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Name: J Lee
Country: United States
State: Michigan
Metro: Ann Arbor
Gender: Male
Interests: My #1 interest is listening to music, and I like many kinds: Synthpop, dance, darkwave, gothic, alternative, modern rock, world beat, chill, rap, classical, praise & worship...and more!Topics I enjoy: Politics, religion, society & culture, travel, history
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
10/1/2004
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| October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so I'll post this while it's still October, in keeping with the focus of the month. Our doctor recently mentioned that wearing underwire bras or tight or ill-fitting bras can increase the risk of breast cancer. I decided to do more research on this, and it seems that it's not just underwire or tight-fitting bras that are the culprit, but wearing any bra at all.
There are two reasons for the connection between bra-wearing and breast cancer. The first is related to the lymph nodes. If these are constricted, they cannot flush out toxins adequately, and the build-up of toxins can help cancer to develop. The other reason is due to the increased temperature of the breasts when enclosed in a bra. Professor Hugh Simpson of the UK conducted research that showed that pre-cancerous and cancerous breasts are both hotter than normal breasts.
The web page Brassieres And Breast Cancer lists 10 sources that track the links between wearing a bra and breast cancer, cysts, pain, and health. For example, in one research study, the researchers--Hsieh, Trichopoulos, & Eur from Harvard University--noted that the rate of breast cancer of the women in their study was 60% lower for those who didn't wear bras than those who did.
Several sources I found mentioned a 1995 study by Sydney Singer and Soma Grismaijer of the Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease, published in their book Dressed To Kill, where they found, in a study of 4500 women in five U.S. cities, that:
--3 out of 4 women who wore their bras 24 hours per day developed breast cancer.
--1 out of 168 women who wore bras rarely or never acquired breast cancer.
Wow, what a difference! With the studies that have already been done on this topic, which show striking differences in breast cancer rates between those who wear bras and those who don't, I wonder why this issue is so below the radar?
Apparently, when Singer & Grismaijer's book came out, they were strongly blasted by the medical community for not using proper scientific methods. Well certainly, proper research methods are needed when determining connections. But when you look at the striking difference in the breast cancer rates between the women who wear bras and those who don't in both their study and the one by the Harvard researchers mentioned above, plus other studies with similar results, shouldn't that be a call to action to investigate the issue further with proper scientific methods?
The website CancerCompass.com list a number of causes of breast cancer, causes that are generally accepted by the scientific community--things like family history, genetic changes, physical inactivity, etc. But then after this list of 12 causes of breast cancer (which include drinking alcohol), the site states: "Studies show that most women who develop breast cancer have none of the risk factors listed above." Wearing a bra is not even mentioned. In light of the findings of others, why is this being ignored?
It seems to me there is enough information to suggest that it's best that a woman not wear a bra.
Some women are afraid to not wear bras--especially women with larger breasts--for fear that it will make their breasts sag more. However, this is fear does not appear to be warranted. A study done in Japan showed that wearing a bra can actually increase sagging. (This study is listed on the website mentioned above, Brassieres And Breast Cancer.) A French study done in 2003 came out with similar results. Bras only hold the breasts up while being worn and have no effect on holding up the breasts when no bra is being worn. In fact, wearing a bra can make breasts sag more quickly. This is because the ligaments which support the breasts, when not being used (while a bra is on) eventually weaken and atrophy; on the other hand, a woman who goes braless is using these ligaments, thus keeping the support of the breasts more. You can read more about the effect of breast sagging and bras at this web page, Why Breasts Sag.
So anyway, I thought I'd throw this out there for you all to chew on. I think it's certainly worth researching yourself and considering what to do. It seems to me that at the very least, a woman should not wear a bra whenever it's not necessary.
P.S. Here are two more links:
The Connection Between Fibrocystic Breast Disease, Breast Cancer, and Bras
Effects of Clothing Pressure Caused By Different Types Of Brassieres | | |
| My inspiration for writing tonight comes from watching part 1 of a 2-part CNN news program, "Latino In America" (part 2 is tomorrow night at 9 ET), a very interesting program, but the issue I'm writing about tonight has been bothering me for a long time. In one of the segments of the 2-hour program, they covered Hollywood's treatment of Hispanic actors. It seems they nearly always get stereotyped into roles like housekeepers, gardeners, gangsters, etc.
They're not alone. Arab-Americans get stereotyped as terrorists or some other type of villain, and how often do you see Asian-Americans at all?
Even among white people, it seems that nearly all the leading female roles in movies are played by blondes. Just how many blondes are there in this country anyway? I used to live in Los Angeles, where most movies are created. There were very few blondes there. Now I live in Michigan, where there are blondes everywhere (a lot of German and Dutch ancestry here), but still not the percentage seen in the movies. What's up with that?
I get irritated with Hollywood and their self-righteous attitude toward their pet topics. I loved the 1967 movie "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" but at times its anti-war message gets a bit too preachy for a comedy movie. I hate the movie "Grease" because it was just way too preachy. The movie "Pleasantville" was a very charming concept ruined by a preachy message. Hollywood gets all preachy about morals, peace, abortion, and homosexuality, but when it comes to race, they're silent. I guess they'd have to be or they'd be utter hypocrites because they are such a racist culture.
Why do all the leading female roles have to be blonde? Why do they even have to be white? Why do all the roles for Hispanics and Arab-Americans and sometimes even African-Americans have to be so stereotypical? Why are Asian-Americans nearly nonexistent...and when they do appear, they're either goofy tourists or over-the-top aggressive women? Why can't we see in our movies people of different races and subcultures in everyday roles like we see them in everyday life?
