ARTICLE:The Breathing Trick That Puts You to Sleep in Seconds

The 4-7-8 breathing technique was pioneered Dr. Andrew Weill from Arizona, who describes the yoga-inspired method as “utterly simple, takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.”

Dr.Weill claims that 4-7-8 breathing can help people fall asleep in just 60 seconds by acting as a “natural tranquiliser for the nervous system” that reduces stress and tension in the body.

How do you do it?

1. Before you begin, place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth just above your teeth and keep it there throughout the exercise.

2. Exhale completely through your mouth quite forcefully so you make a “whoosh” sound.

3. Close your mouth and inhale quietly and softly through your nose for a mental count of four.

4. Hold your breath and count to seven.

5. Next, exhale completely through your mouth, making another whoosh sound for eight seconds in one large breath.

6. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three times for a total of four breaths.

Related: Mom With Skin Cancer Shares Graphic Photo as a Warning Against Tanning

Remember: All inhaling breaths must be quiet and through your nose and all exhaling breaths must be loud and through your mouth.

How does it help?

It takes on more oxygen relaxes the parasympathetic nervous system and promotes a state of calmness.
It helps rebalance the nervous system which can become over stimulated during times of stress.
It helps you connect with your body and your breathing and distract you from everyday thoughts that can prevent you from sleeping.

VIDEO: He tried getting her number, but she refused, when he came back in a luxury car she has gone crazy!

THOUGHTS: WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY DIVORCE

Do you want me to tell you what I learned from my divorce: Marriages become beautiful when two people embrace the only good reason to get married: to practice the daily sacrifice of their egos.You were born with a good and beautiful heart, and it will never leave you. But you started to doubt if your heart was good enough.At first, we only use the ego-wall to keep people out. But eventually, as we grow up, we get tired of hiding fearfully and we decide the best defense is a good offense. We put cannons on our ego-wall and we start firing. For some people that looks like anger. For other people, it looks like gossip and judgment and divisiveness. One of my favorite ego-cannons is to pretend everyone on the outside of my wall is wrong. It makes me feel right and righteous, but really it just keeps me safe inside of my ideas

The entire purpose of marriage is to dismantle your ego-wall, brick by brick, until you are fully available to the person you love. Open. Vulnerable. Dangerously united.People have sex because for a moment at the climax of it, their mind is without walls, the ego goes away, and they feel free and fully connected. With sex, the feeling lasts for only a moment. But if you commit yourself to marriage, you commit yourself to the long, painful, joyous work of dismantling your ego-walls for good. Then, the moment can last a lifetime.

What’s the secret to a happy marriage? Marry someone who has also embraced the only good reason to get married. Someone who will commit to dying alongside you—not in fifty years, but daily, as they dismantle the walls of their ego with you.Someone who will be more faithful to you than they are to their own safety.Someone willing to embrace the beauty of sacrifice, the surrender of their strength, and the peril of vulnerability.In other words, someone who wants to spend their one life stepping into a crazy, dangerous love with you and only you.With my walls down,

VIDEO: REVEALED: The alarming effects of sleep deprivation on the nation's skin

VIDEO: MAD MEN ENDING

THOUGHTS: WHY NO ONE BUY MUSIC, MOVIES AND BOOKS ANYMORE

The music industry and piracy, the movie industry and torrents, newspapers and online news. What do all these have in common? Supply, demand and a shifting market.

I’m a big fan of capitalism and lean quite a bit to the libertarian side of the political spectrum. I believe that free markets almost always find the right direction to move to. Every time I see the government cracking down on piracy, file-sharing and smuggling I wince. And every time I see the government defend an industry, I wince a bit more. I wince because I don’t believe black markets would be around if it weren’t for organizations monopolizing their products and defending their huge profits.

The Internet has opened the market on music and it’s saturated. When I was a child, I didn’t realize that there were millions of artists in the world. The marketplace only had room for hundreds or thousands. For me it was just KISS. Now that the marketplace has opened up, demand has stayed the same but the supply is everywhere. It’s only natural to see that the costs of music would spiral downward while the supply increased.

But it didn’t. The price of an album hasn’t changed in 25 years despite the incredible supply of music and the ease at which it’s distributed via the web. No one complained when the music industry was selling CDs a hundred times their cost. And, with movie stars, rappers and rock stars showing off their new Bentleys, it’s hard for me to empathize at all with the industry. If honest people are sharing music instead of buying it, it means the risk of being caught outweighs the price of the music. The problem isn’t honest people, music, or filesharing… it’s that the music industry ain’t what it used to be.

In my living room I have a HDTV and a surround sound system that I can shake the house with. Why would I go pay for a $12 movie ticket and $10 popcorn and a drink when I can watch a movie for the fraction of the cost in the comfort of my own living room? I can’t match IMAX… I’m willing to pay extra for that experience. The movie industry isn’t a battle between piracy and the movie cinema, it’s a battle between the home theater and the movie cinema. And the home theater is winning!

If the movie industry hopes to succeed, they’d lower the price of cinema tickets and food, add some additional luxuries (perhaps dinner, wine and some cappuccino), and put in some circular seating with an intermission so I can make it a night out with friends. I can’t download that experience!

