Office by Alex Penny
The high prices reflect growing demand and a shortage of willing donors. Asian women can get about $10,000 to $20,000 for their eggs, while women of other ethnic groups typically get about $6,000.
One reason for the lack of supply is that Asian women are less likely to go through the discomfort of egg donations out of financial need. On average, Asian women earn higher salaries and are more likely to be college-educated than their counterparts in other racial groups, according to Labor Department statistics. Asian females out-earn white women by 13%, black women by 31% and Latinas by 52%, the agency said.
FYI, Jewish women are also in high demand.
GODDAMN. Good to know.
To supplement my post from yesterday.
(Source: davethomasperformance.com, via alli-bautista)
Drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in U.S. | Los Angeles Times
09/17/11—Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma. One relative newcomer to the scene is Fentanyl, a painkiller that comes in the form of patches and lollipops and is 100 times more powerful than morphine.
Such drugs now cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined. +
Dementia risk cut by moderate drinking
A glass or 2 of wine or beer a day, can reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to American researchers.
CHEERS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
Big oil spill in China by U.S. company. Looks like China covered-up for a month. Surrounding ocean spoiled.
THIS JUST IN: OIL SATURATES OCEANS, SEAFOOD FOREVER UNEATABLE
The US oil company ConocoPhillips has yet to stem a seeping well that is contaminating China’s Bohai Sea, but it resumed the clear-up operation on Tuesday with a promise that the work will be completed later this month.
The series of slicks, which have spread to about 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) since the first leak was discovered on 4 June, have alarmed environmentalists, fisherman and coastal communities – and remedial work has been delayed by technical problems and typhoons.
The Chinese government criticised ConocoPhillips at the weekend for a laggard response since a previously unreported accumulation of oil-based drilling mud was discovered on the seabed near the Penglai 19-3 platform B.
The company, which operates the field in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, says it has more than 900 personnel and 30 vessels working on the response, but they had to suspend the operation when tropical storm Muifa hit the area yesterday.
Are you fucking kidding me?
(via The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do For Yourself | Conscious Life News)
‘Deborah King, emotional wellness expert and author of “Truth Heals”, told an audience of about 500 earlier this evening that meditation is the single most important thing that you can do for yourself. King, who is leading the “21st Century Energy Medicine Workshop” in Asilomar, CA, said that meditation helps you to eliminate the negatives and enhance the positives in your life. King sited several examples: meditation can help you reduce stress and lower your blood pressure; it can also increase the joy in your life and bring you more clarity.
There have been hundreds if not thousands of studies that have documented the physiological, psychological, and spiritual benefits of meditation. Here’s a list of 100 benefits of meditation. In addition, there are new study reports that come out nearly every week detailing yet another way that meditation helps to eliminate the negatives and enhance the positives in your life. Here a just a few from this past week:
Meditation Helps Depression As Much As Drugs – A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that for people suffering from depression, who had taking drugs to control it but whose symptoms were in remission, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy was just as good at preventing the return of symptoms as was continuing with drugs.
Meditation Helps You Do Well in School - When you are stressed, its very hard to concentrate and thus hard to do well. On the contrary, when the mind is quiet and calm, it prepares you to learning. And really its true with all of us, as the mind is calm and peaceful, we get prepared for anything in life – whether it is office, preparing for the exams, driving, working etc.
Meditation benefits people with brain injuries – People with acquired brain injuries, typically from car crashes, strokes and falls, experience improvements coping with life’s challenges through a specific type of meditation, a new study at the St. Joseph’s Health Centre suggests.’
Things I did this weekend: Sit at the park in the sun, read in the shade of a tree, meditated, wrote in my journal, napped.
NPR: Baby’s Palate and Food Memories Shaped Before Birth
Want your child to love veggies? Start early. Very early. Research shows that what a woman eats during pregnancy not only nourishes her baby in the womb, but may shape food preferences later in life.
Aspartame
Aspartame is a popular sweetener in a variety of foods including soft drinks… low-alcohol beer… candy… and dairy and frozen desserts…
It’s often available commercially as NutraSweet® and Equal®.
But it might not be so popular if people knew this: When Aspartame is warmed to more than 86° F the wood alcohol in the product changes to formaldehyde. Since the body’s temperature is more than 98º F. it kind of makes you wonder. Or do you think folks might be concerned if they knew formaldehyde is known to increase the risk of developing breast and prostate cancer?
You should also know recent studies in Europe found that the formaldehyde in Aspartame can accumulate in your brain—and seriously damage your central nervous system and immune system.
No matter how good it tastes—brain damage is a pretty high price to pay just to keep using a chemical sweetener!
