From The New York Times:

Obesity rates in women have leveled off and stayed steady since 1999, long enough for researchers to say the plateau appears to be real. And, they say, there are hints that the rates may be leveling off for men, too.

The researchers’ report, published online at cdc.gov/nchs, used data from its periodic national surveys that record heights and weights of a representative sample of Americans. Those surveys, said Cynthia L. Ogden, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics and the lead author of the new report, are the only national ones that provide such data.

Dr. Ogden added that the trend for women was “great news.” Obesity rates have held at about 35 percent since 1999, convincing her that the tide had changed. “I’m optimistic that it really is leveling off,” she said.

Men’s rates increased until 2003, when they hit 33 percent and stayed there through 2005-6. Dr. Ogden said she would like to see a few more years of data before declaring that men’s rates had stopped increasing.

Here are some takes on the story suggested by Paul Ernsberger of Case Western . (Any mistakes here are probably my fault, not his.)

1) There are two government data sources being drawn on here; the frequently-updated Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance (BRFS) survey, and the less-frequent but more reliable NHANES survey.

Why is NHANES better? First of all, because the BRFS is a phone survey, it relies on people’s self-descriptions to get height and weight data; but self-descriptions can be mistaken or dishonest. NHANES measures and weighs its subjects to get the data, which is expensive, but more accurate.

Second of all, although both surveys attempt to measure a representative sample of Americans, BRFS excludes people without phones and people who just have cell phones, making it less representative.

Why does this matter? Because the evidence that there are marked increases in obesity (BMI > 30) in every state since 1999 is based on the BRFS; as I understand it, NHANES doesn’t show such an increase. But the BRFS is less reliable.

2) Obesity rates are equal between men and women now, even though statistically weight loss diets and other weight loss methods are used much less by men than by women. Like a lot of other evidence, this suggests that weight loss methods are not successful at reducing obesity rates.

3) A huge number of people will take credit for the plateau in weight. Every purveyor of weight loss advice and programs will claim credit.

4) From the point of view of promoting health, the most important issue is to promote weight stability, and to focus on health indicators other than weight, such as blood pressure and cholesterol.

Just before Thanksgiving a Black family in suburban New York city found a cross burning in their yard. The police have arrested 21 year old Christopher Hudak for this crime.

Police have charged a 21-year-old Cortlandt man with burning a cross on a black family’s lawn the night before Thanksgiving, and prosecutors said he threatened to slit a potential witness’ throat.

Christopher Hudak of 27 Ridge Road is the older brother of one of the girls involved in a fight at Hendrick Hudson High School with Timothy Artope, 15, the oldest son of the family victimized by the cross burning.

Hudak, charged with first-degree aggravated harassment, a felony, was arraigned this afternoon in Peekskill City Court. His lawyer denied the allegation, but entered no formal plea.

City Judge William Maher set bail at $10,000 and issued nine orders of protection, seven for members of the Artope family and two for people in whom Hudak confided about the cross burning. Prosecutors say Hudak threatened to slit the throat of one of those individuals if they told anyone about the crime.

Wesley Artope, Timothy’s father, welcomed the news that an arrest had been made so quickly.

“I’m relieved that someone is being held accountable, and I’m relieved that my family can relax as far as feeling that they were under any danger.”

Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore said at a news conference this morning that Hudak was charged under a section of the law established in June 2006 that makes cross burning a hate crime.

Police charged Hudak late last night after searching his home. An alibi he had given police earlier in the week broke down, police said, prompting them to obtain a search warrant that turned up computer records that led to his arrest.

You can read the entire story here.

When I knocked on the door at 7.15 that morning Anura was still asleep. Anura, aka the frog, is two, and his godless father was in prison. It was the first day any of us could visit Thomas,¹ and I wanted him to be able to see his godless son.

The visit didn’t start until 8.30, but Rimutaka prison is half an hour’s drive from Wellington and I was told to get there half an hour early. So Anura’s mother woke him up, and I strapped a grumpy, sleepy baby into his carseat. We talked about the visit on our way up, me and Anura. “We’re going to visit Thomas” I said; “Yeah” he said”. “He’s in prison” I said; “Yeah” he said. But mostly I just drove.

I’d heard that you could take property (which is corrections lingo for stuff) into the prison while you were visiting. I had my bag of baby stuff in one arm and my bag of prisoner stuff in the other as we went from the visitor’s carpark to the gatehouse. We were a little late, and he was walking really slowly so I slung him on my hip, with my two bags. “Takahe” said Anura - although actually it was a Pukeko.

When we got to the gatehouse it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to take anything in - everyone was putting everything they had into lockers. So I did too and we were the last to go through the metal detector. “One at a time” the guard said - so I sent the baby through first. Neither of us set off the metal detector - I’d worn my black pants rather than my jeans to make things easy. After searching my bag he let me take my nappies and a museli bar down to visiting. I wouldn’t let Anura walk to visiting, but carried him instead - I wasn’t going to cut into our hour.²

When we got there the guard made me go back and leave my bag in the entranceway. I could see everyone else hugging their prisoner, but I couldn’t see Thomas. The guard told me that they would get him and I should sit down.

