Friday, July 30, 2010

Brain Thinking Memory Creativity Repetition Internet Distraction Hurts Memory Creativity

Tags: Brain, Thinking, Memory, Creativity, Google, Repetition, Internet Distraction, The Shallows, Nicolas Carr, Religion, Kandel, Synapses, Neurons, Charlie Rose,

We need to have a large store house of information in our cortex and hippocampus which can unconsciously be sorted for appropriate information to our working memory to correlate facts beyond what the so-called “experts” think. It is really common sense. Most successful individuals do what they do obsessively. It is similar to how we develop strong religious convictions by constant repetition. About 30 percent of members of the prestigious Academy of Science attend church weekly, and one headed the successful government Human Genome Project.


The drawback is that the ultra religious Fundamentalists congress and the Supreme Court who are obviously very bright seem not to understand that our Constitution was for the people, not non-human corporations! They have made many cruel decisions without a hint of regret. Obama made the mistake often trying to accommodate Senators who have this flawed ingrained way of thinking. How can they follow a religion made up by flawed and cruel religious figures in the twelfth, thirteenth, and nineteenth century.


Most of my coworkers at a chemical engineering firm were from the Ivy schools so could do well in school and had high intelligence of about 140 with the few over 160. So does that guarantee good research? Apparently not! Many Nobel prize winners do not have the highest IQ on the block. It certainly does help us understand the complex reasoning involved in understanding the difficult to read publications necessary for us to think in the realm of doing research.


In contrast to the current view, we must have superb memories because we need to absorb information slowly in a non-distraction environment to be able to solve current problems and invent new products.


Unfortunately the Internet in its current form is a very distracting environment. I find that I remember facts much better when I transfer articles to my word processor first, ignore hyperlinks which studies have shown to reduce retention of the article. Also the overwhelming amount of information we get by way of Google makes us want to skim a lot to get the fact we are looking for. Because the information goes to our working memory which has a very small capacity, much of which is thrown out by the following bits of information and so on. The information is retained for seconds and then transferred to the hippocampus. If not reinforced by repetition, the synapse disappears with the memory.


Much of the pioneering Nobel Prize winning work was first by Kandel at Columbia on a snail. What is amazing is the reinforcement strengthens the synapse and with increasing reinforcement, the neurons start to develop more synaptic connections which can run into the hundreds.


All of this is a chemical process whose speed depends on genetics. Over many years with continued reinforcement, the memory is passed on to the cortex memory bank resulting in very long-term memory. One weakness we have is that each time we recall this memory of an event or facts, it can change. This becomes a tragedy in the use of identification in crimes, especially identifying a person of a different race or Catholic Priest abuse often reported decades later. I believe many of these claims are false.


I highly recommend the Kandel moderated Ten part Brain series so far on www.charlierose.com show. In a separate interview Charlie Rose addresses Creativity which has gone down 20% since the 1990s. I repeat things because many of you have distracted and busy lives so manytimes you do not read the material I send. I hope that if you got this far, you will read the Brody column slowly without distractions. Print it out if you want.


Many well-meaning educators want to eliminate rote memory work. How can we think without information in our brain. Some very bright guys seem to think we don’t need to because we can look it up. My question is would you know what to look up?


Sleep is extremely important for our brain to organize information, delete unimportant information unless you find it interesting and important, and more securely keep the memory. Remember Rote repetition is the lifeblood of Thinking and Creating! Many schools in the ghetto that succeed marvelously teach in a rote repetition manner and test at such high levels even with the bad ghetto culture about equivalent to the dumbed down White Internet kids without cheating. One Principal in a ghetto school ignores the so-called modern way to teach reading and has very successfully gone back to the old and test methods to teach reading.


Socrates thought that memory is so important to how we think that he fought the introduction of a reading tablet! Think about this if you can. If we had the Internet during the Enlightenment, I doubt that it would have happened.

Nicholas Carr who wrote the famous article in www.theatlantic.com Google Makes Us Stupid , wrote a book explaining why it does proven with a large amount of excellent brain research by people at the top of brain and memory research. But the first question I had was how can he concentrate enough to write a book if he can’t read one?


