Are you getting on in years and have a few pounds you need to lose? Does your doctor bug you about the ol’ spare tire, that seems to have come out of nowhere? –Well maybe you shouldn’t worry so much.

According to a study done by the University of Western Australia and published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, being a little overweight may actually extend your life.

The university team tracked the number of deaths over 10 years among volunteers who were aged 70 – 75 at the start of the study.

It found that those with a BMI which classed them as overweight, but not obese, not only had the lowest overall risk of dying, they also had the lowest risk of dying from specific diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer and chronic respiratory disease.

The study also showed that being seriously under weight did as much to shorten a person’s life as being obese.

The long and the short of the study is:
As long as you aren’t too overweight, and you get enough exercise, your can outlive that annoying person with the perfect figure who keeps telling you that they can eat anything they want and never gain an ounce.

Live long, prosper and enjoy that bagel with real cream cheese.

Click for larger image.

www.justicewithpeace.org/

Johnson & Johnson has expanded their recall of over-the-counter drugs. That makes the second recall in less than a month.

The list now includes certain batches of regular and extra-strength Tylenol, children’s Tylenol, eight-hour Tylenol, Tylenol arthritis, Tylenol PM, children’s Motrin, Motrin IB, Benadryl Rolaids, Simply Sleep, and St. Joseph’s aspirin.

Caplet and geltab products sold in the Americas, the United Arab Emirates, and Fiji were also recalled.

The recall is because of a moldy smell that has reportedly made a handful of customers ill.

Johnson & Johnson says the smell originated in a plant in Puerto Rico and that cause of the problem was a chemical used in the treatment of wooden shipping pallets.

The company has stopped using these contaminated pallets and has asked their suppliers to do the same.

Johnson & Johnson has asked these other companies to stop. Not refused to accept anything shipped on these pallets. Proving that the bottom line with anything Johnson & Johnson -or any other big company- does is their bottom line.

The PR damage is important, but the 70 customers affected is such a minute number that losing them and paying to settle the inevitable lawsuit won’t even appear in their annual report to the stockholders.

Meanwhile the FDA has criticized the Johnson & Johnson for a slow investigation, saying the company has known about this problem since 2008.

This statement from the company tells what it takes to get them to do something: “McNeil Consumer Healthcare has received an FDA form 483 dated Jan. 8, 2010, and is actively working with the FDA to address their concerns.”

For more on the recall click here.

The British Government thinks they can pay for bringing fast internet to rural GB by putting a yearly tax on fixed phone lines.

BBC online:
The government’s controversial broadband tax has been given the green light by chancellor Alistair Darling in his pre-Budget report.

The £6-a-year levy will be imposed on all households with a fixed line phone.

The money made will be put into a fund to ensure rural areas of the UK do not miss out on super-fast broadband services.

The money is earmarked for the 30% of homes that experts think will be by-passed by commercial fast broadband plans.

It is estimated that the broadband tax would raise about £170m a year, which is a wee bit short of the estimate of £5bn needed to provide super-fast fibre services to every UK home.

Currently BT is committed to rolling out next-generation broadband to about 40% of the UK with Virgin Media offering speeds of up to 50Mbps to about half of UK homes.

The tax wont pay the bills, but they can always raise it after the elections, and the advertised speed of the fibre is mostly advertising hype.

Anyone who’s ever dealt with internet service providers knows that the rates will always go up, and the maximum advertised speed has very little to do with what real people get, or for that matter, can afford.

Here in Las Vegas, Cox offers a maximum speed of 50Mbps down/5Mbps up, with up to 55Mbps “burst” using PowerBoost®, but the cost is currently $119.00 per month. You need to be a hardcore gamer or a downloader of very large files to justify the cost.

Fortunately, the actual speed of high-speed internet doesn’t really matter to someone like me who doesn’t play games or download large files.

Even 3 Mbps beats the hell out of dialup with it’s 56k advertised speed and it’s less than 50k real life speed.

President Obama said that the intelligence had “failed to connect the dots” in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The man who “allegedly” tried to blow-up the Northwest flight Christmas day.