Visits at Rimutaka were in a prefab - bigger than the ones at school - but the same basic shape. In one corner was a small fenced in area - like it should have been for children to play in, but there were no toys.

Then Thomas was there in a bright orange Guantanamo bay jumpsuit and I was hugging him and he was OK. The next fifty minutes weren’t how we’d normally talk, and not just because the guards would come over and tell him to put his feet on the floor. Although when Anura got bored (even a prison visit hour is a long time for a two year old) he came over and grabbed my face - just like he would have in any other conversation (although he’s a better talker now so when I wasn’t paying attention to him yesterday he just said “Stop Talking”).

Prison visits are too short - they tell you it’s over and you try and get one last hug, and say one last thing, and then another last hug, and then it really is over.

The prisoners were taken away and we were sent to the entrance way. They don’t let you out of the visitors centre right away. While waiting in the I got a nappy from the bag they hadn’t let me take in. Anura had needed changing for a while. I put my hand under his head as he lay down and changed his nappy just outside the door to the visitors centre - there was nowhere else.

Once they let us out we walked back to the gatehouse at two year old pace - he wouldn’t be carried.

But in the end, my experience was as borrowed as the baby. When I was waiting to visit the following week,³ I noticed a woman who visited every day. Later she pointed me out to a friend - “She’s with the terrorist” and glared at me. I don’t know what her problem with me was, but I would think part of it is that I was so obviously there temporarily.

I saw people I knew when visiting, and I wasn’t surprised to see them, although they were very surprised to see me. I don’t belong to any of the groups whose existence is criminalised or for whom jail is a life hazard. I visited five times in four different prisons before I saw other pakeha⁴ visiting pakeha.

So I don’t want to talk as if I know anything about having people you love in prison - because twenty-five days is nothing - people are on bail for months and are sentenced to years in prison. There are families and communities, poor and non-white families and communities, where people in prison isn’t a horror or an aberration, but a fact of life.

I kept coming back to how much I had, when working to support people in prison. Most important was that there were heaps of us doing this together. I was in a good position for other reasons I had a car, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a child, English is my first language. While I love my friends who were arrested, their disappearance did not change the fabric of my life. I wasn’t trying to live without their income, or what they did around the house.

Despite all this trying to support people in prison took everything I was able to give. Even prison visiting - which was the high point of my weeks - is work, doubly so if done with a two year old. The work of having people in prisons, and keeping families and communities functioning while they’re away, is done by women. Female visitors outnumbered male visitors three or four to one. It was mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends and friends who were there, with or without kids, to do what needed to be done.

I’m not pointing out anything new when I say this makes prisons a feminist issue. The invisible work women do is even further from the public eye when it is to serve an institution designed to hide and conceal.

There are different ways of knowing. I’ve believed in prison abolition for years, but I believed it different on Tuesday 16 October when I stood outside barbed wire fences and thought about people on the other side. And I knew that prisons were a feminist issue when I changed a nappy at the entranceway to a prison visitors centre.

1. I have a car, and in a crisis situation I like nothing better than I really long to-do list, so I’d gotten myself approved first. (back)
2. that’s the guard’s job (back)
3. A visit that never happened - but the way the corrections department at times seems deliberately set up to make your life worse is a topic for another post. (back)
4. white NZer (back)

This cartoon isn’t by me; it’s by my pal Kevin Moore. Click on the panel to read the whole thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by this post on Hoyden About Town (thanks to Bean for pointing it out to me).

UPDATE: Great comment from the discussion at Hoyden: “What was so unmarketable about a pirate dora doll?”

I don’t imagine most readers of Alas follow Australian politics particularly closely - neither do I. The main political issues I’ve followed have been union issues, racism against immigrants and indigenous issues, particularly the invasion of the Northern Territories. The common theme in all this is that Australian Prime Minister is an evil racist troglodyte.¹

Australia had elections yesterday and after eleven years in power the Howard government was finally defeated. I’m not really celebrating that - not being a huge fan of the Australian Labour party. But I do take some small joy, because it looks like John Howard lost his seat, and won’t even get back into parliament. Assholes losing their jobs is the highlight of any election.

1. The other theme is that the opposition Labour party also sucks beyond the telling of it (back)

The Nine Most Racist Disney Characters.

Thanks to Bean for pointing out this clip to me.

1) Good on Dennis for calling the inane question about his wife’s pierced tongue “trivializing.”

2) I’ll probably be voting for Kucinich in the primary. There’s no reason to vote the lesser evil in a primary.

3) The interviewer (who quickly returned to asking about the tongue piercing, alas) said that if Dennis is elected, Elizabeth will be the youngest first lady ever (also, ice capades in Hell!). Actually, she’ll be about a decade older than the youngest one was.

