I found this on the Drudge Report from Time Magazine. I found it rather interesting. There is much to be said about mortality and drinking. Most people tend to believe the hyperbole and disregard the facts. Global warming would be a perfect example of this behavior.

However, there is a thing we call the French paradox. Most people seem to have never heard of the French paradox, but it does deserve a bit more attention.

Here in America, we are told that eating fatty foods, drinking and smoking will kill us. But then there are the French. They eat fatty foods, drink all the time and smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, but live long lives. Read about it on the link above. Anyway, here is the article on this new study about drinking.

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don’t drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one’s risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers’ mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers. (See pictures of booze under a microscope.)

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don’t have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? It’s true that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors – job and child-care worries that might not only keep them from the bottle but also cause stress-related illnesses over long periods. (They also don’t get the stress-reducing benefits of a drink or two after work.)

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables – socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on – the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers. (Watch TIME’s Video “Taste Test: Beer With Extra Buzz.”)

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.

These are remarkable statistics. Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk. One important reason is that alcohol lubricates so many social interactions, and social interactions are vital for maintaining mental and physical health. As I pointed out last year, nondrinkers show greater signs of depression than those who allow themselves to join the party.

The authors of the new paper are careful to note that even if drinking is associated with longer life, it can be dangerous: it can impair your memory severely and it can lead to nonlethal falls and other mishaps (like, say, cheating on your spouse in a drunken haze) that can screw up your life. There’s also the dependency issue: if you become addicted to alcohol, you may spend a long time trying to get off the bottle. (Comment on this story.)

That said, the new study provides the strongest evidence yet that moderate drinking is not only fun but good for you. So make mine a double.

A few things wrong with Obama’s statement about “Whose ass to kick” statement. First, if a republican used this phrase, the media would be calling him a “jack booted thug” and a “Nazi.” Then the republican would be accused of “strong arm tactics” and “bullying.”

The other problem is that Obama weighs maybe 145 soaking wet. He couldn’t kick his own ass out of a paper bag. We are still wondering what he was thinking using such language. I guess its an attempt to improve his poll numbers that he says he doesn’t care about.

In his toughest words yet on the billion-dollar oil disaster, President Obama said Monday that he’s been boning up on “whose ass to kick.”

Frustrated over BP’s inability to stop a deepwater gusher and fed up with criticism that he hasn’t seemed to be mad as hell, Obama turned as salty the Gulf of Mexico.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick,” Obama fumed in an interview to air this morning on NBC’s “Today” show.

Asked about BP CEO Tony Hayward downplaying the environmental impact as being “very very modest” and the volume of the spill as “tiny” in relation to the Gulf of Mexico, Obama bristled.

“He wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements,” Obama told Matt Lauer.

He insisted he’s been on top of the calamity since the deadly April 20 rig explosion triggered it.

“I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the gulf,” Obama said in the interview from Kalamazoo, Mich.

“A month ago I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be,” the President said.

Noting that a review of what caused the spill is underway, Obama said he didn’t want to prejudge BP, but said that, so far, the oil giant isn’t instilling confidence.

“The initial reports indicate there may be situations in which not only human error was involved, but you also saw some corner-cutting in terms of safety,” Obama said.

His tough talk came as BP revealed it has spent $1.25 billion on the spill so far.

Cash payouts went to spill response and containment, relief-well drilling, payments to gulf states and the feds, and damage claims, BP said Monday.

About 37,000 claims have been submitted and about half have been paid, the company said.

BP said it can’t estimate how much the spill will cost in the end, but Obama said economic impact will be “substantial.”

He also warned that he better not catch BP “nickel-and-diming these businesses that are having a very tough time.”

“This will be contained,” Obama said after meeting with advisers.

“It may take some time and it’s going to take a whole lot of effort. … But the one thing I’m absolutely confident about is that, as we have before, we will get through this crisis.”

There was progress over the weekend on controlling the leak.

The cap on the damaged well is now collecting 462,000 gallons of oil a day – up from 250,000 gallons Friday, according to Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen.

