Optimism is the Key to Protecting Heart Health Researchers Reveal

                 Good Day Humboldt County!

 Hi! My name is Dave and I’m a converted optimist. I started out being a pessimist. Being cynical and pessimistic was easier than being positive – which often required herculean efforts on my part.

  If you’re not naturally an optimistic person, it requires a conscious effort to see the positive side of things. The good news is, those efforts do pay off in time. The more you allow yourself the choice – half full or half empty – and chose the half full...the better you’ll start to feel.

It does feel good to be optimistic. Actually it feels great! As long as you understand there’s a difference between a starry-eyed optimist denying reality - and the optimist who understands bad situations - but remains positive anyway. Here’s what the researchers have to say about the subject of optimism:

“Harvard researchers suggest optimism, happiness and other positive emotions may help protect heart health and lower the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events.

It also appears that these psychological well-being factors slow the progress of cardiovascular disease.

The findings are the result of the first and largest systematic review of its kind, and are reported in the 16 April online issue of Psychological Bulletin, by lead author Julia Boehm, a research fellow, and senior author Laura Kubzansky, an associate professor, in the department of society, human development, and health, at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in Boston, Massachusetts.

According to the American Heart Association, one person dies from cardiovascular disease every 39 seconds in the United States.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Be the first on your street! Now you can pack a 950,000 volt punch with the ‘Knuckle Blaster Stun Gun’

Here you go Boys and Girls…be the first on your street to pack a wallop with either hand!

The Knuckle Blaster Stun Gun is intended as a self defense device for people who jog in dodgy areas (and if it’s a really really bad area you could always wear one of these on each hand as well as the defensive jacket).

Before shocking any potential muggers you should probably ask them if they have a pace maker, then again nah, just knee them and follow up with 950,000 volts to their face!

source

The Numbers Say You Probably Won't Believe The Numbers I’m About to Show You

             Good Day Humboldt County!

The following survey will probably come as no surprise to you. People have lost trust in the mass media.

The new “Lame Stream Media” makes no bones about supporting partisan causes. A flip of the dial and you have the Conservative excuse for reporting – FOX NEWS – or the Liberal excuse for news MSNBC – both party organs where the devoted can go to get sound bytes for ammunition.

All the credibility built up over years of news reporting from the likes of Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite has been destroyed by greed. Yes, greed. Talking heads spewing party lines get more viewers than any attempt to just give the straight news.  A lot of Americans are fed up with the mass media for good reason.

“A new survey from Gallup suggests that six in ten Americans have little or no trust in the mass media to deliver the news "fully, accurately and fairly," a record number since the polling outfit began tracking the trend.

Here was the exact wording of the question: "In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media—such as newspapers, TV, and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly—a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?"

Sixty percent answered either "not very much" or "not at all," with the remaining 40 percent opting for either "a great deal" or at least "a fair amount." Just in case (or, we suppose, in the likely event) you don't believe us, here's the handy chart straight from Gallup:

According to the pollsters, this year's drop in media trust is being fueled largely by self-identified Republicans and independents.

Twenty-six percent of Republicans said they trusted the media either greatly or a fair amount, similar to the level of trust the GOP reported back in 2008, another election year. Independents, meanwhile, are much more negative about the media than they were in 2008, something that Gallup says suggests "the group that is most closely divided between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney is quite dissatisfied with its ability to get fair and accurate news coverage of this election."

Another Gallup chart (left).

Source

 

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Where have all the hippies gone? Long time passing - They sold out before they were even aware of it

             Good Day Humboldt County!

I still hear conversations among baby boomers like myself about how we “sold out” and went “establishment.”

Pretty funny eh? It’s been about 50 years since people danced with flowers in their hair in the parks amid clouds of marijuana smoke.

We all thought we were the original “drop outs” and were really cool customers. We touted free love and sang about expanding our minds on drugs. We re-invented the Victory sign from WWII to mean “Peace,” and flashed two wide spread fingers like it was a secret sign. How naïve we were. How dumb. How idealistic. What dreamers. We all sold out way before we admitted it! Read on:

The Misconception: Both consumerism and capitalism are sustained by corporations and advertising.

