The Great Billboard War of 2012

By Sarah Laskow
Heartland’s crazy billboard featuring crazies was quickly pulled down, but climate groups are fighting fire with fire — or, in this case, billboard with billboard. Forecast the Facts came up with this lovely specimen:



But Clear Channel, which apparently controls the billboard system in Chicago, was having none of it, and would not approve it. The company did, however, give its blessing to a sign from Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, which asks, more tamely, “Who to believe on climate? Heartland … or EVERY National Scientific Academy in the world?” Zing.

Wonder what Clear Channel would have made of Grist’s psychotronic climate billboard generator. Hm, maybe we should look into putting this up near a Chicago highway?

Overall, the backlash to the “crazies believe in climate change, so climate change is crazy, and I don’t know how logic works” billboard is hurting Heartland. According to Forecast the Facts, the group’s lost more than $800,000 in funding from sponsors like PepsiCo, State Farm, and GM. But they still have $1.43 million left to pull whatever diabolical scheme they’re cooking up next.

more

http://grist.org/list/the-great-billboard-war-of-2012/

Nine-year-old’s lunch blog shames school into making changes

By Jess Zimmerman


Martha Payne had some sad-ass lunches at her school in Scotland — unsatisfying food that sometimes had more hair than vegetables. So the 9-year-old decided to start a blog with photos and vital statistics about her meals. Almost immediately, the blog got international attention, including from prominent school lunch busybody Jamie Oliver. Result? Martha’s dad just met with the local council, and they announced that kids could have unlimited salad, fruit, and bread.

For each of her lunches, Martha rated taste, healthiness, and pieces of hair (usually zero but not always). But she only managed five ratings before the media attention started making the school self-conscious:

Gonorrhea superbug spreads in Japan

Scientists have found a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea in Japan they say could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat, Reuters is reporting:

Toon: The Fetishization of Guns

Angry ex-wife puts hate for husband on display

Builder in Australia drills through Banksy piece

By Jamie Wetherbe
May 18, 2012, 7:00 a.m.
A bathroom pipe has destroyed a piece by the elusive street artist Banksy valued at $50,000.


An Australian builder working on a cafe drilled through a wall, piercing "The Parachuting Rat,” which was painted in a Melbourne suburb about 15 years ago.

Other street artists had wrapped graffiti around the wall careful to preserve the stencil depicting a rat descending by parachute that had attracted tourists and boosted business in the area.

This is the third Banksy piece destroyed in the Australian city in two years: In 2010, contractors painted over a piece; vandals destroyed another.


more

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-builders-in-australia-drill-through-50000-banksy-piece-20120517,0,6619223.story?track=rss

Nighttime fasting may foster weight loss

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times
May 18, 2012, 5:00 a.m.
In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era.

It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence.

A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity — and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it.

Just eat your cake — or better yet, an apple — earlier. Then wait 16 hours, until breakfast the next morning, to eat again.

"We have to come up with something that is a simple alternative to calorie counting," said Satchidananda Panda, a regulatory biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla who led the study published online Thursday by the journal Cell Metabolism.

more

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-fasting-diet-20120518,0,1060110.story

Leading Psychiatrist Apologizes for Study Supporting Gay ‘Cure’

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: May 18, 2012

PRINCETON, N.J. — The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.

He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.

The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies.

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/health/dr-robert-l-spitzer-noted-psychiatrist-apologizes-for-study-on-gay-cure.html

Toles Rant: View ja day Edition

By Tom Toles
Boehner announced that he’d like to put the nation back through the Deficit Ceiling Wringer because he finds it amusing when the form of Uncle Sam emerges from the rollers in flexible flattened out cartoon-like shape. Don’t we all. What is the rationale? Aside from amusement and the always-desirable obstruction and chaos, the only other reason I can think of is because we’ve been there before.

“Been-there-before” is the unofficial motto of the GOP in 2012. You can see why the Democrats settled on “Forward.” Tell me some ways that the GOP platform represents something we haven’t heard before. But not just heard! Seen! It’s not like the GOP is saying the same thing over and over until we try it. We HAVE tried it! Low taxes on the rich, light regulations on the financial institutions, itchy trigger finger in foreign policy. Only the faces of the presidential candidates have been changed to protect the guilty.

This was The Bush Era! The climactic culmination and glory years of all the forces Ronald Reagan set in motion. Result: Plutocracy, catastrophic economic collapse and a degree of foreign entanglements that the beloved-by-conservatives George Washington never ever dreamed of. Put the lessons of Bain Capital aside. What exactly is Romney promising that is different from George W Bush? Hands? Anyone? It is not Act II. Is is Act I all over again. And I am forgetful, remind me what about it we want to see repeated.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-view-ja-day-edition/2012/05/17/gIQAgNqKWU_blog.html

Friday TOON Roundup 5- The rest-

Drones



Tests



Faux Newz




Europe








Obama




Coffee




RIP