Thanksgiving Creep."
Target spokesperson Molly Snyder defended the company's decision to open on the holiday. "Target's opening time was carefully evaluated with our guests, team, and the business in mind," she told me in an email. "Thanksgiving weekend is one of the busiest of the year, and we appreciete our Target team's flexibility on this weekend and throughout the holiday season."
Of course, many big-box workers have no choice to but to be flexible. The compliant get rewarded with more hours; the rigid quickly get downgraded to part-timers, union leaders say. Take the example of Greg Fletcher, a member of the overnight crew at a Walmart in East LA. On the night before Thanksgiving he will work a 12-hour shift, from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. His wife, who also works at the store, must be there from 3 p.m. on Thanksgiving day until midnight. "For families like the Fletchers, there really won't be a Thanksgiving this year," said Dawn Le, a spokeswoman for Making Change at Walmart, a campaign working to unionize this and other Walmart stores. Yet Greg feels like he can't say no. Normally, Walmart only gives him about 30 hours of work a week.
The thankless jobs aren't just at Target and Walmart: Sears, Toys R Us, Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Kmart all will stay open on Thanksgiving too.
Broadly speaking, Thanksgiving Creep represents another example of "speedup"—or employers demanding more from their workers without offering them much of anything in return. In a sluggish economy, this is how they gin up profits.
"Just because there are millions of unemployed people does not mean that people who do have jobs should be denied a holiday off to spend with their families," said a poster on Reddit who drew attention to Thanksgiving Creep yesterday. "It may sound naive, but I think treating each other well is a much better ethos for our society than 'suck it up and be miserable.'"

Nonsense

DC politicians wants props for not taking the entire week off for Thanksgiving

Be impressed because DC is working!

In a headline that could only have meaning inside the DC bubble, Buzzfeed editors made a routine article about negotiations for the “fiscal cliff” sound somehow impressive.
It’s not.
There is absolutely nothing sensational about the actual article, which is reporting on the latest discussions about the supposed fiscal cliff problem.
However, we’re all supposed to be impressed that President Obama’s and GOP House Speaker John Boehner’s teams are working this week to find a resolution for the so-called “fiscal cliff”, otherwise known in reality world as an “austerity bomb,” instead of just taking the entire week off for Thanksgiving, unlike most Americans who get a day off, maybe two.

I doubt many are going to be impressed that Washington has graciously lowered itself to our level, and deigned to work during a week that no one in the country gets off but Washington politicians and the unemployed.  There’s a reason why the overwhelming majority of Americans dislike Congress and give them consistently low approval ratings, and it’s because they think they’re slumming it when they’re simply doing what the rest of us have to do every day.

 

Should we really be impressed that the political class is taking a break from taking a break, and actually working for it’s money?  It’s not like they’re not well compensated, making upwards of $200,000 a year, and enjoying such perks as the best healthcare in America, and a retirement plan that none of us could ever hope to see.

To be completely fair to the journalist who wrote the story, there’s nothing unusual in the actual article – she did a fine job.  But in typical Buzzfeed style, someone wanted to hype the story as something special, when it’s not.  And that only feeds the notion that it is special when Washington works an honest week like the rest of us.
And maybe it is. But it shouldn’t be.

The truth be told

A 1951 digital computer restored and rebooted

This is the Harwell Dekatron, aka Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation (WITCH), a 61-year-old machine that was rebooted yesterday to become "the world's oldest original working digital computer." Originally operated at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, it was moved in 1957 to Wolverhampton's Staffordshire Technical College where it was dubbed the WITCH. There it stayed until retirement in 1973 when it became a museum display before dismantling for storage. In 2008, the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park began to restore the valve-laden beast. "The world's oldest original working digital computer"

Minnesota man buys surplus NC light tower for research

To the government, it was a defunct offshore light tower that hadn't helped ships navigate the waters off North Carolina in more than a decade. To a Minnesota entrepreneur, the platform out in the Atlantic is a launching pad for research into wind power and other technologies.

First, some renovations will be needed at the Diamond Shoals Light Tower, which sits about 13 miles off Cape Hatteras. Its buyer hopes to get his first view of his new property next week — provided, of course, that the landing pad is sturdy enough for a helicopter.

"The pilot says he's confident it will be OK," said Dave Schneider of Richfield, Minn., who plans to chopper out Wednesday for his first look. "He says if we try to land and it looks shaky, we're not going to land."

