Surgeon General Regina Benjamin is announcing a new initiative to get Americans moving around:

That is why I am asking healthcare organizations across this country to join the Exercise is Medicine initiative. Exercise is Medicine is a multinational, multiorganizational initiative. It brings physical activity to the forefront of disease prevention and treatment, by making exercise a part of every patient's interaction with a health clinician. Exercise is Medicine strives to provide the essential connection between clinicians, fitness professionals, and the public, so that everyone can receive the guidance they need to stay healthy and active. All the partners in this initiative are dedicated to the idea that exercise is the new medicine. Partners are asked to continue to build, support, and advocate for physical activity as an essential element of global health and well-being by committing to action:

• Policy makers are asked to change policies to support physical activity as a major component of health.
• Clinicians and fitness professionals are asked to integrate exercise into every patient and client interaction.
• Communities, workplaces, and schools are asked to promote physical activity as an essential part of health and well-being.
• Members of the public are asked to educate and empower themselves to seek appropriate counseling on physical activity.

As health professionals, we should remember that patients are more likely to change their behavior if they have a meaningful reward -- something more than reaching a certain weight or dress size. The reward has to be something that each person can feel, enjoy, and celebrate. The reward is optimal health that allows people to embrace each day and live their lives to the fullest -- without disease, disability, or lost productivity. I hope you will join the Exercise is Medicine initiative. Together, America can become a Healthy and Fit Nation.

Since Benjamin is an Obama appointee, I expect we'll soon hear a backlash from the GOP's wacko wing about healthy people being some hidden Muslim socialist plot.

On the one hand, Benjamin has drawn fire for appearing to be overweight; on the other, she's a mountain climber who's training to take on Mount Kilimanjaro. As someone who's clearly "been there" in terms of dealing with excess weight, she might have the moral authority to get us off our fat butts and moving. One can only hope.

If you haven't read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, you oughta. Not just because it's a great book, but because it might be the best way to understand the current political climate, where the investment classes use astroturf movements, big lies, and media manipulation to prey on the fears of working people and actually get them to argue against their own interests, to set the ordinary citizens fighting each other so that they will be too busy to throw off the aristocrats and parasites. The one-percenters read Steinbeck's warning and took it to heart:

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate -- "We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket --take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb.This is the beginning -- from "I" to "we."

Continuing the process of selling bits of America to the highest bidder, California is considering the use of electronic license plates that would turn vehicles into ad space available for sale:

The device would mimic a standard license plate when the vehicle is in motion but would switch to digital ads or other messages when it is stopped for more than four seconds, whether in traffic or at a red light. The license plate number would remain visible at all times in some section of the screen.

...

Interested advertisers would contract directly with the DMV, thus opening a new revenue stream for the state, Price said.

"We're just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues," he said. "It's an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront."

It is remarkable the lengths that politicians will go to avoid discussing the mature solutions to our budget shortfalls: undoing the tax cuts that the richest Americans have received over the past few decades, real health care reform that busts up Big Pharma and Big Insurance, criminal justice reform that ends the "War on Drugs" and stops the prison-industrial complex, and ending the wars and cutting back the military-industrial complex. But in the conservative mainstream media, those are dismissed as "tax and spend", "socialized medicine" (or the new nonsense word, "Obamacare"), "soft on crime", and "unpatriotic".

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. He was also a drummer, an artist, a ladies' man, and a raconteur. His book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a collection of stories about his adventures. This excerpt, where Feynman takes a graduate-level class in biology while he's at Princeton, just to see what's going on in other fields, is one of my favorites.

The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.

I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.

"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write an observational poem

Fells Point Sunday Evening, June

I already forgot about the smell of cigarette smoke -- only now, sitting outside at cafe tables, must I breathe it again

Band up the street, someone overplaying guitar on bar music classics

Every few minutes, someone walking a dog goes by

Bits of three different conversations, outdoor cafe table conversations, things that somehow would not be spoken of indoors. My brain tries to string the fragments together into one story, does not succeed

Just a few years ago, when BP was pushing their "Beyond Petroleum" campaign and was running a solar panel factory here in Maryland (which closed earlier this year), it seemed to many -- including me, and the Sierra Club -- that if you had to buy gasoline, BP was probably one of the least of the evils.

Well, that's clearly not true anymore. So as we head into summer road-trip season, where am I to fuel up my Subaru (the machine affectionately known as "Scooty-Puff, Sr.") now?

The Sierra Club takes an updated look at the options, and puts Sunoco at the "top of the barrel". ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are at the bottom, with a special Dishonorable Mention for BP.

Following up on the topic of the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA), it seems that exposure from water bottles and other plastic food and beverage containers may be dwarfed by that caused by a surprising source: cash register receipts and other papers from thermal printers, and also carbonless copy papers. (Thanks Sean McCutcheon for the tip.)

These printing technologies rely on paper impregnated with zillions of microcapsules containing ink or dye; pressure or heat breaks the capsules and lets the ink out. (Fun fact: up until 1970, the dye was often made with polychlorinated biphenyls -- PCBs, delightfully toxic chemicals). In some methods, the paper has to be coated with a developer that reacts with the dye; that's where "phenolic resins" like BPA come in.

As I have mentioned, I pretty much grew up on Star Trek. Which is why, despite not being a cat person and therefore not a follower of the whole LOLcat thing, this LOLcat take on "The Trouble With Tribbles" ("We Has Tribbles and Also Troubles") had me, well, LOLing.

I've previously reported on Bisphenol-A (BPA), the ubiquitous endocrine-disrupting chemical found in water bottles and many other forms of packaging and linked to breast cancer, insulin resistance, miscarriage, obesity, prostate enlargement, early onset of sexual maturation, and other problems.

The latest: new research shows that BPA can cross the placenta from mother to fetus, where it can affect development during a particularly vulnerable period. And other new research suggests that fetal exposure to BPA and other endocrine disruptors can increase the risk of breast cancer later in life.

More and more I suspect that future generations will look back at our cavalier use of endocrine disruptors the way we look at the Romans' use of lead, and wonder: WTF were they thinking?

Research published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences looks at the effects of feeding three strains of genetically-modified corn -- two of which produce Bacillus thuringiensis derived pesticides ("Bt"), and one of which is "Roundup ready", meaning that it contains derivatives of this herbicide -- to rats.

Looking at data that was actually provided by Monsanto (though in some cases, only after disclosure was mandated by courts), they found that

...in the three GM maize varieties that formed the basis of this investigation, new side effects linked to the consumption of these cereals were revealed, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity. This can be due to the new pesticides (herbicide or insecticide) present specifically in each type of GM maize, although unintended metabolic effects due to the mutagenic properties of the GM transformation process cannot be excluded. All three GM maize varieties contain a distinctly different pesticide residue associated with their particular GM event (glyphosate and AMPA in NK 603, modified Cry1Ab in MON 810, modified Cry3Bb1 in MON 863). These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown.

Monsanto, of course, being one of the finest examples of pure concentrated evil on the planet, looked at this same data and applied weaker statistical methods to say that everything is hunky-dory.