Overpriced, Underperforming U.S. Health Care System Lags Competitors | Crooks and Liars

Overpriced, Underperforming U.S. Health Care System Lags Competitors | Crooks and Liars

Get Happy Without Pills

May 27, 2009 3:58 AM by Mehmet C. Oz, MD, and Michael F. Roizen, MD |

2 comments

You know that guy who is always up? He could have just been fired, but he sees the positive in it? Well, hang with him. Doesn’t matter whether you meet people like that for a walk in the morning or a glass of wine at night or you just pick up the phone and reach out. Happy friends benefit your mental health: Your chances of being happy increase by at least 15% if someone in your immediate social circle is happy.

Happiness seems to be contagious. If a friend who lives within a mile of you becomes happy, the probability that you’ll feel it, too, goes up by 25%. And, man, does that guy have a long arm: The happiness of a friend of a friend may push your mood up, too. Even a neighbor’s happiness may lift yours (and it’s not just because you both live in a nice neighborhood -- the researchers controlled for that). It’s possible that better moods depend more on frequent contact than on deep connections (though deep connections are important for your health, too). Workaholics, beware: Happiness isn’t contagious at work unless your best buddy works there.

Positive emotions can affect your health by changing the way your brain functions to reduce stress. So happiness -- and the friends who help bring it on -- helps cancel the risk of stress-related health problems, including heart disease and cancer. Of course, you’re not going to be happy 24/7, but there’s an upside to that. A little unhappiness helps give you wisdom and perspective, which ultimately gives you more happiness.

Get Happy Quickly by Writing One of These

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Want to feel a whole lot happier? Right now? Then grab a pen and a thank-you card, and share some gratitude with someone.

When a group of students wrote a series of one-page thank-you letters every 2 weeks for 6 weeks, measurements showed that their baseline happiness levels increased by 20 percent.

What Is Happiness?
Science says that happiness is 50 percent genetic, 10 percent circumstances, and 40 percent intentional activity (i.e., what you do). With so much happiness attributed to your own actions, it makes sense to do things that make you feel good. For the study, that meant the students expressed gratitude in writing, and their happiness increased with each letter. Every month, try writing a couple of thank-you notes to people who did something nice for you. (This article helps explain how happy feelings directly affect your health.)

The Gratitude Connection
Seeing the world through the rose-colored lenses of appreciation and thankfulness can help boost feelings of life satisfaction and overall well-being. And that is great for your health. Here are a few more ways to boost feel-good feelings:

• Get up! Exercise helps release endorphins. Get a mood boost by doing theYOU: On a Diet Beginner Workout.
• Get talking! Spending time with happy friends will do warm, fuzzy favors for your mood. Find out how contagious happiness is.
• Make a plan. Happy feelings don't always just happen by themselves. Practice these five simple steps to getting happy.

US Social Forum: We Will Build a New World from the Ashes of the Old

By STARHAWK | Published: JUNE 24, 2010

Settling into the conference.  We get up late but I manage to catch most of a morning workshop led by an environmental network of youth—so sweet to sit in a circle with all these beautiful young people, again, so very diverse, and hear them make connections between the social justice issues and the environmental issues.  Lots of great little moments—I run into Jim Haber, an old buddy from San Francisco who now lives in Las Vegas doing interfaith organizing around the Nevada Test Site and peace and justice issues.  He’s asking me if any of the folks in the Bayview are interested in making the connection between the funding cuts for social issues and the war—when a black woman of about my age who is sitting at a table taps us and points at her button, which says “A million a day”.

“That’s why I can’t get a job,” she says.  “We’re spending a million a day on those wars.”  She goes on to talk about the oil spill, tells me how her heart was wrenched by those pictures of the oil-drenched pelican.  This is why it’s hard for me to get anywhere on time—there are so many great side conversations.

I run into Shea Howell who works with the Boggs Center and Margo Adair, my old friend from Tools for Change in Seattle.  Margo, her partner Bill and I will be working together on our upcoming Earth Activist Training in Bellingham, which will have a special focus on social permaculture.  We go out to lunch with a few others at the Cass Café, way up on Cass Street—another local business which has excellent food.  Rich Feldman, from the interfaith committee, has hooked me up with a projector for our workshop—and between him and Shea, they also hook me up with a ride to go get the projector, the computer, and all the other pieces.

We show our video of the permaculture work in the Bayview—which you can see for yourself at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bdKgBt6LbE

All the technology works perfectly—which was the only part really worrying me.  Lena talks about Hunters Point Family, the agency she started when she was only twenty three.  When I was twenty-three I was travelling around on a bicycle mooning about the drug-addict boyfriend I’d just broken up with and trying to Find Myself.  She created a program for girls, Girls 2000, to help be a safe haven from the violence around them, to build their skills and self-esteem and to provide the resources that might be lacking in their homes.  Lena is an impressive speaker—she’s honest and passionate and people respond to her sense of vision, the same vision that drew me in to help support their work with the gardens.  Then Jasmine talks—and she is awesome, too!  She has such an engaging, confident, radiant personality—she tells us about coming up in the program herself and now being a Case Manager for the girls.  She runs the Girls Group and she’s young enough to be kind of a big sister to them, and she genuinely loves them.

I talk about our Earth Activist Trainings and how we came to be involved in the Bayview.  One part of EAT’s mission statement is “To bring the knowledge and resources of regenerative ecological design to communities with the greatest needs and fewest resources.“   When a friend introduced me to Lena, and I heard her vision of the Bayview becoming the ‘green jewel in the crown of the Emerald City”, I knew we could support that work.  We talk about what has worked well in our collaboration—a strong, shared vision is the beginning.  Respecting the community—coming in with questions, listening rather than slapping down ready-made solutions, employing that permaculture principle of thoughtful and protracted observation—all that is key.  And most of all, something that has come clear to us through our late-night conversations as we’ve talked about the workshop, keeping the goal firmly on capacity building for the community, on transferring knowledge and skills even when sometimes that means sacrificing efficiency or immediate results.

Then we open it up to questions and discussion.  Aresh, who started Homes with Gardens in the Bronx is there and talks about some of the legal issues in New York and their efforts to defend community gardens.  Shea talks about some of the Detroit Summer gardens and offers to take us to see them.  A young woman who is organizing against mountain-top removal coal mining asks some thoughtful questions.  All and all—a great time!

The evening, like everything, is double-scheduled.  I catch some of the plenary, to hear Grace Boggs, an amazing organizer now in her nineties.  She and her husband, Jimmie Boggs, who is now dead, have been the center of much of the creative and transformative work here for decades.  She and other great organizers from Detroit talk about the movement history of the city.  The point they make, over and over again, is that Detroit is a strong center of resistance and resilience.  With all that’s happened to the city, Grace says, “we continue to come back with something new.”

I walk over to the Doubletree to meet up with Lena at the Green for All reception, hosted by Alli Starr and Ash who do great work in inner city Oakland.  I run into some other old friends—like Gerardo who took our social permaculture course a couple of years ago, and is running a program for inner-city Latino and black youth which mixes arts and rites of passage and cultural identity.  David Korten, the writer who has written A New Economic Agenda, The Great Turning, and When Corporations Rule the World.  He’s talking with a young man from Zimbabwe who is involved in democratic, sustainable development.

When we get chased out, finally, I end up back at the plenary sitting next to Jim Haber.  We decide to go out to the Anchor Bar to hear David Rovics and Anne Feeney, and walk out in the rain.  The bar is crowded and noisy, but I decide to have a beer—mostly out of fear that my bad ears, which make me want to avoid noise, and my tendency to fall asleep if I imbibe even the smallest amount of alcohol, together are turning me rapidly into an old fuddy-duddy who never does anything fun.  So, warding off fuddy-duddyness with beer in hand, we squeeze into the back room.  Up front a man with a guitar is singing a country-rock version of Solidarity Forever and everyone is standing and singing.  Someone grabs my hand and holds it up—Dave whom I met on the Gaza Freedom March.  We’re all singing together, the whole crowded room, crammed with old comrades I’ve marched with so many times and with so many people I’ve never met but who have nonetheless been marching together, whether we knew it or not.  We’re singing that old song that raises the ghosts of so many marches and strikes and struggles, and I’m happy.  “We will build a new world from the ashes of the old,” we sing, “Solidarity forever.”  I believe it.

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US Social Forum–We’re Here!

By STARHAWK | Published: JUNE 22, 2010

I flew into Detroit last night with two wonderful women from the Hunters Point Family agency that our Earth Activist Trainings partner with.  Lena Miller directs the agency and Jasmine Marshall runs the Peacekeeper program, working as a case manager for many of the girls who work in the gardens where I’ve volunteered.

We arrived—and attempted to reach our motel by the river—just at the moment Detroit’s Riverfest culminates in a massive fireworks display.  A million people go down to the river to watch—which made reaching out motel a challenge.  We finally had to abandon our taxi and walk the last block, with all our bags.  But we got there to find the streets humming with people, a party in progress in the parking lot, barbecues going on patches of grass by the sidewalks, and the sky alight with the thunder and a rain of light and color.

We got settled and headed out to find food.  I have to say it was a different experience for me, walking down the street in those crowds and crowds of people, mostly young, mostly black, all of them dressed to look good.  The whole city was drenched in heat haze and pheromones, and I enjoyed seeing it a bit through the eyes of much younger women who were looking pretty good themselves—and definitely attracting far more male attention than I ever do on my own these days.  Jasmine, who is twenty-three, was so excited!  “I can’t believe it—all these black people out on the streets, just chillin’, having a good time, and nobody shuttin’ it down!  Why can’t we have that in the Bayview?”  And it’s true—with all the economic devastation of Detroit, there are thousands of people out here enjoying themselves, wearing short shorts and gold platform shoes.  A trio of trumpeters in an empty lot blast out a riff.  A couple of trombone players across the street answer them—and they play back and forth, a musical conversation in the street.

