Best of the Web:

Smoking

Best of the Web: Does Smoking Help Protect the Joints?

Curious as it may sound, a new study of nearly 11,000 older men in Australia has found that the longer the men smoked, the less likely they were to undergo surgery to replace hips and knees damaged by arthritis or other conditions.

Lit cigarette
© Getty ImagesResearchers are quick to cover their butts by pointing out that smoking is "bad for you."
Smoking will increase your risk of cancer, emphysema, heart disease, stroke, and dying young, but if you manage to dodge all those bullets, it may actually reduce your need for joint-replacement surgery later in life.


Comment: Ah yes, they must start with the requisite propaganda mustn't they? If they didn't, they would be accused of working for tobacco companies because they printed the results of scientific studies that showed anything positive about smoking. This is the way of anti-tobacco activists. If you say anything that counters their message of "Smoking kills and there is nothing positive about it" you are attacked.

But we digress. If you subscribe to the Dot Connector now, you'll get to read a very revealing upcoming article on what is really known about smoking and what is only propaganda.


Curious as it may sound, a new study of nearly 11,000 older men in Australia has found that the longer the men smoked, the less likely they were to undergo surgery to replace hips and knees damaged by arthritis or other conditions.

Nuke

Best of the Web: Criminal Assault on the Planet! Monsanto's Agent Orange Being Used to Clear Amazon Forest

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© Wikipedia Commons
Agent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical which killed or injured an estimated 400,000 people during the Vietnam War - and now it's being used against the Amazon rainforest. According to officials, ranchers in Brazil have begun spraying the highly toxic herbicide over patches of forest as a covert method to illegally clear foliage, more difficult to detect that chainsaws and tractors. In recent weeks, an aerial survey detected some 440 acres of rainforest that had been sprayed with the compound - poisoning thousands of trees and an untold number of animals, potentially for generations.

Officials from Brazil's environmental agency IBAMA were first tipped to the illegal clearing by satellite images of the forest in Amazonia; a helicopter flyover in the region later revealed thousands of trees left ash-colored and defoliated by toxic chemicals. IBAMA says that Agent Orange was likely dispersed by aircraft by a yet unidentified rancher to clear the land for pasture because it is more difficult to detect than traditional operations that require chainsaws and tractors.

Info

Best of the Web: The Ultimate Time Travelers --Microbes Survive Millions of Years Traveling in Space

Comet
© The Daily Galaxy

In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores have been purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.

Closer to home, scientists have analyzed aerial dust samples collected by Charles Darwin and confirmed that microbes can travel across continents without the need for planes or trains - rather bacteria and fungi hitch-hike by attaching to dust particles. Their results clearly show that diverse microbes, including ascomycetes, and eubacteria can live for centuries and survive intercontinental travel.

In a paper published in Environmental Microbiology, Dr. Anna Gorbushina (Carl-von-Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany), Professor William Broughton (University of Geneva, Switzerland) and their colleagues analyzed dust samples collected by Charles Darwin and others almost 200 years ago.

Recent space-centric studies have shown that some rock-inhabiting organisms, known as "endoliths," might be able to survive a trip through space and a plunge through a planet's atmosphere to the surface. However, nobody knew whether these organisms could survive the initial trip into space.

An international team of researchers, led by Gerda Horneck of the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Cologne, Germany, selected a number of hardy microbes from Earth and tested their ability to hitchhike aboard rocks similar to Martian meteorites.

Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: Why Do the Police Have Tanks? The Strange and Dangerous Militarization of the US Police Force

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© Alternet
The federal government has supplied local police departments with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training.

Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl's family.

The shooting death of Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones sounds like it happened in a war zone. But the tragic SWAT team raid took place in Detroit.

Pills

Best of the Web: Food Allergy and Joint Pain - Is There a Connection?

arthritis pain
© Unknown
Most, doctors specializing in the treatment of arthritis, joint pain, and autoimmune diseases affecting the musculoskeletal system never even consider diet as an important factor in the development of these conditions.

I was formally trained in rheumatology at the VA hospital in Houston, TX, and I can say that diet and nutritional recommendations to patients were discouraged and in most cases frowned upon by our attending physicians. It was actually this experience that prompted me to dig deeper into the connection between autoimmune disease and food.

