... I was looking for comments to spend my mod points on, but they'll have to wait.
For proper cholesterol, well, stop eating *#$#$#* crap fats. Cholesterol is made by your liver based on the type of fat you eat.
Polyunsaturated fat - lowers total cholesterol levels Unsaturated fat - increases good cholesterol Saturated fat - increases bad cholesteros Transfat - liquid plastic that'll make sure you get a quad bypass.
Much more important is to stop eating ALL polyunsaturated oils (hydrogenated oils/transfats are usually made from polyunsaturated oils), and replace them with saturated oils.
Fats that are less-than-fully-saturated quickly go rancid when exposed to oxygen.
The saturated fat in beef has been slandered in recent years as being unhealthy. It's not that the beef itself is unhealthy, but that most beef cattle are raised with an unatural diet that includes a great deal of polyunsaturated fats, in the form of grains/soybeans in feedlot animal feed.
Coconut Oil and its Virtues The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy That Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. (intro chapter in PDF form) The Tragic Legacy of CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest - instigated the anti-saturated fat campaign of the 1980's) Also see the rest of the articles on fat at the Weston A. Price foundation site.
One reason the polyunsaturates cause so many health problems is that they tend to become oxidized or rancid when subjected to heat, oxygen and moisture as in cooking and processing. Rancid oils are characterized by free radicals--that is, single atoms or clusters with an unpaired electron in an outer orbit. These compounds are extremely reactive chemically. They have been characterized as "marauders" in the body for they attack cell membranes and red blood cells and cause damage in DNA/RNA strands, thus triggering mutations in tissue, blood vessels and skin. Free radical damage to the skin causes wrinkles and premature aging; free radical damage to the tissues and organs sets the stage for tumors; free radical damage in the blood vessels initiates the buildup of plaque. Is it any wonder that tests and studies have repeatedly shown a high correlation between cancer and heart disease with the consumption of polyunsaturates New evidence links exposure to free radicals with premature aging, with autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and with Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Alzheimer's and cataracts. -The Skinny on Fats
Most of the downsides of Hybrids can also be applied to the downsides of any electric vehicle. The envo-friendly people dont understand that when you push for electric vehicles you are only "moving" the pollution from one source to the other.
large powerplants are significantly more efficient than small gasoline engines. See this/. comment about the efficiency of modern steam turbines (author says up to 60%). Most Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) are around 20-25% efficient. So even if you replace an ICE with a BEV (battery electric vehicle) and burn the gas that the ICE would've used in a turbine power plant, you're still doubling the efficiency of the fleet.
Never mind the fact that it's significantly easier to clean up 1 powerplant than 100,000 tailpipes...
But, they dont care, as long as the pollution isnt around "them"... which creates the need for more electric plants, but they dont have any place to put the electric plants since no one wants a nuclear facility in their backyard... or coal burning, or, etc, etc.
There's plenty of spare capacity at night. My Aunt in Phoenix already has a nuclear facility in her backyard (Palo Verde). She's got a dual rate plan, and pays $.04/KWh after 9pm. If I had an electric vehicle that was relatively inefficient, and used 500Wh/mile (charging inefficiencies included), it'd still only cost me $.02 to go 1 mile, as long as I charge up at night.
As you can see, everyone wants all the benefits, but none of the downsides. What are we going to do with these millions of batteries when they need to be disposed?
Lead-Acid batteries are relatively easy to recycle. Do some research, and you'll find that the benefits of electric vehicles far outway the downsides.
They have to keep the charade going. Fuel Cells were the "switch" in the "bait & switch" con Automakers played to get out of California's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. The California Air Resource Board wanted automakers to sell Batery Electric Vehicles (BEV). GM was going all-out to meet the mandate, but then GM's visionary engineers got kicked out, and then they spent some $600 million lobbying against ZEV.
"We can't do BEV 'cause the batteries aren't good enough and people won't want a car that they can't instant-refill. But Hydrogen! Hydrogen is just like gasoline, except it's clean! Never mind that there's no efficient or economical way to get hydrogen, advances in 30 or 40 years will make it possible!"
Humans started messing with the climate significantly only in the past 200 years, but something unprecedented in the 400,000 years of good data we have happened 10,000 years ago - we should have been back to the norm for the Current Ice Age by now.
10,000 years ago was about the time that Atlantis sunk into the ocean. Atlantis' sinking stoped blocking the jet stream, allowing Europe to heat up among other climatic changes. Volcanos went off/etc. Not really up on my alternate pre-history, so you'll have to look elsewhere for details.
On a different note, I'm a big fan of Osteopathy (D.O.s, not M.D.s). It's kind of hard to find an osteopath who specializes in Osteopathy (most D.O.'s practices are no different than an M.D.'s), but if your structure is screwed up, it's certainly worth the trouble.
See Andrew Weil's _Spontaneous Healing_, Chapter 2 for his experience of the Miracle Healing Power of ten-fingered medicine.
I told him not to expect anything -- the medical community self-polices not because it does any good, but because it provides great insurance against real legal sanctions and problems. I don't know for a fact, but I would almost bet that in many states the self-policing medical boards have to sustain a complaint before any further review of the doctor's case or punishments can be meted out.
I have a distant relative who's the head of a department at some hospital... They censured one of their doctors, who came back & sued my distant relative, other doctors on the review board, and the hospital... The jury came back and awarded the censured doctor $100 million+ from my distant relative & the other doctors.
Not telling this to say that I support monopoly doctors, but to make the point that the system is totally fubar'd (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognizance), and just little band-aid fixes won't do jack to help.
w/ e-gold or e-bullion or pecunix or 1mdc, at least you know what you have - a gram of gold is a gram of gold. Some systems have a storage fee, others (such as 1mdc, based on e-gold) have no storage fee.