Schneider, 56, paid $20,000 for the tower and platform in September after he was the only bidder for it in an auction by the General Services Administration, which sells real estate that the federal government no longer needs. In doing so, he brushed aside the GSA's 2-year-old inspection that concluded it would cost $2.3 million to renovate the structure that resembles an oil rig platform.

He pored over the 125-page engineering report before deciding it wasn't in as poor shape as it first appeared. It's sturdy, sitting in 50 feet of water and with pylons going 150 feet into the seabed. Of the renovation estimate, $1 million is for a boat-winching system and boat, neither of which he needs. Another $189,000 was earmarked for contingencies, and part of the renovation was for labor, some of which Schneider will do himself.

And then, there's the view.
"When you look at real estate, it's always location, location, location," he said. "Who wouldn't want to have a location in the Atlantic Ocean?"

The Diamond Shoals Light Tower was made operational in 1966 to help ships cross a treacherous area nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic. It was automated in 1977, removing the need for a full-time Coast Guard Crew. Its condition deteriorated over the years, and the light was extinguished in December 2001.

Schneider plans to be on the tower for four to five hours Wednesday, using cameras on hard hats to record his tour of each room, including getting measurements for all of it. The living quarters housed below the landing pad include five bedrooms, a galley and a recreation room.

The light tower isn't the only unusual property available through GSA auctions. For example, the former Stanley Mickelsen Safeguard Complex near Hampden, N.D. — the country's first anti-ballistic nuclear missile defense system — is up for grabs, as is a cave storage facility in Atchison, Kansas. Some properties never go up for auction, said Lori Dennis, GSA branch chief in real property utilization and disposal in Atlanta.

The government worked with local leaders to turn a former munitions plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., into a Volkswagen plant that makes Passats, she said. "We do get a lot of unusual properties, and we're traditionally successful at getting rid of them," she said.

Business-oriented, methodical people tend to buy traditional properties such as federal buildings, while more daring, entrepreneurial types buy nonconventional properties such as light towers, she said.

That's true of Schneider, who is president of a supplies and logistics that works with government contracts. He also serves as president and CEO of Zap Water Technology, which installs equipment that turns water and salt into an eco-friendly sanitizer and cleaner in meat plants, schools and other places.

He wants to use the tower for research not only by Zap Water, but by other companies. He envisions researchers taking advantage of the tower's enormous space to study wind turbines, solar power, climatology, metal coatings, marine biology, and other subjects.

"There's tons of different research industries I would like to bring out there," he said.

Before Schneider bought the tower, he consulted Richard Neal of Mint Hill, who bought North Carolina's other light tower two years ago for $85,000. After restoring the tower in Frying Pan Shoals, including adding a hoist so people can get from a boat to the tower without climbing, he opened a bed and breakfast at the site in June. For $300 per person, plus the cost of transportation, people can spend a weekend diving and fishing or just watching movies and sunsets from 30 miles off Southport.

His advice? "Keep the long-term perspective. Fix the things you need to fix first. Keep a healthy dose of patience and explain to people what you're trying to do. And they'll want to help."

Schneider does hope to recruit volunteers willing to help renovate the tower in exchange for some breathtaking views and unmatched fishing and diving opportunities.

He said he's no different than the person who wants to restore a 1966 Camaro and sees one that's rusted and dilapidated but still beautiful. "I have the same situation. It's just a heckuva lot bigger," Schneider said. "It's old, it's rusty and it was made in 1966. But there's a lot of potential there."

And as for that landing pad?

"They just said they couldn't guarantee it was safe," he said.

US drought worsens after weeks of improvement

The worst U.S. drought in decades has deepened again after more than a month of encouraging reports of slowly improving conditions, a drought-tracking consortium said Wednesday, as scientists struggled for an explanation other than a simple lack of rain.

