Don’t Fear the Truth

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I found the most interesting was how they’re finding that exercise can make the brain produce new nerve cells and, as the article says, I had always heard that that wasn’t possible. They also talk about this “And there are clues that physical activity can stave off the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD and other cognitive disorders”.

So for as little as a half hour to an hour a day out of your TV time, you can help keep yourself keen of mind and body. Add that to the list of reasons you should find that time everyday and stick with it. It really does get easier after you do it for a little while trust me, you’ll thank yourself for doing it.

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Take this article that shows the top 10 reasons for accidental death in the U.S. Number 2 is Falling, at 14,900 deaths per year while Automobile accident deaths is number 1 at 43,000 deaths per year. This is a small city dead, every year, due to automobiles.

How to solve this? Well, try to take yourself outside of society’s influence and think about it for a moment. The obvious solution - get rid of automobiles. Now I can be extreme sometimes, but I am not advocating this answer. But… our society existed before we had automobiles, so the point here is that we accept 43,000 dead people per year so that the rest of us can… well what do we get from automobiles? We get to travel quickly, and further than we would if there were no automobiles. So why do we need to travel great distances? It’s been a long time since I took a history class, but if I remember correctly, people outside of towns and cities had to run a farm, as there was no way to drive to a workplace that was far away. So your ‘employment’ had to be where you were located - your home. If you didn’t run a farm, you had to live in or very near a town, so that you could get to your workplace easily.

So what have cars given us? Instead of having to be work at home (farms) or be very near to a town, we can now live miles and miles from where we work, where we buy food, find entertainment, etc etc. The cost of this is that we use the earth’s resources, we pollute our environment and ourselves, and we know that 43,000 people died last year (actually the article I referenced doesn’t have a date) that would not have died if we didn’t drive cars.

All that being said… there is no way we would ever get rid of automobiles. Well… until we run out of oil that is, but that is another article for another day.

So. Why can’t we try to find some sort of compromise? As I have shown, cars are not a necessity, they are absolutely a luxury. Well they ARE necessary now, but only because our society has changed to the point that we could not function if we just suddenly stopped using them.

What if we just changed the maximum speed limit over a certain period of time to 45 mph? This change would:

Reduce gas consumption by 32% vs driving at 65 mph. (see this article) I could not find an exact article that stated how much gas consumption would drop, but the article I linked to says your gas consumption goes up by 8% ever 5 mph over 60 mph.

It would reduce accidental deaths DRAMATICALLY. Common sense would indicate that slower speeds mean you have more time to react, and hitting another car at 45 mph would be much less dangerous than at 65 mph. Having more time to react would also mean you could slow down more before hitting another car that might have pulled out in front of you.

It would also reduce CO2 emissions. Increased fuel efficiency = less gasoline burned which = less CO2 put into the air. Now I actually feel the Global Warming idea is being abused by politicians and big companies as just another way to make money, but I put this in for all the people that do feel it is important. Even beyond CO2, increasing fuel efficiency reduces all of the pollutants a vehicle puts into the air.

How many times have you heard the saying on television: ‘If we could save just one life by doing (insert some altruistic act here) then it’s worth the effort, isn’t it?’ I must have heard this statement a hundred times in my lifetime on TV shows and in movies. It always seems though, that the ‘thing’ that people talk about doing is something that doesn’t really impede upon our lifestyle.

So isn’t it funny that if someone actually came up to you and said ‘hey why don’t we lower the speed limit to 45 mph’ you would laugh at them? Yet doing so would save THOUSANDS of lives every year. I would bet any amount of money that we would save more lives each year than were lost in the 9/11 tragedy. It would reduce our oil dependancy, reduce pollutants into the air. Hell it would reduce noise pollution.

It would mean we would need to transport freight by train, and have trains again run into most towns like they did 60 years ago. Trains again are more efficient than trucks. Less gas consumtion, less pollution, less tractor trailers on the road to cause accidents… you get the picture.

Yet we do not do this. We let thousands die each year… for what? I drive 10 miles to work each day. Traveling 45 vs 65 mph would mean it would take me less than 4 extra minutes each trip. Doesn’t seem like much to lose, when there is so much to gain.

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interesting. After discussions with people I know on the net, it does seem the author makes some stretches on somethings, but for others the author is right on the mark.

People laugh when they hear Rosie ranting that 9/11 was helped/staged by the government, but the first step in creating a facist state is to “Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy” and it is obvious that without 9/11 the american people/government would never have allowed our loss of freedoms as we have in the last 6 years. The ‘war on terror’ has somehow gotten the US to a point that the President can incarcerate people at will, use the military as a police force, and even torture people… and we let it all go on.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
— Thomas Jefferson

it is also scary that people actually have said that Rosie should be tried for treason. Tried for treason for *just* questioning our government? Now THAT is scary.

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review of the Bush administration’s reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted

suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

Chris Doherty (program director), is resigning in the coming days

This was an intentional effort to corrupt the process.

The article doesn’t state exactly what curriculum the program was pushing, but it would seem obvious that they were pushing conservative views, and I would bet that they denied funding to schools that proposed any ‘liberal’ reading. I would guarantee that if there was a book that discussed Atheism in anything but a negative tone, they wouldn’t allow it.

Honestly, I don’t see how Conservative and Liberal are even defined anymore. Is there a list somewhere that defines exactly what what a Conservative feels is ok, and what a Liberal does? Isn’t it inherently wrong to subscribe to a group of any type when it comes to things like this? We should look at any issue without any bias, in my opinion. If you call yourself a Conservative or Liberal, you are more likely to form an opinion because ‘your group feels that way’. This doesn’t promote independent thought at all, it makes it more likely that people just follow someone elses lead, and not their own ideas.

UPDATE: Looks like the entire thing is about money and the “Good Ole Boys Network”. This article states the corruption was really about bullying states to use publishers who had Bush cronies as CEO’s and board members.

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But it’s very possible his daughter is being poisoned by his ex wife and she is deliberately messing with him.

I had heard that Kim Basinger released the tape. Now THAT is despicable. While it might help her vs Alec, it just does more damage to the daughter.

That’s the end of the celebrity commentary for today. Tomorrow… back to Government Conspiracies, Atheism, Philosophy and other easy to digest subjects.

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