New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) has a new solution for urban poverty: government-run grocery stores.
The plan, announced as part of his first 100 days in office, would spend roughly $70 million creating city-owned supermarkets across New York, beginning with a flagship location in East Harlem. The stores would operate through private contractors under city oversight, with subsidized staples — cheaper eggs, cheaper bread, cheaper basics — guaranteed by government rather than market competition.
Fast food, the supposed cheap fallback of the food-deprived, has out-inflated inflation itself and is now closer to a sit-down dinner than a quick bite.
Mamdani justifies this spending by invoking a persistent, infrequently examined assumption of liberal policymakers: that cities in America are riddled with blighted urban zones where fresh produce and healthy groceries remain frustratingly out of reach.
These are called "food deserts."
Never mind that a quick look around the proposed East Harlem site reveals multiple grocery stores within walking distance, including produce markets sitting blocks from where the city plans to spend tens of millions constructing another one.
Yet the language persists. Reading recent coverage of America's "food deserts," you would be forgiven for thinking we have all woken up in the back half of "The Road," scavenging tin cans in ash-choked ruins while a feral child clutches our pant leg.
ABC News informs us that 17 million Americans live in a federally designated food desert, a term so bleak it sounds like it should come with a Pulitzer and a black-and-white photo of a barefoot kid staring into the middle distance.
Tara Colton of New Jersey's Economic Development Authority calls food deserts a product of structural racism, neighborhood redlining, and disinvestment — three abstractions stacked into one sentence, which is the literary equivalent of a turducken. Malcolm Gladwell is taking notes.
To be clear, there are real people in these stories who deserve real help. Take Knoxville, for instance, where an elderly disabled woman with a walker needs three to four hours to buy groceries. There are many like her. No car, no one to call when the fridge needs to be restocked.
But is that really a food problem, or is it a loneliness problem in disguise? A what-happened-to-neighbors problem? Whatever it is, it isn't fixed by the nearest Kroger relocating two blocks closer, but by a person with transportation and 20 free minutes.
Which brings us to the definition itself, because the definition is where this whole conversation instantly falls apart. Per the USDA, a food desert is a low-income area where residents live more than one mile from a supermarket in a city or 20 in the country.
The rural number is its own conversation. The urban one deserves a closer look. One mile. That is the apocalyptic threshold, the line past which we reach for the language of famine and structural decay. One mile is the distance between your couch and the place you were going to walk to anyway before you decided to "treat yourself" to DoorDash. There are CrossFit gyms charging $200 a month to make people walk farther than that carrying objects on purpose.
Then there is the part the hellscape correspondents won't touch. A Big Mac combo now averages $9 nationally. A large pizza that feeds two or three people runs $15 to $20 before tip and delivery fee and the mysterious "service charge" that has crept onto every receipt in America. A medium fries alone is $4 now, a price point that used to get you the whole meal. Fast food, the supposed cheap fallback of the food-deprived, has out-inflated inflation itself and is now closer to a sit-down dinner than a quick bite.
Meanwhile, in the so-called desert, a bag of dried lentils is $1.79. A pound of rice is a dollar. A dozen eggs, even after the great egg panic, is around $4 and gives you a week of breakfasts. Frozen vegetables, the great equalizer of American nutrition, run $2 or $3 at any Dollar Tree, which, surprise, exists in basically every "food desert" I've ever set foot in. A whole rotisserie chicken at Walmart is $5.97 and feeds a family for two days. A can of black beans is a dollar. An onion is 50 cents.
So when an able-bodied 28-year-old with a working car and a smartphone tells me he can't eat healthy because he lives in a food desert, what he means is he doesn't want to. He wants the Crunchwrap Supreme combo for $9. He wants the door to open and the food to be hot and the wrapper to crinkle.
That's a preference, not a famine. Calling it a crisis is an insult to people who actually are in one — like, say, the woman with the walker — because it lumps her struggle in with some slob's Tuesday-night laziness and gives both the same vocabulary.
Either way, the term "food desert" seems deliberately designed to invoke panic. Maybe so taxpayers will look the other way when, say, New Jersey passes a $240 million Food Desert Relief Act and starts paying restaurants to deliver hot meals.
But there are no ash plumes. No one is barbecuing cats or plucking ducks from ponds. Well, very few are.
Battlefield Farm, a Knoxville nonprofit, understands this. It doesn't tweet about food apartheid. Instead, it grows actual collards and drives them to actual people in an actual van. The company is planning a low-cost grocery store.
That's the thing about real problems. They tend to have real, boring solutions, and they tend to require us to acknowledge reality before we can do anything about them.
The 53 million Americans the USDA classifies as having "limited" food access are not all starving in a wasteland. Most of them are within walking, biking, or one-bus distance of a place that sells apples and carrots. Most of them know this, and a lot of them are cooking meals right now. The ones who genuinely cannot get there need rides, ramps, and delivery — not a fatalistic op-ed painting America like a Ken Burns documentary nobody asked for.