The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, a former editor for a large book publishing company seems to read like a Google Search. Towards the last few chapters, he seems to have become a good writer an editor should be.


He said in about the last chapter that he had a very difficult time concentrating enough to write the book in distracting Boston. So he and his wife moved to a mountain in Colorado free from cell phone reception and the DSL internet connection was very slow. Distance from the station influences speed of the transmission.


He got rid of all e-mail linkages not absolutely necessary, turned off the RSS feed, and even closed down the e-mail page which I do many times. I found that the Internet is very addictive and it took me a while to greatly reduce my activity, but I still do write blogs completely from memory so I am partially succeeding. Nicolas Carr admitted that he is now back on the web again after he was close to the last chapter!


Jim Kawakami, July 30, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


Vitamin D Best Nonscientific Column About Why It is a Miracle Hormone

Tags: Vitamin D, Lack of High BP, Osteoarthritis, Autoimmune Disorders, MS, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Heart Disease, Cancer, Colon, Breast

Although this article came very late, it is one of two best popular write-ups of the need for vitamin D I have read. She quotes Holick of Boston University who has been working on vitamin D for a longtime, but was virtually ignored by medical establishment and the exalted journals.


Shows how highly intelligent experts maintain their previous beliefs just like radicals on the Left and Right in spite of evidence contradicting their views. Long held beliefs are reinforced by repetition in our neurons and synapses and can’t be dislodged by making a logical fact filled argument. Stop try President Obama and play to your base which should include Independents.


We should all admit that experts do not always offer good advice and sometimes they lie if paid enough as we have seen in doctors supporting the approval of very dangerous medicines or supporting a drug even though many get sick and die. We should all also admit that we are more ignorant than we should be to make good decisions, but we rely on the garbage in garbage out philosophy without knowing we are spewing garbage.


Religion and other beliefs are entrenched in our neurons and synapses and even in our epigenetic genes which can be turned off or on by our environment whether physical or mental to help us survive and maintain our predilections which can be carried from one generation to another even when they are no longer appropriate.


Please read the whole article. Well worth while.


Jim Kawakami, July 30, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


Vitamin D Best Nonscientific Column About Why It is a Miracle Hormone

NY Times Jane Brody, July 28, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/health/27brod.html?src=me&ref=homepage


Vitamin D promises to be the most talked-about and written-about supplement of the decade. While studies continue to refine optimal blood levels and recommended dietary amounts, the fact remains that a huge part of the population — from robust newborns to the frail elderly, and many others in between — are deficient in this essential nutrient.


If the findings of existing clinical trials hold up in future research, the potential consequences of this deficiency are likely to go far beyond inadequate bone development and excessive bone loss that can result in falls and fractures. Every tissue in the body, including the brain, heart, muscles and immune system, has receptors for vitamin D, meaning that this nutrient is needed at proper levels for these tissues to function well.

Studies indicate that the effects of a vitamin D deficiency include an elevated risk of developing (and dying from) cancers of the colon, breast and prostate; high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease; osteoarthritis; and immune-system abnormalities that can result in infections and autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

Most people in the modern world have lifestyles that prevent them from acquiring the levels of vitamin D that evolution intended us to have. The sun’s ultraviolet-B rays absorbed through the skin are the body’s main source of this nutrient. Early humans evolved near the equator, where sun exposure is intense year round, and minimally clothed people spent most of the day outdoors.

“As a species, we do not get as much sun exposure as we used to, and dietary sources of vitamin D are minimal,” Dr. Edward Giovannucci, nutrition researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in The Archives of Internal Medicine. Previtamin D forms in sun-exposed skin, and 10 to 15 percent of the previtamin is immediately converted to vitamin D, the form found in supplements. Vitamin D, in turn, is changed in the liver to 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the main circulating form. Finally, the kidneys convert 25-hydroxyvitamin D into the nutrient’s biologically active form, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, also known as vitamin D hormone.

A person’s vitamin D level is measured in the blood as 25-hydroxyvitamin D, considered the best indicator of sufficiency. A recent study showed that maximum bone density is achieved when the blood serum level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D reaches 40 nanograms per milliliter or more.

