The Hellhound and HeLa: Recent American Historical Writing At Its Best

The last really good history I read was "Hellhound On His Trail, " which follows James Earl Ray's path from his childhood in Alton, Illinois through a violent intersection with the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and continues to follow Ray's trajectory with his quizzical recantations of his "life's purpose." With the same cool hand, Sides sketches the strengths and inadequacies of Dr. King's inner circle and paints larger atmospheric strokes with newspaper headlines on the increasing violence in response to desegregation and the influence of war in Vietnam on national sentiment about federal involvement in heretofore state affairs. By themselves, vignettes about Ray's lackluster career as a petty criminal, his stunted attempts at artistic grandeur and addiction to prostitutes would simply depress the reader. Here, the intentional failures and manipulations of Hoover's FBI and first-hand accounts of Ray's behavior appear like birds descending on a tragic town, flickering across the broader canvas creating momentum and dread. Awful as the true subject of this thriller may be, I found myself disappointed to reach the end.

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Ayn Rand’s real world position regarding government benefits

I recently spotted this excerpt in Wikipedia (I left the footnote references so you can backtrack):

A heavy smoker, Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974. Although she had long opposed government assistance programs, she eventually accepted Social Security and Medicare payments for herself, under the name of "Ann O'Connor", and her husband as well.[87] A July 1998 interview with Ewa Joan Pryor, a New York state social worker, conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute, revealed that Pryor assisted the two with filing. Federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information act request confirmed that between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Rand collected a total of $11,002 in monthly Social Security payments.[88] O'Connor received $2,943 between December 1974 and his death in November 1979.[89]
Rand, is often cited today by conservatives touting extremely limited federal government, including many Tea Party advocates who are currently collecting social security payments and Medicare benefits. Here is the Wikipedia opening paragraph on Rand:
Rand's political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individual rights (including property rights) and laissez-faire capitalism, enforced by a constitutionally limited government. She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism,[3][4]

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The cigarette industry is even more evil than we thought

According to Scientific American, there are more dangers to smoking cigarettes than tar and nicotine. There's also polonium:

[P]eople worldwide smoke almost six trillion cigarettes a year, and each one delivers a small amount of polonium 210 to the lungs. Puff by puff, the poison builds up to the equivalent radiation dosage of 300 chest x-rays a year for a person who smokes one and a half packs a day.  Although polonium may not be the primary carcinogen in cigarette smoke, it may nonetheless cause thousands of deaths a year in the U.S. alone. And what sets polonium apart is that these deaths could be avoided with simple measures.
The print edition of this article reveals that most of the polonium could be removed from cigarettes by removing it from the fertilizer and by washing the tobacco leaves with a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide. What follows is an old sad story: the tobacco industry has long refused to incorporate these changes to reduce the polonium. The good news is that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, passed in June 2009, requires the tobacco industry to address this problem, which it has ignored for more than four decades. Now let's be conservative with the numbers. Let's assume that only 2,500 people needlessly died each year from polonium poisoning for the past 40 years. That's 100,000 people who have been sent to early deaths by tobacco executives. That's the moral equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on Green Bay, Wisconsin. Yet no tobacco executives have ever been prosecuted, much less thrown in prison for this hideous conduct.

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The power of sunshine

In this video, you can see the power of two square meters of sunshine. As a child I used to set fire to a piece of paper outside with a small hand held magnifying glass. This sophisticated mirror is several magnitudes more impressive. You might be wondering whether sort of device could be used for cooking. The answer is yes, and these cheap devices can help slow deforestation and desertification. Here is a video demonstration of the cooking power of the sun:

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