What most people don't realize is that you pay a tax for holding government currencies too. It's called "inflation". The government prints more money to pay for their silly little welfare programs & wars, making the money that you already hold less valuable...
Recently read somewhere that it took ~$347 in 1985 to buy what $100 would have bought in 1965 (when the U.S. government started "printing" money to pay for Vietnam).
And if you will eat fat, how about eating healthy fat? Eat butter instead of margirine. Eat natural olive oil instead of processed oils. The problem is not fat, the problem is companies like McDonalds, to save a few pennies, are using crappy oils that are manufactured and not natural.
Actually, the primary motivator in McDonald's & other manufactured food providers' switch to partially-hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils (from tallow/lard and coconut/palm oil)was a misguided Holy War by the vegetarian-run Center for Science in the Public Interest, starting in 1984.
CSPI's well publicized campaign against "saturated" frying fats, especially those used by fast-food restaurants, was launched in 1984 and was continued in 1986 when CSPI added the "tropical oils" to their list of supposed villains in the American diet.
The whitewash of trans fatty acids began in 1987 with an article by Elaine Blume, published in CSPI's Nutrition Action newsletter. Wrote Blume: "From margarine to Tater Tots, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils play a major role in our food supply.... In fact, hydrogenated oils don't post a dire threat to health.... Improving on Nature.... Manufacturers hydrogenate... these vegetable oils so they won't become rancid while they sit on shelves, or during frying.... it seems unlikely that hydrogenation contributes much to our burden of heart disease... The fact that hydrogenated oils appear to be relatively benign is cause for thanks, because these fats are everywhere."
In 1988, CSPI published a booklet called Saturated Fat Attack, which defended trans fatty acids and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and called for pejorative labeling of "saturated" fats. The booklet contained a section called "Biochemistry 101," which claimed that only tropical oils were dangerous when hydrogenated. "Hydrogenated (or partially hydrogenated) fats are widely used in foods and cause untold consternation among consumers... [they] start out as plain old liquid vegetable oils (usually soybean), which are then reacted with hydrogen... converting much of the polyunsaturated fatty acids to monounsaturated fatty acids... [with]... small amounts... converted to saturated fatty acids... [e.g.], stearic acid, which seems to have no effect on blood cholesterol levels.
"Overall, hydrogenated fats don't pose a significant risk... exceptions are hydrogenated [tropical oils, which are made]... even worse after hydrogenation."
Obviously, the individuals writing the booklet were completely ignorant (or pretended to be ignorant) of lipid science. Modern hydrogenation methods create trans fatty acids rather than monounsaturated fatty acids, and very few saturated fatty acids. By 1988, the adverse effects of trans fats were well known. The article points out that stearic acid has no effect on blood cholesterol levels, yet CSPI continued to accuse beef tallow, which is rich in stearic acid, of "raising cholesterol and increasing the risk of heart disease." As for the tropical oils, they do not need to be hydrogenated!
Blume was at it again in March 1988 with another article, "The Truth About Trans." "Hydrogenated oils aren't guilty as charged.... All told, the charges against trans fat just don't stand up. And by extension, hydrogenated oils seem relatively innocent..... As for processed foods, you're better off choosing products made with hydrogenated soybean, corn, or cottonseed oil..." This article was widely disseminated; Michael Jacobson provided it as a handout to members of the Maryland Legislature during hearings when the University of Maryland group tried to introduce labeling of trans fatty acids in the State.
But by 1990, CSPI could no longer defend the indefensible.
I think Mark Purdey, a British Organic Beef farmer who's never had a mad cow, has a much more plausible & comprehensive theory concerning the development of Mad Cows.
Executive summary:
In the early-80's, there was a warble fly epidemic in the british cow fleet. Warble flys punch holes in cow hides, making them unsuitable for high-quality leather products. In their infinite wisdom, the british government decided that all british cows needed to be treated with a pesticide that kills warble flies.
The pesticide was a synthetic organo-phosphate (an oily concoction), that was applied along the spine of the cow. Not only did it kill warble flies, it also chelated (removed) copper from the cow's system.
Then in 1986, chernobyl went off, blanketing the countryside with radioactive isotopes. Copper-deficient cows picked up some of these radioactive minerals to replace the copper they'd lost to the pesticide.
There's also something about manganese (commonly used in textile manufacturing) substituting for copper.
As an organic farmer, Mark Purdey had no intention of using a synthetic pesticide on his cows. So he sued, and was allowed an exemption to using this pesticide. He's never had a mad cow, not even amoung his cows who are reformed carnivores, so he must be doing something right.
I didn't want to be at school, and I was good at it. My daily refrain for about 4 years was, "do I have to go to school today?" (It ended when I got into a private highschool for the last two years, but even then I only tollerated school). The problem was partially the "f*** ups", as you call them, but I was also bored out of my mind. There were so many things I had to do, that I just didn't care about. It was a total waste of time. The local paper printed my letter last year that ended with, "Can I have my 13 years back, please?
One of your fellow teachers resigned his NYC teaching job with a scathing letter to the Wall Street Journal:
I may be a teacher, but I'm not an educator
From The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1991 By John Taylor Gatto
I've taught public school for 26 years but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I'm going to quit, I think.
I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in.
I just can't do it anymore. I can't train children to wait to be told what to do; I can't train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can't persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn't any, and I can't persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn't true.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren't meant to participate in our form of schooling, rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.
The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the faith that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of biology.
It's a religious idea and school is its church. New York City hires me to be a priest. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession something like this would happen. Professional interest is best served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating laity to priesthood. School has become too vital a jobs project, contract-giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches.
That's why reforms come and go-without changing much. Even reformers can't imagine school much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can,t tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too.
