Our media culture is locked in the Perpetual Now, constantly chasing ephemeral scoops that last only seconds and that most often don’t matter in the first place, even for the brief moment that they’re “exclusive.”

“We are in great haste,” wrote Thoreau in 1854, “to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

And today, we are in great haste to celebrate something going viral, but seem completely unconcerned whether the thing that went viral added one iota of anything good — including just simple amusement — to our lives.

So the question remains: as we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated?
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I like that you don’t let that be your reason for a story. I never miss your blog.

Jacoba

The effort paid off because Mitt Romney won all 18 delegates. I heard it wasn’t that difficult because Santorum was so dumb he knew nothing about the issues facing Guam.

Hafa adai

Anna

Even “Healthy” Whole Wheat Is Linked to Heart Disease, Arthritis and Dementia

What could be more wholesome than whole-wheat bread? For decades, nutritionists and public health experts have almost begged Americans to eat more whole wheat and other grains.

It’s bad advice.

Most of us know that white bread is bad for us, but even whole-wheat bread is bad, too.

In fact, on the Glycemic Index (GI), which compares the blood sugar effects of carbohydrates, both white bread and whole-wheat bread increase blood glucose more than pure sugar.

Aside from some extra fiber, eating two slices of whole-wheat bread is little different from eating a sugary candy bar.

What’s particularly troubling is that a high-wheat diet has been linked to obesity, digestive diseases, arthritis, diabetes, dementia and heart disease.

Example: When researchers from the Mayo Clinic and University of Iowa put 215 patients on a wheat-free diet, the obese patients lost an average of nearly 30 pounds in just six months.

The patients in the study had celiac disease (a form of wheat sensitivity), but I have seen similar results in nearly everyone who is obese and gives up wheat.

NEW DANGERS FROM A NEW GRAIN

How can a supposedly healthy grain be so bad for you?

Because the whole wheat that we eat today has little in common with the truly natural grain. Decades of selective breeding and hybridization by the food industry to increase yield and confer certain baking and aesthetic characteristics on flour have created new proteins in wheat that the human body isn’t designed to handle.

The gluten protein in modern wheat is different in structure from the gluten in older forms of wheat.

In fact, the structure of modern gluten is something that humans have never before experienced in their 10,000 years of consuming wheat.

Modern wheat also is high in amylopectin A, a carbohydrate that is converted to glucose faster than just about any other carbohydrate.

I have found it to be a potent appetite stimulant because the rapid rise and fall in blood sugar causes nearly constant feelings of hunger.

The gliadin in wheat, another protein, also stimulates the appetite.

When people quit eating wheat and are no longer exposed to gliadin and amylopectin A, they typically consume about 400 fewer calories a day.

NOT JUST CELIAC DISEASE

Celiac disease, also known as celiac sprue, is an intense form of wheat sensitivity that damages the small intestine and can lead to chronic diarrhea and cramping, along with impaired absorption of nutrients.

But wheat has been linked to dozens of other chronic diseases, including lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It also has been linked to…Insulin resistance and diabetes.

It’s not a coincidence that the diabetes epidemic (nearly 26 million Americans have it) parallels the increasing consumption of modern wheat (an average of 134 pounds per person per year) in the US.

The surge in blood sugar and insulin that occurs when you eat any kind of wheat eventually causes an increase in visceral (internal) fat.

This fat makes the body more resistant to insulin and increases the risk for diabetes.

Weaker bones. A wheat-rich diet shifts the body’s chemistry to an acidic (low-pH) state. This condition, known as acidosis, leaches calcium from the bones.

Grains—and particularly wheat—account for 38% of the average American’s “acid load.” This probably is the reason that osteoporosis is virtually universal in older adults.

More heart disease. A diet high in carbohydrates causes an increase in small LDL particles, the type of cholesterol that is most likely to lead to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases.

Studies at University of California, Berkeley, found that the concentration of these particles increases dramatically with a high-wheat diet.

The increase in small-particle LDL, combined with diabetes and visceral fat, increases the risk for heart disease.

A WHEAT-FREE LIFE

People who crave wheat actually are experiencing an addiction. When the gluten in wheat is digested, it releases molecules known as exorphins, morphinelike compounds that produce mild euphoria.