I’ve read that newspapers are going to attempt putting up pay walls again. I think we’ve been through this a few times… and they still don’t get it. The Internet is the information superhighway… newspapers are the potholes. Newspapers use content to fill the holes that they can’t sell ads into and many have given up on digging deep to find the real story. I don’t pay for a newspaper because I find better news online, direct from the source, without a slant, and without advertising wrapping around it.

Oh sure, I gave a go at The Daily.. an attempt by the newspaper industry to bring all the unreliability of newspaper delivery to the iPad. It’s slow, it crashes, and it’s rarely news. They should call the it The Yesterday! But, since news is an entire industry, there’s somehow some entitlement they deserve outside the bounds of capitalism that entitles them to continue trying to make 40 percent profit margins? Sorry oldspapers… get back to great reporting and people will pay for the content.

In each of these cases, I don’t fault the consumer and I empathize with the folks breaking the law. After all, isn’t this just capitalism? When the cost surpasses the desire, the only thing left is a black market to get the product or service from. Unfortunately, these industries grew so big and powerful that they’ve got politicians in their back pocket to try to crank out laws every week to try to stop the hemorrhaging. Folks… this isn’t a criminal issue, it’s a market issue.

Given this rant, you may think that I’m all about piracy. Absolutely not! There are countless examples of products and services that have adjusted. And I believe that people are paying for content more than they ever have in the past. When I was a kid, my parents had a phone, a newspaper, a black & white television, and paid for vinyl albums. As an adult, I pay for smart phones, voice messaging, mobile apps, a data plan, a text messaging plan, (x my kids’ plans) cable television, on demand movies, broadband internet, XBox Live, iTunes and Netflix.

These aren’t just a few bad apples that have taken to a lifetime of crime. Chances are, the average person you know is pirating or distributing music or movies. When the crime goes mainstream, the problem isn’t the crime… you have to start wondering what’s flawed with the market that generates that type of response.

Locking up a guy that creates a network where people distribute and download isn’t the answer, either. We’ve been through this with Napster and the Pirate Bay. With Megauploads down, a few thousand other sites are out there that will enable the activity. The newest ones are virtual private networks with anonymous gateways and encrypted communications so governments can’t snoop. The piracy and theft market on music and movies isn’t going anywhere.

I’m tired of these corporations stating that the money lost to the industry is in the [insert]illions. That’s just a bold lie. People that were going to steal a movie weren’t ever planning on spending the money in the theater. You didn’t lose money by them stealing it, you lost money because you charged too much and the home theater is kicking your butt.

And don’t tell me that people won’t pay for content and our only recourse is to lock everyone up. We’re all paying for content everyday! The price simply has to match the value. The folks at Angie’s List have proven this… paid reviews are trustworthy and save their subscribers thousands of dollars. Angie’s List has great retention with their customers and are so popular they were able to go public!

Markets are changing and these other industries are NOT adapting. Why are they making that a criminal issue and not an economic one? Keep up with the efforts of large corporations to criminalize more and more of the web by reading the Deeplinks blog at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

THOUGHTS: WITH MY WALLS DOWNS

Marriages become beautiful when two people embrace the only good reason to get married: to practice the daily sacrifice of their egos.You were born with a good and beautiful heart, and it will never leave you. But  you started to doubt if your heart was good enough.At first, we only use the ego-wall to keep people out. But eventually, as we grow up, we get tired of hiding fearfully and we decide the best defense is a good offense. We put cannons on our ego-wall and we start firing. For some people that looks like anger. For other people, it looks like gossip and judgment and divisiveness. One of my favorite ego-cannons is to pretend everyone on the outside of my wall is wrong. It makes me feel right and righteous, but really it just keeps me safe inside of my ideas

The entire purpose of marriage is to dismantle your ego-wall, brick by brick, until you are fully available to the person you love. Open. Vulnerable. Dangerously united.People have sex because for a moment at the climax of it, their mind is without walls, the ego goes away, and they feel free and fully connected. With sex, the feeling lasts for only a moment. But if you commit yourself to marriage, you commit yourself to the long, painful, joyous work of dismantling your ego-walls for good. Then, the moment can last a lifetime.

What’s the secret to a happy marriage? Marry someone who has also embraced the only good reason to get married. Someone who will commit to dying alongside you—not in fifty years, but daily, as they dismantle the walls of their ego with you.Someone who will be more faithful to you than they are to their own safety.Someone willing to embrace the beauty of sacrifice, the surrender of their strength, and the peril of vulnerability.In other words, someone who wants to spend their one life stepping into a crazy, dangerous love with you and only you.With my walls down,

ARTICLE:How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage By DAVID LEONHARDT and KEVIN QUEAL (THE PROBLEM IS WHERE I AM LIVING)

How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage

By DAVID LEONHARDT and KEVIN QUEALY MAY 15, 2015

Growing up in some places — especially liberal ones — makes people less likely to marry, new data shows.

Places that make being married at age 26...

Less likely

More likely

The place where you grow up doesn’t affect only your future income, as we wrote about last week. It also affects your odds of marrying, a large new data set shows.