Why can’t we have it in the Bayview?  There’s a long history, that goes back to the bulldozing of San Francisco’s Fillmore District back in the 60’s for redevelopment, destroying a thriving and lively Black community.  To the closing of the naval shipyard, once the big employer in the Bayview, and the resulting unemployment and poverty and the residues of toxic wastes.   And most immediately, to the intertwined gang violence and police violence.  More people die violently, per capita, in the Bayview than in Iraq, or so I’ve heard.  The infant mortality rate in the Bayview is on a par with Haiti or Bulgaria.

As I’m writing, Jasmine and Lena are gossiping and the conversation moves to all the young men they know who are dead.  Jasmine says, “My whole age group is gone.  All the boys I grew up with—they’re all gone.”  Dead, or in prison.

We spend a lazy morning, sleeping in, and finally make our way down to Cobo Hall, the big convention center that houses registration for the Forum.  The line to register stretches about a mile back.  We take turns waiting.  In line, I meet a man named Leonardo, from LA.  He turns out to know my buddy Lisa, who is part of our training collective Alliance of Community Trainers.  Lisa is slight and blonde and always charged with energy—after ten minutes of acquaintance, Lena calls her “A soldier of the movement.”  She’s biked down here and is holding a place for us.

Leonardo tells us how he’s organized his community in East L.A.  They’ve managed to get a whole progressive contingent elected in the neighboring town of  Maywood,    and they threw the whole police department out.  The cops were corrupt and abusive, harassing the Latino community, setting up checkpoints for cars and confiscating them from illegal immigrants.  So, they simply fired them all.  Every one.  Now they will create a police department—if only so the city can get insurance—but it will be under the direction of a civilian police commissioner, not a chief of police.

So, I’m already inspired by the time I get my registration armband.   Then I meet up with Bill Aal from Tools for Change—with whom I’ll be teaching the Earth Activist Training in Bellingham with a focus on social permaculture, and Carlos, from New York, who does popular education and is part of a men’s healing group.  We all go to lunch at the Avalon Bakery, a small bakery started by two women, Anne and Jackie, to bring a thriving business alive in one of the city’s dead zones.  Now it’s the anchor of a street of cafes and shops.

Then Bill, Carlos and I go on to the march, while Lena and Jasmine go back to rest up.  The march is quite wonderful—colorful, lively, not painfully loud, but mostly what’s wonderful is the incredible diversity of people.  The organizers of this event have really done it—they’ve brought together a truly diverse crowd.  As Lena puts it—“It’s not only every type of person, but every shade and variety of every type.”  Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, every race, age, style of dress and political persuasion seems represented.  There are environmentalists carrying sunflowers and a contingent of domestic workers in magic T-shirts.  There are a couple of anarchists with black flags and Revolutionary workers selling newspapers and big puppets of Martin Luther King with recordings of his speeches playing.  A brass band plays and four young people in pink T-shirts dance.  Two clowns walk by on stilts, and drummers play a samba beat.

The march is a beautiful vision of what a real social movement could be.  Ironically, we march through downtown Detroit, an area blasted and blighted by the city’s economic losses.   Vast areas are simply empty—full of weeds, with here and there a burned-out carcass of a house.  Beautiful stone churches, relics of a time when there was money and jobs, loom over vacant lots.  The old Detroit Free Press building, a dignified stone castle, is now boarded over with a sign offering free rents to any enterprise that would venture to locate there.  Faded signs grace the tattered marquis’ of boarded over department stores.  London had more signs of life after the blitz.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any enemy nation inflicting more damage on a city than has been done here by capitalism at its most irresponsible and brutal.

Through the devastation winds this lively and beautiful march, a sign of hope and resilience.  If there’s any hope for our poor country and our battered world, any chance we can turn our direction around toward real justice and balance, it lies in the people here, this beautiful coming together across all the divides.

Now we’re resting.  Maybe we’ll go out to a party tonight, maybe we won’t.  But I’m so glad to be here.

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Rep. John Conyers on single-payer healthcare 5/09

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More Wake Me Up in 2008

Closer and closer and it can't come too soon...

Media Reform Now!

The jury is in: the 4th Estate is critical to democracy.... I have to agree with Jon Stewart that we are screwed!
Here's to the CM (Corporate Mediaocracy)!!!!!

What's Happening

Click on link above to find the truth and then, get the truth out there!

Why Isn't This Story Being Covered?

New 5/1/05
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/outrage?pid=2350

In Common Dreams, Doug Ireland's article, "John McCain, Hypocrite" exposes so many of the delusions that we breathe while in our plastic bubbled BUSHWORLD. Take a look and think about our "free press" and how the 4th estate is letting us down when we need it the most...

Also, why are we not hearing anything about the doctored and delayed story of Saddam Hussein's capture reported by Rochester, NY's channel 13?

Wake Me Up in 2008!!

the emperor's new clothes... i feel that i will be stuck in this story forever!! surreal reality where hypocrisy, deception, and greed reign supreme... soothsayers are the enemy, plastic bubbles are the order of the day....