Why no freakout over sugar reduction recommendations?

The US government has proposed new standards for school meals that seek to reduce the amount of sugar (and salt) in them.

U.S. agriculture officials on Friday proposed new nutrition standards for school meals, including the first limits on added sugars, with a focus on sweetened foods such as cereals, yogurt, flavored milk and breakfast pastries.

The plan announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also seeks to significantly decrease sodium in the meals served to the nation’s schoolkids by 2029, while making the rules for foods made with whole grains more flexible.

The goal is to improve nutrition and align with U.S. dietary guidelines in the program that serves breakfast to more than 15 million children and lunch to nearly 30 million children every day, Vilsack said.

“School meals happen to be the meals with the highest nutritional value of any meal that children can get outside the home,” Vilsack said in an interview.

I am bracing myself for the right wing freakout along the lines “OMG! The government is coming to take candy away from our children!” although that is not at all what is being proposed. I am surprised that it has not happened already.
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Small steps towards Irish unity

The question of what to do about the open land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has plagued the UK ever since Brexit, since Ireland remains part of the EU bloc while Northern Ireland, being part of the UK, is now out of it. Irish people on both sides are adamantly opposed to introducing a customs and border barrier that would interrupt the free flow of goods and people that they have enjoyed ever since the Good Friday peace accord that was signed in 1998 that brought an end to the long standing conflict.

The agreement acknowledged:

  • that the majority of the people of Northern Ireland wished to remain a part of the United Kingdom;
  • that a substantial section of the people of Northern Ireland, and the majority of the people of the island of Ireland, wished to bring about a united Ireland.

Both of these views were acknowledged as being legitimate. For the first time, the Irish government accepted in a binding international agreement that Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Constitution was also amended to implicitly recognise Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom’s sovereign territory, conditional upon the consent for a united Ireland from majorities of the people in both jurisdictions on the island. On the other hand, the language of the agreement reflects a switch in the United Kingdom’s statutory emphasis from one for the union to one for a united Ireland. The agreement thus left the issue of future sovereignty over Northern Ireland open-ended.

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Making retirement age eligibility fairer

France is experiencing unrest over President Macron’s proposal to raise the retiring age, when workers can start collecting their pensions, from 62 to 64 by 2030. Nationwide strikes have been called over this issue. As Kevin Drum points out, the unfairness of fixing by age when people can retire is true for the US too, because people whose work involves manual labor typically start work at an earlier age than those who go to college and get advanced degrees. Not only do the latter they put in fewer years of work, the work they do takes much less of a toll on their bodies and, crucially, they live longer.
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Was this deliberate?

In this cartoon, we have the somewhat disconcerting idea of the character Pig planning to eat a ham sandwich. I wonder if cartoonist Stephan Pastis made a deliberate choice because the. strip is quirky, or whether a ham sandwich just happened to come to mind because it is such a ubiquitous banal food choice and these are cartoon creatures after all.

(Pearls Before Swine)

The role of black conservatives

Chauncey DeVega takes the news about Trump’s deplorable ‘eulogy’ at the memorial service following the death of Lynnette Hardaway, who was the ‘Diamond’ to her sister’s ‘Silk’ as part of a duo who appeared prominently on conservative media as ardent Trump supporters, to examine the role that the current generation of what he calls ‘professional black conservatives’ play in American politics.

“Black conservative” is a specific type of character and performance in post-civil rights America (although the archetype long predates it). In the white right-wing imagination, these are black people who fulfill a fantasy role in a type of new-age race minstrel performance where they denigrate and insult the intelligence, dignity, and political agency of other black people for the pleasures of white “conservatives” and white America. These black conservatives claim that other black people are lazy, have “bad culture”, “can’t think for themselves”, are trapped on a “Democratic Party plantation.” If they “knew better,” black conservatives argue, more black people would actually be “conservatives.” Black conservatives also elevate themselves as exemplars of “hard work” and as “proof” that America is a meritocracy where anything is possible — “if you just stop worrying” about racism.

In what is perhaps their most important role, black conservatives are professional “best black friends.” They serve as mercenaries, human racism deflection shields who are deployed to tell white people some of the most grossly racist and vile things about other black people.
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Be skeptical of police reports and their initial statements

Today is the funeral of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year old Black man brutally murdered last month by five Memphis police officers, while other officers and EMT personnel stood around without doing anything to stop them. The five officers are being charged with murder and the others are being investigated.

