Drinking Matcha Tea Can Reduce Anxiety
Kumamoto University (Japan), December 24, 2021 Researchers at Kumamoto University in the Kyushu region of Japan studied green tea’s beneficial properties, specifically its ability to calm the mind. Published in the Journal of Functional Foods in 2019, the study examined the stress-reducing function of matcha green tea in animal experiments and clinical trials. The study honed in on the effects of L-theanine, a primary amino acid in green tea that has been shown to exhibit stress-reducing effects in mice and humans with high-trait anxiety. The amino acid L-arginine, also present in traditional green tea, has previously been shown to enhance stress-reducing effects of certain amino acids. Matcha tea, also called “fine powder tea,” has higher concentrations of theanine and arginine than traditional green tea preparations.
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Omega-3 supplementation associated with reduction in markers of senescence
Akershus University Hospital (Norway), December 27 2021. The November-December 2021 issue of Kidney Medicine reported the finding of a reduction in markers of cellular senescence among kidney transplant recipients who received supplemental omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) in comparison with a placebo. Accelerated cellular senescence has been associated with a decline in kidney transplant function.
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Self-Compassion Reduces Negative Mood Over Time
New research shows that accepting negative moods can reduce them. University of Toronto, Dec 22, 2021 New research headed by the University of Toronto looked at if the amount that people “accept” their negative emotions is associated with (a) better mental health and (b) reduced negative moods over time. By acceptance, these authors do not mean simply allowing and being okay with negative things happening to you or being mistreated, but rather, experiencing and thinking about your own negative emotions in a non-judgemental way. In one study of over 1,000 people, they found that accepting mental experiences was related to less anxiety and depression and to more life satisfaction. This was even when “controlling” for potentially related variables like cognitive re-appraisal (re-thinking something to make it more positive/less negative) and rumination. This means, basically, that the effect persisted even when those other variables were accounted for.
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Researchers identify how red meat increases cardiovascular disease risk
Cleveland Clinic, December 23, 2021 A Cleveland Clinic-led study has revealed new insights into how a diet rich in red meat increases risk for cardiovascular disease. The findings were published in Nature Microbiology. The latest findings offer a more comprehensive understanding of the two-step process by which gut microbes convert the nutrient carnitine into TMAO, an atherosclerosis- and blood clot-promoting molecule, following the ingestion of a red meat-rich diet. “These new studies identify the gut microbial gene cluster responsible for the second step of the process that links a red meat-rich diet to elevated cardiac disease risks,” said Dr. Hazen, who directs the Cleveland Clinic Center for Microbiome & Human Health.
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Try exercise to improve memory, thinking
Mayo Clinic, December 27, 2021 A new guideline for medical practitioners says they should recommend twice-weekly exercise to people with mild cognitive impairment to improve memory and thinking. “Regular physical exercise has long been shown to have heart health benefits, and now we can say exercise also may help improve memory for people with mild cognitive impairment,” says Ronald Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., lead author, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Mayo Clinic. Dr. Petersen encourages people to do aerobic exercise: Walk briskly, jog, whatever you like to do, for 150 minutes a week—30 minutes, five times or 50 minutes, three times. The level of exertion should be enough to work up a bit of a sweat but doesn’t need to be so rigorous that you can’t hold a conversation. “Exercising might slow down the rate at which you would progress from mild cognitive impairment to dementia,” he says.
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New evidence shows the importance of healthy lifestyle programs in pregnancy
Monash University (Australia), December 22, 2021 Healthy lifestyle programs in pregnancy support mums to achieve healthier pregnancies and improve health outcomes Monash University research shows. The systematic review incorporated 34,546 pregnancies and highlighted that supporting mums-to-be with a structured, healthy lifestyle program that provides structured, evidence-based health information, advice and guidance from professionals about healthy eating and physical activity during this priority life stage, helps achieve a healthier pregnancy and significantly improves pregnancy complications.
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Video – Melissa Ciummei – North Ireland investor and economic researcher
The pandemic is about the Great Reset. People have this idea that ‘that’s my money in the bank’, it’s not.
10 minutes
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Video – Anna de Buisseret – Former British army officer and senior UK attorney
Experimental Injections. “Biggest Crimes Against Humanity Ever Committed.”