“Throughout most of human evolution,” Dr. Giovannucci wrote, “when the vitamin D system was developing, the ‘natural’ level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D was probably around 50 nanograms per milliliter or higher. In modern societies, few people attain such high levels.”

A Common Deficiency

Although more foods today are supplemented with vitamin D, experts say it is rarely possible to consume adequate amounts through foods. The main dietary sources are wild-caught oily fish (salmon, mackerel, bluefish, and canned tuna) and fortified milk and baby formula, cereal and orange juice.

People in colder regions form their year’s supply of natural vitamin D in summer, when ultraviolet-B rays are most direct. But the less sun exposure, the darker a person’s skin and the more sunscreen used, the less previtamin D is formed and the lower the serum levels of the vitamin. People who are sun-phobic, babies who are exclusively breast-fed, the elderly and those living in nursing homes are particularly at risk of a serious vitamin D deficiency.

Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University, a leading expert on vitamin D and author of “The Vitamin D Solution” (Hudson Street Press, 2010), said in an interview, “We want everyone to be above 30 nanograms per milliliter, but currently in the United States, Caucasians average 18 to 22 nanograms and African-Americans average 13 to 15 nanograms.” African-American women are 10 times as likely to have levels at or below 15 nanograms as white women, the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found.

Such low levels could account for the high incidence of several chronic diseases in this country, Dr. Holick maintains. For example, he said, in the Northeast, where sun exposure is reduced and vitamin D levels consequently are lower, cancer rates are higher than in the South. Likewise, rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, and prostate cancer are higher among dark-skinned Americans than among whites.

The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said.

The current recommended intake of vitamin D, established by the Institute of Medicine, is 200 I.U. a day from birth to age 50 (including pregnant women); 400 for adults aged 50 to 70; and 600 for those older than 70. While a revision upward of these amounts is in the works, most experts expect it will err on the low side. Dr. Holick, among others, recommends a daily supplement of 1,000 to 2,000 units for all sun-deprived individuals, pregnant and lactating women, and adults older than 50. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that breast-fed infants receive a daily supplement of 400 units until they are weaned and consuming a quart or more each day of fortified milk or formula.

Given appropriate sun exposure in summer, it is possible to meet the body’s yearlong need for vitamin D. But so many factors influence the rate of vitamin D formation in skin that it is difficult to establish a universal public health recommendation. Asked for a general recommendation, Dr. Holick suggests going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen (except for the face, which should always be protected) wearing minimal clothing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes.

Slathering skin with sunscreen with an SPF of 30 will reduce exposure to ultraviolet-B rays by 95 to 98 percent. But if you make enough vitamin D in your skin in summer, it can meet the body’s needs for the rest of the year, Dr. Holick said.

Can You Get Too Much?

If acquired naturally through skin, the body’s supply of vitamin D has a built-in cutoff. When enough is made, further exposure to sunlight will destroy any excess. Not so when the source is an ingested supplement, which goes directly to the liver.

Symptoms of vitamin D toxicity include nausea, vomiting, poor appetite, constipation, weakness and weight loss, as well as dangerous amounts of calcium that can result in kidney stones, confusion and abnormal heart rhythms.

But both Dr. Giovannucci and Dr. Holick say it is very hard to reach such toxic levels. Healthy adults have taken 10,000 I.U. a day for six months or longer with no adverse effects. People with a serious vitamin D deficiency are often prescribed weekly doses of 50,000 units until the problem is corrected. To minimize the risk of any long-term toxicity, these experts recommend that adults take a daily supplement of 1,000 to 2,000 units.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 29, 2010 The Personal Health column on Tuesday, about the deficiency of vitamin D in much of the population, referred imprecisely to the publisher of a book by Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University, who said low levels of the vitamin could be contributing to high rates of some chronic diseases. While Penguin did not publish Dr. Holick’s book, “The Vitamin D Solution,” it owns the imprint that did, Hudson Street Press.


Thursday, July 29, 2010

Military Spending Runs Our Welfare Economy Deficit Spending Republicans Like

Tags: Military Spending Runs Our Welfare Economy,Turse, Orwell, Miami Herald, Washington Post, Deficit Spending Republicans Like

The Post series described an insanely expensive collection of federal programs of dubious worth.

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives by Nick Turse, 2008.