Aaaand this is exactly why I don’t drink sodas, cheap beer, or pretty much anything but water and (some) juices, teas and coffee. I don’t generally buy those fake frozen desserts anyway, and the only dairy I consume is cheese, I rarely drink milk now, and whatever creams used in pasta sauces I like.
Well then, a lot of people are going to be upset about this one.
A 33 year old male patient presents to Emergency Department with a suspected aortic dissection. A CT scan confirms the diagnosis and the patient is rushed to the OR. On visual inspection you notice that the man has unusually long arms, severe kyphoscoliosis, and a deeply depressed sternum. This patient most likely has:
A - Hypogonadism and mental retardation
B - A predisposition to dislocation of the lens of his eye
C - Defective collagen synthesis with hyperextensible joints
D - Hypercholesterolemia with impaired transport of LDL into cells
E - Anti-phospholipid antibodiesThe answer is B.) A prediposition to dislocation of the lens of his eye.
“This patient most likely has Marfan’s syndrome, an autosomal dominant defect in fibrillin which serves as the scaffolding for elastic tissue. Patients present with long legs, arms and fingers (arachnodactyl), high-arched palate, hyperextensible joints, kyphscoliosis, pectus excavatum or pigeon breast deformity. Marfan’s patients can also have dislocation of their lens, mitral valve prolapse, aortic ring dilation, and aortic dissection which is a killer.”
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is defective collagen, Marfan’s is defective fibrillin.
What is both interesting and terrifying about this is that my dad endured an Aortic Dissection a few years ago (and somehow—despite his poor health—survived). Additionally, when I was first diagnosed with Scoliosis, because of my extremely long limbs and flexibility, they tested me for Marfan’s Syndrome as well. After lots and lots of tests and doctor’s appointments, the results were negative. But reading this makes me second guess…
I kinda want to go see some doctors now.
19 Studies Link GMO Foods to Organ Disruption
‘A new paper demonstrates that consuming genetically modified (GM) food leads to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice. Researchers reviewed data from 19 studies and found that parameters including blood and urine biochemistry and organ weights were significantly disrupted in the GM-fed animals.
The kidneys of males were the most affected, experiencing 43.5 percent of all the changes. The livers of females followed at more than 30 percent. Other organs may have been affected too, including the heart and spleen, and blood cells.
According to the Institute for Responsible Technology:
“The GM soybean and corn varieties used in the feeding trials ‘constitute 83 percent of the commercialized GMOs’ that are currently consumed by billions of people. While the findings may have serious ramifications for the human population, the authors demonstrate how a multitude of GMO-related health problems could easily pass undetected through the superficial and largely incompetent safety assessments that are used around the world.”’
The official story on fluoride sounds wonderful: Drink the stuff, and you won’t get cavities, we’re told. It’s a nice story. But there’s another side to this story — the side you’re never told. And it starts with the astonishing but verifiable fact that nearly all the fluoride dripped into municipal water supplies isn’t naturally occurring fluoride at all.
In fact, it’s actually a combination of hexafluorosilicic acid and sodium silicofluoride.
These two chemical are considered highly toxic by the EPA. They’re actually classified as hazardous waste and when packaged for transportation, they must be labeled as poison and handled by workers wearing industrial safety gear.
So what are hexafluorosilicic acid and sodium silicofluoride, and where do they come from?
That’s the part of this story that you probably won’t believe. That is, not until you check it out yourself. Because the more you look into the mythology of fluoride, the more bizarre this story becomes.
Whatever the truth may be, they’ve achieved their goal of totally disorienting us to the point of not knowing who or what to believe. It’s just like that scene in Princess Bride when Vezzini challenges Dread Pirate Roberts to a battle of wit, DPR puts poison in both goblets of wine and allows Vezzini, the self-proclaimed genius to choose which he put it in (he supposedly only put it in one). Vezzini goes back and forth saying initially it’s logical to think that DPR would put the poison in the glass in front of him, but knowing this, and knowing the great capacity of his mind, he probably knew he would suspect this and put the poison in thge glass in front of himself, and so forth… it’s a never ending loop and that’s just what they want us to get caught in. Question is, how do we obtain the real truth?
Coincidentally, that was the perfect metaphor. Ha.
Another TED talk worth watching (they’re all worth watching).
Jamie Oliver’s TED talk: Teach Every Child About Food.
Eat fresh food.
Burger King now has a quad-stacked hamburger. With a large coke and fries that comes out to a whopping 1840 calories. Don’t forget to add some “Funnel Cake Sticks” for dessert.
Every time you eat, you’re voting for a food system. The less shit like this we consume, the less likely we are to see unnecessary, unhealthy abominations like this on the international menu. This is disrespectful all the way up the chain, from the animals slaughtered for this base gluttony to the farmers out there who put care into their meats and produce to the consumer, both those of us who’d never touch this sandwich to those who would. It doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t eat this; other Americans will, and we’ll both pay the price, they with their health and we with our tax dollars to support rising medical costs for a nation poisoning itself.
