Bizarre rules of Italian macrobiotic 'cult' revealed by victims | World news | The Guardian

People who broke free from what police say was a macrobiotic sect in Italy have described gradually losing control over their lives through a web of archaic rules and subtle manipulation.

Some said they spent more than 20 years within a system that police say was carefully cultivated by Mario Pianesi, an influential businessman celebrated around the world as a guru of macrobiotic food.
Pianesi, 73, is among four people accused by the authorities of reducing people to slavery by strictly controlling their diets, denying them contact with the outside world and leaving them impoverished by forcing them to work for free or a pitiful salary.

 

The group was exposed by police last week, following an investigation which began in 2013 when a young woman, whose weight had plummeted to 35kg (77lb), told police Pianesi had promised her that his “Ma-Pi” diet would cure her illness.

Pianesi has not commented on the allegations. Manuel Formica, a lawyer representing all four accused, said: “This thing is far-fetched and the suspects will do everything to defend their integrity.”

Bizarre rules of Italian macrobiotic 'cult' revealed by victims | World news | The Guardian

January 13, 2016::End of the day round-up (pg 2)

Ben Carson: Gays And 'Secular Progressive Movement' Are 'Beating People Down' Over LGBT Rights

"The way it works now is they target you and they have all kind of hate speech ridicule, if there’s a way they can bring action against you they will do that, try to ruin your life," the retired neurosurgeon stated, somewhat from experience. Students at Carson's prestigious Johns Hopkins University petitioned in 2013 to have him removed as commencement speaker after his outrageous anti-LGBT comments.

"Look at all the people who because of their religious convictions and their belief in what the Bible says have lost their livelihood and they’re put in jeopardy over the gay marriage issue, when in fact this is supposed to be a country where you live and let live," Carson continued.

Atheist parents take on Christian ‘Good News Club’ with ‘Better News Club’

The group, consisting of atheists, humanists and skeptics, announced its own after-school program: a Young Skeptics club featuring science, logic and learning activities.

Young Skeptics is being sponsored by a volunteer-led group calling itself “The Better News Club.” Its members come from the Atheist Community of Rochester — the same group whose leader offered the first atheist invocation before a town meeting in Greece, N.Y., after the Supreme Court ruled in May that public meetings could begin with sectarian prayers.

Both clubs are based at Fairbanks Road Elementary School in Churchville, N.Y.

The Better News Club and Young Skeptics operate under the assumption that “it’s more important to teach children how to make belief decisions for themselves, rather than accept claims presented to them without thinking critically about those claims,” according to its mission statement.

As Hemant notes, Dawkin's statement in question was made 24 years prior to the 2013 publishing of Dahlstrom's book,,,



The $58 Million Frivolous Lawsuit Against Richard Dawkins is Finally Over

The lawsuit was filed by Karl L. Dahlstrom, a self-proclaimed “modern Renaissance man” who wrote an anti-evolution book called The Organized Universe in 2013. That book offered “scientific proof” that Darwinism was a hoax. To no one’s surprise, the experts were not convinced.

Dawkins, of course, has made a career out of explaining evolution to the masses — and he gets noticeably frustrated by people who trot out the same faulty arguments against evolution time and time again.
And that was the source of conflict.

In 1989, Dawkins wrote in a New York Times book review that “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”

Dahlstrom was convinced that the “somebody” Dawkins referred to in that statement was him.

I have a "strange" fascination with non-traditional music. Although my preference is old time jazz (no vocals) and early swing, stuff like klezmer music is just fun to listen to.

60 Years Later, A Wild, Baffling Recording Finds A Modern Spark

The Brothers Nazaroff are remaking the disc with a tribute release called The Happy Prince — though the group, which comprises klezmer musicians from three continents, is a lot more polished than their inspiration. Michael Wex, author of the best-selling book Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, says he was taken aback when when he heard the original 1954 recording. "My my initial reaction to it was, 'How the hell did this get recorded?'" he says. "It sounds like the Yiddish-speaking janitor and a bunch of his friends at Folkways broke in one night, and just sort of seized the equipment and started playing songs."

I am a sucker for a good lentil chili or curried lentils over rice. Being that I do not eat beef (maybe 3-4 times a month if that), lentils and chic peas (hummus) are a substitute protein for me. Whether I would go so far as to call them a "superfood", - eh, prolly not,,, I eat em cuz I like em and they're cheap.


Seeing that there may be an added benefit to the overall environment of the planet is a added bonus

With Twice The Protein As Quinoa, The Pulse Might Be The Year’s New Hot ‘Superfood’

“I don’t know if I could be any more excited about this category of food,” Tim McGreevy, CEO of the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council, told ThinkProgress. “This recognition is terrific for the industry and pulse farmers, but overall it’s important for the world. We have to have more focus on these crops.”