The most striking geographical pattern on marriage, as with so many other issues today, is the partisan divide. Spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America — especially liberal bastions like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington — makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country. And no place encourages marriage quite like the conservative Mountain West, especially the heavily Mormon areas of Utah, southern Idaho and parts of Colorado.

These conclusions — based on an Upshot analysis of data compiled by a team of Harvard economists studying upward mobility, housing and tax policy — are not simply observations about correlation. The economists instead believe that they have identified a causal role that geography plays in people’s lives. The data, which covers more than five million people who moved as children in the 1980s and 1990s, suggests that children who move from, say, Idaho to Chicago really do become less likely to marry, even if the numbers can’t explain exactly why these patterns exist.

We have also written about other findings from the study, focusing on upward mobility, and we encourage you to explore them when you’re done here.

Not Married? The New York Effect

The places that discourage marriage most tend to be cities, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as their surrounding areas. Nationwide, the jurisdiction with the single largest marriage-discouraging effect is Washington. But the New York area stands out even more. If we boiled down the list to only the country’s 50 largest counties, the top five in discouraging marriage would all be in the New York area.

How can the researchers think they’re capturing a causal effect here — in which a child who moves to New York actually becomes less likely to marry? Because they have studied more than five million people who moved as children during the 1980s and 1990s. Those who moved to New York, among other places, were indeed less likely to marry than otherwise similar people who grew up elsewhere. And the younger that children were when they moved to New York, the less likely they were to marry.

One caveat: All of these statistics analyze a child’s odds of being married by age 26. We asked the researchers, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, whether the differences in marriage may be much smaller than these comparisons suggest. That is, does a childhood make marriage less likely — or simply delay marriage?

It does not seem to simply delay marriage; the researchers found very similar patterns when they looked at the data up to age 30. The places that made marriage more likely at 26 also tended to make it more likely at age 30. The children in the study aren’t yet old enough for conclusions beyond age 30. But the best guess for now is that these differences aren’t only about timing. Children who grow in New York, among other places, appear less likely to be married by 26, less likely to be married by 30 and probably less likely to marry at any point.

Red and Blue America

Marriage effects by 2012 presidential vote

Each circle represents one county; circles are sized by population

90% Romney80% Romney70% Romney60% RomneyEven60% Obama70% Obama80% Obama90% Obama-15 pts.-10 pts.-5 pts.+5 pts.+10 pts.+15 pts.+20 pts.+25 pts.↑ Marriage more likely↓ Marriage less likelyMore Democratic →← More Republican

Based on share of two-party vote; estimates are based on a full childhood in each county (up to age 20).

One of the most striking relationships we found in the data was between political ideology and the marriage effect: The more strongly a county voted Republican in the 2012 election, the more that growing up there generally encourages marriage.

And it’s not simply about rural areas leaning Republican and promoting marriage — although both are true. The few metropolitan counties that voted Republican in 2012 turn out to be in marriage-encouraging places, such as Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Fort Worth, as well as Waukesha County, Wis., just west of Milwaukee.

Polling data tells the same story about partisanship and marriage attitudes. When the Pew Research Center asked last year if society was better off when people made marriage and having children a priority, 59 percent of Republicans (a group that includes people who lean Republican) said yes, while only 36 percent of Republicans said society was just as well off if people had other priorities. For Democrats, the shares were virtually flipped: 35 percent and 61 percent. These attitudes evidently affect children growing up in different places.

It’s also worth noting that this data set isn’t the only one to suggest that a child’s environment affects later marriage patterns. In a 1990s experiment with housing vouchers, known as Moving to Opportunity, poor children who moved to less poor neighborhoods at a young age became more likely to marry as adults than similar children who grew up in poorer areas.

The Complicated South

For poor people



For rich people

Places that make being married at age 26...

Less likely

More likely

The Deep South presents the most complex picture. It nudges affluent children toward marriage and lower-income children away from it. By comparison, the Northeast generally discourages marriage for children of all income levels, and the Mountain West encourages it for children of all levels.

Race certainly plays a role here. Lower-income children in the South are disproportionately black, and marriage rates are also lower among African-Americans. But the data suggests that race is not the only factor: When poor families move to the South, their children become less likely to marry, and there is no evidence that the effect is restricted to only one race.

Consider Tate, a mostly white county in northern Mississippi, about 35 miles south of Memphis. It has one of the largest class differences. If you’re rich, it’s one of the best places in the country at making marriage more likely; if you’re poor, it’s one of the worst.

The Small-Town Effect

Politics isn’t the only dividing line on marriage. Less densely populated places also seem to promote marriage, even after taking an area’s political leanings into account.

The only two states that both make marriage significantly more likely and that voted Democratic in 2012 are Iowa and Oregon. Those two states have a much lower population density than California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and most other blue states. That’s a sign that rural areas and small towns encourage marriage more than cities.

A Pew analysis, similarly, found that the five states where the highest share of men were currently married (with at least 56 percent in each) were the Republican bastions of Idaho, Kansas, Utah and Nebraska — as well as Iowa. None of these states are especially urban.

