News, Obits, Etc.

With all of the confusion about whether HRT is good for menopausal women, not to mention whether a low-fat diet is beneficial or that vitamin D and calcium prevent osteoporosis, women might just as well call it a day and die.
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Director Sidney Lumet, known for his work on films like Twelve Angry Men, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon, has died from lymphoma. He was 86.

He avoided Hollywood like the plague, which is helpful for one's sanity.
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Former NY governor Mario Cuomo tries to keep the liberal faith while his son Andrew has turned out to be a neoliberal piece of shit:

Except that it has. In the years after Cuomo delivered that address, a restive middle class, beset by industrial collapse and the dissolution of whole communities that went with it, grew ever more skeptical of liberal government, with its focus on poor and minority communities. And so Bill Clinton’s innovation in the 1990s was, in effect, to invert Mario Cuomo’s formulation. Most Democrats giving that speech in the post-Clinton era, Obama included, would have said that the party’s main mission was to serve the middle class without crushing the poor, rather than the other way around. That was, perhaps, the defining difference between Cuomo’s liberal moment and this one, and when I argued this point to Cuomo, he allowed that it was true.

What Cuomo didn’t say is that this probably also explains the political dissonance between him and his son, who seems to identify with a generation of Democrats who care more about the prose of government — restoring the faith of a jaded middle class through metrics and efficiencies — than about the poetry of liberalism. Although he consults with his father privately and speaks warmly of him publicly, Andrew Cuomo doesn’t talk much about his immigrant heritage or his passion for public housing, or anything else that might seem to place him squarely in his father’s tradition. In the weeks after I visited Mario, I tried repeatedly to reach the current governor to talk about his father. He declined to return the call.

His son is a spoiled rotten, clueless sack of shit, just like Barack Obama. Neoliberalism is a political poison and needs to be eradicated before it completely destroys the country.
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No surprise as new NYC schools "chancellor" Dennis Walcott has absolutely no classroom teaching experience.