Poverty and the Brain

“Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life. Experiments showed that the impact of financial concerns on the cognitive function of low-income individuals was similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep.”

Science News

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks — Ideology at the throat of governance

Coming back to the American political scene after three weeks away and not much has changed.  Or perhaps that is unfair: at least more, and more from the middle, are talking about the root cause of the toxicity in politics.  Not everyone is pumping the same sludge.   The Washington Post has a review of a scathing new book about Republican extremism, by two veterans of the political scene who have striven to keep their views free of damaging rhetoric.

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks  — by y Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Today’s Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party — “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional” — doesn’t work in a “separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.”

These Republicans “have become more loyal to party than to country,” the authors write, so “the political system has become grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces unusually serious problems and grave threats. . . . The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.”

Class War in Texas

This is the way the greatest country in the world treats its poor.  The Republican controlled legislature in Texas already has several mentions in the National Hall of Shame.  They are working towards having a wall all of their own.

Leticia Parra, a mother of five scraping by on income from her husband’s sporadic construction jobs, relied on the Planned Parenthood clinic in San Carlos, an impoverished town in South Texas, for breast cancer screenings, free birth control pills and pap smears for cervical cancer.

But the clinic closed in October, along with more than a dozen others in the state, after financing for women’s health was slashed by two-thirds by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

The cuts, which left many low-income women with inconvenient or costly options, grew out of the effort to eliminate state support for Planned Parenthood. Although the cuts also forced clinics that were not affiliated with the agency to close — and none of them, even the ones run by Planned Parenthood, performed abortions — supporters of the cutbacks said they were motivated by the fight against abortion.

It then goes on to say

As the case in Texas illustrates, such battles are affecting broader women’s health services. Some women have lost the only nearby clinic providing routine care.

Nationally, the newest target is Title X, the main federal family planning program. All four Republican presidential candidates support eliminating Title X, which was created in 1970 with Republican support from President Nixon and the elder George Bush, then a congressman.

Food Riots Continue

For at least the second day, citizens of Somalia in Mogadishu rioted over the price of food.

Thousands of angry Somalis rioted Monday over rising food prices and the collapse of the nation’s currency, culminating in clashes with government troops and armed shopkeepers that killed at least five protesters, witnesses and officials said.

Shops and markets throughout Mogadishu quickly shut their doors as protesters, including many women and children, stoned storefronts and chanted slogans accusing traders of cheating them.

Somalia Misery: LAT


Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast….