The Huffington Post: The Millennials Driving a Food Waste Revolution

A recent survey from supermarket giant Sainsbury’s should make us bow our food weary heads in shame. Of the 5,000 adults asked, only 3% felt guilty about throwing food away. Even when it does cost us some £700 per household, per year. [...]

It is of little surprise then that a growing cohort of people is welcoming a backlash against food waste. This is mostly served to us by young, food-savvy, millennials. People who care about where their food comes from and how sustainability it’s produced. However, it’s a slow movement; working against the tide of waste we have already bloated landfills with all throughout the eighties and nineties. Now it’s time for a detox. [...]

Overall, a more lasting plan has to be to change our thinking and to back this with better political will, as in Italy and France. Italy has just introduced a bill where businesses that sell food have to donate anything unsold to charities. In France, similar initiatives might involve fines, yet Italy hopes to give businesses a tax break on rubbish collection. With a little effort all round, we could eliminate so much of the food we waste if only more of us would take responsibility for it.

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The Guardian: Thousands protest against proposed stricter abortion law in Poland

Thousands gathered outside the national parliament in Warsaw while there were demonstrations in several other Polish cities – and a separate event outside the Polish embassy in London – to oppose a measure that would outlaw terminating pregnancies except where necessary to save a woman’s life.

Poland, Europe’s most devoutly Catholic country, already has some of the continent’s most stringently anti-abortion statutes.

Legislators are expected to start debating on Wednesday even tougher rules drawn up by a rightwing thinktank with the backing of the Catholic church and the Law and Justice (PiS) governing party. A petition supporting the crackdown has gained more than 100,000 signatures.

If passed, the legislation would introduce jail sentences of up to five years for causing “the death of a conceived child”. It would apply both to women seeking abortions and doctors and health professional carrying them out. [...]

Fewer than 1,000 legal abortions are carried out in Poland each year, according to the health ministry. But independent groups have estimated that between 80,000 and 190,000 Polish women undergo terminations annually, either in “backstreet” procedures or by travelling abroad.

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Vox: The liberal failure of political reform

Yet history does not support this view. Liberals in the 1970s also believed that institutions were holding back the advancement of their favored policies. They sought and achieved reforms in campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization that were designed to depose moderate and conservative Democratic leaders while bolstering the influence of liberal activists at the expense of "establishment" interest groups. Rather than usher in a period of ambitious liberal achievements, these reforms in fact coincided with the close of an era of left-of-center policy change.

We explore the reasons for this failure in our new book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. Our analysis finds that the Democratic Party is a coalition of social groups, each with pragmatic policy concerns. This party structure was well adapted to a policymaking process that required brokering compromises among a large set of discrete interests to pass legislation, especially within a system of multiple congressional committees aligned with associated interest organizations and constituencies. [...]

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, shifted abruptly to the right and never turned back — even as they captured a growing share of seats in both the House and Senate. The post-reform political system has allowed the flourishing of the more ideologically oriented party: the Republicans. [...]

Note that the historical record gives conservatives good reason to be skeptical of legislative productivity: More new laws usually mean a shift to the ideological left.

As a result, Republican officeholders often focus more on blocking Democratic initiatives than on developing their own alternatives, concentrating instead on broader fights over taxation and the federal budget. We find that Congress is more productive under Democratic rule — not only in policymaking but also in committee hearings and in the number of substantive topics considered. In addition, Democratic presidents send far more new policy proposals to Congress and make more administrative changes within the executive branch.

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The Guardian: Old friends, new way of life – why we bought a house and moved in together

At the age of 70 I, a retired journalist, have gone into this venture with Sally-Mae Joseph, 65, a retired calligrapher and now an artist, whom I have known for five fun years, and Lyn Sands, 66, back from Spain where she lived alone for 12 years, our eco-warrior and vegetable-grower (don’t tell the kids, but I’ve only known her two years).

We all regard this as a forever move but accept that, as in a marriage, things we haven’t anticipated may go wrong. We were all agreed that probate for our children had to be paramount, and that no one would be made homeless because a share of the equity had been inherited. As a couple of our daughters touchingly and independently observed in a role-reversal of parent to stroppy teen: “We don’t know these people. Will your friends love you like we do?” [...]

We had no idea of moving in together until we went on a jaunt to look at a tired and emotional, seven-bedroom Edwardian pile. Could we – should we – move in and do it up? Perhaps not, but what if there were a perfect house, with a bathroom for each of us and a kitchen big enough to seat at least 10, with a large garden for Lyn’s veg, chickens for me and a studio for Sally-Mae? That very day we found it. Four large bedrooms, all en suite, so there’s room for our collective eight children and 12 grandchildren to stay. Maybe not all at once, or not yet, but when they have all got to know each other, who knows …

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Quartz: Reality only means what you think it means

Donald Hoffman, cognitive science professor at University of California, argues that evolution favors an organism who sees the environment exclusively in terms of its “fitness function” (how well-suited it is to that organism’s survival), rather than objective reality. As NPR explains, this would mean that our perception has deviated further from a more fact-based reality as we’ve evolved.

In his TED talk last year, Hoffman cited as an example the species of jewel beetle that is glossy, dimpled, and brown. When this beetle comes across beer bottles that are glossy, dimpled, and brown, it attempts to mate with the bottles. The beetle has never truly been able to properly identify female members of the species, Hoffman argues, but instead has a hack for spotting them by identifying glossy, dimpled, and brown things. And so the male beetle cannot recognize that a beer bottle isn’t actually a proper mating partner: It’s just glossy, dimpled, and brown. [...]

But even if our perception of what’s going on around us isn’t as radically inaccurate as Hoffman suggests, it’s certainly the case that we’re not wholly correct. “We never have direct access to reality, it’s always mediated by what our senses make available to our brain,” says Cleeremans. [...]

Our actual perception, then, is a combination of what we expect to be the case and what’s actually the case. We’re constructing the world around us, just as much as we’re perceiving it.

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