For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education." After a few months she'll be locked into her place forever.
In 26 years of teaching rich kids and poor, I almost never met a "learning disabled" child; hardly every met a "gifted and talented" one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by the human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never ex
When my mother was growing up in 1950's texas, Kindergarten cost extra. Her parents were poor (her mother needed to work), so she spent that year with a caretaker.
They were shocked when my mother's first grade teacher told them that their daughter already knew how to read. Shocked, because they certainly hadn't taught her. My mother could read so well, that after moving to New Mexico half way through the year, she was getting in trouble for reading ahead.
My grandmother said that mom's older (2 years) sister and the caretaker's kids helped her. I asked mom about learning to read, and she doesn't remember getting much help, just that she was horribly bored at the caretaker's house.
John Taylor Gatto says that it only takes 20 hours to teach a child how to read once they've expressed interest in learning. Forcing a kid that's not interested does more harm than good.
And that "teacher unit" will in the majority of cases not be competent to teach every subject at the high school level. And in addition to overestimating their own competence,
The important thing my mother learned while at the caretaker's was not how to read. She learned that if there was anything she wanted to learn, it was her responsibility to teach herself.
Normally you'd expect someone who bounced from school to school to school growing up to struggle academically. Mom finally spent her last three years of high school in one place, and graduated valedictorian. She went on to get a nursing degree (her father's gender-predjudices kind of prevented other options), and a master's degree too.
homeschooling parents also have a tendency to overestimate their child's desire to spend time with them. Your kids don't like you that much.
Mr. Gatto says in his Underground History of American Education that one of the side-effects of compulsory government schooling in this country has been the destruction of the family unit.
No, government schools are bad for children.
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue:
Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
Mom didn't know any better, and sent me to school to learn how to read. I learned the alphabet and short words in Kindergarten, simple sentances in first grade, slightly more complex sentances in second grade, etc. And today, while I can read/. just fine, if it's anything sufficiently complex, I'm lost. I couldn't read Moby Dick in my 10th grade "honors" english class, I've tried to read The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring multiple times (but can't get more than 20 pages into them). I certainly couldn't read Last of the Mohicans - I couldn't even finish the second Harry Potter.
it's libertarian bullshit, asshat. How dare you call me a liberal.:)
Besides, that post was just a first draft. I'll think about fixing some of the gramatical errors and dropping some of the inflamatory words. But the attacks on the sitting "president" are going to stay. He can claim to be president, but I know the truth.
I've been working on a little theory that the whole outsourcing phenomena is reflective of a much deeper economic problem that's been developing in the U.S. over the last 20+ years.
The last great bout with price-inflation in the U.S. was in the late 1970's, after Nixon cut the dollar's theoretical gold-peg (theoretical, because only foreigners could redeem dollars for gold), and while the economy was absorbing all of the dollars that'd been "printed" to pay for the Vietnam war.
Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979->1987, solved the Inflationary crisis of the early 1980's by hiking interest rates to obscenely high levels. His entry in the wikipedia says that inflation was reduced from 9% in 1980 to 3.5% in 1982. The cure wasn't easy, however, as it induced a recession and much joblessness. It was thought that Reagan was going to be a one-termer.
Anyways, today is like the 1970's all over again. We've had tons of newly printed money spewing out of the government since about 1995. First it fueled the dot-com bubble. The government opened the money-faucet even wider after 9/11. The effect of having more money in the economy is that prices go up for scarce items with high demand. Hence we have home prices that seems to grow without end, and the price of oil going through the roof.
The difference between the 2000's and the 1970's is that Giant Corporations seem to think they have a way out of paying American workers the increased wages price inflation forces them to demand: outsourcing.
Remember Little Boy George's hundred-billion $ economic stimulus package that got passed soon after 9/11? In decades past, Americans (er, USians) would've taken the money and gone out and bought products built buy other Americans (USians). Those producers would take their profits from all the sales and use them to invent new things to sale, and new American factories to build them in. Closed circuit, stimulus gets recycled in the economy over and over again.
In the new system, Americans take their economic stimulus to go out and buy stuff "made in china" And profits from that sale allows chinese entrepreneurs to go and build a new factory in China. Open circuit. So Georgie Boy's stimulus package went around once.
There's nothing wrong with trade, so long as it's a two-way street. But at least in the last 4 years, Americans have been buying goods from China, and the chinese have been lending the dollars they've made in the sale back to us, to pay for our illustrious leader's silly little jihad against self-induced terrorism (See Harry Browne's When Will We Learn[part 2], and his other 2001 articles for what I think is a lucid explanation of how the U.S.'s foreign policy has lead to the problems we face today).
Getting back to the subject at hand: the primary problem is not that there's a trade imbalance, but that the Federal Reserve's willy-nilly printing of money allows the imbalance to grow much much larger than it ever could otherwise. In hard-money times, if China accumulated an excess of dollars, those dollars would become worth less in world trade. Chinese products would become more expensive for Americans to buy, and American products would become cheaper for the Chinese.
But as it has been, the Chinese pegged their currency to the dollar (hence, no relative adjustment in the value of the two currencies), and that was just fine for Georgie, 'cause the chinese bought plenty of U.S. bonds to pay for his silly little war.
I think i'm rambling now, so I'll quit soon. My main point is that Giant Corporations are outsourcing today to hide rampant 1970's-style inflation from their customers.
Outsourcing is also done to prevent the natural "leveling of the playing field." In a closed-circuit economy, if no one want
... one that doesn't dwell that much on "efforts by cultural communists to promote sexual activity and homosexual conduct among children".
don't know where you got this. A quick perusal of the site doesn't show any such story... methinks you've made it up to scare people away from the link, though you are a little late.:)
Seriously, while I admit that there could've been such a story as you've alluded to here, they mainly focus on more important topics.