Utah is worth special attention. It’s not surprising that it leads the nation in encouraging marriage: The state is home to a large Mormon population, which is well known for marrying young. Yet Utah isn’t just on top of the list; it’s on top with a bullet. A childhood in Utah County, home of Brigham Young University and the city of Provo, makes marriage 20 percentage points more likely by age 26 than an average childhood in the United States.

By comparison, a childhood in Manhattan, on the other end of the spectrum, makes marriage only 12 percentage points less likely

LETTER: THE LETTER THAT NICE GUY USUALLY GET

I’d say you probably don’t remember me, but I know you do. I know you remember me the way you remember every single girl you’ve ever latched onto like a leech who also happens to recommend books and carry shopping bags. I know you remember me because this is a small town and people talk and you wouldn’t believe some of the things people tell me you say about me, except that I guess you would because I know for sure that you said them.

I know you’ve waxed poetic at length to anyone who will listen (and a fair few people who won’t) about how I don’t know what I’m missing. And you know what? I guess you’re right. I don’t know what I’m missing. Maybe if, somewhere between the endless offers of a lift home and the free coffees I didn’t want and the little intimate gifts “just because”, I’d read your mind and deduced using my psychic powers that you were in love with me, things might have turned out differently. (Like maybe I’d have filed a restraining order. Maybe I’d have stopped seeing the favours you did me as the acts of a friend and started seeing them as the acts of a predator. Maybe I’d have never allowed myself to be alone in a room with you. But I digress.) For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right and I don’t know what I let slip by when I decided to go after that [confident] jerk [with a sense of self-worth and a whole host of interesting hobbies] instead of letting you woo me like a princess in the tackier class of fairy tale.

Then what?

You want me to know you’d have treated me like a princess, but I’m not a princess. You want me to know you’d have worshipped me like a goddess, but I’m not a goddess. You want me to know you’d have waited on me hand and foot, but I’m a functioning human being with agency and independence and I don’t need anyone to wait on me. You want me to know you’d have given me everything I could ever have possibly wanted, but you’re wrong there, because one of the things I wanted – one of the things I still want – is not you.

That’s the thing, see? You could drive me to the edges of the Earth as a “favour”, you could come shopping with me and take me out to dinner and watch movies and let me cry to you over the phone, but you couldn’t make me want you as anything other than a friend and you still can’t. You’ll never be able to. Oh, sure, if you’d asked me out when we first met, before we settled into the routine of girl-and-secret-admirer, maybe I’d have thought about it. Maybe I’d have let you take me out to lunch at a little bistro somewhere and we could have talked like real people and not like Pygmalion attempting to breathe life into his Galatea, and maybe we’d have found out that we had things in common and it would have led to a few more dates and maybe a relationship. Or maybe I would have turned you down and you’d have felt sad about it for a while but you would have moved on and we could have been friends – real friends – and you wouldn’t be obsessively combing through my Facebook photos at midnight and I wouldn’t be writing you this letter.

But you couldn’t make me love you just because you wanted me to, and you still can’t.

You say I’ll regret it. You say that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, you’ll be the one that got away. You say that when I’ve been rejected by a string of [confident, interesting, engaging] jerks and I no longer have my youthful beauty and I’m too old to have kids, I’ll wish I’d settled for you. And maybe you’re right. Maybe one day I’ll be fifty years old and single and childless – but even then, I still wouldn’t regret not being with you. I wouldn’t regret not signing up for a lifetime of being treated like a marble statue on a pedestal created by an obsessed boy-child with an ideal of perfect womanhood to which I could never truly measure up. I wouldn’t regret avoiding that slavish devotion, that expectation of reciprocity of a passion I didn’t and don’t and will never feel. No, I’m sorry – even if you end up being right and I find myself alone and unloved and unlovable, I will never regret that.

Since we’re making predictions, though – and oh, how you love to do that when you talk about me (did you really think I wouldn’t hear of it? did you really think they’d never tell?) – let me make a few of my own.

I predict that I’ll have an enjoyable, interesting relationship with my jerk (who has introduced me to sports and taught me how to shoot a gun and helped me rediscover my love of philosophy and supported my dreams of being a writer and held my hand while I cried without expecting anything in return). I predict that if things don’t work out, I’ll find someone else, and maybe he’ll introduce me to painting or sculpture or belly dancing or yoga or basketball because he’ll have interests other than pleasing me and he’ll want to share them with the woman he loves. I predict that some day, if I choose to, I’ll marry one of those jerks you hate so much and we’ll probably have a few kids and we’ll fight sometimes because nobody’s perfect, not even people in love, but we’ll make up because nobody stays angry forever, especially people in love. And maybe we’ll divorce in five years or maybe we’ll grow old together and see the birth of our great-grandchildren, but the one thing we won’t do is live out some fantasy of a man “winning” a woman with niceness and a woman showing her gratitude with sex.

That’s what you never understood about relationships, Nice Guy. You can’t win people, not with all the put-on niceness in the world. You can’t mould yourself into what you think a woman wants and hope she’ll fill all the gaps in you. You have to be your own person (do you even know who that is any more?) and cultivate your own interests and live your own life and hope that one day, you’ll find someone who thinks your life is pretty neat and wants to share it with you, someone with a life of her own that’s so neat you want to share it with her.

