A couple of news items caught my eye. Neither has anything to do with that voice of the people, Ralph Nader, but both are interesting nonetheless.
The first involves a disturbing trend where companies limit the kind of snacks their employees may consume on the job. They say it's about your health, but really they just want to keep their health insurance costs down. Even if heftyness caused early death, why would a company care -- if you drop dead at 60, they don't have to pay you a pension or post-retirement health care. Fortunately, I do a lot of work from home, so I don't have Big Corporate Brother telling me how to live. A real national health-care system would extend this benefit to all Americans.
The other article I noticed is from Arkansas, a place I've never been. There, a prisoner is suing the state because the meager rations he is given have caused him to lose 100 pounds while in jail. Admittedly, he's still rotund, but this seems like a torture more fit for Guantanamo Bay than for the USA. Not that he's likely to win his suit, since the Republicans restricted prisoners' rights so much in the past ten years. More than the torture, this illustrates my belief that the whole prison system is corrupt and wrong. Better bloggards than I have railed against this ridiculous way of fighting crime. Think about it: putting criminals together in a confined, unfree space is going to get them to act right? Then, when you release them in to society they're even less able to get jobs, exacerbating the poverty-crime cycle.
Better to abolish prisons altogether. But if we must have them, we ought to at least keep the unfree people inside them from starving to death.
Time magazine reported that the most long-lived and productive people get 6 or 7 hours of sleep, not the 8 hours our doctors always tell us to get. Sleeping longer than 8 hours is apparently linked with depression and obesity. I sleep about 9 hours a day. But am I fleshy because I sleep too much, or do I sleep too much because I'm wide of bottom? I think the huskiness may be linked with the handful of Mary Janes I ate this morning. Then again, I took a nap after that, so who knows?