How do you stop it? Don’t eat this sandwich. Don’t eat from fast food restaurants, period. Vote with your dollars by shopping at the farmer’s market. Vote with your stomach by eating real food, grown on real farms. Don’t give in to convenience and excess just because you can.
I can’t think of a better illustration, EVER, pointing out the fact that health care is not a right.
It is the individual’s personal responsibility. You own the care of your health.
I’m going to eat this one day for two reasons:
- It looks freaking delicious,
- To piss off all the lefties like wcfoodies.
I shop at and will continue to shop at Burger King. They have the best service from the rest of the fast food business and their food is cheap and scrumptious.
Burger King gives me tastier, cheaper and faster food than the Farmer’s Market. And, if I choose to spend my money there, no bureaucracy should be able to tell me I can’t. I ride my bike religiously during the warmer seasons and I maintain a healthy weight. I could be healthier, but I could sure as hell be unhealthier. I ride my bike often to offset the damage I do to my body by eating things like this, because I’m responsible. I’m responsible and I know that if I drink three cokes a day it will lead to Diabetes later in life. So I cut back on soda, because it’s my job to take care of myself, not the government’s. It’s the rest of the public’s responsibility to take care of their own body, not the government’s job to take of everyone’s for them, because they can’t make the conscious decision to put a burger down.
Eat like shit. It’s America, you have the right to do that.
What a load of contradictory, ignorant rubbish.
First off, no one is telling you that you are barred from shopping at Burger King. You have that right, so by all means take advantage of it. But just because you HAVE the right doesn’t mean you should exercise it.
Second, exercise is not the antithesis of fast food. It’s not as if there is a great scale that slides back and forth depending on whether you do something “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Such a view is plain ignorance. In order to attain health, one must have a balance between physical exercise AND healthy food choices. Both of them are important. If you eat these as consistently as one might assume, I don’t care how much exercise you do you’re still going to end up with massive health problems and chronic disorders come later on in life. (And no one is interested in paying for that.)
By eating at these fast food establishments you are not only making a poor health choice, but you are supporting the fast food business as well. You are enabling them to continue to unfairly market their unhealthy food. You are helping to propagate a destructive lifestyle in everyone who eats there. You are supporting the consumer’s irresponsibility.
Thirdly, you sound like a child. What, just because everyone else is so much worse than you are in terms of health, you can go eat a quadruple hamburger? That justifies it? If everyone went on a killing spree, and you only stole a television, would it still be wrong and deplorable? Of course it would!
Fourthly, the sad fact is that many Americans don’t know better. Many don’t have any other option. Because of people like you who have supported these gargantuans, they have become too economically competitive for healthier food to compete price-wise. Some Americans don’t have much of a choice. That lack of a choice? That’s your fault.
P.S. If you actually ate good food, you’d be able to tell what fast food actually tastes like… garbage. By no mean stretch of the imagination will I pretend I like Burger King better than anything else I can make for myself at home. Stop being lazy like the rest of America.
Your entire response still boils down to the fact that it’s the consumers personal choice to choose where he or she eats. You have no idea what the lifestyle is of the people who eat at BK. Fast food restaurants provide a service to low income families. The elimination of BK or McDonalds or Wendy’s would wreak havoc on our lower class and economy, because it’s cheap and easy food. Maybe the Left who like to pretend to be champions of the poor should start calling for government legislation to cap the prices on Farmer’s Market products, in order to get more people to eat there (but it wont work, you can’t legislate human activity). At the end of the day, if there is a demand for it, the market will supply it. The government can do all it wants to try to change that, but it will only result in loss of wealth and poorer poor people.
You should watch Penn & Teller’s Fast Food Show. It talks about all these things, including how people who eat at fast food places typically know how bad the food is for them. Quit butting into people’s lives and let them eat what the want. Choosing to eat what you want is the most BASIC human choice.
Interesting point about the fact that people know it’s bad for them, but then maybe governments should aim to cap the prices chargeable at local markets by subsidising goods sold there. I doubt this would work if what you say is accurate, however, because it’s not just that the food is cheap, it’s that it’s easy. The problem that liberal-minded people forget (and I count myself guilty of this, at times) is that those with lower wages have just as many pressing concerns regarding their time after work, with their kids etc and that you can’t just throw money at making people more independent, you also have to free up their time. This is a problem without a solution and until then, government programmes should focus on education regarding what constitutes healthy eating or encourage the start-up of healthy and delicious fast food that provides an alternative to McD’s, Wendy’s, Burger King or any of the numerous other places that you can get a burger.
