“Protests, it strikes me, are not the essence of Berkeley- they are its therapy. Only after months of immersion in this environment of pure and crushing personal failure can we fully appreciate how deeply and perfectly good it feels to catch our peers in the act of being so wrong.”

San Francisco ranked healthiest city in America for women

“I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.”

Maggie Mason says no one cares what I had for lunch today, but I’m mentioned in her book, so that allows me to break the rules. Right? Right!

I walked down to the Ferry Buildings for lunch today. It was my first time inside the food pier — wow, such options. Artisan breads, fancy cheese and infused honeys sat perfect and pricey alongside jarred olive tapinade and imported Italian olive oil. I opted for a slice of cheese and potato quiche from Lulu Petite because it was cheap ($4.75). I should have gotten the $7 egg sandwich, because the quiche was a bust. The egg part was almost liquid-y, and the crust was a soggy disappointment. I hate that my first meal from the Ferry Building bombed. Oh well, I ate just a few bites of what would have been an overly caloric lunch. I’ve been saved from stretch pants by a coagulated quiche.

SF-based service, Woo Me, takes speed dating online.

Thanks for allowing me the newly opened seat on BART this morning. I’d never been on the train with it being that crowded before. I am not quite tall enough to hold on to the bar overhead, but without support I lurch forward and backward with each stop. The vertical rails are nice, but the one nearest me was unavailable thanks to a chatty Cathy who was oblivious to those around her.

You could have taken that seat. I am not disabled or elderly. But, instead you held out your hand toward the empty spot, insinuating I should have it for myself. So, I sat down. It was a nice ride.

I appreciate it,

Brittney

Banning commneters without them even knowing it? Brilliant.

Alameda considers ban on Styrofoam.

Minority Media Ownership Drops as FCC Considers Harmful New Rules

What you have heard about the abysmal toll that illegal immigrants take on emergency rooms around the country may not be true. In fact, a recent study by UCLA researchers shows that Latino illegal immigrants are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to make use of emergency rooms when injured or ill, even though hospitals, by law, must treat all E.R. patients regardless of whether they are insured:

Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
…
“The current policy discourse that undocumented immigrants are a burden on the public because they overuse public resources is not borne out with data, for either primary care or emergency department care,” said Alexander N. Ortega, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “In fact, they seem to be underutilizing the system, given their health needs.”

Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that lobbies for tougher immigration controls, said that usage rates are just one measure of illegal immigrants’ effect on healthcare. The other factor, he said, is the cost to taxpayers, which Ortega’s study did not examine.
…
Ortega’s study is not the first to find that illegal immigrants use fewer healthcare services than people born in the U.S. But his study used the largest sample, analyzing data from 42,044 participants of the 2003 California Health Interview Survey, a randomized telephone survey conducted by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the California Department of Public Health.

And while other studies have attributed lower usage to immigrants simply being younger and healthier than the overall population, the study published Monday took into account age, health status, insurance status and poverty level. All such factors being equal, it found, immigrants still made fewer visits to physicians and were 30% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to have a regular source of healthcare.

Dr. Felix Nuñez, a Los Angeles-based family physician and former medical director of the South Central Family Health Center, said the findings confirm what he sees in clinics.

It is suspected that illegal immigrants are not as inclined to seek medical assistance out of fear of deportation.

It seems to me that many fears touted by the most vocal opponents of undocumented immigrants are unfounded. Or at the very least, hyped to create panic that powerful politicians know full well serves an ulterior motive.