Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/is-this-as-good-as-it-get_b_343144.html
My comment: Pres. O has faced more problems & criticism than expected. Now will be his time to overcome and show the critics to be wrong and foolish. That’s my view; just you wait.
I had a stroke, blood clot on 9/26; …getting better all the time. Now back home! Will blog again soon; read the old stuff! Love ya, readers!
Every day is better. Amazing what attitude can do!
What are you doing? Not so much. Just getting a new hundred mil.
Breaking News: Twitter to Raise $100 Million From Insight, T. Rowe Price, Other Investors
By Deal Journal
The WSJ’s Michael Corkery and Jessica E. Vascellaro report:
Twitter, the messaging web site that has become an Internet sensation, is nearing a deal to close as much as $100 million of new funding from as many as seven investors, according to people familiar with the deal.
The investor group includes mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which are new investors to Twitter. The $100 million investment is about twice as much as Twitter was reportedly expected to haul in this latest round of fund-raising.
Other investors in this round include venture-capital firms Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, which have previously invested in Twitter.
The investors are valuing Twitter, which has yet to generate revenue or finalize its plans for making money, at about $1 billion. A person familiar with the deal said investors are applying a similar value to Twitter as that applied to Facebook, which at one point was valued at $15 Billion. By some estimates, Twitter is expected to have 25 million users by the end of 2009. Facebook has 300 million users.
Twitter could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Twitter valuation is quite a lift from the company’s last round of investing earlier this year, in which investors valued the company at around $255 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company still isn’t generating any real revenue, though executives say they are discussing various options, including advertising and premium services targeted at businesses.
The deal is expected to close today. It is Twitter’s third and largest round of fund-raising.
Selected comments from WSJ readers: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/09/24/breaking-news-twitter-to-raise-100-million-from-insight-t-rowe-price-other-investors/tab/comments/
Leaves me wondering two things: what’s the use of proceeds for $100M and what’s the exit strategy for these investors.
In terms of dollar value per tweet, how much is it?
here we go pop ups on twitter
100 million for a company that has no significant revenue or a proposed revenue model. It reminds me of 1999 where an idea that involved the internet could result in funding. In addition, what will the funds be used for?
Twitter is big and has gained a lot of mind share but it could evaporate just as quickly. The service is easily replicated (low barriers to entry and exit) and has little or no switching cost. There will be competitors in the future and then the typical consolidation. Not worth my 100mil.
Makes you wonder if the latest round of investors can see this company justifying such a valuation on cash flow fundamentals and the potential to generate oodles of free cash in the future, or whether they’re just investing in the Greater Fool theory and hoping they’ll exit to someone who’ll come up with an even more stupid valuation.
Don’t forget that that buyers of Web 2.0 companies have tended to write off much of what they paid only a couple of years later, which isn’t a problem because they are rarely if ever held accountable for destroying shareholder value on acquisitions that – to any sane outsider – are obviously and massively overpriced.
The real point is this…inflated valuations mean founders get rich, VCs get rich, advisers get rich and lots of other companies go up in value, meaning their founders, VCs and adviers will also get rich. The value that gets destroyed belongs to some nebulous “shareholders”, ie fund managers investing someone else’s money (and probably with little or no accountability). So while the initial wealth creation is very direct and tangible for those concerned, the subsequent wealth destruction is much more distributed and less tangible.
Really….this is the emperor’s new clothes…what’s so great about Twitter? I’m not a fan of myspace or facebook…but I can do everything there I can do on Twitter and a lot more. Good luck making your money back folks.
T Rowe Price again…? Must be buying in w/ their huge exit from Slide, that other breakout SF startup which they valued 550M at one time. Good job fellas… keep the money trucks heading west.
25 million users are worth 1bn?!? what a joke!
With some of the additions to video capable phones and add on services like Vidly.com, the ability to get a clip to followers is impressively quick. It continues to expand the “citizen journalism” trend. Not everyone has the time to post to a blog or manage a complex myspace or facebook page, but sending 140 or less plus photos or video to Twitter takes less than a minute and can be done on the run from the a cellphone.