The Truth: Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.

“Beatniks, hippies, punk rockers, grunge rats, metal heads, goth kids, hipsters – see a pattern forming here? It goes back farther than these examples, the baton of counter culture – the mantle of anti…whatever the mainstream is doing – it gets passed from generation to generation.

Whether you lived through Freedom Summer or “Jem and the Holograms” – somewhere in your youth you started to realize who was in control, and you rebelled. You started to discover the paradigms of censorship and consumerism – and they repulsed you.

You needed to self actualize, to find your own way, and you sought out something real, something with meaning. You waved your hand at popular music, popular movies, and popular television. You dug deeper and disparaged all those mindless sheeple who gobbled up pop culture.

Yet, you still listened to music and bought shirts and went to see movies. Someone was appealing to you despite your dissent. If you think you can buy your way to individuality, well, you are not so smart.

Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the market has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to purchase no matter your taste.

See the punk rocker on the left? Yeah, he bought all of those clothes. Someone is making money off of his revolt. That’s the strange paradox – everything is part of the system. There is no such thing as selling out, because there is no one to sell out to.

Every niche opened by rebellion against the mainstream is immediately filled by entrepreneurs who figure out how to make a buck off those who are trying to avoid what the majority of people are buying. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many stabs at trying to thwart this through artistic gesture  – “Fight Club,” “American Beauty,” “Fast Food Nation,” “The Corporation,” etc.

The creators of these works may have had the best intentions, but their work still became a product designed for profit. Their cries against consumption were consumed. Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Cobain, Andy Kaufman – they may have been solely concerned with creating art or illustrating academic principles, but once their output fell into the marketplace it found its audience, and that audience made them wealthy.

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, both philosophers, wrote a book about this in 2004 called “The Rebel Sell.” It’s available in the United States as “Nation of Rebels.” The central theme of the book is you can’t rage against “the system,” or “the man” or “the culture” through rebellious consumption.

Here’s the conventional thinking most counter cultures are founded upon:

All the interconnected institutions in the marketplace need everyone to conform in order to sell the most products to the most people. The media through press releases, advertising, entertainment and so on works to bring everyone into homogeneity by altering desires.

To escape consumerism and conformity, you must turn your back and ignore the mainstream culture. The shackles will then fall away, the machines will grind to a halt, the filters will dissolve, and you will see the world for what it really is.

Finally, the illusory nature of existence will end and we will all, finally, be real. The problem, say Heath and Potter, is “the system” doesn’t give a shit about conformity. In fact, it loves diversity and needs people like hipsters and music snobs so it can thrive.

For example, say there is this awesome band no one knows about except you and a few others. They don’t have a record contract or an album. They just go out there and play, and they are great.

You tell everyone about them as they build a decent fan base. They make an album which sells enough copies to allow them to quit their jobs. That album gets them more gigs and more fans. Soon, they have a huge fan base and get a record contract and get on the radio and play on “The Tonight Show.”

Now, they’ve sold out. So you hate them. You abandon the band and go looking for someone more authentic, and it all starts over again. This is the pump by which artists rise from the depths into the mainstream. It never stops, and over time it gets faster and more efficient.

Unknown bands are a special sort of commodity. Living in a loft downtown, wearing clothes from the thrift store, watching the independent film no one has heard of – these provide a special social status which can’t be bought as easily as the things offered to the mainstream.

In the 1960s, it took months before someone figured out they could sell tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms to anyone who wanted to rebel. In the 1990s, it took weeks to start selling flannel shirts and Doc Martens to people in the Deep South. Now, people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and predict what the counter culture is into and have it on the shelves in the cool stores right as it becomes popular.

The counter-culture, the indie fans and the underground stars – they are the driving force behind capitalism. They are the engine.

