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So does reducing dietary salt reduce cardiovascular events? That’s the key question.

When it comes to clinical practice guidelines, low salt diets are the mainstays of pretty much every set of guidelines on the management of high blood pressure.

The vast majority of the salt we eat (75%) is from processed foods. Restaurants are a large source, too.

Few foods in their original state are naturally high in salt, and in general, we don’t add that much at the table.

Seven studies made up this meta-analysis, including 6,489 patients in total. Three studies looked at those with normal blood pressure, two included patients with high blood pressure, and one was a mixed population, including patients with heart failure. The overall effect? Interventions had small effects on sodium consumption, which led to small effects on blood pressure. There was insufficient information to analyze the effects on cardiovascular disease endpoints.

The authors go on to make the following point, which was ignored in the media coverage: Our findings are consistent with the belief that salt reduction is beneficial in normotensive and hypertensive people. However, the methods of achieving salt reduction in the trials included in our review, and other systematic reviews, were relatively modest in their impact on sodium excretion and on blood pressure levels, generally required considerable efforts to implement and would not be expected to have major impacts on the burden of CVD.

Despite the modest and equivocal results, the authors seem to have lost the narrative on their own research findings: Professor Rod Taylor, the lead researcher of the review, is ‘completely dismayed’ at the headlines that distort the message of his research published today. Having spoken to BBC Scotland, and to CASH, he clarified that the review looked at studies where people were advised to reduce salt intake compared to those who were not and found no differences, this is not because reduced salt doesn’t have an effect but because it’s hard to reduce salt intake for a long time. He stated that people should continue to strive to reduce their salt intake to reduce their blood pressure, but that dietary advice alone is not enough, calling for further government and industry action.

Until the data are more clear, you can find the data to support whatever narrative you believe. If you want to demonize salt and ignore other factors that contribute to poor cardiovascular outcomes, you can do that. And if you believe that interventions to reduce salt consumption are misguided and unwarranted, and symptomatic of an overreaching nanny state, then you can find data to support that position, too.

The case challenges knee-jerk opposition to GMOs. Is it better to risk letting orange cultivation become more costly and pesticide-intensive, or to embrace genetically tweaked orange trees?

The longer answer is that an individual GMO could conceivably cause unforeseen harms. Reasonable people may disagree about whether existing pre-market testing should be more stringent, or how the risks of relatively precise genetic engineering compare to those of creating new crops through conventional breeding or mutagenesis, the process of inducing random mutations with chemicals or radiation and hoping they turn out to be beneficial.

Unfortunately, this balanced approach to GMOs has not much spread to the culinary community, in which opposition remains a fashionable stance.

Titled “Transparency and GMOs: The More You Know, The Better,” the panel’s guests were Delana Jones from the Washington-based pro-labeling group Yes on 522, Robyn O’Brien from Allergy Kids Foundation; Errol Schweizer from Whole Foods, and Arran Stephens from Nature’s Path. EarthFix journalist David Steves moderated. As one might guess from the line-up, there was no one to offer a pro-GMO voice, allowing the panelists to veer into one-sided alarmism without fear of rebuttal.

None of this criticism made it into initial press about the paper due to a very unusual embargo policy imposed on journalists by the scientific team. Reporters were required to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding them from seeking comment from other scientists, ensuring that initial coverage would be uncritical. In response to later questions, Seralini’s team refused to make their raw data available for analysis. Editors at the journal Nature condemned the tactics as a “public-relations offensive” that denied journalists and scientists alike the opportunity to evaluate the research.

I would be more sympathetic to the cause of GMO labeling if its advocates were not so intent on stigmatizing genetic engineering.

as Mark Lynas put it in a recent post, mandatory labeling “may be bad science, but it is good politics.” The cause is not yet a fait accompli, but it’s very close. Labeling laws in Maine and Connecticut will go into effect if more states follow suit, as seems likely. Once a few states pass these laws, larger companies may come to prefer a uniform national standard over of patchwork ordinances, increasing pressure for a federal rule.

Sadhu is claiming that heliocentrism is wrong, and that the motion of the planets around the Sun actually makes a vortex. What he actually means is a helix, not a vortex. They’re different in more than just name; they’re actually very different physical motions with different properties—you can get helical motion without the particles in it interacting, like in the solar system, but in a vortex the particles interact through drag and friction.

But let's not argue over semantics. Look at the video again: Sadhu shows the Sun leading the planets, ahead of them as it goes around the galaxy (he makes this even more obvious in a second video; see below). This is not just misleading, it’s completely wrong.

I’m not arguing some small detail here. The idea that the planets trail behind the Sun as it moves through the galaxy is fundamental to what Sadhu is saying about the helix—as I’ll explain below (in the section “Where Do All These Ideas Come From?”). But first, there’s a bit more to see.

Look carefully at his animation of heliocentric motion. He shows the direction of the Sun's motion around the galaxy as the same as the plane of the planets' orbits. But this is not the case. The solar system's plane is tipped with respect to the galaxy by about a 60° angle, like the way a car's windshield makes an angle with respect to the car's forward motion.