There is a lot of research that goes on you just never hear about it. How about http://www.stirlingengine.com/ or http://www.nanosolar.com/ ?? Those companies founders are risking it all, and if they fail, you'll never hear about it.
but hasn't it always been that way? Er, well - maybe it used to be that way. Today we have ginormous established companies that use all the tools available (primarly lobyists/governments) to suppress competitors that make them obsolete.
I inherited my grandmother's subscription to American Free Press after she died... They bill themselves as "america's last real newspaper", and it arrives weekly in the mail (they do have an online subscription, but Grandma couldn't have handled that, and I do like holding the paper in my hands...). Lots of articles are posted on their site, to get a feel for their brand of coverage. (They say "populist" - they might've said "conservative", before that label got hijacked)
Perhaps you noticed that as Federal power increased, personal freedom decreased?
Depends on whether you're white or black. If you're white, your right to lynch black people decreased. If you're black, your right not to be lynched and to enjoy the basic rights of man increased.
But white people never had a "right" to lynch black people. The nuremburg trials found german officers guilty, even though they were "just following orders" (following their "law") on the basis that there is a higher law than national ones. This is known as "common law".
Whatever Happened to Justice? introduces the Two Laws:
1) Do all you have agreed to do, and 2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property. [this is the "higher law" that "disallows" lynching]
Richard Maybury examines: 1) There is a higher law than any government's law. 2) The government's law often contradicts Higher Law. 3) individuals must choose which law they will support and defend.
This "coward" obviously is obviously a fan of the QuackWatch website. Knowing nothing about the history of the organization, he parrots their party line. Which is fine for him.
Are you going to limit your options because some idiot cries wolf?
"THE LAST DAYS OF THE QUACKBUSTERS"...
Opinion by Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen (jurimed2@...)
I've been following the activities of the "Quackbusters" for about five years, ever since the name Stephen Barrett (quackwatch.com) came up, as a player, against a client of mine in California. I asked the question "why would this group be using a doctor from Pennsylvania, as their witness, when there are 300,000 health professionals in this State?"
Thus began my education. Now I'm going to educate YOU...
The "quackbuster" operation is a conspiracy. It is a propaganda enterprise, one part crackpot, two parts evil. It's sole purpose is to discredit, and suppress, in an "anything goes" attack mode, what is wrongfully named "Alternative Medicine." It has declared war on reality. The conspirators are acting in the interests of, and are being paid, directly and indirectly, by the "conventional" medical-industrial complex.
Millions of health freedom fighters, and members of the public, worldwide, know what I know. Public outrage and reaction is growing. After 25 years of unopposed success, the "Quackbusters" are now in real trouble... "The end" for them, has begun. They, themselves are being hunted.
The "Quackbuster Conspiracy" is in a desperate place now. They know they've lost the war, and are going to pay a terrible price for their actions. The fear is in their eyes...
CRACKPOTS?
Yes. When the self-named "Quackbusters" stumbled around to find a derisive name to call their victims, they picked the word "Quack," without ever bothering to discover it's origins. Its original meaning, from Europe, comes from the term "quacksalver" which was used to describe Dentists who were dumb enough to use mercury (a poison) as fillings for teeth. Look at propagandist, and "Quackbuster" king-pin, Stephen Barrett's website (quackwatch.com), and you'll find that HE IS IN FAVOR of mercury (amalgam) tooth fillings.
Barrett, his cronies, and minions, are not known to do intelligent research.
<snip>
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE?
"Alternative Medicine" is defined as any protocol, action, or therapy that isn't "drugs, radiation, or surgery oriented."
Wrongfully named? Yes. So-called "alternative medicine" is actually the health choice of planet earth. It is a combination of every good health idea invented by mankind, in every country and culture on this planet. There is nothing "alternative" about it. Labeling planet earth's health choice as "alternative" is, and was, a propaganda device.
North Americans have overwhelmingly (by their purchases) made "Alternative Medicine" the "health choice of the people" - for the best of reasons: it works better than allopathic, it "removes the cause" rather than "treating the symptoms," it is cost effective, it makes people feel better and think clearer, and it doesn't have all those horrible effects, and side effects, of invasive surgery or prescription drugs.
More than half of the US health dollar in 1999 was spent on "Alternative Medicine" and it was all out-of-pocket. Conventional medicine is being paid for, and is surviving, only because insurance and Medicare pay for it - the public won't spend an out-of-pocket nickel on it.
Alternative Medicine philosophies fit the "American (I'll make my own decisions)" way of thinking. Allopathic Medicine philosophies fit the "Germanic (follow my orders)" way. "Alternative Medicine" is for people who think for themselves - Americans.
The door to real "alternatives" is barely open. The future of medicine is right in front of us - it isn't in pharmaceuticals - it is in nutrition, body cleansing, prevention, oxygen therapies and energy medicine - all of which are constantly targeted by the sleaziest of the "Quackbuster" soldiers.
source: QuackPotWatch - bitchslapping the idiots who cry "quack".
I suggest taking charge of your own health. You've probably been to a conventionally-trained M.D. for most of your "health care". M.D.s are trained to use drugs and surgery. For everything else they either have to refer to someone else (i.e., physical therapist, nutritionist, etc).
Doctors never, ever "fix" their patients. The body always repairs itself. Doctors might "set the stage" to allow healing to take place, but all too often they do more harm than good. For example, adverse reactions to drugs are about 5th-leading "cause of death".
Historically, Medical Doctors have been quite dismissive of anything that isn't covered in their training, though this is slowly beginning to change. For generations monopolist doctors dismissed the idea that what you eat affects your health. Now they'll acknowledge the imporance of proper nutrition, but fall back on their training when deciding what to do.