Scores of individuals were indicted during the first Trump administration for their involvement in a network of "pill mill" clinics — operations that diverted millions of oxycodone, hydrocodone, and carisoprodol pills with the help of health care professionals evidently eager to endanger public health to make a quick buck.
The current administration, which has significantly ramped up its fraud crackdown, has delivered one of the participants in this scheme to justice.
The Justice Department revealed in an exclusive to Blaze News on Monday that three days earlier, a federal jury in the Southern District of Texas convicted Barbara Marino — a 65-year-old resident of Tomball who served as the sole prescribing physician at Angels Clinica in Houston — of one count of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance and four counts of distributing a controlled substance.
Marino faces more than 20 years in prison for each of the five counts.
"Medical physicians who exploit their prescribing authority for profit over patient care break an inherent trust with their patients, and we will hold them accountable," said Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division in a statement. "The Department of Justice remains committed to protecting the public from dangerous and unlawful distribution of controlled substances, especially when the drug dealer is a doctor."
Marino, who was first licensed to practice medicine in the Lone Star State in 1990, was found to have unlawfully distributed over 1 million pills of opioids and other controlled substances through the strip-mall clinic in Houston where her practice was based.
Angels Clinica in Houston has since permanently closed. Angels Medical, which is linked to the now-defunct Houston clinic, did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
The original indictment against Marino said that of the roughly 1.06 million controlled-substance pills for which she issued prescriptions between September 2018 and August 2019, 518,000 were hydrocodone pills, 65,000 were oxycodone pills, and approximately 416,000 were carisoprodol pills.
Many of the purported patients who obtained prescriptions from Marino's cash-only clinic were effectively drug mules sent her way by traffickers who subsequently peddled the drugs on the street, according to court documents and evidence presented at trial.
This grift proved lucrative.
The Justice Department claimed that Marino — who is supposedly an addiction specialist — received over $400,000 from Angels Clinica's owners both for writing prescriptions that lacked a legitimate medical purpose and for doing so outside the usual course of professional practice.
Evidence shown at trial suggested that Marino rarely if ever encountered a patient for whom she wouldn't prescribe dangerous and addictive drugs.
In one instance, she reportedly prescribed what the DOJ characterized as a "dangerous cocktail of hydrocodone and carisoprodol" — apparently one ingredient short of the so-called "Houston Cocktail" — to a pregnant woman in her third trimester. The woman's OB-GYN testified that the drugs had threatened the well-being of both the mother and her unborn child.
The DOJ highlighted another case exemplifying Marino's willingness to give practically anyone hard drugs, specifically a mentally compromised patient — a diagnosed bipolar schizophrenic who suffered from the chronic delusion that he was President Richard Nixon — to whom she allegedly prescribed her dangerous cocktail on at least three occasions.
Drug Enforcement Administration Assistant Administrator Cheri Oz, whose agency investigated this case, stated, "Patients put their trust and their lives into the hands of our medical and health care professionals.
"The highly addictive, dangerous misused drugs in this case — oxycodone and hydrocodone — are meant to treat pain, not cause it," continued Oz. "DEA remains relentless in our pursuit of those who poison our communities and exploit our health care system, all to line their own pockets with the profit from others' pain."
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I don’t get sick days, so the test results were posted to my chart while I was sitting in my office. I opened them before I ever saw the doctor.
I knew what I was looking at, but I checked it again. After researching what I already suspected, I sat there for a moment. The first thought came and went, then the one that remained: What about Gracie?
For 40 years, I have been my wife’s caregiver. After a catastrophic car wreck at age 17, doctors didn’t expect her to survive the night. No one imagined she would marry, have children, and live to see grandchildren.
Trusting Him does not remove the burden, but it defines how I can carry it.
But she did. What didn’t change was the crises.
When the surgery count approaches 100, a crisis is no longer an interruption. It becomes the environment. For 40 years, it has never plateaued.
The pressure doesn’t arrive once a month in tidy episodes. Sometimes it arrives daily. You live on alert, always vigilant, always calculating what could go wrong next. Choking. Seizures. Code blue. Falls. Wound care. Non-responsive. I’ve seen it all. This is the terrain we live in.
Our life runs on a system most people never see and few could imagine. Meals, medications, transfers, safety, transportation, finances, advocacy. I carry all of it. I speak when she can’t. I’m there when she needs something as simple as a glass of water.
It’s a highly specialized operation with no backup, no redundancy, and no margin for error. And like millions of caregivers across this country, I am the one running it.
Two days after I received my test results, sitting in the exam room, the doctor asked if I had any questions. I had the usual, plus two more: How much care will I need afterward? And how much care will I still be able to provide?
That’s how close this is.
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So when cancer enters the picture, the question isn’t so much about survival as collapse. If I go down, what happens to her?
That’s not fear; it’s just math.
We spend a great deal of time arguing about who is fit to lead this country. But across this country, there are millions of people quietly carrying responsibilities that would break most of the people we argue about.