That’s a relationship, Nice Guy. Not unwanted gifts and free rides home and pining over someone and hoping that if you hang around her long enough, she’ll feel the way you want her to feel. A relationship is two people sharing their lives – their messy, imperfect, fantastic, exciting, terrifying, amazing lives – because it’s what both of them want to do, not because one of them wants the other to want it.

This guy I’m seeing, this jerk? He’s pretty sweet. We’re talking about getting married, maybe having kids some day. He read Hamlet for me because I mentioned I liked Shakespeare and I went to a football game with him and had the time of my life. We fight sometimes and we laugh a lot of the time and we never expect anything of each other that the other wouldn’t be willing to give. I think maybe we’re going to go the distance. But even if we don’t, it still will have been worth it, because he’s helped me grow as a person and I’ve helped him grow as a person and neither of us is Galatea and neither of us would want to be Pygmalion because what kind of relationship can there be between a man and his idol?

I hope you figure that out one day. I’d hate for all your prophecies about other women to come true for you.

Get over me. You never had me to begin with. You never will.

Sincerely,

A girl who goes for jerks.

ARTICLE:Income Inequality Is Costing the U.S. on Social Issues bY Eduardo Porter

Income Inequality Is Costing the U.S. on Social Issues


Eduardo Porter


Thirty-five years ago, the United States ranked 13th among the 34 industrialized nations that are today in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of life expectancy for newborn girls. These days, it ranks 29th.

In 1980, the infant mortality rate in the United States was about the same as in Germany. Today, American babies die at almost twice the rate of German babies.

“On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries,” says a report on the nation’s health by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

What’s most shocking about these statistics is not how unhealthy they show Americans to be, compared with citizens of countries that spend much less on health care and have much less sophisticated medical technology. What is most perplexing is how stunningly fast the United States has lost ground.


The blame for the precipitous fall does not rest primarily on the nation’s doctors and hospitals.

The United States has the highest teenage birthrate in the developed world — about seven times the rate in France, according to the O.E.C.D. More than one out of every four children lives with one parent, the largest percentage by far among industrialized nations. And more than a fifth live in poverty, sixth from the bottom among O.E.C.D. nations.

Among adults, seven out of every 1,000 are in prison, more than five times the rate of incarceration in most other rich democracies and more than three times the rate for the United States four decades ago.

The point is: The United States doesn’t have a narrow health care problem. We’ve simply handed our troubles to the medical industry to fix. In many ways, the American health care system is the most advanced in the world. But whiz-bang medical technology just cannot fix what ails us.

As economists from the University of Chicago, M.I.T. and the University of Southern California put it in a recent research paper, much of America’sinfant mortality deficit is driven by “excess inequality.”

Advertisement

American babies born to white, college-educated, married women survive as often as those born to advantaged women in Europe. It’s the babies born to nonwhite, nonmarried, nonprosperous women who die so young.

Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.

Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way.

How did we get here? How do we exit?

As the presidential campaign draws the political debate to our national priorities, these questions must take center stage. As candidates argue over the budget deficit and the national debt, debate what to do about income inequality, address the problem of mass incarceration or refight the battles over the Affordable Care Act and the minimum wage, they should be forced to address how their policy wish list adds up to an answer.

Looking at how the United States compares with other nations is illuminating. As I noted in last week’s column, over the last four decades or so, the labor market lost much of its power to deliver income gains to working families in many developed nations.

But blaming globalization and technological progress for the stagnation of the middle class and the precipitous decline in our collective health is too easy. Jobs were lost and wages got stuck in many developed countries.

What set the United States apart — what made the damage inflicted upon American society so intense — was the nature of its response. Government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.

The conservative narrative of America’s social downfall, articulated by the likes of Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute, posits that a large welfare state, built from the time of the New Deal in the 1930s through the era of the Great Society in the 1960s, sapped Americans’ industriousness and undermined their moral fiber.

A more compelling explanation is that when globalization struck at the jobs on which 20th-century America had built its middle class, the United States discovered that it did not, in fact, have much of a welfare state to speak of. The threadbare safety net tore under the strain.

Call it a failure of solidarity. American institutions, built from hostility toward collective solutions, couldn’t hold society together when the economic underpinning of full employment at a decent wage gave in.

The question is, Is there a solution to fit these ideological preferences? The standard prescriptions, typically shared by liberals and conservatives, start with education, building the skills needed to harness the opportunities of a high-tech, fast-changing labor market that has little use for those who end their education after high school.

Ensuring everybody has a college degree might not stanch the flow of riches to the very pinnacle of society. But it could deliver a powerful boost to the incomes and the well-being of struggling families in the bottom half.

And yet the prescription — embedded in the social reality that is contemporary America — falls short. In contemporary America, education is widening inequity, not closing it. College enrollment rates have stagnated for lower-income Americans. Sean Reardon from Stanford University notes that the achievement gap between rich and poor children seems to have been steadily expanding for the last 50 years.