For example, when my grandmother first began cancer treatment, the doctor sent her to a nutritionist. Grandma said, "she wanted me to eat five servings of vegetables a day. She's crazy!" Grandma stuck with her microwave meals and token amounts of vegetables, and was dead in six months. Her doctor never said anything about her diet again, afaik.
There are plenty of options in the so-called "alternative" (that is, not drugs and surgery) field for your condition.
Also look into finding yourself a Cranial Osteopath. If your body has ever suffered any sort of trauma (car accidents, falls, unresolved birth trauma, etc.), that's probably still with you. And this kind of osteopath can help your body release whatever it's still holding onto.
You can also take up meditation/self-hypnosis/skilled-relaxation. This is especially important when you have a condition such as MS.
4) try to pay a little extra every month (my initial payment was $1180/mo, I at *least* always paid $1200, and generally $1300-$1500 when I could afford it) - work to pay it off.
Whenever I think of mortgage payments, I always remember a certain exercise from high-school algebra 2, where we figured how much we'd save if we made *two* payments the first month of a 30-year mortgage (followed by the regular monthly payment for the duration of the loan). As I recall, based on the interest rates of the time (1996 or so), it was seven years.
In a home loan, all the interest is front-loaded. So your first payment is just about 99% interest, and only 1% principal. Every month you pay a little bit more principal, until by the last year your payments are almost entirely for principal.
So, instead of putting more money down on the house, it makes more financial sense to borrow more money, and put your extra reserves into the first payment.
Wendi Friesen (well-marketed internet hypnotist) has a program specifically for porn addiction.
This therapy program will help you long for true intimacy with a real person. Your mind will restore the fascination and comfort that can only be found in real contact. As your mind loses interest in porn, you will realize that you want to seek out healthy, fun, exciting encounters with real people. This is probably the most important part. You will not just stop wanting porn. You will actually begin to desire the real thing again, and feel true satisfaction that only comes from real encounters.
I've been there - found dad's playboy when I was... 12 or so, 'net porn ever since I got online. Like the old NLP saying goes, "if what you're doing isn't working, DO SOMETHING ELSE". I know you've tried quiting before, you just haven't yet done what Will Work For You. If you had, your post above would have been entirely different - "this is how I beat the pr0n daemon"
Learning self-control through self-hypnosis could very well be that "something else" you're looking for.
There's other options too - feel free to email me if you're interested. (Even though I only check the above-listed email address once a month or so, I'll get back to you eventually:).
Doc Brown: "Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed, it says made in Japan." Marty: "What do you mean Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan." Doc Brown: "Unbelievable"
Which reminds me, I saw a real delorean going down the street this past week. Kind of a neat little car - definitely something that very few people have.
I doubt they really spent that much on a hammer. Get congress to budget $X,XXX for an $X or $XX item, and spend the extra money on "off the books" projects. Area 51 and its replacement(s) come to mind...
People don't want to spend all their money on a great education...
I spent all my money on schooling (3.5 years at a rather expensive "institute"). About a year after I got out, I was going through John Taylor Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher, and identified strongly with his experience of his 7th or 8th graders reading comprehension abilities were dismal. I took his simple reading test (first 20 pages of All's Quiet on the Western Front), and couldn't answer his simple questions.
16.5 years of schooling, and I still can't read. The signs were there all along - couldn't get more than 20 pages into The Hobbit or the first Lord of the Rings, and I have no clue what Moby Dick's about, or any of the other books I supposedly "read" for english class. Sure, I scanned the pages, and did okay on the teacher's tests, but I had no real comprehension of what all those books were about. I somehow managed to get through the first Harry Potter (it's about a boy who goes to wizard school), but I couldn't read the second one.
But I could do well on standardized reading tests (which should not to be cnofused with actually reading something), so no one ever caught on. According to Mr. Gatto, 90%+ of his students couldn't really read before they got to his class.
Don't be fooled. "School" is not Education. It can be, but just 'cause you go doesn't mean you'll be "educated".
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For proper cholesterol, well, stop eating *#$#$#* crap fats. Cholesterol is made by your liver based on the type of fat you eat.
Polyunsaturated fat - lowers total cholesterol levels
Unsaturated fat - increases good cholesterol
Saturated fat - increases bad cholesteros
Transfat - liquid plastic that'll make sure you get a quad bypass.
Much more important is to stop eating ALL polyunsaturated oils (hydrogenated oils/transfats are usually made from polyunsaturated oils), and replace them with saturated oils.
Fats that are less-than-fully-saturated quickly go rancid when exposed to oxygen.
The saturated fat in beef has been slandered in recent years as being unhealthy. It's not that the beef itself is unhealthy, but that most beef cattle are raised with an unatural diet that includes a great deal of polyunsaturated fats, in the form of grains/soybeans in feedlot animal feed.
Coconut Oil and its Virtues
The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy That Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. (intro chapter in PDF form)
The Tragic Legacy of CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest - instigated the anti-saturated fat campaign of the 1980's)
Also see the rest of the articles on fat at the Weston A. Price foundation site.
Most of the downsides of Hybrids can also be applied to the downsides of any electric vehicle. The envo-friendly people dont understand that when you push for electric vehicles you are only "moving" the pollution from one source to the other.
/. comment about the efficiency of modern steam turbines (author says up to 60%). Most Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) are around 20-25% efficient. So even if you replace an ICE with a BEV (battery electric vehicle) and burn the gas that the ICE would've used in a turbine power plant, you're still doubling the efficiency of the fleet.
large powerplants are significantly more efficient than small gasoline engines. See this
Never mind the fact that it's significantly easier to clean up 1 powerplant than 100,000 tailpipes...