If you are slightly above the disk you feel an overall pull down, toward the disk. Imagine the disk is just a huge slab of matter, and the Sun is above it. The gravity of the disk would make the Sun plunge down into it. Since stars are so far apart, the Sun would go right through the disk and out the bottom. But then the disk would be pulling it up, once again toward the disk. The Sun would slow, stop, and reverse course, plummeting into the disk once again. It gets about 200 or so light years from the midplane of the galactic disk every time its bobs; the disk is 1000 light years thick, though, so we always stay well inside it. But these oscillations would go on forever, the Sun moving up and down like a cork in the ocean.

Since the Sun is also orbiting the galaxy, the combined motion makes that lovely waving pattern, up-and-down as it goes around, like a horse on a carousel. So Sadhu has that part (more or less) right.

In that video and its notes Sadhu confuses coordinate systems, forces, and motions pretty often.

In his videos and on his page, Sadhu says that he learned all this from a man named Pallathadka Keshava Bhat.

The claim that the Sun is at the tip of the solar system with the planets trailing behind is also demonstrably wrong. The Sun does not really lead the solar system through the galaxy like the tip of a bullet as Bhat apparently claims (and as Sadhu’s videos show). The planets go around the Sun, and the whole shebang moves around the galaxy as a unit, tipped by that 60° angle. That means sometimes the planets are ahead of the Sun, and sometimes behind it along that galactic orbit.

given Sadhu's misapplication of the Earth's precession, I tried to read what Bhat had to say about it. But it's so garbled (and plain wrong; he claims the precession cycle is 225,000 years long, when it's actually 26,000 years) it's like trying to untie the Gordian knot. And there's much more.

 it’s not clear why protecting utility shareholders ought to outrank other social goals. EEI’s recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt.

As solar customers pay less to the utility, they contribute less to the maintenance of the electric grid and other utility “fixed” assets. The utility’s fixed costs (as opposed to the variable costs of fuel and electricity) must be recovered from the other ratepayers.

In some ways, EEI’s discussion reflects utilities’ instinctive hostility toward distributed energy. It makes a great deal of the costs of incorporating rooftop solar PV into the system, but says little about the benefits.

(The study was commissioned by the Vote Solar Initiative.) The costs are those described above — all utility customers pay for credits to solar customers and for the metering and billing necessary to integrate them in the grid.

But as utilities get power from solar, they don’t have to get it elsewhere. There are “avoided costs,” which benefit all ratepayers, not just the solar few. Here are the benefits Crossborder considered (and the California PUC has considered in rate cases): • Avoided energy costs • Avoided capacity costs for generation • Reduced costs for ancillary services • Lower line losses on the transmission and distribution system (T&D) • Reduced investments in T&D facilities • Lower costs for the utility’s purchase of other renewable generation

Now, obviously this doesn’t mean distributed solar always and everywhere lowers costs for non-solar utility customers. But it does suggest that utilities shouldn’t assume the inverse either.

Midwest Energy News (which you should be reading) did a great piece on this subject recently. I thought this bit captured it well: “This is exactly the same as when a private company, an electric utility, for example, is approved by its regulator to build a conventional power plant ‘in the public interest’,” says [renewable energy analyst Paul] Gipe. The costs and benefits are studied, and if regulators think the plant is in the public’s interest, they will approve it even if it results in new costs for customers.

First, EEI wants all power bills to include a flat charge for fixed costs, which would apply to all grid-connected customers.

Second, they want solar customers charged for the services the grid provides them: “off-peak service, back-up interruptible service, and the pathway to sell [distributed energy resources] to the utility or other energy supply providers.”

And third, it wants net-metering programs revised to pay solar customers only the going market rate, not some fancy subsidized rate.

the utilities cannot be locked into a death spiral this far in advance. It’s not healthy for them to be in a pitched battle with their customers and the planet. It’s politically untenable.

On energy efficiency, which poses many of the same threats to utilities, the conflict has been somewhat papered over by “decoupling,” whereby a utility’s profits are disassociated from its sales of energy.

But decoupling has always struck me as a classic kludge. It amounts to forcing utilities to slowly dig their own graves, strand their own assets.

Over at NDN, Michael Moynihan did a great report called “Electricity 2.0: Unlocking the Power of the Open Energy Network.” It wrestles with exactly these issues in an incisive and comprehensive way.

At the Center for American Progress, Bracken Hendricks and Adam James recently put out a report called “The Networked Energy Web” that addresses many of the same questions.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has a program called eLab devoted to creating a modern electricity system. Check out this video they made and see if it doesn’t sound familiar!

The research team of Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Herndon, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez looked at each "commuting zone" (CZ) within the U.S., and found that the American Dream is still alive in some parts of the country.

You can see what my colleague Derek Thompson calls the geography of the American Dream in the map below. It shows where kids have the best and worst chances of moving up from the bottom to the top quintile—and that the South looks more like a banana republic. (Note: darker colors mean there is less mobility, and lighter colors mean that there's more).