Trying to destroy a people’s food source to drive them away is not a minor matter or a prank; it’s a disgusting, hideous crime, and if it happened to Americans or Israelis it would be labeled terrorism. I hope folks will read Avishai Margalit’s review of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David Shulman. From Shulman’s book:

It began some two weeks ago when Palestinians from [the village of] Twaneh noticed a settler —almost certainly from Chavat Maon, the most virulent of the settlements in the area—walking deliberately through their fields in the early morning. Shortly afterward the animals got sick and the first sheep died. Then the shepherds found the poison scattered over the hills, tiny blue-green pellets of barley coated with… deadly rat poison from the fluoroacetate family…. The aim was clear: to kill the herds of goats and sheep, the backbone of the cave dwellers’ subsistence economy in this harsh terrain, and thus to force them off the land.

Schulman travelled to Twaneh and verified that the poisoned barley was there. Margalit provides more background:

In the southern West Bank, Assaf tells us, southeast of Yata, the main township in the area, more than a thousand Palestinians dwell in caves, in an area of some 7,500 acres. Some of the cave dwellers live in this area only during the seasons for planting and harvesting; some live there throughout the year. Water is scarce and the cave dwellers are dependent to a large degree on local cisterns.

In the 1970s, Israel declared part of the Yata region a “closed military area.” In 1980, next to the closed area, Israel established four settlements, which now have about two thousand settlers. Between 1996 and 2001, these settlers erected four additional outposts—small, armed encampments, said to be needed to protect the larger settlements. A fifth outpost, Maon Farm, was set up inside the area that the occupation forces had said was closed to settlement, and the settlers at Maon Farm were evacuated by the army for a few months; but they soon returned. Before they did so, the army had already expelled the Palestinian cave dwellers by force from the closed area, destroying their wells, blocking their caves, and confiscating their meager property of blankets and food. The army justified the expulsion on grounds of “a necessary military need,” specifically, its need for a training ground that would use live ammunition, endangering anyone who lived there. But the settlers of Maon Farm returned to the closed area unopposed by the Israeli authorities, and there was no mention of live ammunition endangering them. [...]

There seems no chance that these young people will understand what Shulman is trying to do. On a cold, wet, and muddy January day, Shulman and his friends are on their way to bring blankets to the cave people. The settlers try to stop them. “One of the men shouts that we are on the side of Bin Laden…. They are determined to keep the blankets away from the cave dwellers.”

The review (and the book it’s reviewing) covers a lot more ground than just the poisoning; I encourage folks to click over and read the whole thing.

Last year, I noticed Chris Ware had done a Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker cover but didn’t think much of it, other than “this seems disappointingly simple for a Chris Ware cover.”

Somehow it wasn’t until this week that I found out that Ware had in fact done a series of four alternate New Yorker covers and an online one-page comic strip; the five pieces are strongly interrelated, and the full meanings of the earlier covers in the series can’t be appreciated without reading the later covers and the one-page comic. The first of the series is a single-panel illustration; the second, two panels; the third (which is the one I saw last year) four panels; the fourth, 26; and the online comic page has, I dunno, a hell of a lot of ‘em.

There are some really ridiculously large copies of the Ware Thanksgiving on the New Yorker’s site, which is good because “ridicuously large” is probably the only way to read these. First cover; second cover; third cover; fourth cover; and companion one-page comic. And a brief interview with Ware about the covers can be heard here.

From A Tiny Revolution, the Daily Show writers explain the premises of the writer’s strike with their usual flair and humor.

To close the most recent Democratic candidates’ debate, a female student in the audience asked Hilary Clinton which she prefers, diamonds or pearls (Clinton laughed and said “both”). Watching the debate, I wondered what sort of person would ask a question that asinine.¹

As it turns out, the answer is: an ordinary, serious person, who had wanted to ask a real question but was told not to by CNN’s decision-makers.

A former illegal immigrant whose parents clean and do laundry for Las Vegas hotels, she attends a UNLV honors program on scholarship and work-study programs. Two summers ago, she interned for Senator Harry Reid; last summer, she won a fellowship in public policy at Princeton. She wants to be an immigration lawyer when she’s older.[...]

Last week, CNN had contacted Ms. Parra-Sandoval, a political science student at University of Las Vegas-Nevada, through a professor, and asked her to submit a question. She wrote one about health care for children. CNN rejected it, calling it too similar to another question that would be asked. (No such question was.) So she sent another, about Iraq. That was rejected too. On Wednesday, a CNN producer asked her for two final questions, one substantive and one light. Ms. Parra-Sandoval sent one about Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site under consideration as a storage facility for radioactive waste. With the deadline approaching, she stared at her computer screen. Noticing the pearl-pattern background on her MySpace page, she dashed off the jewelry one.

CNN asked her to come to the debate with both questions memorized. Two hours in, a producer whispered that she should ask the second one.

CNN, of course, has defended the question by pointing out that Parra-Sandoval wrote it herself, as if CNN had nothing to do with it. Oy.

1. I think the “boxers or briefs” question is asinine, too. (back)