Vidly example: http://is.gd/3Dx44As for marketing … I’ve venture to guess that commercial users will see their cost rise as they grow their base of followers?
Here is a tool to calculate a website value(Calculated twitter value too):
http://www.how-much-is-my-website-worth.info/Tweet this: “Twitter could not immediately be reached for comment.”
My comment: Hmmm… seems like the smart money is on Med Research Rising, not on Twittering Tweet. But, the ponies are still in the paddock, so who really knows?
What surprises me is how easy money is to come by now, almost but not quite a year from the time we all were ‘on the brink, staring over the cliff’. Remember when the banks were all broke and you couldn’t get a used car loan? And now people are lining up to give money to another ‘dot.something’ experiment with absolutely no revenue. Maybe it’s one of those hidden underground streams?
Funny, I just finished reading “The Devil’s Candy”, the well-told story of the making of the movie that was loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. Who cares, that was almost 20 years ago, right?
Ah, heck, I just went over my tweet limit by 689 characters!
No offense is intended toward overweight people or the employees of McDonald’s restaurants. Toward the dietitians and portion planners of that company, yes.
Where The Buffalo Roamed
By Stephen Von Worley • September 22nd, 2009
Published by the blogger: http://www.weathersealed.com/
This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall. First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a cubic yard of kitty litter, a carafe of pre-Columbian frappasmoochino, or fifty gross of pink highlighter pens, I’m there in a jiffy!
But, Mr. Real Estate Tycoon, did you have to plop your shopping center smack dab in the middle of what was previously nowhere? Okay, the land was cheap. And yes, you did traffic studies and proved that the interstate and distant suburbs would drench whatever you built in a raging torrent of eager consumerism. But your retail monstrosity drains the wildness from the countryside for twenty miles in every direction! Sure, you can’t see it from everywhere – but once you know it’s there, you feel it. In the rural drawl of a neighboring rancher, that flat-out sucks!
Hi girls and boys! It’s Ronald. I’m your big friend! See how big my ass is?
Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?
As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead. To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.
So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and…
Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!
You can download a bigger, wallpaper-ready version of the visualization, too!
As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.
For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.
Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!
Suffer a Big Mac Attack out there, and you’re hurtin’ for certain! For a coupla hours, at least, unless graced by the tender blessings of “manna from heaven” – that is, a fast food air drop from the Medi-Copter.
My comment: We all know that a diet of fat, sugar, salt and special sauce has been sought by mankind ever since the days when we had to hunt (literally) and sometimes even move our homes for our next meal. It seems humans are desirous of those elements because they help keep us warm in the winter, make us into soft couch shaped objects others can snuggle up with, and make us want iced high-fructose corn syrup in 32 ounce containers during the sweaty days of the year to sluff off all that salt.
At least those are the excuses we’ve been given by some of our enlightened and well-funded medical establishment. You desire Frito’s, Mountain Dew and ice cream because that’s what your ancestors dreamed of 10,000 years ago when they were freezing to death under the beautiful Northern Lights—something easy to grab in easy-open packages that was easily gulped down and that would feel like your empty space in the middle of your body had been filled with a bowling ball, not yet invented, OK, a caribou head. So you could sleep all night… feeling full. And, it only takes about an hour of labor (plus gas and drive time) to be able to get it, assuming you have a job at all.
Sorry, I don’t believe a word of those excuses. Why? Because it’s a fatso European/American idea promulgated by the people who want to sell unhealthy food to everybody for $2 to $6 each, three times a day, so that Mommy or, god forbid, Daddy doesn’t have to cook real food. Think about it: why are Asians or Indians or Africans not fat and why do they (almost) never think of eating at Mickey D’s or any of its many competitors? Because they haven’t been inundated with the TV commercials since they were first born and learned to sit up and watch the pretty pictures move. And their food is (mostly) meant to give them nutrition instead of pleasure and then sleep.