But, they dont care, as long as the pollution isnt around "them"... which creates the need for more electric plants, but they dont have any place to put the electric plants since no one wants a nuclear facility in their backyard... or coal burning, or, etc, etc.
There's plenty of spare capacity at night. My Aunt in Phoenix already has a nuclear facility in her backyard (Palo Verde). She's got a dual rate plan, and pays $.04/KWh after 9pm. If I had an electric vehicle that was relatively inefficient, and used 500Wh/mile (charging inefficiencies included), it'd still only cost me $.02 to go 1 mile, as long as I charge up at night.
As you can see, everyone wants all the benefits, but none of the downsides. What are we going to do with these millions of batteries when they need to be disposed?
Lead-Acid batteries are relatively easy to recycle. Do some research, and you'll find that the benefits of electric vehicles far outway the downsides.
AC Propulsion's website has some good articles on the superiority of electric vehicles...
some links:
CARB's Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles (pdf) (complete)
Perspectives on Fuel Cell and Battery Electric Vehicles (problems w/ fuel cells)
Letter to California Air Resource Board [CARB] against watering down the ZEV mandate (by requiring advanced technology batteries.. Later they watered it down even more by giving in to the fuel cell bait & switch)
They have to keep the charade going. Fuel Cells were the "switch" in the "bait & switch" con Automakers played to get out of California's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. The California Air Resource Board wanted automakers to sell Batery Electric Vehicles (BEV). GM was going all-out to meet the mandate, but then GM's visionary engineers got kicked out, and then they spent some $600 million lobbying against ZEV.
"We can't do BEV 'cause the batteries aren't good enough and people won't want a car that they can't instant-refill. But Hydrogen! Hydrogen is just like gasoline, except it's clean! Never mind that there's no efficient or economical way to get hydrogen, advances in 30 or 40 years will make it possible!"
Of course, now that ZEV is DeaD, battery technology has advanced to the point where an "instant" re-charge is possible...
See Perspectives on Fuel Cell and Battery Electric Vehicles, and this mailing list post on GM's coming demise ("good riddance").
CARB's Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles
Humans started messing with the climate significantly only in the past 200 years, but something unprecedented in the 400,000 years of good data we have happened 10,000 years ago - we should have been back to the norm for the Current Ice Age by now.
10,000 years ago was about the time that Atlantis sunk into the ocean. Atlantis' sinking stoped blocking the jet stream, allowing Europe to heat up among other climatic changes. Volcanos went off/etc. Not really up on my alternate pre-history, so you'll have to look elsewhere for details.
From a different site:
100 years of Medical Robery
Real Medical Freedom
On a different note, I'm a big fan of Osteopathy (D.O.s, not M.D.s). It's kind of hard to find an osteopath who specializes in Osteopathy (most D.O.'s practices are no different than an M.D.'s), but if your structure is screwed up, it's certainly worth the trouble.
See Andrew Weil's _Spontaneous Healing_, Chapter 2 for his experience of the Miracle Healing Power of ten-fingered medicine.
I told him not to expect anything -- the medical community self-polices not because it does any good, but because it provides great insurance against real legal sanctions and problems. I don't know for a fact, but I would almost bet that in many states the self-policing medical boards have to sustain a complaint before any further review of the doctor's case or punishments can be meted out.
I have a distant relative who's the head of a department at some hospital... They censured one of their doctors, who came back & sued my distant relative, other doctors on the review board, and the hospital... The jury came back and awarded the censured doctor $100 million+ from my distant relative & the other doctors.
Not telling this to say that I support monopoly doctors, but to make the point that the system is totally fubar'd (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognizance), and just little band-aid fixes won't do jack to help.
w/ e-gold or e-bullion or pecunix or 1mdc, at least you know what you have - a gram of gold is a gram of gold. Some systems have a storage fee, others (such as 1mdc, based on e-gold) have no storage fee.
What most people don't realize is that you pay a tax for holding government currencies too. It's called "inflation". The government prints more money to pay for their silly little welfare programs & wars, making the money that you already hold less valuable...
Recently read somewhere that it took ~$347 in 1985 to buy what $100 would have bought in 1965 (when the U.S. government started "printing" money to pay for Vietnam).
Actually, the primary motivator in McDonald's & other manufactured food providers' switch to partially-hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils (from tallow/lard and coconut/palm oil)was a misguided Holy War by the vegetarian-run Center for Science in the Public Interest, starting in 1984.
All based on fraud and lies. See the Mary Enig's The Tragic Legacy of CSPI:
I think Mark Purdey, a British Organic Beef farmer who's never had a mad cow, has a much more plausible & comprehensive theory concerning the development of Mad Cows.
Executive summary:
In the early-80's, there was a warble fly epidemic in the british cow fleet. Warble flys punch holes in cow hides, making them unsuitable for high-quality leather products. In their infinite wisdom, the british government decided that all british cows needed to be treated with a pesticide that kills warble flies.
The pesticide was a synthetic organo-phosphate (an oily concoction), that was applied along the spine of the cow. Not only did it kill warble flies, it also chelated (removed) copper from the cow's system.
Then in 1986, chernobyl went off, blanketing the countryside with radioactive isotopes. Copper-deficient cows picked up some of these radioactive minerals to replace the copper they'd lost to the pesticide.
There's also something about manganese (commonly used in textile manufacturing) substituting for copper.
As an organic farmer, Mark Purdey had no intention of using a synthetic pesticide on his cows. So he sued, and was allowed an exemption to using this pesticide. He's never had a mad cow, not even amoung his cows who are reformed carnivores, so he must be doing something right.
Much more information on his website.