On the left, there are calls to build the kind of generous social insurance programs, which despite growing budget constraints remain largely intact among many European social democracies. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, for example, is calling for an expansion ofSocial Security, paid for by lifting the cap on payroll taxes so the rich pay the same share of their income to support the system as everybody else.

That may be desirable, though at the moment, our greatest problems are not about the elderly. And at least for the foreseeable future, it remains a political nonstarter in a nation congenitally mistrustful of government. Just in time to kick off the presidential campaign, Republicans in the House and Senate were working on a budget that would gut Obamacare — most likely increasing the pool of the nation’s uninsured — and slash funding for programs for Americans of low and moderate income.

Yet despite the grim prognosis, there is hope. The challenge America faces is not simply a matter of equity. The bloated incarceration rates and rock-bottom life expectancy, the unraveling families and the stagnant college graduation rates amount to an existential threat to the nation’s future.

That is, perhaps, the best reason for hope. The silver lining in these dismal, if abstract, statistics, is that they portend such a dysfunctional future that our broken political system might finally be forced to come together to prevent it.

VIDEO: Grey's Anatomy--THEY KILLED DEREK SHEPHERD

I AM SO SHOCKED...I AM SO SAD

VIDEO: Mime Through Time by SketchSHE

THESE GIRL ARE HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ARTICLE: “Let the Palestinian people go”: BY MICHAEL LERNER

“Let the Palestinian people go”: What younger Jews will be asking of Israel at Passover Seder this year

Or at least give them the vote! No better time than this Passover to challenge Netanyahu's hard line on Palestine

MICHAEL LERNER


What makes this year’s Passover Seders unlike any others is that a majority of American Jews have been forced to face the fact that Palestinians today are asking Jews what Moses asked Pharaoh: “Let my people go.”  The Israeli elections, and subsequent support for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s open racism and obstinate refusal to help create a Palestinian state, is not playing well with many younger Jews, and they will be challenging their elders to rethink their blind support for Israeli policies.

Increasingly, young Jews are on the Moses side, and see Netanyahu as the contemporary Pharaoh.  So at the Seder more and more Jews will be asking Israel to “let the Palestinian people go.”

The easiest way for Israel to allow Palestinians their freedom is to create a politically and economically viable Palestinian state living in peace with Israel and based on the 1967 borders of Israel with slight border changes to allow Israel to incorporate the settlements in Gush Etzion and Jewish parts of Jerusalem that were built on conquered Arab land in 1967.  The terms for that agreement were well worked out by “The Geneva Accord” developed by former Yitzhak Rabin aide (and Ehud Barak’s Minister of Justice) Yossi Beilin, and would include Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states, massive reparations to the Palestinian people to help fund such a state (paid in part by the international community), and joint police and military cooperation, supplemented by international help, to deal with the inevitable acts of terror from both Israeli and Palestinian terrorists who would want to block any such agreement.

Though Prime Minister Netanyahu has now sought to back away from his unequivocal election commitment in mid-March that he would never allow Palestinians to have a separate state, it is clear to most American Jews that he was telling the truth to his own community when he made that commitment. Only a fully unambiguous embrace of a detailed plan for ending the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, and major unilateral acts on Israel’s part to begin to implement the creation of a Palestinian state, would be believed by any Palestinians at this point. And who can blame them?

________________________________
________________________________

But Netanyahu, like Pharaoh, has a hardened heart. Like Pharaoh’s dealings with Moses, he is likely to make statements seeking to appease the people he holds in bondage on the West Bank and Gaza, but when it comes to actions, he will give little but token steps that are not close to the freedom the Palestinian people rightly ask for themselves.  In a tragic reversal, we who had been oppressed now oppress, as though the psychological dynamic of the victim identifying with the oppressor is now playing out in a way that brings dishonor to the revolutionary vision of freedom that the Jewish people brought to the world and have celebrated for at least 2,000 years as central to Judaism. Not that we had no warning—our Torah explicitly repeats over and over versions of the following theme: “When you come into land, do not oppress the stranger/other, remember that you were the stranger/other in the Land of Egypt.”

Given this reality, many Jews, and a disproportionately larger number of young Jews, will be asking a provocative question at their Seder tables: “If Israel won’t let the Palestinian people have their own state, then don’t we have to insist that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza be given the vote? After 45 years of Occupation and subordination to the Israeli government, Israel can no longer claim to be a democratic society while denying the vote to those Palestinians who live under Occupation. If West Bank Palestinians and Gazans are not allowed the same rights as Jews living next door to them in West Bank settlements, how can we pretend that Israel is not acting as an oppressor and forsaking any claim to be a democracy?”

The call for “One Person, One Vote” has a strong resonance with the American people and with most people on the planet. It may even resonate with many Israelis who have memories of what it was like to live in societies that did not give Jews equal rights. But for other Israelis, that demand might be the one thing that would open them up to the need for the immediate creation of a separate Palestinian state.  Fearful that giving Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the same rights already given to Palestinians living within the pre-’67 borders of Israel might give Palestinians real power to influence the outcome of elections, they might respond in the same panic that led Netanyahu to scare Israelis that they had better get out to vote because Israeli Palestinians were already going to the polls in large numbers.  The Palestinian Authority might find that adopting the demand for “One Person, One Vote” might be the most powerful way to get the two states they’ve unsuccessfully sought up till now. In my view, two states are preferable to trying a forced marriage between two peoples that have so much mutual suspicion–they need a clean divorce, not a shotgun wedding! But since Israel won’t give that divorce any other way, the demand for a fair marriage is better than Palestinians remaining a de facto slave to Israeli fears and Israeli power.