This brings us to the point – competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism. Everyone who lives above the poverty line but isn’t wealthy pretty much has no choice but to work for a living doing something which rewards them with survival tokens.

Working as a telemarketer, for example, allows you to have food, clothing and shelter, but doesn’t put you directly in charge of creating, growing or killing those things you need for sustenance. Instead, you trade in tokens for those things. As a result, you have a lot of free time and some leftover tokens.

We don’t directly compete with each other for resources like we did for the millennia before mass production. Before this setup, people were often defined by their work, by their output. The things they owned were usually things either they handmade, or were things other people made by hand. There was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used and lived in.

Today, everyone is a consumer, and has to pick from the same selection of goods as everyone else, and because of this people now define their personalities on how good their taste is, or how clever, or how obscure, or how ironic their choices are.

As Christian Lander, author of “Stuff White People Like,” pointed out in an interview with NPR, you compete with your peers by one-upping them. You attain status by having better taste in movies and music, by owning more authentic furniture and clothing.

There are 100 million copies of every item or intellectual property you can own, so you reveal your unique character through how you consume.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions is the way middle-class people fight each other for status. They can’t out-consume each other because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste each other.

Since everything is mass-produced, and often for a mass audience, finding and consuming things which appeal to your desire for authenticity is what moves these items and artists and services up from the bottom to the top – where it can be mass consumed.

 Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consumerism. Which is ironic – but not like a trucker hat or Pabst Blue Ribbon. It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.

“I think ‘sell out’ is yelled by those who, when they were selling, didn’t have anything that anyone wanted to buy.” – Patton Oswalt

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn’t have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained, or why it is possessed, does.

Once enough people join in, like with trucker hats or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again. You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level.

Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions. If you live in a jungle and forage for food between spear-sharpening sessions, you compete for status with talent or prowess or…something.

If you get a paycheck, someone out there is buying what you are offering. You are selling – they are buying. You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make – those are only details.” (source)

Time for me to walk on down the road…

AS IT STANDS: Politicians aren’t talking about America’s gang problem

                                      

          By Dave Stancliff?For The Times Standard
Politics dominate the airwaves and cyberspace, perhaps rightly so in an election year,  but there’s a subject I’m not hearing about during the campaign and it bothers me: the gang problem in our country.
 We do have a gang problem in case you haven’t noticed or live in a good neighborhood. The FBI reports there are now 1.4 million gang members involved in the 33,000 different gangs active inside the United States. The number of gang members in the U.S. has increased by 40 percent since 2009.
Some communities have pretty much been taken over by the gangs, but instead of addressing the problem, the federal government continues to ignore it. It seems, during a campaign year, politicians are afraid of alienating any segment of voters.

I wonder if we’ll have to wait until the election is over before the media turns its attention to the growing problem of gangs in our society? The ten people who were killed during the Memorial Day weekend this year in Chicago underscore the continuing struggle to control criminal gangs.
There have been 200 murders in Chicago so far this year - up from 139 at this time last year. Local police say about 80 percent were gang-related in a city whose gang membership is estimated at 100,000.
  Chicago's gang problem is a reflection of a troubling national trend in which criminal gangs have been expanded in number and reach throughout the country, according to the National Gang Center (NGC), an arm of the Justice Department.
  James "Buddy" Howell, a senior research associate at the gang center, told USA Today (9/4) that gangs have become so "entrenched" in some of the nation's largest cities that gang-related crime is largely immune to forces that have driven down overall crime.
Violent crime has declined throughout the nation, according to the Justice Department. The irony of this is obvious. Americans live with their own brand of domestic terrorists while being taxed to wage a war against international terrorists.

 We may pride ourselves on being a superpower, not a third world country, but what’s happening in the streets of America puts us in a similar place as those struggling nations.
  For too long now, the growing threat of gangs to innocent people in America has been virtually ignored. If the federal government would stop busting people for smoking pot,  they’d see gangs are a much larger problem.
 I’m not saying everyone ignores this encroaching threat to our society. There are gang task forces in nearly every city and county across the nation, but most are struggling for funding to keep up with the growth of organized gangs. (Here’s a list of gangs in America today: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gangs_in_the_United_States)

 What monies do come down from the federal government to fight gangs are limited because it’s not a priority. The wrong-headed War on Drugs eats up millions of dollars that should go toward a national approach to deal with the growing gang problem.