The researchers found that local tax and spending decisions explain some, but not too much, of this regional mobility gap. Neither does local school quality, at least judged by class size. Local area colleges and tuition were also non-factors. And so were local labor markets

1. Race. The researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower the upward mobility. But this isn't actually a black-white issue. It's a rich-poor one.

2. Segregation. Something like the poor being isolated—isolated from good jobs and good schools. See, the more black people a place has, the more divided it tends to be along racial and economic lines.

That leaves the poor in the ghetto

So it should be no surprise that the researchers found that racial segregation, income segregation, and sprawl are all strongly negatively correlated with upward mobility.

3. Social Capital. Living around the middle class doesn't just bring better jobs and schools (which help, but probably aren't enough). It brings better institutions too.

4. Inequality. The 1 percent are different from you and me—they have so much more money that they live in a different world.

it doesn't hurt your chances of making it into the top 80 to 99 percent if the super-rich get even richer.

But inequality does matter within the bottom 99 percent.

5. Family Structure. Forget race, forget jobs, forget schools, forget churches, forget neighborhoods, and forget the top 1—or maybe 10—percent. Nothing matters more for moving up than who raises you.

we don't really have any idea how to promote marriage.

Flat mobility is the defining Rorschach test of our time. Conservatives look at it, and say, see, we shouldn't worry about the top 1 percent, because they're not making the American Dream any harder to achieve. But liberals look at it, and say see, we should care about inequality, because it can make the American Dream harder to achieve—and it raises the stakes if you don't.

The American Dream is alive in Denmark and Finland and Sweden. And in San Jose and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh.

The Obama administration trapped Snowden in Russia. The U.S. unsealed the charges before it had Snowden in custody, revoked his passport, then downed the plane of the president of a sovereign state over other sovereign states because it thought Snowden was on board.

If a Russian Edward Snowden ended up in JFK Airport, there is no way in hell we'd turn him over to the Russians. Not in a hundred years, and not ever.

If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that. You would also know that when dealing with thugs like Putin, you know that things like this are better handled quietly. 

The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010? Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of spying for the U.S.

My main beef with O'Donnell is not that he wouldn't let me make these 11 points—because, let's face it, that's not what the TV is for—but that he did exactly the same shit Russians did to me when I was in Russia. They assumed that the U.S. and its government was one sleek, well-functioning monolith, that Obama was omnipotent, and that everyone in the world, including other important (and nuclear!) world leaders, act and must act as Russia demands it should, using Russian foreign policy calculus, and with only Russian interests in mind.

To this day, my kids won't eat fresh green beans. There's such a huge difference in texture and taste compared to the canned version that they're honestly like two different foods. None of us will eat homemade macaroni and cheese. If it doesn't come out of a box, it tastes weird. And the list is a mile long. We've eaten these things for so long, we've grown to prefer them to the fresh version.

And just like many poor people, we'd be broke within days of cashing that check, our living room sporting a new TV. Or we'd replace our old computers and all of our furniture. There's a reason many poor people blow through that money instead of saving it for future bills.

When you live in poverty, you're used to your bank account revolving very tightly around a balance of zero. Your work money comes in and goes right back out to bills, leaving you breaking even each month (if you're lucky). That's the life you've gotten used to. It's normal for you.

When a windfall check is dropped in your lap, you don't know how to handle it. Instead of thinking, "This will cover our rent and bills for half a year," you immediately jump to all the things you've been meaning to get, but couldn't afford on your regular income.

Don't misunderstand me here, it's never a "greed" thing. It's a panic thing. "We have to spend this before it disappears."

Have you heard those stories about lottery winners who are bankrupt within a year or two, despite winning millions? That's because they can't turn that off. They can't shake the idea that the money is perishable.

When you don't have the extra cash, you don't know how to handle it when you do get some. When you escape that level of poverty, and you find yourself having extra money for the first time, you eventually learn how to manage it.

Like anything else, it takes practice, and the poor never get the chance.

being the provider of the household, it makes you feel like a failure. And like anything else, that makes you want to overcompensate.

After we exhausted our bank account, my fiance and I looked at the number of boxes around the tree and pointed out that it didn't look like all that much. So we waited until our next check and went back for more.We overcompensated so much in the other direction that we damn near drove ourselves back into the poorhouse.

For girls already doing well in sixth grade, however, there was an opposite influence. "It could be for these girls, having friends who also are getting good grades, school is challenging and stimulating, and they end up doing better than expected," she said.

"Puberty is taking place. The brain is changing rapidly. Kids' brains are almost wired to be reading the social world to see how they fit in, and the school is the arena for it."

In a previous longitudinal study, he said, he and colleagues looked at the impacts of peer relationships of young people at ages 13, 15 and 17 to look for predictive indicators of life adjustments at age 24. Those influences at age 13 -- going back to middle school -- were the most influential, he noted. While instruction is school is vitally important, he said, it may be that more eyes should be looking at shifting peer relationships.

"Parents should pay attention to what their kids are doing and with whom they hang out," Veronneau said. "If parents notice that there is a shift in a child's friendship network, they should try to get to know those kids, talk with teachers and communicate naturally with their own child about where they are going and when they will be coming home."