While more than half of the continental U.S. has been in a drought since summer, rain storms had appeared to be easing the situation week by week since late September. But that promising run ended with Wednesday's weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report, which showed increases in the portion of the country in drought and the severity of it.
The report showed that 60.1 percent of the lower 48 states were in some form of drought as of Tuesday, up from 58.8 percent the previous week. The amount of land in extreme or exceptional drought — the two worst classifications — increased from 18.3 percent to 19.04 percent.
The Drought Monitor's map tells the story, with dark red blotches covering the center of the nation and portions of Texas and the Southeast as an indication of where conditions are the most intense. Those areas are surrounded by others in lesser stages of drought, with only the Northwest, Florida and a narrow band from New England south to Mississippi escaping.
A federal meteorologist cautioned that Wednesday's numbers shouldn't be alarming, saying that while drought usually subsides heading into winter, the Drought Monitor report merely reflects a week without rain in a large chunk of the country.
"The places that are getting precipitation, like the Pacific Northwest, are not in drought, while areas that need the rainfall to end the drought aren't getting it," added Richard Heim, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center. "I would expect the drought area to expand again" by next week since little rain is forecast in the Midwest in coming days.
He said there was no clear, scientific explanation for why the drought was lingering or estimate for how long it would last.
"What's driving the weather? It's kind of a car with no one at the steering wheel," Heim said. "None of the atmospheric indicators are really strong. A lot of them are tickling around the edges and fighting about who wants to be kind of the hill, but none of them are dominant."
The biggest area of exceptional drought, the most severe of the five categories listed by the Drought Monitor, centers over the Great Plains. Virtually all of Nebraska is in a deep drought, with more than three-fourths in the worst stage. But Nebraska, along with the Dakotas to the north, could still see things get worse "in the near future," the USDA's Eric Luebehusen wrote in Wednesday's update.
The drought also has been intensifying in Kansas, the top U.S. producer of winter wheat. It also is entirely covered by drought, and the area in the worst stage rose nearly 4 percentage points to 34.5 percent as of Tuesday. Much of that increase was in southern Kansas, where rainfall has been 25 percent of normal over the past half year.
After a summer in which farmers watched helpless as their corn dried up in the heat and their soybeans became stunted, many are now worrying about their winter wheat.
It has come up at a rate on par with non-drought years, but the quality of the drop doesn't look good, according to the USDA. Nearly one-quarter of the winter wheat that germinated is in poor or very poor condition, an increase of 2 percentage points from the previous week and 9 percentage points worse than the same time in 2011. Forty-two percent of the plantings are described as in fair shape, the same as last week.
Farmers who might normally irrigate in such circumstances worry about low water levels in the rivers and reservoirs they use, and many are hoping for snow to ease the situation. But it would take a lot. About 20 inches of snow equals just an inch of actual water, and many areas have rain deficits of a foot or more.

UN report: Rwanda commanding Congo rebel force

The Rwandan military is commanding and supporting the rebel force that overtook a major city in eastern Congo this week, a United Nations report released Wednesday said.

Uganda is also providing more subtle but nonetheless decisive backing to the M23 rebels, the report said.

The report's release, just one day after the violent takeover of Goma, is sure to increase pressure on the international community to confront the two eastern African countries over their role in neighboring Congo's conflict. Both Rwanda and Uganda have repeatedly denied supporting the M23 movement and have faced little international criticism over the allegations.

The highly anticipated report from the U.N. Group of Experts said both Rwanda and Uganda have "cooperated to support the creation and expansion of the political branch of M23 and have consistently advocated on behalf of the rebels. M23 and its allies include six sanctioned individuals, some of whom reside in or regularly travel to Rwanda and Uganda."

The document said that Rwanda is funneling weapons, providing direct troop reinforcements to the M23 rebels, facilitating recruitment and encouraging desertions from the Congolese armed forces. The de facto chain of command of M23 ends with Rwandan Defense Minister Gen. James Kabarebe, the report said.