Passover Seders are all about asking important questions—this year, many American Jews are likely  to be  asking how Jews can celebrate our own freedom without insisting that Israel “Let their people go” or at least give them the vote! Many younger Jews are good at sniffing out hypocrisy, and they may be causing a heated debate at any Seder that avoids this question.

ARTICLE: Robert Lanza, M.D. Become a fan Why the Earth Will Never Be Invaded (HOW SPECIAL WE ALL ARE)

Robert Lanza, M.D. Become a fan 

Why the Earth Will Never Be Invaded



Why haven't the Borg invaded the Earth yet? I have watched every episode of Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, and myriad movies where the Earth is invaded by aliens. I love science fiction. But it is only fiction and will remain so.

Many people, including renowned scientist Stephen Hawking, are also concerned about extraterrestrials invading the Earth. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," said Hawking "I imagine they might exist in massive ships... looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."

Last week, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel asked President Obama about Area 51 and UFOs; and just last May, two top astronomers told Congress that it would be "bizarre if we are alone" and asked for continued funding to detect extraterrestrial life. If you extrapolate "there are a trillion planets in the galaxy," said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute "That's a lot of places for life." Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI Research Center added "It would be a cramped mind that didn't wonder what other life is out there."

So where is ET? Since the 1960s, Soviet scientists, NASA and others have been searching the cosmos for signs of intelligent life. Scientists estimate the universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies (our own Milky Way alone is home to around 300 billion stars). According to the late Carl Sagan, there should be about a septillion -- 1 followed by 24 zeros -- planets capable of supporting life. Surely, in this lapse of suns, advanced life would have evolved somewhere if life and consciousness were just random accidents. Yet despite half-a-century of scanning the sky, astronomers have failed to find any evidence of life, which our radio telescopes should be able to easily detect.

Scientists note that extraterrestrials should have had enough time to have colonized the entire galaxy. Did they blow themselves up or is the problem more fundamental? In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Eric Metaxas wrote, "What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting... As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn't be here."

Yet, here we are on this warm little planet at just the right time in the history of the universe: The molten earth has cooled, but it's not too cold. And it's not too hot; the sun hasn't expanded enough to melt the Earth's surface with its searing gas yet. Even setting aside the issue of being here and now, the chance of random physical laws and events leading to this point borders on a statistical impossibility.

A scientific theory, biocentrism, provides the explanation -- and predicts we're alone. Although evolution does a terrific job of helping us understand the past, it fails to capture the driving force. It needs to add the observer to the equation. Indeed, "When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value," said Nobel physicist Niels Bohr "We are not 'measuring' the world, we are creating it."

Cosmologists propose that the universe was until recently a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other. It's presented as a watch that somehow wound itself up, and that will unwind in a semi-predictable way. But they have ignored a critical component of the cosmos because they don't know what to do with it. This component, consciousness, is an utter mystery. How did inert, random bits of matter ever morph into Obama or Lady Gaga?

To understand what's going on requires an understanding of how the observer, our presence, plays a role. According to the current paradigm, the universe and the laws of nature just popped into existence out of nothingness. From the Big Bang until the present time, we've been incredibly lucky. This good fortune started from the moment of creation; if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, the universe would have rushed out too fast for galaxies to have developed. There are over 200 physical parameters like this that could have any value but happen to be exactly right for us to be here. Change any of them and life never existed.

But our luck didn't stop there. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby (to draw away asteroids), a thousand times more asteroids would strike Earth, potentially producing a blast of heat, followed by years of dust that would freeze or starve us to death. Nearby stars could go supernova, their energy sterilizing the Earth with radiation. These are just a couple of things (out of millions) that could go wrong.

The odds of us existing, concluded Metaxas, "are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all "just happened" defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row."

Loaded dice? It all makes sense if you assume it's us, the observer, who create space and time. Consider everything you see around you. You can't see through the cranium. In fact, everything you experience is a whirl of information occurring in your head. Space and time are the mind's tools for putting it all together.

In their book, The Grand Design, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow stated: "There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."

We -- the observer -- are the first cause, the vital force that collapses the cascade of past spatio-temporal events we call evolution.

I recently bought a 3D television to watch Avatar and have watched it three times. There may well be a universe where a habitable moon like Pandora really exists, and where extraterrestrial beings like the Na'vi live in harmony with nature. The good news is that -- in such a biocentric universe -- there wouldn't be any humans to invadetheir world.

PERSONAL: FINDING THIS TYPE OF WOMAN

When you find that type of woman –  you never let her go. I am looking for a woman who makes me smile just by thinking of her. Not just when I talk to her, or when I am with her, or when I come across a photo of her online – but I am simply think of her (which is often) or see something that reminds me of her. I smile not just because of who she is, but what she stands for. Happiness, excitement, hope, and possibilities for the future.This type of woman makes you realize why it never worked out with anyone else.

