In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.
Wow. This really hit me hard.
EAT
Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.
Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.
This is a Gran Fury piece for ACT-UP. Landlords were evicting AIDS victims (and had been for years.) There were no legal protections to stop this, and AIDS was such a great stigma that these people were largely being erased.
ACT-UP installed an enamel sign in Petrosino Square, NYC.
when i was really little, my babysitter only spoke spanish with me so i became bilingual but i never knew when i was speaking spanish or english. one time i told my mom i wanted an avocado & she understood but then when i said the same thing to my babysitter later that day, she burst into tears with laughter because i was saying “quiero abogado” which means “i want a lawyer.”
imagine a two year old repeatedly saying “i want a lawyer!” as an adult laughs at her.
A GOP trope that long predates the Trump administration is the desire
to see the federal government run more like a business. George W. Bush
was the MBA president, after all. Mitt Romney was very successful in the
private sector, and during the 2012 campaign he pledged to apply lean management techniques to the federal government.
From
these early tendrils, the Trump administration has let a thousand CEOs
bloom. Among the more prominent private-sector folks in Trump’s Cabinet
are: Goldman Sachs exec-turned Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin,
financial manager-turned-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and, most
notably, former ExxonMobil CEO-turned mythical
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It was not an exaggeration when
Trump’s Cabinet was described as consisting of generals and plutocrats.
Nine
months in, looking at Trump’s Cabinet, it is striking at how those with
prior government or military service have vastly outperformed the
plutocrats. Jim Mattis has received strong reviews for his performance
as secretary of defense, as has Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations. John F. Kelly impressed enough during his stint at
Homeland Security to be made the new Prime Minister White House
chief of staff. Jeff Sessions is more controversial, but no one disputes
that he has been effective in pursuing his policy objectives at
Justice. Slowly but steadily, H.R. McMaster is professionalizing the
National Security Council staff.
am increasingly convinced that the rise in apocalypse narratives in our culture is fueled by the fear that nothing will ever change, that we are rooted in stasis and nothing short of extreme disaster will upend the current status quo. burning down the world is a catharsis for that fear, both terrifying and weirdly satisfying.
california anti-drought measures are always like “take shorter showers! consider brushing your teeth with the sink turned off” and never mention the fact that nestle is bottling all of our fucking water and selling it to people who live in areas with plenty of water
It’s like the Irish potato “famine” I stg
In California, residential use only accounts for 4% of total water use. Industrial use is 80%.
This is true of any resource. Yes turning your lights off will save you a but of money. But industry wastes far more electricity than you. Yes recycling your garbage is good. But companies, like the retail chain i work at produce far more garbage than you ever could and do not recycle it at all.
Turning natural resource and environmental crises into individual responsibility is form of class warfare so fucking insidious
Honestly just burn every company to the ground or cut them off from electricity and water systems
Tax them heavily for their usage Make recycling mandatory or theyre fined Oh im sorry am i stepping all over your precious free market I hope to choke it out
Word
“Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet?
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans….People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.” – Derrick Jensen (author & environmentalist)
California has been mishandling water since it’s been California and too many of the people there with the most power to stop it are too fucking busy living in a dream world where you can solve shit like this by throwing enough money, braininess, or weird spiritual shit at it. Meanwhile Okies like my family have been warning about this pretty much since we fucking arrived in the state (we were fleeing a huge man-made natural disaster after all and could see the signs) and heard crickets. Not that I have any personal stake in this with family from all over Kern and Tulare counties or anything…
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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