Over the past 10 years, I have treated thousands of patients with arthritic conditions. The most single effective therapies have always been diet and exercise. The paradox with exercise... It is harder to stick to if it flares up the arthritis. The problem with food...everyone reacts uniquely based on their own unique chemistry. But it only makes sense that if drugs can target inflammation as a treatment, why can't food. After all, isn't food a drug of sorts?

I have found that medical research greatly supports this connection, but more importantly, I have found that patients get better after eliminating inflammatory foods from their diets. What foods should we avoid to help recover from arthritis? Depends on the person. Everyone is unique.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Psychopaths often lack insight into their nature: "Sexy Israel" gets treatment for flotilla nightmares and exposes her pathology in the process

(Update below: Actress is Israeli and appears to have been commissioned on Hasbara gig)

I'm somewhat of a fool for excruciatingly bad Hasbara videos, but this one surely takes the cake:


Family

Best of the Web: Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive

fairness
© Serge Bloch
Among the Ache hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay, healthy adults with no dependent offspring are expected to donate as much as 70 to 90 percent of the food they forage to the needier members of the group. And as those strapping suppliers themselves fall ill, give birth or grow old, they know they can count on the tribe to provide.

Among the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari in Africa, a successful hunter who may be inclined to swagger is kept in check by his compatriots through a ritualized game called "insulting the meat." You asked us out here to help you carry that pitiful carcass? What is it, some kind of rabbit?

Among the Hadza foragers of northern Tanzania, people confronted by a stingy food sharer do not simply accept what's offered. They hold out their hand, according to Frank Marlowe, an anthropologist at Durham University in England, "encouraging the giver to keep giving until the giver finally draws the line."

Among America's top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you're feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you're tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.

Cult

Best of the Web: Monsters among us: Ritual child abuse in France

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© Brian Curnel
Interesting, but shocking German documentary that delves into three cases of child abuse in France. Three victims, 'Deborah', 'Robbert' and 'Noemi' tell about their experiences of abuse, and how they were molested in a pedophile network.

Rumours about these pedophile networks are not uncommon. The Casa Pia case in Portugal, the Dutroux case in Belgium, the Franklin affair in the USA and the Zandvoort affair in the Netherlands to name but a few - in all these cases there have been allegations of cover-ups and involvement of people in high societal standing, and investigations seldom lead to a satisfactory result - the Portuguese Casa Pia scandal, where politicians and a national tv-show host were actually convicted, being the proverbial black swan.

Noemi, in this documentary, claims to have met Marc Dutroux, the Belgian pedophile who was convicted for kidnapping and killing several girls in the late 1990's, through her father. If this is true, it is explosive evidence of the case reaching beyond national borders, something that has always been suspected by researchers.

The two girls and the boy's stories are horrible beyond imagination - not only involving abuse, but also child-murders, infant sacrifices and instances of cannibalism. It's tempting to dismiss their stories as the product of imagination, given the trauma they have been through, but it should be stated that these testimonies are very similar to what the "X-witnesses" in the Dutroux affair claimed.

There is an excellent book: Les dossiers X: Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l'affaire Dutroux (the X-files: what Belgium wasn't allowed to know about the Dutroux affair) in which three investigative journalists research the story of Regina Louf, aka witness "X-1". She was the first to come forward with her story. Many believed her but then the press instigated a character assassination. The writers of this book however, not only find many credible details in her story, about never resolved murders of young girls in Belgium, but they also show beyond a doubt the whole investigation into the case was deliberately derailed by Belgian Justice.

Comment:
We used to call them psychopaths - these creatures that appear on our planet physically in human form, but are not human beings.

We noted they are amoral. That should have given us a clue.

We noted they do not FEEL feelings. That should have instructed us.

We noted they are heartless. That should have set off the alarm.

These creatures lack elements which distinguish the human being. They exhibit no connection with, no understanding of what we call "morality," "honesty," "decency," "fair play," etc. They lack the faculty we call empathy. They lack the faculty we call introspection.

Mankind has spent centuries trying to make sense of these creatures as some form of human being. All in vain. Not only in vain, but at enormous on-going cost to our civilization. These creatures are not human beings gone wrong. They are a different species ... dedicated to the murder of human values ... as a prelude to the murder of human beings ... e.g., the tactics used by Nazis, past and present.

They laugh at us. They say: "No one understands us. People can't put themselves in the minds of men who act without a conscience. They try to understand, but they can't."