 Gangs are everywhere. Even here in Humboldt County. I’ve watched their growth over the last two decades with dismay. Couple those gangs with the recent influx of Mexican cartels and Humboldt County might as well be in Southern California.
 Many of the areas along our border with Mexico are open war zones. Just across the U.S. border lies the city of Juarez, Mexico. Juarez is considered one of the most dangerous cities on the entire planet because of the brutal drug war being waged there.

Border patrol agents have reported that Mexican drug cartels now openly conduct military operations inside Arizona and Texas. Their association with American gangs is no secret. A large part of the cartel’s success can be attributed to the help American gangs provide.
Enough is enough. Let’s get over the wrong-headed thinking employed in the past. We need to prioritize fighting our own domestic terrorists today. Be it political correctness, fear, or a national case of hoping the problem will go away, gangs can’t continue to be accepted as a way of life in America.
As It Stands, I’m a firm believer in taking care of my own house before I go elsewhere to help others clean theirs.

Reader response to this column via email

Mr. Stancliff:

“Your very cogent column in the Times-Standard only glanced on what I believe is the center of the gangs issue. Pot. Pot profits are a tax free subsidy program for more crime and violence.

More important to the campaigns is the fact that about 55 million Americans smoke pot*. And many of those Americans are middle class people who can afford the high price of today's pot.  At least 18% of the U.S. population. With pot law liberalization on the ballot in several more states politicians are taking caution because these initiatives bring out voters and those voters have no reason to love either of the two dominant parties. Fact is the day after the election both parties will be arresting American pot smokers just as aggressively as they do any other time. These voters know this.

Its all in the numbers for the campaigns. The Massachusetts special election for liberal icon Teddy Kennedy's senate seat is the most significant example. In 2008 Barack Obama won MA with 62% of the vote. On the same ballot was a pot liberalization initiative. It received more than 65% of the vote. Come forward to 2010. The Democrats put on the ballot Martha Coakley who was the state attorney general who also led the effort AGAINST the winning 2008 pot initiative. She lost to a Republican political neophyte by more than 5 percentage points. It is obvious, to me, that Coakley could not draw the pot reform voters to the polls.

There are other electoral upset examples that I am sure are keeping the Democrats and Republicans walking on eggs rather than broach the Drug War issue in this election. They know that they will change nothing That would be a major turnoff for pot smoking American voters. A voting constituency of less than 20% of these 55 million American pot smokers would be greater than the number of people that gave Barack Obama his majority in 2008. The margin in this election is much tighter than in 2008. The voters among these Americans feel betrayed and misled by President Obama. He can't afford to remind them or their feelings now, this close to the election.”

Pat Rogers, Allentown, PA

Marijuana And Cancer: Scientists Find Cannabis Compound Stops Metastasis In Aggressive Cancers

   Good Day Humboldt County!

I’ve been following news on medicinal marijuana for years and this study is a culmination of others I’ve read that indicates marijuana helps treat cancer.

I’ve been ridiculed many times when I run an article about the connection of marijuana and cancer treatment, but the negative “nellies” are starting to fade away these days. Perhaps it’s information like this that is finally turning the tide on how important a medicine marijuana is. See what you think:

“A pair of scientists at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco has found that a compound derived from marijuana could stop metastasis in many kinds of aggressive cancer, potentially altering the fatality of the disease forever.

"It took us about 20 years of research to figure this out, but we are very excited," said Pierre Desprez, one of the scientists behind the discovery, to The Huffington Post. "We want to get started with trials as soon as possible." The Daily Beast first reported on the finding, which has already undergone both laboratory and animal testing, and is awaiting permission for clinical trials in humans.