"In impressive detail, Nick Turse shows how the military is now tied to everything from your morning cup of Starbucks to the video games your kids play before turning in for the night. It's not just political anymore--it's personal. Turse has sounded the alarm--now it's up to us to do something about it." William D. Hartung, author of "How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration."

Just read the chapter headings in Turse's book and you might conclude that we will have wars in both the military sense and economic sense forever until we collapse economically. (1984 Orwell). The introduction shows a 3 page table labeled The Pentagon in Your Pantry. In chapter 2 The Military-Academic Complex, chapter 3 The Military-Petroleum Complex, chapter 4 Global Landlord, chapter 8 The Military-Donut Complex, chapter 11 Six Billion Movies and No Separation, chapter 20 The Military-Corporate-Conference Complex, and chapter 25 The Homeland Security State.

As I mentioned a number of times, every state, county, city, and district have some economic dependence on the Pentagon budget including Oregon. It is our economy stupid!

Jim Kawakami, July 29, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
Commentary: Why aren't conservatives blasting military industry welfare?
By Glenn Garvin | The Miami Herald Posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010

A most peculiar thing happened last week: The Washington Post ripped a federal welfare boondoggle to shreds, exposing tens of billions of dollars of waste, duplication and bureaucratic excess . . . and conservatives didn't erupt in astonishment and praise. In fact, they didn't raise a peep.

That's because the welfare queens ripping off taxpayer dollars in this case aren't poverty pimps waving the bloody flag of race and class, but military-industrial hustlers exploiting the war on terrorism to build themselves opulent and powerful fiefdoms.

At a time when newspapers are shrinking, not many ran The Post's 16,000-word Top Secret America series, a rough map of the murky yet vast labyrinth of intelligence and defense agencies that securitycrats have burrowed into the federal budget since Sept. 11.

But if you care at all about either the wholesale waste of federal dollars or the real capabilities of the U.S. government to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, The Post series is worth tracking down on the Internet.

If anything, its conclusion -- that we've created a surveillance-industrial complex "so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within or exactly how many agencies do the same work" -- is modestly understated.

• The known U.S. intelligence budget has increased 250 percent to $75 billion since Sept. 11, and that doesn't include most military spy agencies, where the major growth has been.

At least 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private contractors now work on counterterrorism and intelligence programs. (Don't worry, South Florida gets its share of the pork: The Post says there are 78 "top secret" worksites in Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.)

• More than 250 intelligence-related organizations have been created or given major expansions since Sept. 11. Some, like the Defense Intelligence Agency, have doubled in size; others, like the National Security Agency, have tripled. The NSA's Maryland headquarters alone covers 112 acres. Oops, let me correct that: The headquarters' parking lots cover 112 acres.

To say a lot of the work of these agencies is duplicative, or even triplicative, doesn't begin to cover it. You need whatever derivation of -cative goes with 51, which is the number of federal organizations and military commands tracking the flow of money to terrorist networks. Did you even know we have a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency? I don't know what that agency does that the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency and the Army Geospatial Center don't. But whatever it is, there must be a lot of it: The new headquarters building cost $1.5 billion and houses 8,500 employees.

• If the pen is really mightier than the sword, then we ought to be able to declare victory over al Qaeda and go home. Our battalions of desk-bound spooks churn out almost 1,000 intelligence reports a week. "I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything," one despairing Defense Department official told The Post.

About 854,000 people -- that is, a city a little bigger than Jacksonville -- have top-secret security clearances. (Nearly a third of them don't even work for the government; they're contractors.) Whether any of those people are actually able to shoot at terrorists isn't clear. One military officer interviewed by the Post recounted signing a secrecy pledge that forbade him to disclose anything about his work to his commander -- a four-star general.

Not only can the spies not to talk to each other, neither can their computers. Many of the vast databases collected by the various agencies are incompatible with one another. Perhaps that explains why despite a warning to the CIA from the bomber's own father, a jihadist plot to blow up an airliner over Detroit was discovered not by U.S. intelligence but by a passenger who saw the man setting his underwear on fire. Or how, despite a U.S. Army major's chatty e-mails with a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen, his plan to carry out a mass shooting at Fort Hood was detected only when the bodies started hitting the floor.