“Failed to connect the dots” my ass, with the amount of intel being collected the dots are so close together that the page is black.

What happened, and will continue to happen, is the bureaucrats will shuffle papers, the intelligence people will write reports saying what their supervisor, who’s final report will be geared to please the politicians, wants them to say, the politicians will make speeches and the people on the ground will continue to be automatons. Shuffling bureaucracies and area of responsibility won’t change anything.

The problem is amazingly simple: There was a report floating around that al-Queda was planning an attack on the US during the holidays and a Nigerian was involved. This man’s father went to the US Embassy and told them his son was radicalized with ties to al-Queda and had talked of “sacrificing himself.”. Some mid-level bureaucrat at the embassy dutifully wrote it all down and sent this information on up the food chain where Abdulmutallab was put on a generic terrorist list along with a half a million other names.

As I understand it, this man boarded an international flight in Amsterdam without any luggage. –Who the hell flies across the Atlantic with nothing but a passport and a pair of loaded underwear? Wouldn’t that make you stop and wonder, just a little?

Back in 2007 they deployed full body scanners in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. They also have iris scanners and all kinds of other security. –All of which failed.

The equipment didn’t fail. those people who’s job it is to be on the front lines failed.

The man at the embassy in Nigeria that handled the case either wasn’t informed or more likely did it all on autopilot. –Maybe there are so many extremists with ties to al-Queda wanting to sacrifice themselves in Nigeria that this didn’t raise any alarms, or perhaps this is a common way for parents to get embassy personnel to help them find wayward children. –My bet is that he’s just putting in his time.

In the airport they process so many passengers that everything is done automatically. Nobody thinks. They just stand around waiting for something they can see. Like maybe a Browning 50 cal. tucked into somebody’s carry-on bag.

We don’t need more intelligence gathering, we need more common sense.

Back in the day when this airport insanity first started and you couldn’t bring liquids on board because they might be explosive, I watch as security tossed bottle after bottle in trash cans right behind them.

I don’t know about you, but if I think something is going to explod,e I am not about to toss it anywhere near me. Neither are those security personnel who were collecting anything liquid. They were simply going through the motions. They knew none of it was likely to do anything worse than possibly stain someone’s clothes. But the rules are the rules, and somebody in charge, who also had no clue, told them to do it

The system is broken and it has so little to do with intelligence that to say the dots weren’t connected is laughable.

It’s the TSA hiring hundreds of people and putting them to work without the proper training for the job they’re being asked to do.

It’s the bureaucrats protecting their turf.

It’s a dog and pony show as opposed to real change.

It’s an intelligence Czar who can’t get the CIA, NSA or FBI to share data.

It’s disparate computer systems. –Even within the individual agencies.

But mostly it’s the people on the ground failing to do their jobs.

If the guy at the embassy had said “hey I think we may have something here” instead of filling out forms.

If the people farther up the food chain had done anything other that file the report and put his name on a generic list.

If the airline had required something less than a history of blowing himself up to put his name on a cautionary list.

And most importantly, if the airport screeners had used that fancy equipment or had paused long enough to think that a man with no luggage might warrant a second look.

–We wouldn’t have had to rely on a failed detonator and fast thinking passengers to save lives..

The owner of Sheri’s Cabaret, 2580 S. Highland Drive, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last month and has proposed to reorganize by temporarily lowering its mortgage payments to two banks.

Sheri’s generates $20,000 to $26,000 per week in gross income and that it has 17 employees.

The dancers are independent contractors, who pay the club to work there, so are not counted among the employees, or as part of the club’s operating expenses, but do contribute to the company’s gross income.

A long time ago when Downtown Las Vegas started dying in a major way, and the city was making all that noise about how Neonopolis was going to make everything better, a man that ran the topless joint put the problem in simple terms. He said that “if tits and beer won’t bring them in, nothing will.”

Now we have an abundance of take-em-off joints, a shortage of tourists and the unemployment rate is officially almost 13%. (If I recall correctly this number only counts people receiving unemployment)

The tourists who are left go primarily to the big joints and the strip club’s bread and butter, the blue collar worker with his freshly cashed paycheck, is gone for the time being.