I didn't want to be at school, and I was good at it. My daily refrain for about 4 years was, "do I have to go to school today?" (It ended when I got into a private highschool for the last two years, but even then I only tollerated school). The problem was partially the "f*** ups", as you call them, but I was also bored out of my mind. There were so many things I had to do, that I just didn't care about. It was a total waste of time. The local paper printed my letter last year that ended with, "Can I have my 13 years back, please?
One of your fellow teachers resigned his NYC teaching job with a scathing letter to the Wall Street Journal:
They were shocked when my mother's first grade teacher told them that their daughter already knew how to read. Shocked, because they certainly hadn't taught her. My mother could read so well, that after moving to New Mexico half way through the year, she was getting in trouble for reading ahead.
My grandmother said that mom's older (2 years) sister and the caretaker's kids helped her. I asked mom about learning to read, and she doesn't remember getting much help, just that she was horribly bored at the caretaker's house.
John Taylor Gatto says that it only takes 20 hours to teach a child how to read once they've expressed interest in learning. Forcing a kid that's not interested does more harm than good.
And that "teacher unit" will in the majority of cases not be competent to teach every subject at the high school level. And in addition to overestimating their own competence,
The important thing my mother learned while at the caretaker's was not how to read. She learned that if there was anything she wanted to learn, it was her responsibility to teach herself.
Normally you'd expect someone who bounced from school to school to school growing up to struggle academically. Mom finally spent her last three years of high school in one place, and graduated valedictorian. She went on to get a nursing degree (her father's gender-predjudices kind of prevented other options), and a master's degree too.
homeschooling parents also have a tendency to overestimate their child's desire to spend time with them. Your kids don't like you that much.
Mr. Gatto says in his Underground History of American Education that one of the side-effects of compulsory government schooling in this country has been the destruction of the family unit.
No, government schools are bad for children.
Mom didn't know any better, and sent me to school to learn how to read. I learned the alphabet and short words in Kindergarten, simple sentances in first grade, slightly more complex sentances in second grade, etc. And today, while I can read /. just fine, if it's anything sufficiently complex, I'm lost. I couldn't read Moby Dick in my 10th grade "honors" english class, I've tried to read The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring multiple times (but can't get more than 20 pages into them). I certainly couldn't read Last of the Mohicans - I couldn't even finish the second Harry Potter.
And I tried to read the assigned reading for my
it's libertarian bullshit, asshat. How dare you call me a liberal. :)
Besides, that post was just a first draft. I'll think about fixing some of the gramatical errors and dropping some of the inflamatory words. But the attacks on the sitting "president" are going to stay. He can claim to be president, but I know the truth.
I've been working on a little theory that the whole outsourcing phenomena is reflective of a much deeper economic problem that's been developing in the U.S. over the last 20+ years.
The last great bout with price-inflation in the U.S. was in the late 1970's, after Nixon cut the dollar's theoretical gold-peg (theoretical, because only foreigners could redeem dollars for gold), and while the economy was absorbing all of the dollars that'd been "printed" to pay for the Vietnam war.
Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979->1987, solved the Inflationary crisis of the early 1980's by hiking interest rates to obscenely high levels. His entry in the wikipedia says that inflation was reduced from 9% in 1980 to 3.5% in 1982. The cure wasn't easy, however, as it induced a recession and much joblessness. It was thought that Reagan was going to be a one-termer.
Anyways, today is like the 1970's all over again. We've had tons of newly printed money spewing out of the government since about 1995. First it fueled the dot-com bubble. The government opened the money-faucet even wider after 9/11. The effect of having more money in the economy is that prices go up for scarce items with high demand. Hence we have home prices that seems to grow without end, and the price of oil going through the roof.
The difference between the 2000's and the 1970's is that Giant Corporations seem to think they have a way out of paying American workers the increased wages price inflation forces them to demand: outsourcing.
Remember Little Boy George's hundred-billion $ economic stimulus package that got passed soon after 9/11? In decades past, Americans (er, USians) would've taken the money and gone out and bought products built buy other Americans (USians). Those producers would take their profits from all the sales and use them to invent new things to sale, and new American factories to build them in. Closed circuit, stimulus gets recycled in the economy over and over again.
In the new system, Americans take their economic stimulus to go out and buy stuff "made in china" And profits from that sale allows chinese entrepreneurs to go and build a new factory in China. Open circuit. So Georgie Boy's stimulus package went around once.
There's nothing wrong with trade, so long as it's a two-way street. But at least in the last 4 years, Americans have been buying goods from China, and the chinese have been lending the dollars they've made in the sale back to us, to pay for our illustrious leader's silly little jihad against self-induced terrorism (See Harry Browne's When Will We Learn [part 2], and his other 2001 articles for what I think is a lucid explanation of how the U.S.'s foreign policy has lead to the problems we face today).
Getting back to the subject at hand: the primary problem is not that there's a trade imbalance, but that the Federal Reserve's willy-nilly printing of money allows the imbalance to grow much much larger than it ever could otherwise. In hard-money times, if China accumulated an excess of dollars, those dollars would become worth less in world trade. Chinese products would become more expensive for Americans to buy, and American products would become cheaper for the Chinese.
But as it has been, the Chinese pegged their currency to the dollar (hence, no relative adjustment in the value of the two currencies), and that was just fine for Georgie, 'cause the chinese bought plenty of U.S. bonds to pay for his silly little war.
I think i'm rambling now, so I'll quit soon. My main point is that Giant Corporations are outsourcing today to hide rampant 1970's-style inflation from their customers.
Outsourcing is also done to prevent the natural "leveling of the playing field." In a closed-circuit economy, if no one want
... one that doesn't dwell that much on "efforts by cultural communists to promote sexual activity and homosexual conduct among children".