The arrogant movie director James Cameron, who made such movies as “Avatar” and “Titanic” has clearly crossed over into a level of intelligence that mere humans could never possibly attain. After all, he makes movies and stuff.

I have always thought James Cameron was an asshole, and statements like this simply prove that. Think of it in these terms. His wife left him for another woman! Clearly Cameron has not mastered the Kama Sutra, so what makes Cameron think that he can plug a broken oil well under 5000 feet of water?

What James Cameron is insinuating is that he has more knowledge of oil leaks that teams of the finest engineers in the world that specialize in these sort of problems.

The fact of the matter is that British Petroleum and every other oil company on the planet would not be in this predicament in the first place if it wasn’t for wealthy people like James Cameron not wanting their precious ocean views obstructed by oil rigs.

That and environmental nut bags wanting them to drill twenty miles from shore in 5000 feet of water in the first place, which after seeing “Avatar” it pretty clear that James Cameron is among the nut bags.

I have news for James Cameron. Dude, you make movies. You know nothing about plugging oil well leaks that people like you are responsible for creating in the first place because your own environmental stupidity. JD

So, after just eight hours, the truth about the Israeli attack of flotilla aid workers comes out. Thank the lord that the Israeli government decided to film and document their boarding of the vessels.

Dear stupid flotilla people, when entering any port of any country around the world, it is customary to allow that countries officials on board to see a bill of lading and other documents as well as allow a thorough search of the vessel for contraband.

You idiots pulled the trigger on yourselves by attacking the Israeli officials and military as they boarded your vessel. Perhaps it might have been a good idea to read maritime laws and procedures of Israel before you crossed into their waters. JD

Talk about a bum deal. A man has diabetes and finally gets a kidney transplant, but the kidney is cancerous? Talk about being cheated in life. After a five-year wait, Vincent Liew was ecstatic when he got the call in 2002 that a new kidney was available for him. The 37-year-old diabetic was in complete kidney failure and receiving dialysis three times every week. Liew and his wife Kimberly believed the transplanted kidney would save his life. Instead, the kidney was a ticking time bomb that killed him just seven months later.

Experts say that apparently Liew is the first man ever to die of uterine cancer. There are no medical records of another transplant patient succumbing to the deadly disease, and men, of course, have no uterus to develop the cancer in the absence of a transplant.

Originally from Singapore, Liew lived in New York and worked at the Hong Kong Economic Office. Dr. Thomas Diflo at NYU Langone Hospital performed the transplant. The kidney was from an apparently healthy 50-year-old woman, Sandy Cabrera, who had died from a stroke the day before. Unbeknownst to Liew and his doctor, the woman had an undiagnosed uterine cancer. She appeared healthy and no one at St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital, where she died, suspected that she carried the deadly disease. Relatives, friends and even the patient herself believed she was perfectly healthy until the stroke.

Just days after the transplant, an autopsy revealed that the donor had uterine cancer. No one knows why Dr. Diflo, who performed the transplant, was not informed of the cancer for almost two months. Liew’s widow, Kimberly Liew, has sued Dr. Diflo and the hospital where the transplant took place. Testifying in the malpractice case, Dr. Diflo says that he told Liew it would be safest to remove the transplanted kidney, but assured him that there was a very low chance that he would develop a type of cancer based in the female organs.

Liew opted to keep the kidney. Four months later, in extreme pain, Diflo removed the kidney. The organ was obviously cancerous at that point. A month later, just seven months after the transplant, Liew died. An autopsy found that Liew died from cancer, and that the cancer cells in his body were genetically female, meaning they originated in Cabrera’s body and were transplanted with the organ.

Despite safeguards, about 1 percent of transplants in the U.S. are believed to spread a disease including HIV, cancer, tuberculosis and others. Potential donors are screened for HIV and syphilis, and medical histories are taken, but a risk remains. For many donors, the probability of living years longer with the organ outweighs the small risk of infection with a deadly disease.

Now I know there are a lot of old geezers like me that remember these, but I was actually in the hardware store the other day and a dad was explaining to his son what this device was and what it did.

