Introduction to your microbiome

From the NYT--most of the cells that comprise you do not contain your DNA:

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome — that is, the genes not of “me,” exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.

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No information means no policy

According to Pogo, here are 10 basic questions about tax expenditures and the economy for which there are no meaningful answers. Here are the first 5 questions--the answers are all "we don't know": 1. How many federal dollars are spent in my community? 2. What small businesses in my community are receiving federal dollars? 3. How many jobs were created with federal spending? 4. How much fraud is there in federal spending? 5. What happens to the federal spending that falls through the cracks?

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Proposed legislation deals with too big to fail

Bernie Sanders is one of the few incorruptible Senators. It's not surprising, then, that it was Sanders who stepped forward to proposed legislation to actually break up the largest banks. It's distressing that laws accomplishing this weren't passed back in 2008, but not surprising, since the banks own Congress. Politico reports:

Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed legislation today that would break up the big banks and financial institutions that crashed the economy. The ending of too big to fail would also open the door to criminal prosecutions. Sen. Sanders called ending too big to fail a matter of justice, “We have a situation now where Wall Street banks are not only too big to fail, they are too big to jail. That is unacceptable and that has got to change because America is based on a system of law and justice. In my view, no single financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis. At the very least, no institution, no CEO in America should be above the law. If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” The legislation makes its intended purpose clear, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, beginning 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Treasury shall break up entities included on the Too Big To Fail List, so that their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout.

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A breast is a breast is a breast

According to PolicyMic,

Ladies of New York , you are free to walk bare-breasted through the city! New York City's 34,000 police officers have been instructed that, should they encounter a woman in public who is shirtless but obeying the law, they should not arrest her. This is a good step towards gender parity in public spaces.
So, a woman's bare breast should be treated no differently than a man's breast under the law. Nonetheless, the fact that this NY law is so contentious (or at least newsworthy), means that a breast is not the same as an arm or a leg, especially a woman's breast. I explore the existential connotations of breasts here.

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