I had dinner last evening with a former student who alerted me to this action next week.

Some of the world’s largest tech firms are planning a “go slow” day next week in protest of proposals that could create fast lanes on the internet for some companies.

On 10 September, tech firms including Etsy, FourSquare, KickStarter, Mozilla, Reddit and Vimeo will install a widget on their sites to show how they believe the internet would look if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overturns “net neutrality” rules.

The FCC is currently redrawing its rules after a series of legal challenges from cable and telecoms companies undermined its authority to regulate the internet. One proposal could allow internet service providers to offer fast lanes to higher paying customers, a move critics charge would break net neutrality – the principle that all traffic is treated equally online.

Evan Greer, co-founder of Fight for the Future, a pressure group helping to organise the protest day, said in an email: “Net neutrality is tough to explain to people, so we wanted to organize an action that actually shows the world what’s at stake. I think the three most hated words on the internet right now are ‘Please wait, loading … ’ Unless internet users unite in defense of net neutrality, we could be seeing those dreaded ‘loading’ wheels a lot more often on some of our favorite websites, while monopolistic companies get to decide which content gets seen by the most people.”

I think this is brilliant. If Google can be convinced to join this action—in union terms this would be a work slowdown—the protest could be devastating to the telecoms.

Rule No. 65 – Give Some Thought to Where Your Food Comes From.

From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.

Saturday Morning…

From my dad, of course…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Sweet Treats: Hometown-inspired ice cream served up for festival
Upgrades for Solvay
Shooting suspect denied contact with his parents
Roberts Funeral Home makes family the focus
Resident expresses feelings over eviction

Top Headlines Poll: Are you in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?

Great pictures of Marietta…

What’s going on here…

Previously…

A nationwide protest against low wages in the US fast-food industry culminated in hundreds of arrests on Thursday, as activists stepped up their campaign for higher pay and better benefits for workers at companies such as McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC.

Protesters in more than 100 cities including Chicago, New York and Detroit took part in sit-ins and marches outside fast-food restaurants, with many conducting acts of civil disobedience designed to get them arrested.

Many fast-food jobs pay little more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Thursday’s day of action called for a minimum wage of at least $15.

By the afternoon organisers reported police had arrested 436 people nationwide with more than 43 arrests in Detroit, 19 in New York City, 23 in Chicago, 10 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and 10 in Las Vegas. Protestors were arrested in New York after blocking traffic in front of a McDonald’s in Times Square. In Los Angeles police warned fast food workers sitting in the street they were part of an “illegal assembly” before arresting them.

“We’re definitely on the upward move because we feel justice is on our side … we can’t wait,” said Douglas Hunter, a McDonald’s worker in Chicago who said he has difficulty supporting his 16-year-old daughter on his hourly wage. “We think this is ridiculous in a country as rich as America.”

Thursday’s strikes were the seventh in a series that began as a local protest in New York two years ago. Each strike has been progressively bigger and organisers credit the movement with focussing the debate on low wage workers and reinvigorating president Barack Obama’s attempts to increase the federal minimum wage.

Dominic Rushe, Lauren Gambino, Rory Carroll and Mark Guarino writing in Hundreds of fast-food protesters arrested while striking against low wages for The Guardian.

I have worked, and continue to work, with a number of students suffering from a wide range debilitating, and often deadly, allergies. Over the years I have asked the question: why so many children now? In conversations I have suggested, admittedly with tongue a bit in cheek, that George Carlin’s thesis, that we don’t work our immune systems enough to keep them healthy, made a lot of sense. Now science is agreeing with George and me.

One in three of us is allergic. From grass pollen to latex, peanuts to pets, allergies send 20,000 of people in England to hospital every year.

But generations before did not suffer from this epidemic, so what is it that’s making us so allergic in our modern world?

Many theories have come and gone over the years, but now scientists think they may have discovered what’s to blame – and BBC Two’s Horizon has put this theory to the test.

Every one of us is covered head to toe with bacteria, and intriguingly scientists believe these microscopic bugs are the key to explaining why we are becoming more allergic.

The bacteria that cover our skin, line our mouths and fill our guts not only outnumber our own cells by about 10 to one but may play a vital role in training our immune systems. Changes to our lifestyles are influencing these microorganisms, and allergies are the consequence.

Life in the West appears to be changing our bacteria and susceptibility to allergy. But what is it about the Western lifestyle that is to blame?

There are likely to be many culprits, but a big factor could be how we are bringing up our children.

Today a quarter of babies in the UK are born by Caesarean section. That is a significant statistic in light of a Norwegian study that found Caesarean babies were 52% more likely to suffer from asthma than those born vaginally.

Scientists believe the bacteria that babies are exposed to in the birth canal somehow help protect them from allergies, and the rise in Caesarean births may be making children more allergic.

But the assault on their bacteria appears to continue as they grow up. Breast milk is now known to contain up to 900 species of bacteria, possibly explaining why exclusively breast-fed babies are less likely to suffer from allergies.

One of the greatest threats to allergy-protecting bacteria comes from antibiotics. These medicines, meant to protect us, often severely reduce our harmless friendly bacteria.