The choice should remain. But the point remains that this economy is built around people regularly eating something that, given money, time and the choice, they would rather not.
i really just don’t understand how people can believe themselves when they say things like all of this. apart from a couple of good points touched on by ‘gqsmooth’ and ‘elijahlain’ this is some of the most ignorant terribleness i’ve ever read. you people know nothing about economics. do you think it would somehow be more difficult to subsidize small-scale, organic farmers than it is to subsidize industrial-scale farmers? you don’t want the man telling you what to eat, but what you don’t realize is that he already is and always has done. the state controls everything you put in your little ‘libertarian’ bodies ESPECIALLY if you shop at fast food chains. many individuals that can only afford a meal that costs $1 have no choice but to take advantage of fast food. i’ll agree with that. what i will not agree to is that this is all right and that we collectively can do nothing.
trying to convince others that it is everyone’s right as an american to ingest this bull shit is not helping anyone. whom are you defending? the over-weight poor kids with diabetes? do you think their parents and themselves feel empowered every time they go to a fast food restaurant? if the government can control your situation enough to make the lower class fat and diabetic do you not think they also have the power to change the subsidies (or stop them all together, which i think would be just fine) so that we can really have clear choices?
hate the government, but eat government subsidized foods. love capitalism for freedom of choice, but refuse to admit that there are places in the world where capitalism is crushing peoples’ well-being. hate the poor for their poor choices, refuse to recognize that sometimes the choices your beloved capitalism provides are shitty choices. at present, our government subsidizes terribly unhealthy things. instead of saying, ‘get the government out of my life,’ maybe you need to say, ‘put the government in better places.’
I agree that the money you spend on food is essentially a vote. It is. You’re putting your hard-earned cash towards supporting whoever was responsible for preparing the food you’re about to consume. It is VERY important where you spend it. It is also true that you’re paying for convenience when you buy fast-food. Which is the dilemma poorer citizens face. The food is cheap AND easy which caters to their lifestyle, and their struggles. It takes a little weight off their shoulders.
In the end, the choice is left to each individual. However, being a middle-class citizen, making the healthy choice is more within reach. I make the choice to support local farms and small businesses rather than corporate chains because I am aware of and concerned about the paradox that these giants have created for the less fortunate people in our society. I make the choice not to ‘vote’ for shitty food because I feel it’s my responsibility.
In addition to that, I make the choice because I am aware of and concerned about my own health. Eating like shit and exercising doesn’t do my body justice. I admit, I eat better than most, but I don’t exercise all that much. Maybe 20-30 minutes a day of light cardio. But that’s better than nothing! Either way, I know that my health is MY responsibility, so I act accordingly.
In regards to the food itself, fast-food barely passes as food in the first place. You’re consuming empty, nutritionless calories that essentially eat away at YOU rather than providing you with any useable nutrients to better your health. The food only tastes ‘good’ because of the addictive trifecta: a combination of salt, fat and sugar (salt all up in the meat and fries, fat in the meat and fries, and copious amounts of sugar in the soda) that end up desensitizing your tongue to the taste of healthy food… which is why you think healthy food is bland.
Try going a few weeks without consuming sugar (in soda, or any other junk foods), and taste some roasted veggies. THEY ARE DELICIOUS AND TASTY. Your tastebuds’ tolerance for salt and sugar in the regular processed-food-american-diet is so high that it can no longer taste the goodness of nutritious meals.
Last point, it seriously saddens me to observe the level we have let our laziness get to. Convenience is supposed to open up more time slots for leisure and self improvement, but instead we stuff more tasks into the time we free up, or we fill it with mindless activities like watching TV and playing video games. The common habit of overworking ourselves just stresses us out even more, which makes us turn to self-destructive forms of stress relief (i.e. alcohol consumption, drug-use, etc) rather than healthy forms of stress relief (exercise) because we’re ‘too tired’. It’s an endless clusterfuck of nonsensical decision making. The only way to stop it is to wake up and stop being so fuckin’ lazy.
Use your free time to exercise to relieve stress. It’s healthy and much more effective than drinking them away. Use your free time to COOK or learn how to cook! YES COOK! Buying food, and preparing it, once you get the hang of it, is extremely rewarding, aaaannnndddd it offers the advantage of being able to customize your food to your liking, as well as knowing where everything came from start to finish. So you never have to worry about someone else getting your order wrong, OR if they spit in your food.
Cooking really isn’t THAT difficult. There are a multitude of different recipes that are simple and easy, that require minimal work and clean up. You just have to stop wasting your time whacking off to porn and playing video games, and set aside 30 minutes of that time to doing a little research.
IM JUST SAYIN.