Las Vegas lives off discretionary funds. People have to have extra money or credit to come here. Now more and more the money is spent on frivolous things like food or rent, and their credit cards are maxed with no more automatic increases in their credit line.

For what it’s worth:
I don’t know about the thousands of warm bodies CES is supposed to bring to town, but the big complaint about COMDEX was that the guys never left the convention, and when they did they were not only cheap, they were lousy tippers. So they while may have helped the hotel’s bottom line and made the politicians happy, but they never did much for the working stiffs. –I suspect this will be true for CES as well.
(The AVN on the other hand should help the strip clubs and the outcall dancers.)

The Pope and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were on the same stage in front of a huge crowd.

The Pope turned to Pelosi and said, “Did you know that with just one little wave of my hand I can make every person in the crowd go crazy with joy? This joy will not be a momentary display like that of your subjects, but will go deep into their hearts, and they will forever speak of this day and rejoice.”

Pelosi says, “One little wave of your hand, and all people will rejoice forever? Prove it.” —-So the Pope slapped her.

—Goldman Sachs’ profits for the period were $3.19bn, a four-fold increase from the same period in 2008.—

They profited from the bailout not just from the money they were given but from the AIG money and mostly from friends in the right places.

By Michelle Fleury, BBC business reporter, New York

Goldman Sachs is the firm everyone loves to hate. There is a lot of anger towards the firm that took government money during the financial crisis and is now making so much cash.

Capturing the mood, a Rolling Stone magazine article published in June described Goldman as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”.

The news that the bank has more set aside for pay and bonuses in nine months than in the whole of last year will only fuel that anger. The compensation pot is on track to hit $23bn.

With bonuses overshadowing performance, the challenge for Goldman is fixing its image.

From Rolling Stone Magazine – The Great American Bubble Machine:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

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“They did not receive just $10bn in government money – they received quite a bit more than that. $10 billion is the amount that they got under the Tarp program.

“Goldman Sachs was the recipient of tens of billions of dollars more; a lot of that came through the bailout of AIG [a US bank] and a great deal of cheap government money that they were able to borrow through a variety of programmes by the US Federal Reserve.

“These programs allowed Goldman to borrow money for almost nothing. If you are just an ordinary person in the United States, you will notice that your money is not getting cheaper to borrow. All these banks are basically borrowing money for free from the US government, and lending it out to us at market rates.”

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But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, called old friends when they were planning the bail out. Three guesses who they were.

The interest the banks pay on savings is effectively zilch, but the interest we pay on our debt is skyrocketing.

Read the Rolling Stone article to better understand how the little guy is and is always going been screwed by the elite.

—It’s good to be the king, but it’s just as good to have him on speed dial.—

The headline from CNET: “Feds: Top e-tailers profit from billion-dollar Web scam”

Words like “scam,” “fraud,” and “arrest” filled the air during a Senate hearing on Tuesday that focused on the controversial marketing companies that allegedly dupe consumers into paying monthly fees to join online loyalty programs.

Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion generated more than $1.4 billion by “misleading” Web shoppers, said members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which called the hearing. Lawmakers saved their harshest rebuke for Web retailers that accepted big money–a combined sum of $792 million–to share their customers’ credit-card information with the marketers.

When you do business with an online retailer there is a privacy policy somewhere on the site. –”Privacy Policy,” makes you feel safe doesn’t it?

Well if you can wade through the legalese you will find that they can share your data with other under terms that allow your credit card data to be shared with affiliates. –Which is to say: pretty much anyone they damn well please.

There is money to be made tricking people into signing up for these so called “loyalty programs.” Billions are made by the company running the con, but millions are made by the retailers you should be able to trust by selling your credit card data. This outright scam is legal under both the law and the company’s tos.

Now the senate is holding hearing and the scam artists are telling the committee that they will use something besides you email address to sign up.

The problem with this scenario is that the retailer can sell credit card data to scammers and not only not violate any laws but to make a serious profit all the while knowing that the source of the information is unlikely to ever be reveled to the consumer.