His son appeared to be absolutely beside himself. He could not believe that people used to use these to edge the lawn. The son told his father “I’ll take the weed whacker any day.”

The idea that his son actually did yard work at all floored me, seeing how we have whole legions of illegal aliens doing our yards for 40 dollars a month.

But back at the beginning of time, around 1970, this is all I had to edge our yard. It did a good job if used weekly, but let the yard get away from you for a couple of weeks and it was like breaking rocks at Leavenworth.

Blisters were common back in those days, because everything you did was manual labor. We had a push mower too, but my father did that because the blades were exposed and he had a visual of me losing all my fingers. Ah, the good old days. JD

Is nature out of control? MSNBC Proves How Incredibly Stupid They Are

Is it just me or is this the dumbest headline you have ever seen? Nature out of control? Has nature ever been “in control” in the first place? The article from MSNBC never asks this pressing question.

Its the same thing with the global warming myth. Can you imagine a time when mankind has become so egocentric that we believe that we can control nature?

So here is MSNBC doing what all news agencies do to keep the sheeple watching their crappy network. Trying to scare the masses into believing that somehow humans are responsible for all these earthquakes.

Now that the global warming issue is being debunked, I can already see the next big socialist cause. Global Earthquakes. Somehow a correlation will be made to scientifically prove that man is responsible for earthquakes.

I got it. Its because our automobiles are putting extraneous forces on the earth’s crust, thus causing the planet to to be pulled in a million different directions at once, creating the earthquakes we are having today. That’s the ticket . . .

Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake activity. And so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region overnight was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was it outside the realm of normal, scientists say, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so.

The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth’s crust dives under another. It’s part of the active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

“This particular subduction zone has produced very damaging earthquakes throughout its history,” said Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The largest quake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5, occurred along the same fault zone in May 1960.

Even so, magnitude-8 earthquakes occur globally, on average, just once a year. Since magnitudes are given on a logarithmic scale, an 8.8-magnitude is much more intense than a magnitude 8, and so this event would be even rarer, said J. Ramón Arrowsmith, a geologist at Arizona State University.

Is Earth shaking more?
The Ryukyu Islands of Japan were hit with a 7.0-magnitude quake on Friday night. News of that tremor, the Haiti quake and now Chile may make it seem as if Earth is becoming ever more active. But in the grand scheme of things, geologists say this is just Mother Nature as usual.

“From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent,” Arrowsmith said. “But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance.”

Coupled with better communication, as the human population skyrockets and we move into more hazardous regions, we’re going to hear more about the events that do occur, Arrowsmith added.

Thousands rattle the Earth daily — but only a few cause utter devastation.
However, “relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years,” said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth’s lithosphere.” (The lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth.)

While the Chilean earthquake wasn’t directly related to Japan’s 7.0-magnitude temblor, the two have some factors in common.

For one, any seismic waves that made their way from Japan to the Chilean coast could play a slight role in ground-shaking.

“It is too far away for any direct triggering, and those distances also make the seismic waves as they would pass by from the Haiti or Japan events pretty small because of attenuation,” Arrowsmith told LiveScience. (Attenuation is the decrease in energy with distance.) “Nevertheless, if the Chilean fault surface were close to failure, those small waves could push it even closer.”

In addition, both regions reside within the Ring of Fire, which is a zone surrounding the Pacific Ocean where the Pacific tectonic plate and other plates dive beneath other slabs of Earth. About 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur along this arc. (The next most seismic region, where just 5 to 6 percent of temblors occur, is the Alpide belt, which extends from the Mediterranean region eastward.)

Colliding plates
The Chilean earthquake occurred at the boundary between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates. These rocky slabs are converging at a rate of 3 inches (80 mm) per year, according to the USGS. This huge jolt happened as the Nazca plate moved down and landward below the South American plate. This is called a subduction zone when one plate subducts beneath another.

(Over time, the overriding South American Plate gets lifted up, creating the towering Andes Mountains.)

The plate movement explains why coastal Chile has such a history of powerful earthquakes . Since 1973, 13 temblors of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred there, according to the USGS.