Some suggestions floating around the internet

 A Lakeside friend, Susan Hanselman, posted this on Facebook.  Generally, I like my advice to have a source, but some of these are worth checking out.  If I can verify, I'll link.

DID YOU KNOW?

1. Your shoes are the first thing people subconsciously notice about you. Wear nice shoes.
2. If you sit for more than 11 hours a day, there's a 50% chance you'll die years earlier.
3. There are at least 6 people in the world who look exactly like you. There's a 9% chance that you'll meet one of them in your lifetime.
4. Sleeping without a pillow reduces back pain and keeps your spine stronger.
5. A person’s height is determined by their father, and their weight is determined by their mother.
6. If a part of your body "falls asleep", You can almost always "wake it up" by shaking your head.
7. There are three things the human brain cannot resist noticing - food, attractive people and danger.
8. Right-handed people tend to chew food on their right side.
9. Putting dry tea bags in gym bags or smelly shoes will absorb the unpleasant odor.
10. According to Albert Einstein, if honey bees were to disappear from earth, humans would be dead within 4 years.
11. There are so many kinds of apples, that if you ate a new one every day, it would take over 20 years to try them all.
12. You can survive without eating for weeks, but you will only live 11 days without sleeping.
13. People who laugh a lot are healthier than those who don’t.
14. Laziness and inactivity kills just as many people as smoking.
15. A human brain has a capacity to store 5 times as much information as Wikipedia.
16. Our brain uses the same amount of power as a 10-watt light bulb!!
17. Our body gives enough heat in 30 minutes to boil 1.5 liters of water!!
18. The Ovum egg is the largest cell and the sperm is the smallest cell!!
19. Stomach acid (conc. HCl) is strong enough to dissolve razor blades!!
20. Take a 10-30 minute walk every day & while you walk, SMILE. It is the ultimate antidepressant.
21. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
22. When you wake up in the morning, pray to ask God's guidance for your purpose today.
23. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.
24. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries, broccoli, and almonds.
25. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
26. Don't waste your precious energy on gossip, energy vampires, issues of the past, negative thoughts and things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.
27. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a college kid with a maxed out charge card.
28. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
29. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Forgive them for everything.
30. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
31. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
32. Make peace with your past so it won't spoil the present.
33. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
34. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
35. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: 'In five years, will this matter?'
36. Help the needy, Be generous! Be a 'Giver' not a 'Taker'
37. What other people think of you is none of your business.
38. Time heals everything, except grief. Grief is a sign of Love.
39. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
40. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. Each night before you go to bed, pray to God and be thankful for what you accomplished, today. What if you woke up this morning and only had what you thanked God for yesterday? DON’T FORGET TO THANK GOD FOR EVERYTHING.
43. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed!
COPY & PASTE to your timeline.

What happened to academic freedom? Wokeism

"As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge. But for most of my career, that kind of behavior came from the right. In the old days, most students and administrators were actually on our side; we were aligned against creationists. Now, the threat comes mainly from the left. . .We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism." Laura Maroja

If you are a Democrat, vote like your life depends on it, because it does. Your party has let the margins and marginals take over. CRT and gendermandering in schools, millions of illegals storming the border, raging inflation, Americans held in foreign jails, abandoning our allies and principals in a Biden Bug Out in Afghanistan, children locked out of their schools and losing 2 grade levels, shortage of medical personnel and hospitals closing because of early retirements due to power struggles and your anti-science swampy government, fentanyl grown in China flooding over the border, demands to kill the unborn up to the day of birth, incompetent people in the White House, gaslighting so bad we could light up and heat Europe for the winter, and a media with no morals and no boundaries protecting politicians. What have I overlooked? Your complicity in destroying the best economy and strongest border because you didn't like Trump's snarky attitude? For that you sold us down the river?

What is common sense?

 The joke is that common sense isn't very common.  But what is it?

Pew Research has studied the effect of religion on every day life and decisions, and arranged it by state. The percent of adults in Ohio who say they look to religion most for guidance on right and wrong is only 33% and 47% say they look to common sense. However, in 2007 it was 27% look to religion and 57% to common sense. Maybe the recession sent a few of them back to church.  Only 32% of Ohioans say there are clear standards of right and wrong, whereas 66% says it depends on the situation. 

For my generation "common sense" probably was the values and ethics handed down by parents and grandparents, which they most likely learned in church.  My parents were born in 1912 and 1913, they both grew up on farms, attended one room schools, and neither one had any choice about going to church, and in those days that meant worship with adults.  They heard about how treat their neighbor and the poor, they knew from observation and lectures about an honest day's work, they were told the wages of sin is death.  My siblings and I heard a similar message either in church, at school, or from our parents and it was reinforced in club activities like Girl Scouts and 4-H or church choir practice and in our friends' homes.