Video – Dr Scott Jensen Sounds Alarm on New Medical Surveillance Regime
VIDEO Russian Roulette “Vaccines” Classified by the FDA: “Gene Transfer Technologies”
Safety and Tolerability of Hydroxychloroquine in healthcare workers and first responders for the prevention of COVID-19: WHIP COVID-19 Study
ABSTRACT Healthcare workers (HCW) are among the highest risk groups for acquisition of COVID-19 due to occupational exposures. The WHIP COVID-19 study aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as chemoprophylaxis for SARS-CoV-2 infection in this population. HCW, first responders and other occupationally high-risk participants were enrolled in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical study of HCQ from April-October 2020. The trial compared daily versus weekly HCQ to placebo and to a prospective cohort on HCQ for autoimmune diseases. Participants were followed for 8 weeks. Serology or a positive PCR test were used to determine laboratory confirmed clinical cases. Conclusions This randomized placebo-controlled trial was able to demonstrate the safety of HCQ outpatient chemoprophylaxis in high-risk groups against COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine chemoprophylaxis is safe in high-risk populations for COVID-19 No increased cardiovascular risks with hydroxychloroquine chemoprophylaxis• Adverse events were similar between placebo and hydroxychloroquine treatment a
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Study of fully vaccinated patients with cancer who had breakthrough COVID-19 shows 13% mortality rate
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, December 24, 2021 The first study to evaluate the clinical characteristics and outcomes of fully vaccinated patients with cancer who had breakthrough COVID-19 infections indicates they remained at high risk for hospitalization and death. The study, published Dec. 24 in Annals of Oncology showed that fully vaccinated patients who experienced breakthrough infections had a hospitalization rate of 65%, an ICU or mechanical ventilation rate of 19%, and a 13% death rate. The study was conducted by the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19), a group of 129 research centers that has been tracking the impact of COVID-19 on patients with cancer since the beginning of the pandemic. “Patients with cancer who develop breakthrough COVID-19 even following full vaccination can still experience severe outcomes, including death,” said Toni Choueiri, MD, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a senior author on the report.
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Tweet by Max Blumenthal on Twitter
49-year-old NY Times editor Carlos Tejada died of a heart attack 24 hours after a Moderna mix-and-match booster. Instead of investigating and seeking justice, NYT omits this fact in his obit, the media looks the other way & his colleagues ignore it.
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Elon Musk and all that was wrong with 2021
Time magazine picked a billionaire unconcerned with human misery as ‘Person of the Year’. This is quite befitting. Belen Fernandez, AL-JAZEERA, December 27, 2021 Time magazine recently chose Elon Musk – the “richest private citizen in history” and the CEO of rocket firm SpaceX and electric vehicle company Tesla – as its “2021 Person of the Year”. In the first paragraph of the lengthy profile of Musk accompanying the accolade, we learn that the man “tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun”, sends the stock market soaring and swooning with a “flick of his finger”, and also “likes to live-tweet his poops”. The second paragraph of the profile is devoted to further exploring this last theme: “‘Just dropping some friends off at the pool’, the 50-year-old zillionaire informed his 66 million Twitter followers on the evening of Nov. 29, having previously advised that at least half his tweets were ‘made on a porcelain throne’”. Might it not be more charming, then, to select a Person of the Year who is actually concerned with alleviating human misery – as opposed to someone chasing a dystopian vision of an exclusive future universe run by and for Elon Musk? Granted, this is the same magazine that named Adolf Hitler “Man of the Year” in 1938. Capitalism, of course, is fundamentally anti-human – as, it seems, is Musk, whose own brother and business partner Kimbal acknowledges in the Time profile that Elon’s “gift is not empathy with people”. Case in point: in October, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay almost $137m to a Black ex-employee who, as the Washington Post notes, claimed workers were subjected to “a scene ‘straight from the Jim Crow era’”, characterised by rampant racist abuse and supervisors who refused to address the issue. Then in December, six women filed separate suits against Tesla for alleged sexual harassment in the workplace – with many of them contending that Musk’s own frequent lewd behaviour on Twitter only encouraged sexual taunts and other abuse in a male-dominated work environment. Add to this Musk’s willful endangerment of employees’ lives during the pandemic and other violations of labour laws – including his underhanded machinations and threats against workers wishing to unionise – and one begins to worry about how that whole Mars idea will pan out.
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The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity
Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable — maybe heroic — and must not cease.
Peter Maass The Intercept, December 26, 2021 MY EDUCATION IN wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000. How does America react when it kills civilians? Just last week, we learned that the U.S. military decided that nobody will be held responsible for the August 29 drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. After an internal review, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin chose to take no action, not even a wrist slap for a single intelligence analyst, drone operator, mission commander, or general. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby bizarrely said, “We acknowledge that there were procedural breakdowns” but that “it doesn’t necessarily indicate that an individual or individuals have to be held to account.” There has been quite a lot of savagery-adjacent news to absorb this month. The New York Times just published a two-part series by Azmat Khan, based on military documents, revealing that U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians but that the Pentagon has done almost nothing to discern how many were harmed or what went wrong and might be corrected. As Khan noted, “It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use.” Savagery consists of more than the act of killing. It also involves a system of impunity that makes clear to the perpetrators that what they are doing is acceptable, necessary — maybe even heroic — and must not cease. To this end, the United States has developed a machinery of impunity that is arguably the most advanced in the world, implicating not only a broad swathe of military personnel but also the entirety of American society. Impunity tends to begin at the top. No American general has been disciplined for overseeing the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor for lying to Congress about these disasters. The opposite has occurred: Stars have usually been added to their shoulders, and when they retire from the military, they