Those responsibilities don’t come with cameras or talking, and they have no margin for error. There is just the weight of responsibility.
And when something like cancer enters that equation, the question isn’t political, but structural. What actually holds up when the person holding everything together can’t?
This diagnosis was caught early. That gives me time to deal with it.
Caregivers are told to take care of themselves. I have said that for years, and I meant it. But this case is no longer maintenance. It requires intervention, recovery, and being pulled away from the work. And that interrupts and affects everything: Health. Emotions. Lifestyle. Profession. Money. Endurance. Nothing is left untouched.
Spell that out, and it says what so many caregivers struggle to say: Sometimes we need help.
I need the system to hold while I step away long enough to deal with this current issue, and that means accepting care that won’t be done the way I would do it. It means training others and paying for help. It means absorbing the reality that things will go wrong, as they inevitably do.
But this is where conviction steps in. My wife has a Savior, and I am not that Savior.
But still, breakfast has to be made and the laundry has to be done. Trusting Him does not remove the burden, but it defines how I can carry it.
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The question I have asked for years now returns to me: Christian, what do you believe?
If I believe what I say I do, then what is required of me in this moment? We sing hymns about trusting God, and times like this are when that trust is tested.
Years ago, a reporter asked me, “What would Jesus do as a caregiver?”
I don’t know what He would do. I know what He did do. From the cross, He looked at His mother and entrusted her to John.
Over the years, I have trusted surgeons I barely knew to take my wife into a room and do what I could not. I have signed the papers, handed her over, and waited. Not because I understood everything they were doing, but because I trusted that they did.
I trust surgeons I barely know. How much more can I trust the Savior whom I do?
In His hands, what looks severe is not careless. It is precise and purposeful.
I don’t get to step out of this, but I am not standing in it alone. So I take the next step.
A proposed device has the potential to monitor how much energy a person's skeletal muscles produce, a patent application reveals.
The notion that earbuds are simply a convenient way to take phone calls or listen to music on the go may be a thing of the past if certain applications reach their goal. However, given the timeline, headphones may already be capable of recording complex biometrics of the person who wears them.
'The device may have more electrodes than are necessary.'
Online researchers have recently discovered the patent, first filed by Apple Inc. in January 2023, titled "Biosignal Sensing Device Using Dynamic Selection of Electrodes," which is still pending.
The patent describes how brain activity can be monitored by electrodes placed inside or around the outer ear of the user. Images provided look very similar to Apple AirPods.
The headphones are described as a "wearable electronic device, such as an earbud, a pair of earbuds, and/or a wired headset."
The earbuds would "measure biosignals of a user of the wearable electronic device," which may include, "but are not limited" to: electroencephalography, electrooculography, electromyography, electrocardiogram, "galvanic skin response," and "blood volume pulse."
All of these measurements seem incredibly intrusive, particularly when each term is dissected in detail.
First, electroencephalography is a technique that measures the brain's electrical signals and how its neurons communicate with each other. The patent literally states that the earbud "may be used to measure a biosignal, for example, an electroencephalogram (EEG), for measuring brain activity."
Things only get more bizarre from there.
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Electrooculography, also known as EOG, is a standard technique for measuring eye movements via electrical potentials, which are the body's tiny electrical outputs. The body's movements — in this case from the eye — can be identified by how many millivolts are produced in the area.
Next is electrocardiogram; Apple wants its device to be able to measure electrical heart activity.
Additionally, blood volume pulse measurements would monitor the user's heart rate.
At the same time, the patent covers electromyography and galvanic skin response. These techniques also measure the body's electrical activity in very specific manners.
According to Cleveland Clinic, electromyography is a diagnostic test that evaluates the health and function of skeletal muscles and the nerves that control them. In this context, it would measure the electric activity produced by a wearer's skeletal muscles.
Galvanic skin response is described by Noldus as the measurement of "the skin's electrical conductance, which changes with sweat gland activity."
"This activity is controlled by the autonomic nervous system," the description adds. This means that the earbuds would measure the electrical conductivity of the user's skin.
Lastly, the patent describes that the device may have "more electrodes than are necessary" in order to measure user biosignals. The justification for this is to account for how the device is being worn, with it dynamically choosing between different subsets of electrodes at different times.
There is no clearly stated end goal described in the patent; it chiefly seeks to monitor brain activity and "biosignals" in a manner alternate to electrodes on the scalp. What that information would be used for is up for interpretation.
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The sacred obligation of therapy — to restore dignity and offer healing — is being replaced by an ideological agenda that evaluates victims according to their 'privilege.'
If the right and left agree on reining in hospitals’ abusive tactics, then why hasn’t Congress acted?
Schools are a gateway for needlessly putting children on drugs.
It’s time for all states to follow in the steps of Tennessee and scale back their certificate of need programs.
The bill would ensure that religious freedom protections do not apply to certain vaccine requirements, among other provisions.
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