Researchers at King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, together with the University of Nottingham and Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, found that the use of antibiotics in early life may increase the risk of developing eczema by 40%.

There is no doubt that children today are being exposed to fewer bacteria than they were in the past, and they are suffering more allergies.

But it is not just the way our children are born that impacts their bacteria. How they are brought up also makes a difference.

The words are not the problem, the intent is. The old, if-you-can’t-say-something-nice-don’t-say-anything-at-all rule is still good.

First, take the “continuous” part. Lurking behind most schemes for life-transformation – especially all that “A New Year, A New You” nonsense that’s finally subsiding now February’s here – is the unspoken notion that change is something you achieve, once and for all. Since that day never actually arrives, this means living life as a perpetual dress rehearsal for the future point at which you’ll have things “sorted out” – or rejecting the idea of change entirely, on the grounds that you’d rather live in the moment and accept yourself. Seeing change as a constant sidesteps this elegantly: you can be happy with who you are, kaizen implies; but who you are is someone constantly changing, hopefully for the better.

Then there’s the “incremental” part. Sworn critics of self-help like to point out that real change takes time and is difficult. But what if they’re right that it takes time, and wrong about it being difficult? In his book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, Robert Maurer suggests taking almost absurdly tiny steps, day after day. Start exercising by marching in front of the TV for one minute daily; resolve to work on a daunting project for two minutes first thing each morning. The point is not that this will be sufficient, on its own, to get fit, or write a novel. Rather, it enables you, in Maurer’s words, to “tiptoe past fear”: our monkey-brain, it seems, is fooled when we tell it we’re embarking only on something minuscule, and it stops putting up resistance. Little and often: perhaps we shouldn’t need reminding about this obvious piece of fridge-magnet wisdom, but we do.

Oliver Burkeman writing in his column will change your life for The Guardian.

What do you think a similar flight over an Israeli community under Hamas rocket attack might look like? This reminds me of WW II photos of Berlin, Leningrad or Hiroshima.

Via Mano Singham. Warning, not for the queasy.

Good morning and welcome to our live blog coverage of a day of national protests by fast-food workers and allied service industry employees. Organizers are billing Thursday’s walkout protests as the largest demonstrations yet in the workers’ fight for a $15 minimum wage and better benefits.

Workers from McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut and other large chains planned to protest outside stores in more than 100 cities in California, Missouri, Wisconsin, New York and elsewhere. The Service Employees International Union, one of the US’s largest unions with two million members, said thousands of home healthcare workers would join the protests.

“The company should pay me more. I am worth more,” said Dana Wittman, 38, a Pizza Hut employee in Kansas City, Missouri, who makes $9 an hour working night shifts. “They make billions a year and I don’t even get health insurance. The CEO gets health insurance.”

The fast food walkouts began in New York City in November 2012. In July, 1,300 low-wage employees met outside Chicago and voted to use nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to their cause. Organizers hoped the expansion of Thursday’s protest to include home health-care workers, janitors and other service industry employees would carry the movement beyond the fast food industry.

Guardian reporters will speak with protesters today in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Follow along here for all the latest updates.

From a Google Alert for Jeff Hess.

Rule No. 64 – Try to Spend as Much Time Enjoying the Meal as It Took to Prepare It.

From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.

Friday Night…

From my dad, of course…

Local News

River history
Not so neighborly
Dealers’ $10,500 for lamb benefits BrAva
People in areas with high levels of C8 to get notices
Local band, renown singer

Top Headlines Poll: How do you prefer your sternwheel festival fireworks?

Great pictures of Marietta…

What’s going on here…

Previously…

What swiftly happens, the masters of strategic incompetence learn, is that people stop expecting you to undertake certain tasks; they no longer ask you to do them, and they adjust how they rate you: your failure to perform the activity stops counting against you. If all this sounds overly Machiavellian, it’s worth noting that it’s only a personalised version of what corporate types refer to as “expectations management”, which is a key component of any company’s customer-relations strategy. If you want satisfied customers, it’s certainly wise to act in ways that will satisfy them. But it’s also wise to pay attention to (and, if possible, influence) their criteria for feeling satisfied.

Oliver Burkeman writing in This column will change your life for The Guardian.

Burkeman concludes:

If you start small, it’s surprisingly easy to begin adjusting others’ expectations. It’s like strength training: gradually, you build up tolerance. If you think you shoulder an unfair burden of household chores, pick one, don’t do it, and monitor what happens. If you’re driven crazy at work by ceaseless emails demanding instant responses, try always waiting a few hours to respond, even when you’ve no reason to wait. Far better to have a reputation as someone who reliably replies within 24 hours than someone who replies within seconds – because in the latter case, as soon as you fail to respond instantly, you’ll be seen as underperforming. Thus do the people who try hardest to please end up annoying people more than those who don’t try so hard. No, it’s not fair.

*…you want to perform the task for the rest of your life.

When we practice Right Mindfulness, we bring about Right Concentration. p. 96

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Rule No. 63—The Banquet Is in the First Bite.

From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.

At Home, After Work…

From my dad, of course…