:)
don't know where you got this. A quick perusal of the site doesn't show any such story... methinks you've made it up to scare people away from the link, though you are a little late.
Seriously, while I admit that there could've been such a story as you've alluded to here, they mainly focus on more important topics.
There is a lot of research that goes on you just never hear about it. How about http://www.stirlingengine.com/ or http://www.nanosolar.com/ ?? Those companies founders are risking it all, and if they fail, you'll never hear about it.
but hasn't it always been that way? Er, well - maybe it used to be that way. Today we have ginormous established companies that use all the tools available (primarly lobyists/governments) to suppress competitors that make them obsolete.
thanks for the links, btw.
I inherited my grandmother's subscription to American Free Press after she died... They bill themselves as "america's last real newspaper", and it arrives weekly in the mail (they do have an online subscription, but Grandma couldn't have handled that, and I do like holding the paper in my hands...). Lots of articles are posted on their site, to get a feel for their brand of coverage. (They say "populist" - they might've said "conservative", before that label got hijacked)
But white people never had a "right" to lynch black people. The nuremburg trials found german officers guilty, even though they were "just following orders" (following their "law") on the basis that there is a higher law than national ones. This is known as "common law".from Richard Maybury's Whatever Happened to Justice
Are you going to limit your options because some idiot cries wolf?
source: QuackPotWatch - bitchslapping the idiots who cry "quack".
I suggest taking charge of your own health. You've probably been to a conventionally-trained M.D. for most of your "health care". M.D.s are trained to use drugs and surgery. For everything else they either have to refer to someone else (i.e., physical therapist, nutritionist, etc).
Doctors never, ever "fix" their patients. The body always repairs itself. Doctors might "set the stage" to allow healing to take place, but all too often they do more harm than good. For example, adverse reactions to drugs are about 5th-leading "cause of death".
Historically, Medical Doctors have been quite dismissive of anything that isn't covered in their training, though this is slowly beginning to change. For generations monopolist doctors dismissed the idea that what you eat affects your health. Now they'll acknowledge the imporance of proper nutrition, but fall back on their training when deciding what to do.
For example, when my grandmother first began cancer treatment, the doctor sent her to a nutritionist. Grandma said, "she wanted me to eat five servings of vegetables a day. She's crazy!" Grandma stuck with her microwave meals and token amounts of vegetables, and was dead in six months. Her doctor never said anything about her diet again, afaik.
There are plenty of options in the so-called "alternative" (that is, not drugs and surgery) field for your condition.
Donna Eden(Author of Energy Medicine has had some success assisting Multiple Schlerosis patients.
Also look into finding yourself a Cranial Osteopath. If your body has ever suffered any sort of trauma (car accidents, falls, unresolved birth trauma, etc.), that's probably still with you. And this kind of osteopath can help your body release whatever it's still holding onto.
You can also take up meditation/self-hypnosis/skilled-relaxation. This is especially important when you have a condition such as MS.
4) try to pay a little extra every month (my initial payment was $1180/mo, I at *least* always paid $1200, and generally $1300-$1500 when I could afford it) - work to pay it off.
Whenever I think of mortgage payments, I always remember a certain exercise from high-school algebra 2, where we figured how much we'd save if we made *two* payments the first month of a 30-year mortgage (followed by the regular monthly payment for the duration of the loan). As I recall, based on the interest rates of the time (1996 or so), it was seven years.
In a home loan, all the interest is front-loaded. So your first payment is just about 99% interest, and only 1% principal. Every month you pay a little bit more principal, until by the last year your payments are almost entirely for principal.
So, instead of putting more money down on the house, it makes more financial sense to borrow more money, and put your extra reserves into the first payment.
Wendi Friesen (well-marketed internet hypnotist) has a program specifically for porn addiction. I've been there - found dad's playboy when I was
Learning self-control through self-hypnosis could very well be that "something else" you're looking for.
There's other options too - feel free to email me if you're interested. (Even though I only check the above-listed email address once a month or so, I'll get back to you eventually
Doc Brown: "Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed, it says made in Japan."
Marty: "What do you mean Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."
Doc Brown: "Unbelievable"
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future
Which reminds me, I saw a real delorean going down the street this past week. Kind of a neat little car - definitely something that very few people have.
I doubt they really spent that much on a hammer. Get congress to budget $X,XXX for an $X or $XX item, and spend the extra money on "off the books" projects. Area 51 and its replacement(s) come to mind...
Coffee brewer: $7,622 (Air Force)
Pair of pliers: $748 (Air Force)
Vinyl armrest pad: $670 (Air Force)
Toilet seat: $640 (Navy)
Drill set: $599 (Navy)
Rechargeable flashlight: $181 (Air Force)
(from the link)
People don't want to spend all their money on a great education...
I spent all my money on schooling (3.5 years at a rather expensive "institute"). About a year after I got out, I was going through John Taylor Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher, and identified strongly with his experience of his 7th or 8th graders reading comprehension abilities were dismal. I took his simple reading test (first 20 pages of All's Quiet on the Western Front), and couldn't answer his simple questions.
16.5 years of schooling, and I still can't read. The signs were there all along - couldn't get more than 20 pages into The Hobbit or the first Lord of the Rings, and I have no clue what Moby Dick's about, or any of the other books I supposedly "read" for english class. Sure, I scanned the pages, and did okay on the teacher's tests, but I had no real comprehension of what all those books were about. I somehow managed to get through the first Harry Potter (it's about a boy who goes to wizard school), but I couldn't read the second one.
But I could do well on standardized reading tests (which should not to be cnofused with actually reading something), so no one ever caught on. According to Mr. Gatto, 90%+ of his students couldn't really read before they got to his class.
Don't be fooled. "School" is not Education. It can be, but just 'cause you go doesn't mean you'll be "educated".