M23 is "a Rwandan creation," said Steven Hege, a member of the Group of Experts. He said Rwandan soldiers and commanders embedded with M23 take orders from Rwanda, not the rebels.
Hege said the Group of Experts submitted to the Security Council a confidential list of individuals recommended for sanctions, some of them mentioned in the report.
The report puts the U.N. in an uncomfortable position. Rwanda has been elected by the U.N. General Assembly to serve a two-year position on the 15-member Security Council beginning in January, which will complicate efforts by the council to come to grips with the country's intervention in Congo.
The Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to impose travel bans, assets freezes and other sanctions on the leaders of M23 and called for an end to external support for the rebellion, but without naming Rwanda or Uganda.
Rwanda's representative spoke to the council after the vote to deny that his country is involved in the Congolese rebellion. Uganda has previously denied involvement and said it would pull its troops out of U.N. peacekeeping operations if it was named in the report.
Timothy Longman, director of Boston University's African Studies Center, said the U.S. and other countries have been reluctant to confront Rwanda out of lingering sympathy for its 1994 genocide and because the country is considered a successful model for development. He said Rwanda has become a key international player under President Paul Kagame, including supplying troops for the African Union mission in Darfur.
"The international community needs to stop pretending like Kagame is a benign leader and realize that the green light given to his unacceptable behavior in the past is allowing him to get away with literally murder," said Longman, a former director of the Human Rights Watch office in Rwanda.
The U.S. suspended its military aid — albeit only $200,000 — to Rwanda after parts of the U.N. preliminary report were leaked last month. Other European countries followed suit, suspending humanitarian aid to Rwanda.
The U.S. Mission to the U.N. did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.
The M23 movement, which was born in April when hundreds of troops defected from the Congolese armed forces, now has some 1,250 troops, according to the report.
Thousands of Congolese soldiers and policemen defected to the M23 rebels Wednesday as rebel leaders vowed to take control of all Congo, including the capital, Kinshasa.
The U.N. report accuses the M23 commanders of recruiting hundreds of young boys and girls as soldiers and ordering the extrajudicial executions of dozens of recruits and prisoners of war.
The document cites members of the Congolese army, current and former M23 members and former members of the Rwanda military who attested to Rwandan weapons deliveries to the rebels and the deployment of Rwandan troops to help consolidate rebel control over territory. It said senior Ugandan officials have also provided direct troop reinforcement, weapons delivery and technical and political assistance to the rebels.

Rwandan support was critical to the M23 capture of four eastern Congo towns in July, the report said. The Rwandan army deployed more than 2,000 soldiers to help seize Bunagana, and Rwandan commanders provided machine guns, anti-tank and anti-aircraft launchers ahead of the attack, it said.

Prior to the July assaults, Ntaganda and other rebel commanders flew to Rwanda to meet with Kabarebe, the Rwandan defense minister, the report said.

The report said that Rwandan soldiers and M23 rebels communicate through commercial radio sets that the rebels obtained while in the Congolese armed forces. The Congolese military has thus been able to intercept several communications between Rwandan soldiers and M23 combatants, the experts said. One member of the U.N. Group of Experts witnessed an M23 commander communicating by radio with Rwandan troops for reinforcements.

Earlier Wednesday, the U.N.'s special representative for Congo said the 19,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force there is being stretched thin by multiple rebel militias in the eastern part of the country, including Goma.

Roger Meece made the assessment in a live videoconference linkup to the Security Council from Kinshasa.

The council is assessing the performance of the MONUSCO peacekeeping force after 1,500 of its troops stood by Tuesday and let M23 rebels take Goma without resistance.

U.N. helicopters over the weekend fired hundreds of rockets at the rebels in a bid to slow their advance on the city of 1 million.

But U.N. officials say the U.N. force commander in Goma ordered the peacekeepers not to shoot Tuesday in order to avoid provoking a major firefight in the city after Congolese troops retreated.

Meece said the M23 rebels were "well provisioned," uniformed and supplied with weapons, including night-vision goggles, which clearly came from some outside party.

He did not name Rwanda or Uganda.

Legendary Italian Warrior Exhumed

Italian researchers have exhumed the tomb of Giovanni de' Medici, one of the most celebrated condottieri (mercenary soldiers) of the Renaissance, in a bid to understand the life and death of the charismatic 16th century army commander. Also known as... Read more

The Most Ancient City In Russia

The Dagestani city called Derbent is the most ancient in Russia: historians claim it is 5000 years old. True or not is a moot point, but the city is really very, very old. Wiki says that the modern city was founded in 438 AD while it got the status of a Russian city not so long ago - in 1840. The historical part of the city is worth seeing indeed. More

Battle For Stalingrad: 70 Years After

19th of November, 1942. 7:30 a.m. The air over Stalingrad started shaking. Volleys of thousands of artillery shells marked the beginning of the "Uranus" operation - a counter-offensive one, which became a radical turn in the Second World War. Seventy years have passed and last Sunday there was held a reconstruction in Volgograd devoted to that battle. More

Retro Photo

Hair dryer(s) in the 1920s

Judge denies motion to freeze meningitis pharmacy owners' assets

 

A federal judge on Wednesday denied a motion to freeze the assets of the owners of the compounding pharmacy at the heart of the deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak, but said the company may not make extraordinary cash transfers or pay dividends or bonuses to the pharmacy's owners.