After being involved in any incident, the police involved are required to file a report on it and the initial statements issued by police spokespersons are based on that account. According to news reports, the initial report filed following the murder of Nichols was nothing like what was seen on the video taken from the body cams.
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Film review: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

I watched this film that has garnered a number of awards and eleven nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. It takes the intriguing scientific concept of the multiverse as its basic premise, that the universe splits and branches at various points and hence there are a huge number of parallel universes, of which ours is just one, that have different degrees of similarity to our own depending on how long ago those universes split away and evolved independently. As far as we know, if the multiverse exists, there seems to be no known connection between the various universes but in this film, the main characters can move between them.

Given the acclaim that the film has received and that the multiverse is the driving idea, I anticipated enjoying it but found the film to be a huge disappointment. It started out trying to make some points about why some people are moving from universe to universe (because they are trying to stop a very bad person from doing some very bad thing) but about two-thirds of the way through, the screenwriters seemed to lose interest in that and instead turned the film into a fairly standard family drama involving the strained relationships in families and the way they play out in the various universes.
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What Republicans want to cut

Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy is due to meet with president Joe Biden on Wednesday. What about? It depends. According to the White House, the talks will be about raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a default. According to McCarthy, it is about what kind of budget cuts Biden will agree to in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday he is looking forward to discussing with President Joe Biden a “reasonable and responsible way that we can lift the debt ceiling ” when the two meet Wednesday for their first sit-down at the White House since McCarthy was elected to the post.

McCarthy, R-Calif., said he wants to address spending cuts along with raising the debt limit, even though the White House has ruled out linking those two issues together as the government tries to avoid a potentially devastating financial default.
…

Asked whether he would make a guarantee, McCarthy said, “There will not be a default,” though he suggested that declaration depended on the willingness of Biden and Democrats to negotiate.

The White House on Sunday confirmed Wednesday’s meeting on “a range of issues.” It said Biden looked forward to “strengthening his working relationship” with McCarthy and to asking about the speaker’s plan on spending, noting that the first House bill passed by Republicans this year to slash IRS funding would ultimately increase the deficit.

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The toxic culture in US police departments

Video of the brutal death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis police officers following a traffic stop has been released. I have not seen it and will not watch it because it is reportedly horrific and I have no stomach for such things. This article describes in detail what happened.

Before the release, his mother RowVaughn Wells said that she will not watch the video. This is hardly surprising. If I, who have no connection to the victim, think it would be too painful to watch, imagine what it would be like for a mother to see her son beaten and kicked to death. She and the rest of the family appealed for calm and urged people not to riot in the wake of the release. People seemed to have heeded their call and the protests have been peaceful. That is a relief because if the protests had turned violent, media attention would have shifted from the murder of Nichols to the violence. Wells seems like a remarkable woman. She has even said that she feels sorry for her son’s killers.
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Greedy, selfish, rich jerks

Evan Osnos exposes the many ways in which the ultra-wealthy shield their income from taxes even when they die, using loopholes that are not available to ordinary people. They do this while claiming to be philanthropists by putting their names on things, which are also forms of tax avoidance. But one the main ways they avoid taxes is by means of creating elaborate trusts that ensure that their children and their children pay little or no taxes on their inheritances when they die. These trust fund babies continue their tax avoidance schemes. The consequences are apparent.

And yet, in recent times, the fortunes of many prominent American clans have soared…. In 1978, the top 0.1 per cent of Americans owned about seven per cent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns eighteen per cent.

A century ago, American law handled the rare pleasure of a giant inheritance with suspicion. Instead of allowing money to cascade through generations, like a champagne tower, we siphoned off some of the flow through taxes on estates, gifts, and capital gains. As the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1927, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” But, since the late seventies, American politics has taken a more accommodating approach to dynastic fortunes—slashing rates, widening exemptions, and permitting a vast range of esoteric loopholes for wealthy taxpayers. According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the average tax rate on the top 0.01 per cent has fallen by more than half, to about thirty per cent, while rates for the bottom ninety per cent have climbed slightly, to an average of twenty-five per cent.

That lucrative maneuvering is the realm of specialized attorneys, accountants, and money managers, many of whom work for family offices: in-house financial teams that typically include a dozen or so full-time attendants… They tend to have no public presence—Gordon Getty’s family office is known, inconspicuously, as Vallejo Investments—but by some estimates they control about six trillion dollars in assets, a larger sum than is managed by all the world’s hedge funds.

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