Desprez, a molecular biologist, spent decades studying ID-1, the gene that causes cancer to spread. Meanwhile, fellow researcher Sean McAllister was studying the effects of Cannabidiol, or CBD, a non-toxic, non-psychoactive chemical compound found in the cannabis plant. Finally, the pair collaborated, combining CBD and cells containing high levels of ID-1 in a petri dish.

"What we found was that his Cannabidiol could essentially 'turn off' the ID-1," Desprez told HuffPost. The cells stopped spreading and returned to normal. "We likely would not have found this on our own," he added. "That's why collaboration is so essential to scientific discovery." Desprez and McAllister first published a paper about the finding in 2007. Since then, their team has found that CBD works both in the lab and in animals. And now, they've found even more good news.

"We started by researching breast cancer," said Desprez. "But now we've found that Cannabidiol works with many kinds of aggressive cancers--brain, prostate--any kind in which these high levels of ID-1 are present." Desprez hopes that clinical trials will begin immediately.

"We've found no toxicity in the animals we've tested, and Cannabidiol is already used in humans for a variety of other ailments," he said. Indeed, the compound is used to relieve anxiety and nausea, and, since it is non-psychoactive, does not cause the "high" associated with THC.

While marijuana advocates will surely praise the discovery, Desprez explained that it's not so easy as just lighting up. "We used injections in the animal testing and are also testing pills," he said. "But you could never get enough Cannabidiol for it to be effective just from smoking."

Furthermore, the team has started synthesizing the compound in the lab instead of using the plant in an effort to make it more potent. "It's a common practice," explained Desprez. "But hopefully it will also keep us clear of any obstacles while seeking approval." (source)

Time for me to walk on down the road…

The Republican War On Chairs: We Are All Chairs Now!

 The entire Progdom is up in arms since the Chair Wars started with Clint Eastwood's unprovoked attack on an innocent chair at the RNC. Instead of acting as a policy expert like all the Prog actors do, Mr. Eastwood presumed to act as an actor and delivered an acting performance. What a bizarre idea!
Unbeknownst to Eastwood, that was actually the 5th or the 6th most interesting chair in the room. It had enough capacity to seat not just our invisible president, but also millions of jobs that had been saved or created, as well as undocumented voters, necroproxies, and all the fake Twitter followers.

Implying that Obama was an empty chair was as nonsensical as saying "The Emperor has no clothes!" But the Emperor "episode" has been thoroughly debunked by the progressive historians, who proved that the Emperor was, in fact, wearing a magnificent dress, visible only to the smart and the enlightened, and that the boy's heckling was manufactured by the Republican machine, paid for by the Koch brothers. Just like that non-story, Eastwood's attack on all chairs is bound to the ash heap of history, along with capitalist greed and American imperialism in general.

                                                      We are all chairs now!
Below are some helpful visuals prepared by our Department of Visual Agitation to be used in the fight. No Pasaran!
~
                                                                UPDATE:
The incumbent chair - COTUS (Chair of the United States) - is now available on transparent background, for you Photoshoppers to use in your own tactical maneuvers.

 

Drill, Baby, Drill Regardless of the Consequences - Fueling the Addiction

             Good Day Humboldt County!

Thirty national parks face the prospect of future oil and gas drilling within their borders.

The BNP Petroleum Corporation's gas rig (shown below) on Padre Island National Seashore, Texas. Oil and gas drilling in national parks has the potential to be devastating to natural wildlife and poses risks to environmental safety and public health.

See more: Drilling Could Threaten Our National Parks by Jessica Goad

Cartoon By Ann Telnaes, the Cartoonist Group

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Patriotic Pause: Homer Simpson casts his vote for president

Homer Simpson is doing his civic duty once again this election season.

In a new "Simpsons" short released on YouTube Wednesday, the doughnut-loving goofball heads to the polls to decide whether to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney ... and he's not too pleased with having to do so.

"Why do we have to choose our leaders?" he gripes. "Isn't that what we have the Supreme Court for?"