Judge Dennis Saylor, of U.S. District Court in Boston, ordered an attachment of $5 million for each of the two plaintiffs who had moved for a preliminary injunction and prejudgment attachment restraining the assets of the Framingham, Massachusetts-based New England Compounding Center.

An attachment represents a preliminary seizure of property pending a final judgment in a case.

The plaintiffs, Michele Erkan and Robert Cole, who have filed a lawsuit against NECC, had also sought to freeze the assets of NECC-affiliated companies Medical Sales Management Inc and Ameridose LLC and six individual directors, shareholders and employees, up to $461 million.

These included Barry Cadden, NECC's co-owner and chief pharmacist; his brother-in-law Gregory Conigliaro, who is also an NECC co-owner; and other members of the Conigliaro family who are principals of the companies.

On Tuesday lawyers for NECC's owners argued before Saylor that there is no evidence any of them directly participated in the events that led up to the meningitis outbreak. They argued to block the motion by the meningitis victims to freeze assets of NECC and its owners.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 490 people have been injured by a tainted steroid distributed by NECC and 34 have died.

Texas judge questions tools that grab cellphone data from innocent people

The Wall Street Journal reports that a Texas judge is asking questions about whether investigators are providing courts with sufficient detail details on technlogies that allow them to grab data on all cellphones in a given area, including those of people who are most certainly innocent of any crime. Snip:

One of the investigative tools in question is something called a “cell tower dump,” which allows law enforcement to get information on all the phones in a given area at a given time.In two cases, Magistrate Judge Brian Owsley rejected federal requests to allow the warrantless use of “stingrays” and “cell tower dumps,” two different tools that are used for cellphone tracking. The judge said the government should apply for warrants in the cases, but the attorneys had instead applied for lesser court orders.
Among the judge’s biggest concerns: that the agents and U.S. attorneys making the requests didn’t provide details on how the tools worked or would be used — and even seemed to have trouble explaining the technology.

Random Photo

Free dope left at roadside for the taking

Three bags brimming with cannabis have been dumped on the side of a road on the New South Wales south coast of Australia with a sign advertising "free dope".

Shoalhaven police posted pictures of the garbage bags and the sign, which said "Free Dope. Smoke. Mull up" accompanied by a drawing of a cannabis leaf.

A local had reported seeing the bags on Bolong Road, Bomaderry, on Saturday morning.

Officers inspected the bags and found 16 kilograms of cannabis leaf inside. Police said the leaf was of little value, as the head of the plant is sold. The cannabis will be destroyed.