About one-third of people who give up wheat will experience some withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, moodiness and insomnia.

My advice…Go cold turkey.

It’s the most effective way to break the addiction to wheat. The withdrawal symptoms rarely last more than one week.

If you’re really suffering, you might want to taper off. Give up wheat at breakfast for a week, and then at breakfast and lunch for another week. Then give it up altogether.

Beware of gluten-free products.

People who give up wheat often are tempted to satisfy their craving by buying gluten-free bread or pasta. Don’t do it.

The manufacturers use substitutes such as brown rice, rice bran, rice starch, corn starch and tapioca starch, which also increase blood glucose and cause insulin surges. Even oatmeal can cause blood sugar to skyrocket.

Switch grains.

Small supermarkets now stock quite a few nonwheat grains, such as millet, quinoa, buckwheat and amaranth.

They’re easy to cook, and they taste good—and they don’t have the gluten and other wheat proteins that trigger weight gain, inflammation and insulin resistance.

Helpful: If you aren’t willing to give up wheat altogether, you can substitute an older form of wheat, such as spelt or kamut.

These grains haven’t undergone all of the genetic modifications, so they’re somewhat better for you than modern wheat.

Any form of wheat can be a problem, however.

You’ll want to limit yourself to small servings—say, a few ounces once or twice a week.

Get plenty of protein.

Protein satisfies the appetite more effectively than carbohydrates. Eat eggs for breakfast and chicken salad for lunch.

For dinner, you can have fish or even steak.

New finding: New research has shown that people who eat a reasonable amount of saturated fat in, say, red meat (about 10% or a little more of your total fat calories) have a reduction in small LDL particles, as well as an increase in protective HDL cholesterol.

Source: William Davis, MD, a preventive cardiologist and medical director of Track Your Plaque, an international heart disease prevention program.

Based in Fox Point, Wisconsin, he is author of Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health (Rodale). http://www.WheatBellyBlog.com

While Rush said just yesterday that everything “is cool” with this business side of the show — never you mind about those dozens of advertisers who have left — there were 5 minutes of dead air on the show Thursday. And no, not intellectually dead, we’re talking stone cold silence. You know, in a place on the program where advertisements might appear. As one tally had it, 77 of the 86 ads that ran on El Rushbo’s show today were free ads, sponsored by the Ad Council.

Also, The Atlantic is reporting that somehow portions of the show’s transcripts where Rush talked about expecting Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke to produce sex tapes …have been scrubbed from Rushlimbaugh.com. Yes, allegedly history is being re-written/whitewashed.

Oh, but here in the digital age bad commentary/actions/nude photos never go away. Here’s what Rush said and is no longer in the transcripts:

“So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.”

And we can all watch that, even if we can’t read it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CYxxps6tgSQ#!

The United States may be a republic, but it’s democracy that Americans cherish. After all, that’s why we got into Iraq, right? To take out a dictator and spread democracy.

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” “One person, one vote.” We are an egalitarian society that treasures the mandate of its citizenry.

But more than a decade’s worth research suggests that the citizenry is too dumb to pick the best leaders.
incompetence study

They know what’s best for the country.

Work by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and then-colleague Justin Kruger found that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas,” according to a report by Life’s Little Mysteries on the blog LiveScience.

“Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

What’s worse is that with incompetence comes the illusion of superiority.

Let’s say a politician comes up with an ingenious plan that would ensure universal health care while decreasing health care costs.

According to Dunning-Kruger, no matter how much information is provided, the unsophisticated would 1) be incapable of recognizing the wisdom of such a plan; 2) assume they know better; and 3) have no idea of the extent of their inadequacy.

In other words, stupid people are too stupid to know how stupid they are.

If this seems elitist to you, you are probably not alone. Maybe we should only let Ph.D.’s, Mensa members and Jeopardy! champions vote? At least require a passing an IQ test before you get to cast a ballot?

The scientists do say that the incompetent can be trained to improve, but only if they acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, which would seem to be a catch-22 since they are too ignorant to do so on their own.

Life’s Little Mysteries said that Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, ran a computer simulation of a democratic election based on Dunning and Kruger’s theories:

“In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters’ own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.”

It would appear then that democracy dooms us to mediocrity and misinformed choices. Not exactly encouraging news for the next round of California’s ballot initiatives.