These creatures do not THINK human. They do not SPEAK human. They do not know what it is to BE human.

We classify them as "humanoid."

Yes, they have human form. If we manage to resist their onslaught long enough, we will eventually develop technical scanning equipment which will measure how different they are from human beings, despite their similarity of form.

In the meantime, the quality of our lives ... and often our very lives ... depends on our recognizing these creatures for what they are, and taking steps to neutralize their attempts to destroy us.

[...] Humanoids do not understand the distinction we humans make between good and evil. When they harm us, they do not understand why we call them evil. They do not understand why we have laws against murder. Their approach is to boast, even moralize over their victims.

Since they do not understand the reason for such laws, they argue they cannot be held accountable for their actions.

Not so. While they take the position the law does not apply to them, they do know the law was enacted to apply to everyone. Furthermore, if they try to claim they didn't know there was such a law, we respond with a firmly established principle: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

When they use those arguments, they make it clear they will continue to operate in accordance with their structure. We may look for remorse (a human capacity). We find none. They do not think of themselves as promulgating evil. They are simply doing what it is in their structure to do. The rattlesnake does not think of itself as evil when it injects poison. It is simply doing what it is in its structure to do.

Experience has shown humanoids continue to behave in the ways of their species . . murdering human values as a prelude to murdering human beings. Nazis demonstrate this graphically.

The issue as to whether to hold them "accountable," in our human sense of the word, has to be divided into two parts. We do not hold them accountable for BEING what they are. We do hold them accountable for the damage they DO.

When a dog gets rabies, we don't hold the dog accountable for becoming rabid. What we do, as a matter of self-protection, is put the dog down BEFORE it bites us, BEFORE it infects us.

We do not hold the rattlesnake accountable for HAVING poison fangs. What we do, as a matter of self-protection, is kill the rattlesnake BEFORE it kills us.

So with the humanoid. We need to be on our guard at the first sign of a murder of human values.
Amos M. Gunsberg, Beyond Insanity


Star of David

Best of the Web: A July Fourth Shame on the Founders

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© N/A
The tendency is to think of ourselves as "exceptional" Not just "all Americans," mind you, but all people. The Declaration of Independence was meant to be a statement expressing the "self-evident" rights of all mankind. Those principles had a universality that was a beacon to the world.

Yes, that was I standing before the U.S. Embassy in Athens on the eve of the July Fourth weekend holding the American flag in the distress mode - upside down.

Indignities experienced by me and my co-guests on The Audacity of Hope, the American boat to Gaza, over the past 10 days in Athens leave no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama's administration has forfeited the right to claim any lineage to the brave Americans who declared independence from the king of England 235 years ago.

In the Declaration of Independence, they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to a new enterprise of freedom, democracy and the human spirit. The outcome was far from assured; likely as not, the hangman's noose awaited them. They knew that all too well.

But they had a genuine audacity to hope that the majority of their countrymen and women, persuaded by Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the elegant words of Thomas Jefferson, would conclude that the goal of liberty and freedom was worth the risk; that it was worth whatever the cost.

USA

Best of the Web: What Are We Celebrating On The Fourth Of July?

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© Ben Garrison
You see it everywhere - on signs in stores, in TV commercials, newspaper ads, and sales fliers: Happy Fourth of July.

Well, now, isn't that special? What's the big deal about saying, "Happy Fourth of July?" After all, every country in the world has a "fourth of July."

Ask school kids what the Fourth of July is all about, and virtually each and every one will answer something like, "Fireworks" or "Cookouts." Retailers see it as yet another excuse to hold a sale. For most, it's a day off from work. But how many people today understand what July 4th is really about?

The fact that the Fourth of July is a celebration of independence from government tyranny under British rule seems to have been pretty much forgotten, or is viewed as an unimportant afterthought.

What kind of government tyranny did the Colonists want freedom from? Well, for one thing, the kind that involves warrant-less searches of peoples' homes, where government agents could just walk right into your private home for no reason and conduct a search without even getting a court-issued warrant. That was a form of government terrorism waged against the people, and when America declared its independence from British rule it adopted a new rule at home that specifically forbade such tyrannical government actions. To deal with this particular abuse, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution was created to protect citizens from illegal searches and seizures undertaken by a lawless, tyrannical government.