Chocolate As Diabetes Medicine

by David Spero on Diabetes Self Management

I used to say chocolate tasted great, but if you thought it was a health food, you were kidding yourself. But research shows that chocolate helps manage diabetes, prevents heart disease, and improves mood. Is this too good to be true?
Next week, I’ll get back to toxic chemicals. This week, I felt like something tastier.
According to nutritionist Amy Campbell, chocolate is made from cacao (cocoa) beans. The insides of the roasted beans, or the “nibs,” are crushed into a paste.
So right there is a good start. We’ve written before about the diabetes benefits of beans, so chocolate has a good pedigree for health.
Most of chocolate’s healing power seems to come from “flavonoids,” biological chemicals that Campbell says “are thought to help lower cholesterol and lower the risk of blood clots.” Other studies show chocolate can relax blood vessels; lower blood pressure, LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, and blood glucose; and improve insulin function.
Unfortunately, pure chocolate is bitter. You have to add sugar to make it taste good. And pure chocolate is powdery and dry. You have to add an emulsifier, like fat, to give it an enjoyable texture. So authorities have long called chocolate harmful and told people, especially people with diabetes, to avoid it. Is there a way to get the benefits, minimize the harmful sugars and fats, and still have something you want to eat?
The healing flavonoids and flavonols are in the dark part of the chocolate. About.com guide Elizabeth LaBau defines “dark chocolate” as “chocolate without milk solids added…The cocoa content of commercial dark chocolate bars can range from 30%… to 70%… or even above 80% for extremely dark bars. Common terms used to distinguish the cocoa content of dark chocolate bars [from bitterest to sweetest] include bittersweet, semi-sweet, and sweet dark chocolate.” The cocoa percentage should be printed on the label.
Recent studies are even more strongly pro-chocolate. A meta-analysis of seven studies published in 2011 “linked high chocolate consumption with a 37% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk, a 31% reduction in diabetes risk and a 29% reduction in stroke risk when compared to low chocolate consumption” according to ABC News.
Flavonoids and flavonols are natural antioxidants, which means they reduce damage to blood vessels caused by normal circulation and wear and tear.
Chocolate also has well known mood benefits. Writing on PsychCentral, Diana L. Walcutt, PhD, said, “Chocolate’s mental health benefits include the ability to boost brain levels of endorphins (natural opiates) as well as serotonin (a [natural antidepressant]).”
Chocolate has also been found to raise levels of dopamine (the “well-being” hormone) and oxytocin (the “attachment” hormone, released during sex and while breast-feeding a baby). So some people find it has good effects on their sex life and love relationships.
Too Good to Be True?
So should everyone be running out to buy chocolate as medicine? Can medicine taste this good? Some of the scientists think not. “I’m not suggesting that dark chocolate is some therapeutic medicine,” says Jeffrey B. Blumberg of Tufts University, who studied chocolate’s effect on blood glucose levels.
Italian scientist Claudio Ferri, leader of Blumberg’s study, said, “a little bit of cocoa per day can be useful.” But like most scientists, he is afraid of the extra sugar, calories, and fats people consume in the form of chocolate. If people eat too much chocolate, “The potential benefits will be surely bypassed and exceeded by excessive weight gain,” says Ferri, an internist at the University of L’Aquila.
I think these doctors worry too much. There should not be a problem if people eat dark chocolate moderately. But concerns about blood glucose are widespread. An article on Livestrong.com advised, “Those who monitor their blood glucose levels should consume only small amounts of dark, or semi-sweet chocolate, or varieties that contain at least 70% cocoa content.”
There are other potential downsides to chocolate. Dark chocolate is high in caffeine, which can raise blood pressure and interfere with sleep. It has also been implicated in migraine headaches, so you may need to monitor for that. Chocolate also contains oxalates, which are associated with a higher risk of kidney stones.
A frequently recommended dose is one ounce of dark chocolate a day, but perhaps the experts are being too careful.
In practice, while scientists debate the health effects of chocolate, experts like the recipe editors at Diabetes Self-Management seem to have made up their minds. Chocolate is good and can be consumed in dozens of wonderful forms. Just don’t eat too much, keep it dark, and choose kinds that don’t have added sugars. It’s probably best not to eat it at night, so the caffeine doesn’t keep you awake.
To get a listing of dozens of these recipes — sample “raspberry chocolate cream pie” — click here.

The Traditional Thanksgiving Eel

Turkey? No, thanks. I want a traditional Thanksgiving--the way the Pilgrims did theirs. Two years ago, James Prosek wrote in The New York Times that the original Thanksgiving feast may have been upon freshwater eels:

Indeed, eel was the dinner that Pilgrims were given on the very day after they made peace with Massasoit, the sachem, or leader, of the region. The following account is from “Mourt’s Relation,” mostly written by a Plymouth resident, Edward Winslow: “Squanto went at noon to fish for eels. At night he came home with as many as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat and sweet. He trod them out with his feet, and so caught them with his hands without any other instrument.”

So who's up for some eel on Thursday?
More

Birds Descended from Gliding Dinosaurs

These gliding dinosaurs certainly had the edge on size, but modern birds are much better fliers.  

Read more

 

Funny Pictures

The History Of Presidential Turkey Pardoning

Each year before Thanksgiving, the President of the United States formally pardons a live turkey presented to him by the National Turkey Federation. It's a tradition that's seemingly been around forever, and while the NTF has been supplying the White House with holiday birds since the 1940s, the pardoning bit is actually a pretty new development.

New Fish Named for Presidents

Five new species of small, colorful river fish have been named for presidents. 

Don't ask why.  

Read more

 

Are These Animals Too 'Ugly' To Be Saved?

 

People are used to being asked to help save photogenic pandas, but are there animals whose strange appearance hinders conservation? Creatures that achieve world fame for being under threat - the panda, the mountain gorilla, the tiger - tend to be conventionally aesthetically pleasing, even cute.

But the scientists who study the planet's rarest beasts say that many of the most precious and threatened creatures have physical characteristics that, although perhaps not adorable in the most orthodox sense, make them truly unique.

Animal Pictures