I know one thing. Taste is an acquired taste. (Think about it.) And some things that are designed in laboratories and corporate kitchens are addictive. So addictive that their dispensaries now must cover our very landscape (see map above).
What a success story, huh? It kinda makes you want a reasonable health care insurance bull, uh, bill to come out of Congress doesn’t it? You know, eat yourself sick and then spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get a diagnosis that says, “hey, you’re unhealthy. You need thousands more of pharmaceuticals, and uh, a change in lifestyle.”
Sugar, salt, fat, corn starch, ice cream— sure beats getting blown up in some faraway war, I guess. Same kind of misplaced patriotism, however. McDonald’s is where AMERICANS eat!
Our future. In a few years, they could be drafted for military service.
I think it has now been pretty well proven that the best diet (meaning WHAT you eat, not some weight-loss regimen) for most people in many parts of the world is what is called ‘the Mediterranean diet’. If you don’t know what food groups that consists of, you may go to ‘The Google’ now.
Oh yeah, and fancy, high-priced restaurants? Not so good. Their food tends to make one look thick. Just look at celebrities’ photos: when they were young and struggling and when they are rich and middle-aged— high-priced sauce-laden exotic meals make you thick. Check it out.
A classic example of the style! M-m-m, patent leather and Lucite! Yow-sa!
Whether they’re wearing spike-heeled leather boots or sheer tights with a garter belt, plenty of celebs are going thigh-high, more now than ever. It’s not a sexy look for everyone! When is above-the-knee leather a good idea and when does it just look silly? You decide with the photos below.
Want to ID these showoffs above? And see many more examples of perhaps bad wardrobe advice followed? Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/20/thigh-highs-which-celeb-w_n_291523.html
The logo, the address, the favorites.
Have you seen it? http://favstar.fm/
Some recent samples:
Thanks a million. Here’s Rob…
Hi, it’s Rob… My first and last tweet. My dad made me do it.Maybe if you read my Facebook status once in a while you wouldn’t be all surprised about having herpes right now.
The early bird, befuddled by sleep deprivation, quickly succumbs to better-rested predators.
Just recorded a segment with NPR. Turns out you don’t need to play your own flute music at the breaks. Awkward.
At this rate, we may need to tap into our Strategic Celebrity Reserves. Tell Loni Anderson to stand by.
Anyone else concerned that celebrities are dying off faster than American Idol can create them?
Why did the Muslim cross the road? … Oh. So now a Muslim crossing the road is suspicious activity?
I can’t believe Kanye was walking around with an open bottle of Hennessy. Now it looks like I’m copying him.
This is NOT the America I grew up in. Seriously, where am I. I woke up cuffed to a panther. Everyone’s speaking in clicks.
You’re mad he left $1 but didn’t take the tooth? Well maybe the tooth fairy has a stressful job and doesn’t need this kind of grief at home.
The Kindle version of Dan Brown’s new book is outselling the hard copy on Amazon. Meaning nobody wants to be seen reading it.
One day I hope to meet a man who’s as into me as my hand is.
What?Watching this woman at Wendy’s try to drink her Frosty with a straw is the most action I’ve had all month.
My comment: Yikes! I think I’d better stop before my readers in Vatican City think that I made up this stuff. Have you clicked on my World Map lately? Yeah, my readership is growing all over the Big Old World! One more American, says “Hey, world! Luv u 2!”
“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” -Monty Python, early ’70’s. Just thought I’d throw in that classic.
Anyway, if you wish to waste a little more time visiting some aggregated website… wait, that describes ME! …ANYWAY, you can go to favstar.fm. Have a laugh, won’t you? It’s HEALTHY!
What Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh are really afraid of
by Timothy Karr – campaign director, Free Press, and SaveTheInternet.com
Posted: September 16, 2009 10:47 AM
Can you smell the fear? Switch on cable news or tune in to talk radio and it comes wafting in.
Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck has bottled his own scent. Lou Dobbs’ fear gives off a distinct undertone of racial intolerance. And Rush Limbaugh takes to the air to spread an odor that’s designed to make Americans angry at, well, other Americans.
It’s a fear that’s laced with paranoia, stoked by misinformation and prejudice and fed to millions of people via powerful media. But most of all, it’s a fear of the changes that an overwhelming majority of Americans called for when they stepped into voting booths last November.
Since then, the old guard has fallen into alignment with old media to hijack the public debate over reform, and vilify reformers as anti-American. And to them the most anti-American notion of the lot is the idea that we need to reform the media itself.
“Part of the strategy of this fundamental ‘transformation’ of America is to silence dissent,” Glenn Beck said on Fox last month. The “most diabolical, hidden parts of this plan,” according to Beck, are efforts to reform media through “localism and diversity” — two principles that have grounded modern communications policy for decades.
Beck was later joined on the program by Rush Limbaugh, who called localism and diversity part of the growing tyranny of the left. This issue is “simply un-American,” Limbaugh crowed. “They’re trying to do this back-door route with diversity… to shut you up by shutting us down.”
Not to be outdone, Lou Dobbs stated falsely: “When you talk about diversity, [you aren't] talking about ethnic, racial or religious diversity, [you’re] talking about more liberals on the air.”
The cloud of media hysteria could have been waved off by more sensible voices on cable’s evening news roster. But few have stepped forward to challenge Beck, Limbaugh and Dobbs, to replace their fomenting with facts. More worrisome, voices of reason seem to be absent from the media “pundocracy” altogether.
While Beck and his ilk want to portray diversity and localism as a dangerous conspiracy to censor, the fact remains that these ideas have been staples of communications policy since the beginning. The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission — as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934 — is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.
Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.
Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that “safeguarding the public’s right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is … an integral component of the FCC’s mission.”
Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard. And what mainstream media’s fear-merchants are most afraid of is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job — creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media.
We don’t have that now. Washington bureaucrats have allowed powerful media corporations to control the public airwaves and dominate local cable networks. We have reached a nadir where the free press that Thomas Jefferson hoped would open “all the avenues to truth” has devolved into a media system that’s a megaphone for the few.
Beck and Limbaugh, in particular, are two corporate welfare babies who owe much of their existence to this regulatory failure, which handed control of our airwaves to massive conglomerates like Clear Channel and ABC Radio to broadcast their fear agenda via a syndicated network of centrally owned radio stations.
The cable sector that carries Beck and Dobbs’ nightly paranoia is itself a gigantic bundle of government handouts, having built invaluable local monopolies via granted rights-of-way that beam these two into nearly every den in America.
Try calculating what it would cost to get your content across America without a local or federal government clearing your path, and you quickly realize that blowhards like Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh are three of the nation’s biggest beneficiaries of public largesse.
And while they’re raking in millions in salaries via their government-granted fiefdoms, you, the owner of the airwaves and roads and telephone poles over which they transmit, are getting nothing in exchange.
The ultimate irony of Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh is that they couch in populist rhetoric a message that, in its very essence, is anti-populist — designed to protect the swindle at the core of our media system’s failure.
And that is why the media’s old guard is targeting the idea that this system needs to change.
In his media and technology agenda, President Obama took up the cause of reform by committing to “diversity in the ownership of broadcast media,” and pledging to “promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints.”
Obama is right, but he needs to get started on fulfilling that commitment.
Winning real change and giving more people a media voice is ultimately the best response we have to fear campaigns.
Follow Timothy Karr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TimKarr
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/what-beck-dobbs-and-limba_b_288480.html
My comment: I don’t listen to the ‘toxic air’ of the three media performers mentioned in this article. I figure there is enough illness in our air without my catching some of it from those guys.