Beyond their nutritional characteristics, pulses are unique in the plant kingdom in that they fix their own nitrogen in the soil, meaning that growing pulses requires little to no added inputs from synthetic fertilizers. Nitrogen fertilizers, when applied to soil, release nitrous oxide as a byproduct, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to agriculture’s carbon footprint. Excess nitrogen can also be washed away during storm events, making its way into streams, rivers, lakes, and bays where it encourages algal blooms and dead zones that can be destructive to marine ecosystems.
,,,
Still, the pulse industry will need to overcome some key barriers before lentils and beans can reach the superfood status of things like quinoa; perhaps the most pressing issue is that most consumers either don’t know what pulses are, or are unaware of their environmental and health benefits. Currently, O’Neill said, most of the Montana’s pulse crop is exported, either to India or Mexico. In the United States, the majority of demand for pulse crops comes from garbanzo beans, which are used in hummus. But O’Neill and McGreevy both hope that the spotlight given to pulses by the United Nations increases both public interest in the food, as well as public funding for crop research.

Food Stamps Are Worth Double at These Michigan Farmers Markets—Helping Families and Local Businesses - NationofChange

ATTENTION MICHIGAN READERS:: 

(Please note that the left side of the article is cut off, this is occurring in all browsers.  As per a suggestion from comments, copy+paste into a suitable word processing program to read.) 

Zilke is a farmer in Ypsilanti, Mich., population 20,000, where more than a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. Every week, she sells her vegetables at Downtown Ypsilanti Farmers Market, one of two in the city. Nearly 40 percent of the shoppers at both hubs are on some form of food assistance funding from the government.

The two farmers markets first started accepting payment through food assistance programs back in 2006. But that year, they only received $378 from the program.

But in 2010, an incentive program called Double Up Food Bucks expanded from Detroit to Ypsilanti. The program matches SNAP money (formerly known as “food stamps”) dollar-for-dollar when people spend it at farmers markets. That means shoppers can double up to $20 in spending on fruits and veggies. By 2014 customers spent more than $39,000 at these markets through initial SNAP dollars combined with Double Up’s supplement.

So instead of a customer base with $20 of SNAP money to spend, farmers like Zilke had a customer base with $40 to spend. “I make more money, I expand my business, and then I can hire more people,” Zilke said. “If I hire more people I then improve the bottom line of my community. It’s a ripple effect.”

That’s why the USDA is providing $31 million in grants to finance organizations around the country that, like Double Up Food Bucks, provide SNAP incentives. The grants were announced March 31 and were authorized under the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program in last year’s Farm Bill. Double Up Food Bucks will receive $5.1 million and will be matched in full by private donations.

Food Stamps Are Worth Double at These Michigan Farmers Markets—Helping Families and Local Businesses - NationofChange

Is it Time to Just Say No to Eating Beef? | Alternet

To that end, WWF this year helped launch the  Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef , an association of businesses and environmental groups
that has begun to “facilitate a global dialogue on beef production that is environmentally sound, socially responsible, and economically viable.” The roundtable plans to identify the best practices for raising beef, and spread them widely using the leverage of retailers like Wal-Mart and brands like McDonald’s to do so. Someday your burger may come with fries, a Coke, and a “green” seal of approval.

[,,,]
Nevertheless, green groups that readily fight coal plants or suburban sprawl have for the most part shown little desire to do battle with meat. The  Meatless Monday  campaign was started not by environmentalists but by the school of public health at Johns Hopkins.  The Mayo Clinic has more to say about meat  than The Nature Conservancy, although TNC’s chief executive, Mark Tercek, is a vegetarian. Another vegetarian, Danielle Nierenberg, who directs the Nourishing the Planet program at the Worldwatch Institute, explains: “Most environmental groups don’t want to tell people what to eat or what not to eat. It’s a personal issue that’s tied to your culture, to your history, to what your mom fed you when you were five years old.”

[,,,]
Amy Larkin, who has led successful corporate engagements with Coca-Cola, Unilever, and the Consumer Goods Forum as the solutions director at Greenpeace USA, says green groups that take corporate donations will have a hard time pushing for the transformational changes that business needs to make. “If you want to make serious, dramatic change, you have to be brutally honest,” she says. “Who wants to tell the truth to the hand that feeds you? At some point, you have to be free to say ‘not good enough’ and walk away from the table. That’s hard under any circumstance, but harder if a company is giving you money”

[,,,]
Others say that’s exactly the wrong approach. Fewer cattle should be in feedlots, they say, and land now devoted to growing corn and soy should be allowed to revert to pasture. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which accepts no corporate money, lists on its website  10 reasons why meat lovers should opt for beef that have been fed all their lives on pasture . Courtney White of the nonprofit Quivira Coalition  writes about carbon ranching , a way of raising cattle that enriches soil, sequesters CO2 and produces what he calls “climate-friendly beef.”

Is it Time to Just Say No to Eating Beef? | Alternet