In short, The Post series described an insanely expensive collection of federal programs of dubious worth. Several top officials quoted by name, including CIA Director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, conceded grave doubts about the value of what the government is getting for its money.

These are precisely the elements that conservatives are quick to denounce in the welfare state. But when it comes to the national-security state, they're strangely muted. The influential conservative blog The Volokh Conspiracy confined itself to critiquing the series' graphics. ("More like eye candy than useful tools.") The Weekly Standard protested weakly that "redundancies are not necessarily a bad thing." Rush Limbaugh? Glenn Beck? The rest is silence.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Glenn Garvin is the Miami Herald's TV critic. He covered Latin America for 19 years -- the last five of them as The Herald's bureau chief in Managua. He can be reached by e-mail at ggarvin@miamiherald.com. Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/29/98192/commentary-why-arent-conservatives.html#ixzz0v4z3VWuv


Sunday, July 25, 2010

Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt What Made Him Great Short Book

Tags: Presidents, FDR, Hoover, W. Bush, Obama, FDR Short Book, Comparisons, Strengths, Weaknesses

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Alan Brinkley, December 2009, Oxford University Press, 128 pages, $12.95 list.


According to Brinkley, President Obama is extremely poor in communicating to the public, but he does have the problem with the Right Wing corporate radio, corporate television, and Press, and does not enjoy politics. Roosevelt was superb communicator and loved politics. Obama is known as someone with a high intellect, Roosevelt was not, but he loved working with both friends and opponents. He is not a people person, and selected superb advisors. He spent most of his life alone, even at Columbia. Obama picked his advisors and cabinet whom he did not know well except for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with the exception of his Chicago campaign staff. Americans should be praising President Obama for passing bills with close to 100% lack of cooperation. Should we vote against the Democrats for the problems that took at least 8 years for the Bush Republicans to develop? He passed a comprehensive Healthcare Bill that no other President succeeded, even Franklin D. Roosevelt who did not try!


President Herbert Clark Hoover (1929-33). He was trained in geology but his major accomplishments were managing engineering projects. He was both a humanitarian Food relief in China and Russia and served as Secretary of Commerce in both the Harding and Coolidge and some historians consider him to be the best Commerce Secretary ever. After presiding as Secretary of Commerce over the laissez faire economic times in the 1920s in a similar to George W. Bush, Harding worried about the deficit and cut the budget in the same manner the Republicans now want to do.


Brinkley said unless Obama acted, we would now be in a Depression without a doubt. In a recession or Depression tax revenues drop sharply so deficits go up naturally. The Republicans want to do the same thing Hoover did to "help" our economy. The inexperienced PM in the UK and too many in Europe want to practice Hooverism now too!


I hope they understand and act on what history has made clear about what to do. He defined Liberal as a person or group that wants to empower the people so government and corporations cannot make our country similar to feudal times where the rich own everything worth owning.


Maybe we are getting back to the good old bad days unless we vote to help ourselves. Governments and the people who run them are far from perfect human beings and we saw with Bush that it does matter whom we elect to Congress and the President. We got the Great Depression from Hoover.


Roosevelt served as assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson and served through World War I. In 1921 he got polio which paralyzed his legs. From 1921 to 1928 he worked in a law firm and a vice president of a bank. He served two terms as Governor of New York from 1929 to 1933 while the country was going to hell under Hoover.

At the 1933 Democratic convention he was behind #1 Garner and #2 McAdoo who was planning to throw his votes to Garner so he could win the nomination, but with # 3 Roosevelt’s political skills and some skullduggery, he got the votes and won the election over Hoover by a landslide. Unfortunately the Supreme Court was similar to the Roberts/Scalia corporate Supreme Court now and they tried hard to stop the New Deal.


Wall Street’s J.P. Morgan tried to convince a War hero Medal of Honor recipient Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler to join his effort to overthrow the President by slaughtering the huge number of unemployed workers demonstrating for jobs there. Instead Butler informed Congress of the plot and wrote a very short book which was republished a few years ago by his children’s family.


