April 3, 2010 archive

March 31 – MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, and Jane Hamsher, on offshore drilling, the oil industry, political corruption, and funding terrorism.

Barack Obama went to New Jersey (Afghanistan) last week to meet with Tony Soprano (Hamid Karzai).

“Tony,” says Barack, “we know that you and your under-boss Big Pauly (Ahmad Wali “Big Wally” Karzai) are total mobsters!”

“We know you’re involved in money-laudering, extortion, and heroin trafficking!”

“But we (me and George W. Bush) have supported you anyway, and killed everybody who got in your way!”

“We made you the over-boss of all of Jersey!”

“And how do you pay us back? You let some penny-ante election fraud get all over my media! You’re making me look bad, Tony! You gotta clean up your act!”

“Big Pauly should sleep with the fishes!”

And Tony Soprano replied…

“Big Pauly is a made man, Mr. President, and that means that Big Pauly can fuck with anybody, and nobody can fuck with Big Pauly.”

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

(Reuters) – Easter eggs may be good for you, but only if you eat small ones made from cocoa-rich dark chocolate, according to the latest in a string of scientific studies to show potential health benefits of chocolate.

German researchers studied more than 19,300 people over a decade and found those who ate the most chocolate — an average of 7.5 grams a day — had lower blood pressure and a 39 percent lower risk of having a heart attack or stroke than those who ate the least amount of chocolate — an average of 1.7 grams a day.

But, the difference between the two groups was just under six grams (6g) of chocolate a day, less than one small square of an average 100g bar, they wrote in a study in the European Heart Journal to be published on Wednesday.

Chocolate contains flavanols, anti-oxidant flavanoids, that are found in coco, wine and vegetables. Flavanols aid the release of nitrous oxide from the cells that line the blood vessels, Nitrous oxide is a smooth muscle relaxant that once in the blood stream, causes the blood vessels to relax and widen thus reducing blood pressure. Dark chocolate containing 70% coco has also been linked to  reducing stress. Along with a healthy diet, exercise and changes in lifestyle, 100 gm of Dark chocolate a day keeps the doctor away. One word of caution, there are 500 calories in 100 gm of chocolate. Happy Easter

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.  

[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.

The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

The sorcerer’s description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.

When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.

In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.

The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.

After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.

The Teachings of Don Juan

by Carlos Castaneda

Have a friend that contacted me and in that e-mail she told me about a brainstorming meeting taking place just before this weekend and into, April 1-3 of the Millennial Veterans. One of the couples sons, an Afghanistan and Iraq war Veteran, he served in both theaters, is attending this gathering. This group of Millennials sounds an awful lot like what happened as to us boomer’s especially those of us after our service in the military and especially Vietnam. Matter of fact the whole movement, the Millennials, of this generational group are getting much more involved in many issues that seemed to have skipped over the couple of generations just previous to them at least for most in those generations. I’ve been watching them for a few years now. They’ve not only taken up the issues we oldsters worried about and lobbied to change, in government and in society, they’ve been expanding on them not only to fit these times but like the technology they’ve expanded the issues forward, and now some of them have not only served in War but have done so in Two occupations of choice and in more then one tour of duty.