The ‘media owners’ who have licensed the public airwaves (owned by all Americans and doled out [licensed] by the FCC) will put ANYONE on the air who can draw a crowd. That’s the way it has been since before the days when I was a little guy listening to radio and watching TV programs blatantly sponsored by ‘people-killing’ cigarette companies and other toxic bastards.
As it turns out, sponsors are the key to this poisonous media circus. As has been shown with Glenn Beck’s little TV show, when the advertisers (corporations) are merely threatened with an organized boycott of their products for sponsoring such blatant bullshit, they quickly drop hucksters of fear like Beck was, and put their money in front of another crowd on another channel. They don’t care where the ad dollars go as long as they reach a sizable crowd of eyeballs. Mr. Beck has now lost over 60 advertising sponsors from his little show, and no one has actually been boycotted yet, as far as I know.
And, here is the really silly part of the ’scare shows”. I don’t believe that Beck (or Dobbs, or even Limbaugh, who has the most convincing delivery style) actually are believing what they read on their shows. I think their performances could be bought by anyone who writes the biggest checks to them.
That, to me, is one of the scariest aspects of our 1st amendment ‘bill of rights’ that protects freedom of speech. Political propaganda can be bought easily and can actually make large sums of money for those who spread it, which leads to more of the same. That situation is due to our somewhat unregulated ethics-free system of capitalism and to the ‘free’ (read, ‘bought’) airwaves. Fear always sells pretty well. What ultimately matters is whether you (yes, little independent ‘you’!) believe it… or not.
Did Joseph Goebbels have corporate sponsors? Did they hire professional spokesmen? I’m looking that up right now.
BLURTS ON BUTTS, TRAMP STAMPS!
OMG! Now everyone’s blurting! First, Lyin’ Joe Wilson, then hothead Serena Williams, then drinkin’ Kanye West… all on national or international TV! I realize that Kathy Lee Gifford has made a career out of that type of TV personality talk, but seriously, can we get a break here?
Are we really that fed up with each other? Are we ‘Benjamin Buttons’, living our lives backwards, reverting to 1st grade school behavior? Quick, I’m about to blurt out something, something really rash, find me a TV camera won’t you? “Maybe this is just the hangover from having Backwards Man as President of the United States for 8 excruciating years?” Gosh, I hope so. I can’t wait for the Earth to spin into another area of the Universe, so we can find that ‘mellow vibe’ again. Can we just ‘lighten up’ a bit and have a laugh?
Speaking of that, here are the photos I’ve been promising: the mellow young ladies with the butt ends that blurt. Oh, they’ve made their statements all right. Get the message? See right below L5 vertebrae and right above the gluteous maximi… yep, there’s the billboard!
A lovely shout-out to parents! Mum, Dad,
She always promised to tell the truth.
The typestyle is clear but the meaning is… ?
Steve Jobs will sue her ass.
These bottoms will never come off!
Sorry sweetie, I don’t speak HTML!
She will never have to raise her price on postage.
Let’s see the video!
Is that the Playmate Reagan daughter? Could’ve gone lower.
It’s R2D2! Twice! With a bunch of other… wait I see a cross, too! Gacck!
Ducks, a dog, a magic carpet… what th’…?
Oh yeah, that ‘American Idol’ TV show guy from 2006… uh, cool…
What no room for the Unicorn? Oh NOW I see the Unicorn!! OMG.
Hello Kitty. She turns up everywhere!
Aw, what a sweetheart! Only 5 cents.
Then what happens, then what happens?
And, your favorite of all. The most instructive, the most loving, the most misquoted, the most misspelled, the most worked over, the most lowest, and not least, the most Christian of all “tramp stamps”.
My comment: Someday dads all over America will be explaining those blurring messages on Mommy’s ass to little kiddos:
“Mommy was once abducted by aliens, but she conquored THEM!”
“I think they did it at the hospital when you were born.”
“Mommy was dancing and backed into a big rubber stamp on the wall.”
“Before she met us, Mommy had really bad taste in friends and they colored her with crayolas!”