War is a Racket in 1935. Excerpt from very short book: I Spent 33 Year in the Marines, Most of My Time Being a High-class Muscle Man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the Bankers. In Short, I was a Racketeer for Capitalism. My how things remain the same!


Jim Kawakami, July 25, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, where he served as Provost from 2003-2009. He has published numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, (Very influential anti-Semitic racist priest and radio talk show host) and the Great Depression; The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War ; and Liberalism and Its Discontents.


Reviews

"Alan Brinkley's incisive and eloquent biography of FDR clarifies what he achieved and what he did not. Brinkley brings deep knowledge of Roosevelt and the New Deal to help readers understand why Roosevelt's was arguably the most important presidency of the twentieth century."--Lizabeth Cohen, Bancroft Prize-winning author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939

Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt What Made Him Great Short Book

This brilliant, compact biography chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rise from a childhood of privilege to a presidency that forever changed the face of international diplomacy, the American party system, and the government's role in global and domestic policy.


Alan Brinkley, the National Book Award-winning New Deal historian, provides a clear, concise introduction to Roosevelt's sphinx-like character and remarkable achievements. In a vivid narrative packed with telling anecdotes, the book moves swiftly from Roosevelt's youth in upstate New York--characterized by an aristocratic lifestyle of trips to Europe and private tutoring--to his schooling at Harvard, his brief law career, and his initial entry into politics.


From there, Brinkley chronicles Roosevelt's rise to the presidency, a position in which FDR remained until death, through an unparalleled three-plus terms in office. Throughout the book, Brinkley elegantly blends FDR's personal life with his professional one, providing a lens into the President's struggles with polio and his somewhat distant relationship with the First Lady, Eleanor.


Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the United States through the worst economic crisis in the nation's history and through the greatest and most terrible war ever recorded. His extraordinary legacy remains alive in our own troubled new century as a reminder of what bravery and strong leadership can accomplish.


Features

  • The only short biography of FDR on the market
  • Written by renowned, award-winning author Alan Brinkley
  • Timely subject: Makes clear Roosevelt's influence on the current administration, including handling of financial crises
  • The successes and failures of the New Deal succinctly and eloquently chronicled
  • Attractive package at affordable price
  • Engaging biography for the non-specialist or a student in need of a quick refresher …

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Emotions Affect Health Untrusting Fear Rejection Insecure about Relationships

Tags: Emotions Affect Health, Insecure Attachment, Republican Political Economy, Work Environment, Mate Choice DNA
Insecure attachment seems to be a Republican politician Disease. It seems to apply a lot to people who live in the South, Middle-west, Mountain States and in rural environments such as the Appalachian Mountain or foothills where Scot-Irish preferred to settle when they immigrated from Northern Ireland and Southwest Scotland.


I suspect our emotional health depends largely on genetic and environmental epigenetic changes due to home, work (Ruthless Capitalism), neighborhood environments, ghettos, increasingly the middleclass poor, and many poor immigrants legal or not.


Genetics and environments are strong determinants of our psychological state based on my layman knowledge in taking college courses and reading widely in Science and Medicine.


Mate attraction is based strongly on our DNA mismatch ... major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a large genomic region or gene familyfound in most vertebrates and plays an important role in the immune system andautoimmunity.


... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex


to optimize our survival mismatch to optimize the immune system of our children, and keeps us from seeing character flaws as I have experience more than a few times. Daughters are more attracted to men who have some DNA similar to their fathers and men are more attracted to women who have some DNA similar to their mothers.


Marriages are hard, especially for wives who have to work and largely take care of children leading to the neglect of the husband even now. These problems seem to on the way to being solve with the younger generations so I am optimistic. Relationships are now longer so logic intrudes which leads us to more stable one.


Combine this with the fact that close to 80 percent of Californians did not feel secure in their jobs before this current greedy corporate Republican changed communities destroyed society destroyed our economy and profited greatly from this destruction even if their million plus stock portfolio suffered, but not as much as the middleclass who did not have advisors to hold their hands and sold everything.


Less managers to interfere with the work of their employees seems to be a trend. Hooray! Let's spread the wealth. It is a myth that achievements at the top led to new developments. It occurred in spite of managers. Only Entrepreneurs only deserves large financial rewards.