   If you look at this topic on the internet, where I found this picture, you'll find all sorts of negative comments on how religion and common sense conflict.  I don't think so. Everything from saving for the future, to being faithful to family and friends, to working hard, to staying in the race, to the importance of cleanliness and good health, to speaking truth is covered in the Bible, and probably in most religions. If you're prejudiced and cherry picking, you can probably make your point, but if you look at how life generally works out, religion is the winner.   

Common Core—are you smarter than 4th grade math?

Government bureaucrats, from your local board up to Arne Duncan (Dept. of Education) will demean your concerns, calling parents the educational equivalent of racist or homophobe if they try to organize and express their concern. Time to stand up for your children.

Who bears the responsibility?

If the managers and owners of Peanut Corporation of America knew about the salmonella contamination, they are worse than pond scum and should go to jail. But what about all the workers, the ones who now say they saw the filth, the rats, the chipped paint above roasters?

Terry Jones, a janitor, remembered the peanut oil left to soak into the floor and the unrepaired roof that constantly leaked rain.

And James Griffin, a cook at the plant, recounted how his observations led to this simple rule. “I never ate the peanut butter, and I wouldn’t allow my kids to eat it.”

In interviews, these three men and another employee who worked at the now-closed plant, provided an inside glimpse into the day-to-day sanitation lapses there. AJC.com

There must have been employees up and down the line, managers, union members, illegals and legals, educated and no-so-much, who saw and didn't act because they wanted to keep their jobs. How is that different than the men testifying before Congressional leaders whose values and ethics are also screwed up?

So now a government that can't provide enough employees so the FDA can keep the plants inspected using regulations and laws long on the books is going to spend massive amounts of our money dabbling in less critical facets of our lives, like universal pre-school, light bulbs to save energy and dangerous to dispose, and rewriting marriage laws so gays don't feel left out.

A good book for the New Year

I really like key #2. That was the name of the newsletter I used to write--No Free Lunch--about coupons, refunds, green stamps (remember those?), wooden nickles, sweepstakes, and so forth. Loyalty cards and clubs hadn't yet made much of an appearance in the early 1980s, but it's all the same--the belief that there is a free lunch. The latest edition is 2005, the 10th. We'll see if the basics have changed to meet the challenges of today's investment climate.

Health care scams and scares

What happens when medical science conquers a serious, deadly disease--like eliminating small pox or polio through vaccination, or TB through sanitation, or malaria through DDT (although it's now back again due to environmentalists)? People live longer. And they develop chronic diseases that don't kill them quickly, but just linger and require constant treatment.

But you would think all the treatment and drugs for chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes and hypertension were bad.

"The prevalence of chronic illnesses in the United States is projected to increase, from 133 million persons in 2005 to 171 million in 2030. Health care spending accounts for 16% of GDP and may rise to 25% by 2025." (JAMA May 28, 2008 p. 2437).

This is followed by a lengthy, gloomy list of how chronic illness is eroding corporate profits, threatening Medicare, state budgets, pensions, health insurance, etc. So did they think when they saved a child from a fatal illness through screening at birth that he wouldn't grow up to use more health care than if he died? The man who loses a lung to cancer, may just live to die of heart disease. Duh? What were they thinking?

Do you know what they propose? Well, currently chronic diseases consume 75% of health care expenditures, so we'll go after the risk factors--the big four being smoking, diet, exercise and alcohol--and then up the screening, and, and. . .I guess no one ever dies of old age or kidney or heart failure or AIDS or Alzheimer's or cancer (which most people get eventually even if they don't smoke and run marathons til they're 90). With only one or two workers per retiree paying into social security, and Obama running corporations out of the country with higher taxes, it ought to be fun at the other end.

There are good-to-great reasons to behave responsibly and live healthy--you'll enjoy life much more and be of greater service to your fellow man. But having the government and "independent" regulatory agencies invading every cavity and organ of my body and life, sticking nutrition statistics in my face at McDonald's, obsessing over BMIs of toddlers, running wellness campaigns that no one pays attention to? No thanks.

Buy real food; fix it at home; then go for a walk and breathe some fresh air. Toss the cigarettes; limit your alcohol and listen to the friends who are concerned. Take that money and open a savings account. Honor the marriage bed. Laugh at yourself. Listen to some good music that isn't too loud. Take in an art show once a month. Go to church. Tithe your income. Own a pet.

There. We can probably get that all on one 8 x 10 poster. If the government would just listen to me, I could save our country billions.

Read what Junk Food Science has to say on childhood obesity private and public dollars and programs.