Do you dance with your dragon? An interview with Shaeri Richards, who has written “Dancing with your Dragon” about how to make life work better for yourself. It’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The dragon not only represents the darker forces in our lives, but also brings us the opportunity …
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(NaturalNews) Among all supplemental vitamins, vitamin C may be the most controversial. The scientist most responsible for bringing vitamin C’s benefits to the public, Linus Pauling, has been vilified in an attempt to kill the messenger and marginalize the message. But proof of vitamin C efficacy continues despite the medical mafia’s suppressive efforts.
The November 24, 2011 Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine newsletter discussed a study referenced in PubMed that linked high blood levels of vitamin C with lower incidence of heart failure, while lower serum levels of vitamin C were connected to higher death rates. (1) The study summary abstract is here ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/… ).
If you peeked at the report summary, you’ll have noticed that the study was based on determining if high vegetable and fruit consumption is beneficial for heart health. Most of us know this already, but the bio-marker used in the study was vitamin C serum blood levels.
The Militarization of America’s Police The police are there to serve citizens and protect us from dangers. The military makes war on enemies. A big difference, obviously. But for a number of reasons, America’s police have been morphing into more of a military force. Burt’s gust is Alex Pareene, a …
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — People who eat baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis may be improving their brain health and reducing their risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study presented November 30 at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
“This is the first study to establish a direct relationship between fish consumption, brain structure and Alzheimer’s risk,” said Cyrus Raji, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The results showed that people who consumed baked or broiled fish at least one time per week had better preservation of gray matter volume on MRI in brain areas at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”
Alzheimer’s disease is an incurable, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and cognitive skills. According to the National Institute on Aging, as many as 5.1 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s disease. In MCI, memory loss is present but to a lesser extent than in Alzheimer’s disease. People with MCI often go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
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http://www.iab.uaf.edu/news/index.php?newsrel=97 U of Alaska 30 November 2011 FAIRBANKS, Alaska — As the Arctic warms, greenhouse gases will be released from thawing permafrost faster and at significantly higher levels than previous estimates, according to survey results from 41 international scientists published in the Nov. 30 issue of the journal Nature. Permafrost thaw will release approximately the same amount of carbon as deforestation, say the authors, but the effect on climate will be 2.5 times bigger because emissions include methane, which has a greater effect on warming than carbon dioxide. The survey, led by University of Florida researcher Edward Schuur and University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Benjamin Abbott, asked climate experts what percentage of the surface permafrost is likely to thaw, how much carbon will be released and how much of that carbon will be methane. The authors estimate that the amount of carbon released by 2100 will be 1.7 to 5.2 times larger than reported in recent modeling studies, which used a similar warming scenario. |
http://news.yahoo.com/horses-could-soon-slaughtered-meat-us-080907323.html
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Horses could soon be butchered in the U.S. for human consumption after Congress quietly lifted a 5-year-old ban on funding horse meat inspections, and activists say slaughterhouses could be up and running in as little as a month.
Slaughter opponents pushed a measure cutting off funding for horse meat inspections through Congress in 2006 after other efforts to pass outright bans on horse slaughter failed in previous years. Congress lifted the ban in a spending bill President Barack Obama signed into law Nov. 18 to keep the government afloat until mid-December.
It did not, however, allocate any new money to pay for horse meat inspections, which opponents claim could cost taxpayers $3 million to $5 million a year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have to find the money in its existing budget, which is expected to see more cuts this year as Congress and the White House aim to trim federal spending.
Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/30-7
by Ralph Nader
“Here, look at this handsome L.L. Bean catalog and tell me what you want for Christmas,” said a relative over Thanksgiving weekend. I started leafing through the 88 page cornucopia with hundreds of clothing and household products, garnished by free gift cards and guaranteed free shipping. I wasn’t perusing it for any suggested gifts; instead, I was going through every offering to see whether they were made in the U.S.A. or in other countries.
This is what I found: over 97 percent of all the items pictured and priced were noted “imported” by L.L. Bean. The only ones manufactured in the U.S. were fireplace gloves, an L.L. Bean jean belt, a dress chino belt, quilted faux-shearling-lined L.L. Bean boots (made in Maine), a personalized web collar and leash (for your pet), and symbolically enough, the “made in Maine using American-made cotton canvas are the Original Boat and Tote Bags” to carry all those goodies coming in from China and elsewhere.
We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. (See here and here .)
These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-’09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what we now know:
Netanyahu slams ‘anti-liberal’ Arab Spring
By Jonathan Cook
Global Research , December 1, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27973
As protests raged again across the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, offered his assessment of the Arab Spring last week. It was, he said, an “Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave”, adding that Israel’s Arab neighbours were “moving not forwards, but backwards”.
It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.
In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s rightwing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.
Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.
By Adrian Salbuchi
Global Research , December 1, 2011
Russia Today
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27971
The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths and lies in the best (worst) style of George Orwell’s novel 1984. We all live in the unreal world of “Newspeak” used by the Global Power Elite to control our minds.