“Mommy fell on a Bible, and it stuck, OKAY! OK?”
“I inserted my coins in Mommy’s slot and you arrived a little later… isn’t that magical… like the Chronicles of Narnia!”
“Once upon a time, Mommy did everything Pam Anderson did… sort of…”
“Mommy once had a date with Kid Rock, and fell asleep, and, ah hell it’s a long story.”
“That’s an Apple, which was the logo of a small computer company before we all became iWorld.”
“It’s not supposed to make any sense, it’s Momma’s butt.”
“Before Mommie got clean, she had all kinds of monkeys on her back… kinda like Amy Winehouse.”
“Gee, I dunno, I’ve never seen that before, let’s go ask Mommie. No, you CAN’T have one!”
IF YOU HAVE BETTER ONES, SEND LINKS IN ‘COMMENTS’. IT’S SHOWTIME!
Freshly harvested weed
13 Sep 2009 04:56 pm
Marijuana Goes Mainstream, Ctd
Jonah Lehrer continues a discussion he began at the Dish:
I thought this brand new paper on stress and the cannabinoid receptor was extremely interesting. The Israeli scientists demonstrated that microinjecting an agonist of the CB1 receptor (a primary binding site of THC, the active ingredient in pot) significantly reduced the elevation of stress hormones in response to scary stressors. They researchers argue that their evidence “supports a wide therapeutic application for cannabinoids in the treatment of conditions associated with the inappropriate retention of aversive memories and stress-related disorders.” Like I said before, pot just might be the next Prozac. Are you listening Eli Lilly?
(Image from the LA Times shows medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles; Hat tip:Reason)
Marijuana vending machine
My comment: Hmmmm…. just don’t prescribe for airline pilots or Homeland Security employees, please.
Elderly Japanese man
More than 40,000 Japanese aged 100 or over: survey
Last Updated: 2009-09-11 15:49:47 -0400 (Reuters Health)
TOKYO (Reuters) – More than 40,000 Japanese people are aged 100 or over, up 10 percent over last year, a government survey showed on Friday. The report is the latest reminder of the economic problems facing the world’s most rapidly aging country.
Of the 40,399 citizens in their 100s, 87 percent are women, the Health and Welfare Ministry said.
An aging population that is also forecast to shrink is among the challenges facing new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama and his Democratic Party, elected in a landslide last month.
A smaller workforce will have to shoulder the burden of ballooning pension and healthcare requirements. Just over three people of working age now support each elderly person, but in 50 years the ratio will be closer to one to one.
Hatoyama’s Democrats have pledged to standardize the pension system with a minimum of 70,000 yen ($765) per month for those who had low incomes or lacked sufficient contributions to qualify for a pension.
Japan’s centenarian numbers rank it second in the world behind the United States, which now has more than 96,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. But the U.S. population is more than double that of Japan.
Japan boasts the longest life expectancy in the world, with experts citing healthy diet, high quality health care and a tradition of active pensioners as factors in the phenomenon.
The survey was issued ahead of Respect for the Aged day, a national holiday, on September 21.
Happy Respect for the Aged Day!
My comment: Why don’t other countries have ‘Respect for the Aged Day’?
Puff, the cat, in dreamland
Is Your Sleep Deprivation Leading You to Diabetes?
Dr. Michael J. Breus - Dr. Breus, aka The Sleep Doctor, is the author of “Beauty Sleep”, available on Amazon.
Posted: September 11, 2009 12:23 PM
Pop quiz: Which of the following words does not seem to go with the others?
- Obesity
- Calories
- Insulin
- Sleep
- Fat
If you said sleep, you’re right. Er, you’re wrong actually.
While sleep may not seem like it belongs in the same category as words that revolve around weight, it actually has everything to do with weight and whether or not you’re at risk for diabetes.
A brief nap on the train to catch up on rest and sleep time. (Not so good.)