We all have a past. We have all experienced heartbreak, we have broken up with others and had them break up with us. We have laughed and cried and had to move on from relationships we may have never thought would end – but when a woman who is truly right for you comes into your life, she will open your eyes to things you may not have realized were lacking in previous relationships.

The type of woman who loves everything about you that the wrong women took for granted.Not everyone will appreciate your kindness, your giving nature, or your selflessness.The fact is that some people just will not appreciate you for you – but the right person will.

The type of woman who respects those who are important to you.I always remember my parents saying when I was growing up – “when you marry someone, you don’t just marry them – you marry their whole family.” While this is more true in some situations than others, more than likely you will be around your partner’s family during holidays or special occasions at the very least – far more frequently at the most. While we cannot be expected to like every person we come in contact with, showing respect and courtesy to each other’s families, friends, and anyone important in lives is essential to making everyone happy in the long term.

Dating has become so casual today that people are all about just living in the moment. Hooking up, taking things a day at a time, whatever happens happens. While this is all well and good for awhile or in younger ages, eventually most people will reach a point where they wonder exactly what they’ve been doing this whole time. While I don’t think any experience is a waste of time, per-say, I do think our time is better used building something that has the potential to last in the long term.

Perhaps one of the most important points of all – it doesn’t matter how attracted we will be to  each other or how well we will get along, if we view the world from completely opposite ends of the spectrum, finding synergy within our relationship will be a constant challenge. For example, do you place the same importance on family? I have recently really began to understand the importance of being with someone who perhaps there was a similar upbringing, or at least an instilling of values as what you had. There is a big difference between making compromises for someone and having to change your entire view of the world. One can work out, the other likely cannot.

Every single person reading this has a different image in their head of what happiness looks like. We all have different pasts, experiences, upbringings, and backgrounds. We are from different parts of the world and hold different ideals and expectations. But, we do all have one thing in common: We want to be happy.

Regardless of any mental checklist we may define in our heads, regardless of where someone is from or what social class they are a member of, the most important thing we can ever ask for is that we are simply with someone who makes us happy. When two people find and feel this way about each other, I truly believe they will find a way to make things work. They will overcome the hard times and celebrate the good times. They will work through challenges together and come out the other side smiling bigger and stronger than before – because that’s what teams do.


The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside of me,She had become a physical necessity.If you’re ever lucky enough to find a girl who is a hopeless romantic with a dirty mind, you should hold onto that. Because she’ll be yours at two in the morning and at two in the afternoon the following day. She’ll kiss you where it hurts and until it hurts. And that’s important. Someone who not only knows how to turn you on but also knows how to treat you right is someone worth a little something…and a little more than usual. When I do find this type of woman,  I will make sure I will  hold on to her. I won’t have to worry about losing her, because she will be holding on to me, too.









I am really good at starting conversations and keeping them going. That being said, I’m really tired of going on dates and not feeling like there’s no give and take. I’m tired of asking all the fun questions! And I’m so sick of the standard “date” questions. It’s really, REALLY attractive when people ask well thought out questions that at least give the illusion that they want to know me better. And I mean REALLY know me. Not just know where I went to college and what I do for a living.. 

So here ya go. 30 questions I will bust out on you  on our date 


1. Who inspires you? Who do you aspire to be like?

2. What was the last book you read without skipping through anything?

3. What is the weirdest scar you have and how did you get it?

4. What is the most random thing you’ve ever watched all the way through on Netflix?

5. If you could trade lives with one person for an entire day who would it be and why?

6. Do you believe in ghosts?

7. Shark diving, bungee jumping, or sky diving?

8. Which would be harder for you to give up: coffee or alcohol?

9. How did you meet your best friend?

10. Do you have a sweet tooth or a savory tooth?

11. What is something you’ve always wanted to try but have been too scared to?

12. What accomplishments are you most proud of?

13. If you were going to go to the movies alone, what would be the perfect film for you to watch by yourself?

14. What is your favorite Wikipedia article? (Shuddup. Everyone has one.)

15. What is your favorite physical attribute about yourself?

16. Tell me about the best vacation you’ve ever taken.

17. Where is your favorite place to go on a weekday afternoon when you have no plans or obligations?

18. What is one of the weirdest things you used to do as a teenager?

19. Gin, vodka, or tequila?

20. What drives you to do what you do? What motivates you?

21. In your opinion, what is the best Disney movie to come out since Disney’s Golden Age?

22. What kind of phone was your first cell phone?

23. What did you love most about the place you grew up? What about it did you love the least?

24. What trajectory are you hoping to push yourself onto? Where do you want to head?

25. What is your most bizarre talent?

26. Is there a documentary or book that really changed the way you thought about something?

27. What are three albums (soundtracks or compilations don’t count) that really define you or have shaped you as a person?

28. Who was someone you really looked up to when you were little — someone you considered to be a mentor?

29. What’s your favorite cheesy pick-up line? Have you ever used it for real?

30. Who is a character from a TV show or a book that you’ve always resonated with?

31. Can I get you another drink?