No matter how careful you are to protect yourself from identity theft, the bad guys can buy all your data from the company where you purchased the latest Harry Potter book.

Some of the retailers that partnered with Affinion, Webloyalty, or Vertrue.
Travelocity
US Airways
Barnes and Noble
FTD
Victoria’s Secret
Pizza Hut

And the list of companies who have no qualms about helping rip you off goes on practically forever.

I will no longer be doing business with Barnes and Noble. –It’s a shame that they won’t even notice I’m gone.

Read the CNET article all the way to the bottom. There you will find an image listing the companies that have sold you out.

“What’s happening is many online merchants have decided to betray their customers’ trust.”
–Sen. John Rockefeller

China is so afraid of the internet that they have announced a plan to register all domain names. Those that aren’t registered will presumably not be accessible to Chinese web surfers.

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has issued new Internet regulations, including what appears to be an effort to create a “whitelist” of approved websites that could potentially place much of the Internet off-limits to Chinese readers.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ordered domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten control over domain name registration, in a three-phase plan laid out on its website (www.miit.gov.cn) late on Sunday.

“Domain names that have not registered will not be resolved or transferred,” MIIT said, in an action plan to “further deepen” an ongoing anti-pornography campaign that has resulted in significant tightening of Chinese Internet controls.

They claim this is to control pornography, but regardless of the “official” reason, anyone who is even slightly aware of the behavior of the mainland Chinese government, knows that they want absolute control of what the Chinese people see, hear, or say.
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Iran has tried in vain to control access to the internet so they can control what the people hear, see, or say.

Two days ahead of a new round of planned protests against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Internet access in the nation’s capital is largely down, according to Agence France Presse.

Sources close to Iran’s technical services told AFP the cut was the result of “a decision by the authorities” rather than a technical breakdown, but telecommunications ministry officials were unavailable for comment.

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Russia has also tried to control the internet.
In January of 2000 then acting President Vladimir Putin put a law into effect that grants eight different security authorities direct access to all Internet transactions. Beside the domestic secret service FSB, other agencies given access to Internet monitoring include the tax police; the Interior Ministry; the border guard; the customs committee; the security agencies of the Kremlin, the president and parliament, as well as the foreign intelligence agency.

Now Russia wants to allow the use of Cyrillic for Web addresses. This seems fair enough but many people are so afraid of the Russian government and the FSB in particular they think that the push for Cyrillic amounts to a plot by the security services to restrict access to the Internet.

They fear greater isolation and the possible creation of an hermetic Web. What someone described as a cyber-ghetto.
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Vietnam extensively regulates Internet access to its citizens, using both legal and technical means. The collaborative project OpenNet Initiative classifies Vietnam’s level of online political censorship to be “pervasive” while Reporters without Borders considers Vietnam one of 15 “internet enemies”. While the government of Vietnam claims to safeguard the country against obscene or sexually-explicit content through its blocking efforts, much of the filtered sites contain politically or religiously sensitive materials that might undermine the Communist Party’s hold on power. Amnesty International reported many instances of Internet activists being arrested for their online activities.
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You may not think that this applies to you, here in the US you should consider the pervasive spying by the Government as well as the spying by communication companies on behalf of our government.

You also need to add the all inclusive record keeping by companies like Google to this equation.

Perhaps you should consider filtered search results, that supposedly help you by showing selected selected web pages rather than everything related to your search. –With the exclusion of most websites from your search results these companies control what you see, This is called censorship.

Considering our government’s ubiquitous spying, and their history of insidious relationships with the major ISPs, I would think that blocking certain material of domains would be irresistible.

The internet is still the wild west but it is rapidly being corralled by people who are afraid of anything they don’t understand. Or worse, anything that goes against their religious beliefs, their personal opinions, their moral standards, and their political ideology. –And we mustn’t forget those JR. J Edgars that would monitor and control us in the name of security.

Enjoy your freedom while you have it, because unless you’re one of the sheeple who are willing to let big brother make all your decisions for you, you will soon miss it.