Two fascinating studies that just came out to further prove it:
1. One study out of a sleep lab at Penn State College showed that insomniacs who slept only five to six hours a night had greater odds of developing diabetes.
2. The other study, this one from the University of Chicago and published in this month’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, demonstrated that sleep deprivation mixed with sedentary living and free access to food can change the body’s physiology to the point it resembles that of a prediabetic. In other words, the body’s insulin resistance and glucose tolerance shifts, leaning toward a dangerous condition that’s a precursor to full-blown diabetes.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty remarkable…and scary. This change in physiology, by the way, in the second study happened over the course of just two weeks as healthy adults were forced to get by on only five hours a night.
None of this was news to me. I’ve written numerous times about the impact of quality sleep in our ability to lose and maintain a healthy weight, and avoid the ravages of diabetes.
Other studies have also shown what happens when we miss out on sleep. We can’t seem to go a day without more news about our diabetes and obesity problem. But I still find that the conversation about this hugely popular topic often gravitates toward access to healthy diet choices, and ways to get more regular physical activity. What about access to more and better sleep?
Sweet Dreams,
Michael J. Breus, PhD
The Sleep Doctor™
www.thesleepdoctor.com This article on diabetes, weight and sleep is also available at Dr. Breus’s official blog, The Insomnia Blog.
My comments: The reasons for the photo of the sleeping kitten at the top are these: kitten and cats are very popular on the Web, it got your attention; kittens and cats almost always get enough sleep. Could that be why they are so alert and full of life when they are awake?
If you are not getting at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep in each 24-hour cycle, you could be endangering your health. And if your partner tells you that you have sleep apnea, please get medical help. You can die in your sleep (at any age) if you suffer from sleep apnea. Diabetes is no condition to ignore. Get a blood sugar test ASAP if you think you have diabetes symptoms. You may not even need insulin injections, or diabetes pharmaceuticals, you may just need to change your daily diet. Be sure to talk with your general practicioner or family medicine doctor… they will take the most time to talk with you and form a diagnosis.
You see, if we stay healthy by getting plenty of rest and deep sleep, we may not even need health insurance. After all, health insurance does nothing to keep you healthy; in fact, they are encouraging you to bet against yourself, so your mind tells your body, “it’s OK, now you can get sick, you have insurance”. Ha!
Those companies are just “the middleman” who take in billions of dollars in premiums, keep over 30% in profits (legally) and pay our doctors and hospitals for our care… well, I’m told they pay a percentage if and when they feel like it. They are just a money exchange and record-keeping enterprise. They do nothing to keep us well. Think about it.
They are more like the phantasms we deal with in our dreams sometimes. When we wake up, they go away.
However, most all Americans should have insurance that pays if a serious accident happens or if a hospital stay is required. Those two occurances can bankrupt a family as well.
Read more advice from a physician (it’s FREE!):
Just one more post about the jacking up of political insanity from this week and then you get more pictures of ‘tramp stamps’.
Why Wasn’t There A Single Democrat Willing To Heckle Bush Like Joe Wilson Did?
Quick question: why the fuck are Democrats boasting that they kept their mouths shut and their hands folded on their knees during every crazed speech Bush gave, unlike that bad ol’ Confederate Joe Wilson? Is that something the Dems should be proud of? If anything, Wilson’s outburst should make Democrats flush their own heads down the nearest toilet in shame for being such spineless pieces of shit right at the time that America needed an opposition most–a noisy, vicious, unpredictable opposition–to save the nation, us, and our grandchildren. Instead, they were polite, and they’re still proud of how polite they were. Do Democrats realize that by not having a tenth of Joe Wilson’s balls or the Tea Baggers’s fanaticism, that they enabled Bush to destroy the US military in two idiotic wars, and destroy the economy through plunder? What’s to be proud of? This is exactly why it’s so hard to be on the side of Democrats: they see what a real opposition looks like–ugly, frightening, unpredictable, breaking the rules– and they have this appalled Polite Society reaction, like a Southern Belle with white gloves on going, “Why I nevuh in all my life,” as if politics is a country club rather than a battlefield.