A long time close friend sent me the article about health and relationships, a topic often discussed, but not well understood.


Jim Kawakami, July 24, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


Emotions Affect Health Untrusting Fear Rejection Insecure about Relationships


Wikipedia

Secure attachment

Securely attached people tend to agree with the following statements: "It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me. I don't worry about being alone or having others not accept me." This style of attachment usually results from a history of warm and responsive interactions with relationship partners.

Securely attached people tend to have positive views of themselves and their partners. They also tend to have positive views of their relationships. Often they report greater satisfaction and adjustment in their relationships than people with other attachment styles. Securely attached people feel comfortable both with intimacy and with independence. Many seek to balance intimacy and independence in their relationships.

Insecure attachment

Anxious-preoccupied attachment

People who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to agree with the following statements: "I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like.

I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don't value me as much as I value them." People with this style of attachment seek high levels of intimacy, approval, and responsiveness from their partners. They sometimes value intimacy to such an extent that they become overly dependent on their partners—a condition colloquially termed clinginess.

Compared to securely attached people, people who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to have less positive views about themselves. They often doubt their worth as a partner and blame themselves for their partners' lack of responsiveness. People who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment may exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry, and impulsiveness in their relationships.

Dismissive-avoidant attachment

People with a dismissive style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with these statements: "I am comfortable without close emotional relationships. It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient, and I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me."

People with this attachment style desire a high level of independence. The desire for independence often appears as an attempt to avoid attachment altogether. They view themselves as self-sufficient and invulnerable to feelings associated with being closely attached to others.

They often deny needing close relationships. Some may even view close relationships as relatively unimportant. Not surprisingly, they seek less intimacy with relationship partners, whom they often view less positively than they view themselves.

Investigators commonly note the defensive character of this attachment style. People with a dismissive-avoidant attachment tend to suppress and hide their feelings, and they tend to deal with rejection by distancing themselves from the sources of rejection (i.e., their relationship partners).

Fearful-avoidant attachment

People with a fearful style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with the following statements: "I am somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others. I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely, or to depend on them. I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others."

People with this attachment style have mixed feelings about close relationships. On the one hand, they desire to have emotionally close relationships. On the other hand, they tend to feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness.

These mixed feelings are combined with negative views about themselves and their partners. They commonly view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their partners, and they don't trust the intentions of their partners. Similarly to the dismissive-avoidant attachment style, people with a fearful-avoidant attachment style seek less intimacy from partners and frequently suppress and hide their feelings. … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_in_adults

Relationship Uncertainties Linked to Higher Risk of Heart Attacks July 23, 2010 Rachael Rettner www.LiveScience.com People who are untrusting, fear rejection, or are otherwise insecure about their relationships might be at a greater risk for health problems than their more secure counterparts.


A new study shows such relationship uncertainties, known as "insecure attachment," were linked to a higher risk for a number of health conditions, including stroke, heart attack and high blood pressure.


The researchers were initially surprised by the results since much of the work related to relationship attachment and health has focused on conditions involving pain, such as arthritis, and not cardiovascular conditions.


The study "suggests that attachment is associated with these fairly concrete and negative health outcomes," said study researcher Lachlan McWilliams, of Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Pain conditions are somewhat subjective experiences in that people can experience more or less pain, while something like a heart attack is a distinct, clear cut event, he said.


And since these insecurities are thought to develop at a young age, the work adds to "a growing body of research that suggest that negative experiences in childhood have a wide range of negative outcomes in terms of mental health and [physical] health later in life," McWilliams told LiveScience. … http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38385105/ns/health-heart_health/ The results are published in the July issue of Health Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association.


Friday, July 23, 2010

Demon Sheep Video by Democrats 2 minutes

Tags: Senator Boxer Competent Favors Us, Failed CEO Fiorina favors the Rich, Calif TV Campaign $3 million per week, Boxer needs contributions, OpenSecrets.Org

http://www.demonsheepmovie.com/ The video is very funny and funnier than Fiorina's original Demon Sheep video! Please pass on. Thanks! Jim

It takes $3 million dollars a week to cover TV ads in California according to the campaign chairman for failed CEO Fiorina.