Oh, snap!

The digs about politics and the

Homer does it again…

elections keep on coming after that, with references to new voter ID laws, health care reform, religion and more.

Homer also targets Obama and Romney with his insightful observations.

"He promised me death panels and Grandpa's still alive!" he complains of the president.

As for Romney, "I hear he wears magic underpants," Homer says suspiciously.

But after some serious consideration, he does finally cast his vote ... and instantly regrets his choice. Check it out. (source)

Alert To All Bloggers! Are you getting comments on your posts from Anonymous sources in your mailbox with a link to bad places?

For over a week now I’ve noticed something new and troubling in my email box:

I’ve been getting comments from anonymous sources -regarding my blog posts - saying real nice things and providing a link to their website and asking me to visit them.

The first time I thought it was odd and looked up the post the email was referring to so I could see if the comment was there. Guess what? It wasn’t. I knew something was rotten in Denmark right then. The emails have been coming daily now.

Today (below) I got another suspicious email shortly after I posted something. This time the hoverlink didn’t just have garbled letters, it was an ad from the UK! I don’t know if that means the bastard who did it is from there or what.

I do know these spam emails with suspicious links could prove to be a real problem if opened. I have not opened one yet, nor will I open one at any time. I’ll just continue to be wary of them, document them, and to look for more information about them.

I mainly want to warn my blogger colleagues that this threat is out there. It’s relatively new as far as I can tell. So far, I haven’t heard or read anything about this spam approach. If you, or someone you know is experiencing the same thing please let me know. Knowledge is power. The more people who are aware of this cyber scam the better. Past this post along if you agree.

In my Email Box this morning shortly after my first post of the day:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post

"Yes, the Rich Are Different – Pew Research study shows”:
It's a shame you don't have a donate button! I'd certainly donate to this fantastic blog! I suppose for now i'll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account.
I look forward to brand new updates and will talk
about this site with my Facebook group. Chat soon!
Here is my web site : Hoverlink was here leading to a bogus website

Yes, the Rich Are Different — Pew Research study breaks down the numbers

       Good Day Humboldt County!

With all the talk lately about the secret Romney tapes I thought I’d take a scientific look at the differences between the rich and the rest of us as presented in this recently taken Pew Research survey.

It’s been an uphill battle since Day One trying to convince people that Romney could relate to the common American. He’s managed to increase the gap between the haves and have nots in a short conversation with wealthy donors during a fundraiser. His view of 47 percent of Americans is pretty bleak. But among that circle of wealthy donors his attitude was par for the course for someone who can afford to pay $50,000 for a lunch.

“Pew Research has released the results of a survey done last month on the differences between the rich and the rest of us. The survey results didn't really break any new ground, but did throw some light on who Americans think the rich are and what they're like. Some highlights:

• The total U.S. median annual income for a "wealthy" family is $150,000, but that varies between $200,000 in the Northeast to $150,000 in the Midwest and South.
• 43% of respondents said the rich are more likely to be intelligent and 42% said they are more likely to be hardworking.
• 55% said the rich are more likely to be greedy and 34% said they are less likely to be honest.
• Still, 92% of the self-described middle class and 84% of the self-described lower class say they admire people who get rich by working hard.
• 58% say upper income people pay too little in taxes.
• 44% of Republicans said upper-income people pay their fair share of taxes compared with just 13% of Democrats.
• More than three-quarters of Democrats say upper-income people pay too little in taxes, and (perhaps surprisingly) 33% of Republicans say the same thing.

  A large number of respondents - 65% - say the income gap between rich and poor has gotten larger in the past 10 years and 57% say that is a "bad thing."

  Finally, on the coming elections, 71% of respondents said Mitt Romney's policies would benefit the wealthy, while just 40% said the policies would benefit the middle class and 31% said his policies would benefit the poor. According to 37% of respondents, President Obama's policies would benefit the rich, and 50% said his policies would benefit the middle class and 60% said the policies would benefit the poor.”

  Time for me to walk on down the road…