The right gets it–and and Joe Wilson’s outburst reminded us yet again. I think deep down that’s what the liberals and Dems were so bothered by: they don’t like it when the rightwing reminds them that this isn’t a grammar school civics class. All across the liberal blogosphere, you see all this plankton that passing for human beings whingeing in unison, “Teacher! Joey made fun of Barack! Can you tell his mommie please? And can you put another star on our liberal foreheads please, because unlike Joey, we were always polite while Bush destroyed America! And pat us on the head too, like you did over the past 8 years. We like getting patted on the head like that.”
So while most liberals are collectively shaking their hollow liberal fists at the nerve of that Confederate goon Joe Wilson, let’s keep in mind the real lesson: some of us who remember what a bunch of spineless pieces of shit Democrats were when the country needed them most, when heckling and threatening our Dumbfuck-In-Chief could have made a difference, when the Dems could have taken a risk and possibly saved America from that hyperactive retard Bush and saved the country from ruin… Just one “Liar!” from a Congressman or Congresswoman during Bush’s 2003 pied-piper dance to get America to commit national suicide in Iraq. What were Dems so afraid of anyway? Hundreds of thousands of Americans are taking much bigger risks, dying and getting their legs blown off to supposedly protect America–and yet the Dems were and still are afraid of upsetting decorum? Why couldn’t the Dems yell out at Bush during his war speech something, anything, like, “Sit the fuck down, retard!” or “Someone call social services!” or just “You’re a LIAR!” like Wilson did. It would have given a badly-needed spine-transplant to millions of Americans who didn’t know how to stop Bush from ruining America… if only Dems would have taken that risk and led.
But instead, unlike that awful, terrible hillbilly Joe Wilson, the Dems sat politely in their seats, just as the rules say they should, while Bush convinced the country to drive the bus over the cliff. Because heckling Bush might have broken the rules, and god knows if there’s one thing today’s liberals fear, it’s when someone doesn’t adhere to grade school civics class rules.
This is what I mean when I say that the only true opposition in this country comes from the rightwing. It’s been this way for the past 25 years, and it’ll probably be this way for another 25.
Mark Ames is the author of “Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine“.
Click the cover & buy the book!
NOTE: Blog post reprinted without the knowledge or permission of the blog author.
My comment: ‘The Exile’ uses somewhat stronger language in his rant than I ever will. Not that that’s a bad thing. I’m sure that back in 1858-9, people both Southern and Northern were hurling schoolyard insults at each other that their mommas would not have liked.
And, I suppose the chambers of our U.S. Congress could become a pit of vipers loudly sneering and guffawing like the Members of the House of Lords do when the Prime Minister of England makes an appearance to present his plans to that august and moneyed body of the supposedly ‘most civilized’ folks on the planet. But, of course, the difference would be that while the Lords carry on with their loud heckling to drown out the PM with smiles and an obvious sense of humor (usually taken with same) our lobbyist-enriched Representatives would break out in fist fights (like in some hot Asian countries) and in the next speech would bring their weapons (Glocks, most likely) tucked under their silk suit jackets. Not good for Americans to cross the line into shouting. Never has been. We end up (like in our Old West movies) with bodies lying lifeless, while the Brits (who in their Middle Ages usually used the ’stocks’ in the streets with someone’s head locked in them) hold their fire until the next day’s newspapers when they kill with gossip and ridicule.
‘The Exile’ has been blogging since 1997. He has an audience who like what he gives them. What else does he give them? Here’s another sample, picked at random from his little promos:
http://exiledonline.com/death-bonds-wall-streets-shocking-new-plan-to-reap-billions-off-dying-americans/
And, as I promised, next this wee blog will be back to ‘tramp stamps’ on young ladies’ butts. Wee bloggers have to keep an audience, too, y’ know.