Man gets confused when things that happen around him and to him, or which are done in his name, cannot be properly grasped, understood or made sense of. Normally, such confusion leads to inaction. If you’re lost at night in the middle of a forest but you can still see the stars, then a bit of astronomical knowledge will at least quickly tell you which way is north. But if it’s cloudy or you’re ignorant of the constellations in starry heaven, then you might as well light up a fire and do nothing until dawn…. You’re Lost!
By Rady Ananda
The head of Health and Human Services not only denies that Americans have a right to bodily health and food of their choice, but Kathleen Sebelius is hell bent on spending taxpayer money to promote genetically modified food and drugs. One of her projects, Kansas Bioscience Authority, a publicly funded venture enterprise developed to promote biotechnology, is currently under criminal investigation. CEO Tom Thornton has resigned.
KBA also lobbied the Dept. of Homeland Security for the highly controversial bioweapons and cattle disease lab in the state, along with former Governor Sebelius, now President Obama’s Cabinet Secretary. Under her governorship and full support, the Kansas Economic Growth Act of 2004 passed, funding KBA’s mission with $581 million in tax revenue to develop a bioscience industry in Kansas.
Jim Garrison, President, State of the World Forum
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-garrison/arab-spring-american-fall_b_1120902.html
With the elimination of the Los Angeles and Philadelphia Occupy sites, the Federal Government, in partnership with mayors across the U.S., has essentially closed down most of the Occupy sites across the nation, replacing protestors representing the 99 percent with police occupations protecting the 1 percent. Simultaneously, Tahrir Square in Cairo has been reoccupied by activists as the first more or less free election in Egyptian history gets underway, guarded by a military that is not really sure democracy is a good idea.
There are important distinctions in these diverse and politically loaded arenas in which democratic insurgents clash with state power. What ignited in Tunis and Egypt in the Spring catalyzed a global conflagration of activism both fed up with the inequalities of the current economic and political systems and desperately seeking to wake the wider public up to the scope of what is essentially a crisis of governance. In Tunis and Egypt, this concerned protesting dictatorships that had infested the polity virtually unopposed for decades. In the U.S., it concerns protesting the rapaciousness of the financial elites who are throttling the American middle class and destroying the economy.
Alliance for Natural Health On November 29, 2011
http://www.anh-usa.org/starting-children-on-drugs/
That seems to be the path a new recommendation is putting us on.
An expert panel appointed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is now urging cholesterol screening for all children between ages 9 and 11 [1]—before puberty, when cholesterol temporarily dips—and again between ages 17 and 21. News accounts discuss a family who put their daughter on cholesterol-lowering medicines when she was 5 (“that gives me hope that she’ll be healthy”) and a doctor at Johns Hopkins who thinks his 12-year-old son should be tested “because he has a cousin with very high ‘bad’ cholesterol.”
What is “bad” cholesterol, anyway? Conventional medicine says HDL cholesterol is good, and LDL is bad. But scientists at Texas A&M University have found that LDL cholesterol is actually needed by the body to build new muscle [2]—a finding that is particularly important both for kids and for the rest of us as we get older and lose muscle more rapidly. It also helps get vitamin D [3] around our body.
Moreover, as we reported last year [4], people with high cholesterol live the longest. Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine found that old people with low cholesterol died twice as often from a heart attack as did old people with high cholesterol . Many studies have found that low cholesterol is in one respect or another worse than high cholesterol. A review of nineteen large studies of more than 68,000 deaths by the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota found that low cholesterol predicted an increased risk of dying from gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases .
Pew Charitable Research
Released: November 29, 2011
Since the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Party has not only lost support nationwide, but also in the congressional districts represented by members of the House Tea Party Caucus. And this year, the image of the Republican Party has declined even more sharply in these GOP-controlled districts than across the country at large.
November 30, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/30/the-lessons-of-obamamania/
by ANDREW LEVINE
Ten years ago in America, War Party fervor was on the rise, the media was in tow, and many a liberal was on board. Thus began the Bush-Cheney era, one of the darkest moments in American history. Those years seem like only yesterday, probably because on matters of substance – keeping the perpetual war machine going, undermining personal freedoms and the rule of law, encouraging environmental indifference while courting ecological disaster, and making the world safe for the corporate “persons” who own our duopoly party system — the Obama administration has been more or less continuous with George W. Bush’s.
What seems unreal was that brief interlude, begun just four winters ago as the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries loomed, and lasting into the summer of 2009, when liberal hearts and minds succumbed to the belief that Barack Obama would put an end to decades of Reaganite (neolibleral) depredations, and that we could then take up where the New Deal and Great Society left off. That Obamamaniacal moment now seems a lifetime away.
Obamamania was always an illusion in Freud’s sense, an expression of an unconscious wish. Freud also spoke of delusions, illusions held in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Before Election Day 2008, Obamamania was only an ordinary illusion to which liberals, trade unionists and, of course, persons of color were especially susceptible. By Inauguration Day, as the President-elect’s choices for top positions became known, Obamamania took on a more delusional aspect.