Senator Boxer now has $11 million in her campaign chest. Fiorina, a failed CEO, is very wealthy and has already donated lots of her own money to the campaign and corporate money and Republican independent ads which allows Fiorina to say she did not authorize the many lying and damaging ads expected.

Rose, Boxer Campaign Head: "In an unguarded moment, he gave us the strongest signal yet that Fiorina was prepared to spend millions of dollars from her own personal fortune on the Senate race."
When I asked him whether Fiorina was going to write herself a big check, he responded, "I think we'll end up probably not having a horrible money problem. Does that answer your question, Rose?"

Most Americans, unfortunately, actually believe these ads unless they have contrary information. That is how they voted in many elections. Americans are ignorant about politics because they are told that it is dirty and not worth their time and now not studied in school.
We saw what Bush, twice failed CEO, did to our country. Unfortunately the corporate press and media, more exactly the corporations and wealthy wanted him to win for his tax cuts and corporate friendly policies, especially towards the financial industry's banks and essentially stopped all regulations of industry.

When Clinton left office, we were increasing climate changing carbon dioxide by one percent a year which helped the coal companies who did not have to follow the law of putting in modern pollution abatement systems in expanding their production output. Coal puts out twice as much carbon dioxide as oil. When Bush left, we doubled the increase of carbon dioxide emissions per year. The Global Climate Change scandal was based on lies and has been shown untrue by many investigators, but not emphasized in the newspapers and television news.
Republicans will vote for her and so will lots of Independents. So only a high Democratic turnout against Fiorina will allow Senator Boxer to win.

For this to happen she needs money for advertising. Even though Bush/Cheney and the Republicans caused this severe recession with the loss of 8 million jobs affecting 32 million families, the clever Republicans have tried to stop any bill that would help the economy. Only two Republican senators in Maine voted to extend unemployment insurance to people so they might not lose their homes or be expelled from their apartments leaving them homeless.

www.opensecrets.org , a non-profit organization which could also use your support, records all the contributions to politicians by corporations and individuals. They record those who contributed over $200 to campaigns. This is the only direct easy to access source of recorded campaign contributions.

Yes, who we elect does have consequences!

It will take years to fix the damages, especially to our economy and the income of Americans except for the top 2% who did very well under Bush/Cheney. The Bush tax cut due to expire in 2011 for the rich (53 Billion top 1%) and middleclass (3 billion). Only the $53 billion will be cut for the top 1% and corporations. Obama said he will consider decreasing the corporate tax rate in the hopes of increasing jobs in future 2011 legislation.

Jim Kawakami, July 23, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

From Senator Boxer's Campaign:
In 2005 Bush and Cheney passed a law that said that damage from a spill (leak) larger than that by BP can be easily contained.
You never know what you're going to learn at a conference.
Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion in Sacramento with Carly Fiorina's media consultant, Fred Davis -- you know, the creator of the "Demon Sheep" video. (No, he did not come in costume.)
In an unguarded moment, he gave us the strongest signal yet that Fiorina was prepared to spend millions of dollars from her own personal fortune on the Senate race.

When I asked him whether Fiorina was going to write herself a big check, he responded, "I think we'll end up probably not having a horrible money problem. Does that answer your question, Rose?"

It sure does. Now we need your help to fight back.

Contribute $100 to Barbara's campaign now -- and match Fiorina's big check with strong Boxer grassroots support!

We've been working hard over these past many months to begin raising the funds we need to get Barbara's message out during the bruising campaign ahead. Thanks to your support, we've opened an early financial edge over Carly Fiorina.

But Fiorina can close that gap with one stroke of her pen in her checkbook -- and, based on Fred's comments yesterday, that day may be soon.

We can't let Fiorina buy this U.S. Senate seat with the golden parachute she received after being fired from HP.

Contribute $100 now -- and make sure Barbara can fight back against Fiorina's millions!

Fiorina has already loaned her campaign more than $5.5 million to this point. Now it looks like the next installment is right around the corner.

It's time to make sure we return Barbara Boxer to the Senate to keep fighting for us -- but we can't do it without your help.

Contribute now -- and stand up for Barbara today.

Thank you for everything,

Rose Kapolczynski
Campaign Manager
Boxer for Senate