THANK GOODNESS THOMAS FREY IS ON TO TALK ABOUT THE FUTURE Because I need a break and I know you do too. He's on at 1, find him and his cool company and podcast here. He wants to talk about the pending collapse of the income tax system, which you can read here.
MICHELLE ZELLNER IS ON TO TALK HEART HEALTH Because it is Heart Health Month in February. She's got some alarming statistics and some suggestions on how to work on your heart health. Find Michelle and her upcoming classes by clicking here!
THIS AS STUDIES SHOW LONELINESS IS A KILLER FOR YOUR HEART Studies have shown that loneliness and isolation can be really tough on us physically, not just emotionally. Women especially are prone to heart issues after menopause and social isolation can make it much worse. Read about the connections here.
WANT TO EAT LESS? GET MORE SLEEP This new study tells me nothing I don't already know. Getting enough sleep is critical for so many areas, but when it comes to how much we eat it REALLY matters. I've experienced this in the past where I did not get enough sleep and then I'm starving the entire next day. I think it's your body trying to compensate with other energy sources and this new study kind of thinks the same thing.
A HEALTHY DIET CAN HELP MANAGE DEPRESSION And this article discusses how your gut microbiome can affect your brain and hormone regulation. Is it a coincidence that we, who mostly eat the Standard American Diet (SAD), have higher rates of depression than other nations who don't? I don't think anyone is saying that eating an apple is going to cure depression, but taking care of your body with good food and some exercise has been shown to have an impact similar to anti-depressants.
IT'S TRUE, DAWN COMSTOCK IS OUT And if I'd known how good she was at turning people into Republicans I would have kept her in office a lot longer. What am I talking about? This claptrap from Kyle Clark:
She was ROUNDLY criticized by both the Right and the Left. But she has magic powers to turn everyone into a Republican, I guess. Someone should hire her on the campaign trail to pull this magic trick. The very unpopular and dictatorial head of Jefferson County Public Health resigned yesterday after a closed door meeting.
WE MAY BE ABLE TO VOTE TO END THE TIME CHANGE MADNESS! I sure hope this bill being proposed makes it through the Colorado Legislature. A resolution would allow voters in Colorado to decide if they wanted to do away with the twice yearly time change and just stick to ONE time year round. The second part is to align Colorado with a similar bill at the Federal level that would keep us on Daylight Saving Time year round. I am FINE WITH EITHER TIME, JUST PICK ONE AND STICK TO IT. Read more here.
THE OSCAR NOMINEES ARE OUT And I haven't seen any of them so I present this without comment.
THESE ENHANCED MOVIES FROM 1920 ARE REALLY COOL
MY MEMORY ISN'T BAD, I'VE GOT LOUSY RECALL This article about how our memory works and more importantly why it doesn't work somehow made me feel better about my crap memory. It seems that memories are stored in a certain kind of cell called an engram cell. Those cells are activated when you recall a memory. When your brain loses the ability to kick those into gear, your memory fails. It's about how your brain rewires itself constantly so it's not overwhelmed with stuff, and mine has rewired itself in such a way that I can't remember crap.
COULD THE ORGASMATRON BE HAPPENING SOON? If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is a Woody Allen clip to bring you up to speed.
Elon Musk has a program called Neuralink that is allegedly going to allow us to have artificial intelligence worked seamlessly into our brains. Some say that this could create a scenario where we could flip a switch to activate our pleasure centers to give us the Big O. Go Elon, Go!
NEWSPAPERS WON'T CORRECT THE RECORD AND THAT IS A BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM Remember when the New York Times and Washington Post won Pulitzers for their coverage of the Russian Collusion scam? Remember how a whole bunch of what they reported was found to be completely, utterly wrong? They don't, but this column does. In it you can see the concerted effort to protect their biases from scrutiny, as if just ignoring how they lied to the American people makes it okay. It does not. It never does.
A MASSIVE NEW STUDY SHOWS JUST HOW EFFECTIVE THE VACCINE IS AT PREVENTING DEATH AND SERIOUS INJURY And when I say MASSIVE I mean 700,000 people massive. From the City Journal article:
The researchers report that none of the healthy people under 65 had a severe case of Covid that required treatment in an intensive-care unit. Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was minuscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died. In all, there were 36 deaths, mostly among a small minority of older people with a multitude of comorbidities: the 3 percent of the sample that had at least four risk factors. Among everyone else, a group that included elderly people with one or two chronic conditions, there were just eight deaths among more than 1.2 million people, so their risk of dying was about 1 in 150,000.
So why do people who are vaccinated THINK THEY ARE still in danger? Blame politics. Why do the unvaccinated refuse to accept that the virus is a much bigger risk for them than the vaccine? Blame politics. But the first group isn't dying, are they?
IF YOU'RE TRAVELLING THIS YEAR, JUST BUY THE DANG TRAVEL INSURANCE Dave sent me a great article on whether or not to buy travel insurance but it's paywalled so I found another article that works. I do not book a trip for more than a thousand dollars without booking travel insurance at this point in my life. Parents die, people get sick, and if you've dropped a bunch of money on a fabulous vacation you are foolish to not spend the extra money and get it. I've used it once when Chuck broke his leg right before a cruise and it saved us 5,000 bucks.
PAIRS FIGURE SKATING SHOWS IT'S BIGOTRY And The Babylon Bee is covering the scandal of this sport saying there are only two genders here.
ARE YOU WATCHING THE OLYMPICS? We are watching the HELL out of the Olympics in my house. So far I've watched Women's Freestyle Snowboarding, women's freestyle skiing, curling, luge, speed skating and last night I watched Nathan Chen CRUSH his short form to set a new record for score. You have to click here to watch it because NBC won't let me embed anything from the Games. Jerks.
SPEED GOLF SHOULD BE A THING I grew up on a golf course (hole #2 to be exact) and my friends and I would go out in the late afternoon and play golf JUST LIKE THIS. It was super fun and totally exhausting but now I want to do it again.