tend to march into well-paid positions as board members in the weapons industry or elsewhere (even though they are not strapped for resources, thanks to pensions that can reach $250,000 a year). The reputation-protection racket is so galling that an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq wrote a now-famous article in 2007 that noted: “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” We should not be surprised. We are a society that excels in elite unaccountability. Just look at the number of bank CEOs who faced criminal charges after the 2008 financial collapse (zero), or the number of Sackler family members who were criminally charged after their company, Purdue Pharma, started the opioid epidemic with OxyContin (also zero), or the number of billionaires who avoid paying income taxes (lots of them). And let’s not forget the politicians and pundits who goaded America into an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and suffered no consequences. It’s not clear who takes their cues from whom, but it is obvious that all of these elites benefit from the con. Military impunity is somewhat unique because it stretches downward, too. If an intelligence analyst or drone operator or fighter pilot follows orders and procedures for an airstrike that kills dozens of civilians in a wedding party — which has happened — they need to be excused of wrongdoing. After all, who gave the orders, and who set the procedures? These questions would require looking up the chain of command, and for that reason, they are not asked with any intention of finding the answers. That’s why it was with no sense of alarm that secret military documents published by The Intercept in 2015 noted that in a two-year campaign called Operation Haymaker, 9 of 10 Afghans killed in U.S. drone strikes were not the intended targets. For the U.S., this was the acceptable cost of doing business. The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous pursuit of soldiers for other offenses. Unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the financial industry, or the IRS, which oversees taxpayers, or the Senate and House ethics committees, which keep an eye on members of Congress, the U.S. military has wide authority and deep resources to impose an array of penalties, from pay reductions to loss of rank and death sentences. The military avidly uses these powers, too. In 2020 alone, there were more than 37,000 cases of discipline in the armed forces, and since 2001, there have been more than 1.3 million cases. Yet these powers have been used sparingly or not at all when it comes to airstrikes that kill civilians. One of the worst massacres in two decades of warfare occurred not long ago, on March 18, 2019, when U.S. warplanes dropped bombs that killed scores of civilians, mostly women and children, in an Islamic State enclave in Syria. The carnage was immediately apparent. As the Times reported last month, an analyst who watched the attack on a drone video typed into a secure chat system, “Who dropped that?” Another analyst wrote, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” A quick battle assessment settled on 70 people killed. A legal officer flagged it as a possible war crime that warranted an investigation, the Times noted, “but at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.” The Pentagon’s inspector general looked into what happened, but even its report was “stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.” An evaluator who worked on the inspector general’s report, Gene Tate, was forced out of his job after complaining about the lack of progress and honesty. Tate told the Times: “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.” I could go on for thousands of words describing other airstrikes that killed civilians and resulted in no discipline or slight reprimands that were issued only after embarrassing reports from news organizations and human rights groups. For instance, there was a 2015 airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 patients and staffers; the military’s reluctant discipline included counseling and retraining for some of the personnel involved. The point is this: A military establishment that has enthusiastically enforced requirements for things as petty as wearing a reflector belt while jogging has consistently failed to discipline soldiers for wrongful bombings that its own battle assessments acknowledge have killed civilians. The machinery of impunity actually has two missions: The most obvious is to excuse people who should not be excused. The other is to punish those who try to expose the machine, because it does not function well in daylight. That’s why Daniel Hale, an Air Force veteran whom the government accused of leaking those classified drone documents to The Intercept, was sentenced under the Espionage Act to nearly four years in prison. It is not the act of killing civilians that will result in definite and heavy punishment, but exposing the act of killing. Undoing Impunity In 1992, I interviewed a Muslim girl in Bosnia who had been raped. “The Višegrad warlord took a fancy to her,” I later wrote, “and one night dragged her and her younger sister away from their mother, who of course was crying hysterically and holding onto the legs of the warlord, who kicked her away and shouted, ‘I am the law.’” The warlord’s name was Milan Lukić, and he was one of the most evil men in a war that had a surplus of them. He killed women and children with particular ruthlessness, one time setting fire to a house in which 59 civilians were sheltering; they all perished. But Lukić was saying one honest thing when he kidnapped the sisters: He was the law. His paramilitary thugs had a monopoly on violence in Višegrad and the full support of Serb political and military authorities. At the time, I didn’t imagine that their crimes would catch up with any of them. My interest right now is in the durability of these machines of impunity, not the comparative depravity of the crimes they protect (what happened in Bosnia was genocide). It seems ridiculous to think that the U.S. military’s cover-ups will be undone. The Pentagon is now getting even more support from the country in a form that is easy to measure and crucial to sustaining its clout: funding. Congress has just passed a military budget of $768 billion, which is more than was allocated in 2020, even though U.S. troops withdrew this year, in a humiliating fashion, from their forever war in Afghanistan. Despite what has happened, America’s elected representatives are not loosening their protective embrace of the Pentagon. Yet the impunity that seemed eternal in Bosnia turned out to be short-lived, at least for the elites of criminality. Lukić is now in prison with a life sentence, thanks to his conviction at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity. Key wartime leaders were extradited to the Hague too. Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia, died of a heart attack before his trial concluded, but Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military leaders of Bosnia’s Serbs, were convicted of genocide. America in 2021 is not Serbia in 1995. Our machinery of impunity is not susceptible to pressure from larger nations. But the journalists, whistleblowers, and researchers who have done the hard work of exposing its lies — they are still at work. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more these people uncover, the harder they toil. I wouldn’t bet against them.