Friends

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Lack of friendship is supposedly worse on your well being than a Quadruple Bypass Burger from the Heart Attack Grill.
From Reuters on a report released Tuesday by a research team at Brigham Young University:

Having good social relationships — friends, marriage or children — may be every bit as important to a healthy lifespan as quitting smoking, losing weight or taking certain medications…
…
“A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148 studies that covered more than 308,000 people for their analysis, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org.
…
Having low levels of social interaction was equivalent to being an alcoholic, was more harmful than not exercising and was twice as harmful as obesity.
Social relationships had a bigger impact on premature death than getting an adult vaccine to prevent pneumonia, than taking drugs for high blood pressure and far more important than exposure to air pollution, they found.

Yet, the techno-irony:

Her team found some troubling evidence that Americans are becoming more isolated, and thus losing the support and care that love and friendship provide.
“For instance, trends reveal reduced intergenerational living, greater social mobility, delayed marriage, dual-career families, increased single-residence households, and increased age-related disabilities,” they wrote.
“More specifically, over the last two decades there has been a three-fold increase in the number of Americans who report having no confidant,” they added.
“Such findings suggest that despite increases in technology and globalization that would presumably foster social connections, people are becoming increasingly more socially isolated.”

Modern life seems in itself, a “feedback loop,” which creates or makes an environment or a situation far-even worse, as there’s more communication but far less friendship.
So, if you always dine alone on a menu of burgers and fries, you’re one screwed puppy.

Pass This On…

Filed Under Orwellian, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment

Must-read on the twisted-horror of the US Senate health care bill at FireDogLake.

Politics and the human condition.

‘Net Virus Hoax as Hoax

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A few scant seconds can mean the difference between truth and a lie.
Such as the case of Desiree Jennings, a 25-year-old training to become a Washington Redskins cheerleader, who has claimed the noted swine-flu vaccine she took last August gave her a rare, but terrible disease.
And from that came the “flu girl hoax” that spread across the Internet — see one example here.

A big problem, however, might lie in some kind of lie.
Sharp-eyed blogger Eric Metze might have uncovered a glitch:

I’ve used a web service called Splicd to highlight these five seconds of the original two minute piece from Inside Edition.
In this clip, you will see/hear a glitch in the video.
This glitch causes the narrator to say, “Doctors say what happened to Desire should [glitch] discourage people from getting a flu shot.”
Now listen to this longer clip so you can hear the glitch in context.
It’s obvious that the doctors say that even though this happened to the young woman, people should not be discouraged from getting the flu shot.
But considering how that clip is edited, it’s not exactly clear what they mean unless you happen to catch it.
…
What does this mean? It means that someone took the original Inside Edition article, chopped out the word “not”, and provided physical copies for people to upload. There are dozens (hundreds?) of people actively spreading an obvious propaganda virus that was edited by an anonymous person and injected into the veins of the internet.

Another Fox News moment — Run with a falsehood no matter the facts.