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Posts tagged ‘Health’

Sep 29

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What Are Family Values?

A few years ago, I remember seeing a sign during the election season with the campaign slogan, “I’m for the Family”. I thought it was funny because I had never met anyone that was against the family? What do these strange appeals for “family values” mean? The seem vacuous to me. Wouldn’t family values include excellent, free education and healthcare for children – not just for the rich kids. Wouldn’t family values mean valuing families? Yesterday I was asked to sign a petition to tell Congress that they should make insurance for children mandatory. A petition. How insane is it that a petition is required to convince the morons on Capitol Hill that insurance for children is a good idea? Read more

Sep 9

Placebos and Mind-Body Relationships

Rupert has just returned back home from Hollyhock in British Columbia in Canada. The popular retreat hosted the most recent trialogue with Rupert Sheldrake, Andrew Weil and Ralph Abraham on the topic of “Placebos and Mind-Body Relationships”. Most of modern medicine and science deny the power of the of mind to heal – yet everyone accepts that placebos are often as effective as the “real thing”. How is it that a simple sugar pill can have an effect on the body’s ability to heal? Head over to Sheldrake’s site to listen to the audio from the discussion:

Placebos and Mind-Body Relationships

Sep 6

Parapsychology and The Skeptics

Sheldrake has written the Forward for a new book, Parapsychology and The Skeptics, by Chris Carter (not the X-Files Chris Carter), on the history of dogmatic skepticism and parapsychology. The book opens with a very interesting anecdote from the seventeenth century – when people believed that balls of fire came hurtling to Earth from space – believers called these “meteorites”. However, because there was not a theory that could accommodate rocks falling from space, the experts agreed that it was obviously a mass delusion. Of course, this still happens today. If the facts don’t fit the theory, to hell with the facts.

In the Forward, Sheldrake writes, “The kind of skepticism Carter is writing about is not the normal healthy kind on which all science depends, but arises from a belief that the existence of psychic phenomena is impossible; they contradict the established principles of science, and if they were to exist they would overthrow science as we know it, causing chaos and confusion.” This looks like a great book. I plan on picking up a copy. I will try to write up a brief review later this month.

Continue reading…

Aug 17

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CMS Review: Bricolage

Moving a great story from concept to content requires inspiration, a little creativity, a lot of proofreading, and publication – or as they say in the newsroom, “Copy!” A good web content management system (WCMS) makes this happen seamlessly for the content creator. In the newspaper business where a quick content turnaround equals revenue, the last thing software should do is stand in the way.
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Jul 25

Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die

A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.

read more | digg story

Jul 9

Interesting Internet

Jun 24

Very Interesting Internet

The Greatest and Most Unusual Travel Photo of All Time? – Everything about the image is just so amazing: The poof-y shapes of the clouds in the background…

100-foot deep Andes lake disappears – A five-acre glacial lake in Chile’s southern Andes has disappeared — and scientists want to know why…

No More Black Holes? – A new hypothesis suggests the weirdest objects in the universe don’t exist… Read more

Sep 14

More Die From Suicide

From PsycPORT, “More people kill themselves each year, than the numbers who die from wars and murders combined, but most of these suicides can be prevented, Swiss Radio International reported on Sunday, the day marking the third World Suicide Prevention Day. About 20 million to 60 million people try to kill themselves each year, but only around 1 million of them succeed, said Dr. Jose Manoel Bertolote, a mental health official at the World Health Organization (WHO).
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