I dream of being a movie producer (director?--I don't know much about the making of movies) who has tryouts for parts where any race can apply for any part with equal chance of getting it. So what if I end up with a husband of one race and a wife of a different race? Does the movie have to be about interracial marriage to have an interracial couple? That's my dream, and maybe it's too far for Hollywood, and unfortunately, for much of the movie-going public, but at least other people in the film...does it matter if the boss or co-worker or best friend is of another race? I've worked with people of many races, and race is not part of our story...our job is.
I wish Hollywood would stop featuring white people all the time and stereotyping any of the non-whites they have. Let the movies represent the diversity of America! | | |
| I just came back from a 3-day intense class. The class was billed as "Start Your Own Business," something for those who have not yet started one or who want to grow what they have. When I lost my job a little over a year ago, I decided to try starting my own business. It's been tough, and I took the class to get some help.
I took the class from an entity called Rich Dad Education, which is actually a 20-year-old entity, the Wealth Intelligence Academy, that fairly recently acquired the licensing to use the famous Rich Dad name and ideas. For those of you who may not be familiar with this, Robert Kiyosaki wrote a famous book called "Rich Dad Poor Dad," in which he describes the ideas he learned from his real father, who was a university professor (the Poor Dad), and from his friend's father, who was a wealthy businessman. The book was a narrative, but the point was to show that the reason some people are poor and others are rich is primarily because the rich think differently from the middle class and the poor. The second book in the series, "Cash Flow Quadrant," is more instructional in nature, though it still has plenty of stories, teaching the reader the kind of thinking that needs to be adopted to change your life.
Now it has never been my goal in life to get rich. But these books have been a huge lightbulb turning on in my head because they stress that all you need to do to become rich is educate yourself, change your way of thinking, and act upon it. The reason most people don't do this is simply because it's a lot of work and determination. The same has been true for me--I get the basic concept and what is required, but I'm not a highly motivated person.
All this to say, while the class did cover some of the things I was looking for to help me in my current business, much of it was about choosing kinds of businesses that generate a lot of money. And while the focus of the class was how to generate wealth, it was never ever in a context of greed. The context was about making enough for retirement (if you want to have $70,000 a year during your retirement, you need to have $1,000,000 at retirement), having time to spend with your family, and to be able to freely give to others. This is something I've always liked about Robert Kiyosaki's approach: When you make money, it should be for good for more than just yourself.
And in fact, of the 80 people in the class, I didn't meet a single person who was there salivating at the idea of getting rich. They were all like me...just sick of being jerked around by others--working hard and getting treated like dirt, a promotion meaning even more responsibility and less free time, putting all your effort into a job and then getting downsized...as well as just wanting to be able to give money and help people--family, friends, the needy--instead of being unable to, or worse, needing help from others.
But how do you get there? What Robert Kiyosaki shows you in the "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and "Cashflow Quadrant" books is that this will never happen as long as you are an employee, or even as long as you are merely in business for yourself (lawyer, accountant, etc.); you have to learn to grow businesses (that you don't work in yourself) and invest money.
BUT IT TAKES MONEY TO MAKE MONEY, RIGHT?
A major issue for me on this is that I have no money to start with. We had to figure out our net worth before going to the class. It was very depressing for me. Including our mortgage (which is big time underwater, so it's much more debt than equity), our student loans, and credit cards, we are nearly a quarter of a million dollars in the hole. Yikes! We live in a near-ghetto neighborhood. The past year I've made less money than most people make in a month. So this amount of debt is huge. Things are desperate. So at this conference, when they were talking about needing a million dollars to retire, a million dollars didn't sound like so much: it's only four times as much as we are in the hole.
What was so enlightening in this class was to learn ways to make money with little money to start and to do so quickly. One thing I had never heard of, but that has been around for centuries, is factoring. Something I like about this--as with every money-making method we learned this weekend--is that it is a win-win-win deal--everyone is happy. Here's how it works. Take for example, a wholesaler that sells equipment to a retail establishment, such as a hotel. They buy the equipment from a manufacturer and have to pay in 30 days, but the hotel, part of a huge, slow-moving chain, won't pay the bill for 90 days. How will the wholesaler do without the money in the interim? They can sell their accounts receivable. So here's where I would come in if I was starting a business with little money. I would find businesses that want to sell their accounts receivable; once I found them, I would take the accounts to a factorer, someone already rich who has money to lend, and for every account the factorer approves, I get a cut. So, say a business has $10,000 in receivables that they want to get cash for now. The factorer will give them $8,500 for the $10,000, a 15% cut, and will then collect the money directly from the hotel chain. Since I was the agent to find the deal, I'll get about 3%, so I'll get $300. As part of these deals, I also get a cut of all future transactions between this factorer and business (it's part of the contract), so money will continue to come in from that business as I continue to find new ones. Over time, this accumulates a nice sum. (The business wins because they now have cash to purchase more equipment. If they make a 30% margin, for example, they can now do it again, for a net 15% gain over what they could have done without selling the receivables.)
We also learned about a number of real estate tactics. I was most interested in what I could do with no money, since I have none. There is something called a real estate contract. I find someone who has had trouble selling their house, and enter a contract with them to find someone to get them a particular sum of money for their house. This is normally going to be quite a bit below market value, but this is someone who needs to ditch the house--perhaps they've got a job somewhere else and they don't want to be paying two mortgages. (Houses around here sit for a year or two, so this is a very real situation here.) So, let's say I get a contract for $75,000. I find someone who will pay me $78,000 for the house. I get $78,000, pay the homeowner $75,000, so I make $3,000 without ever having owned the house or needing to borrow any money. The homeowner is happy to get rid of the burdensome extra mortgage, the buyer has a house below market value, and I have a good bit of money from finding the deal. If I work a job 40 or more hours a week, I'll make about $3000 gross income in a month (I've never made much more than that). Once I get good at this skill, I could do two or three of these deals in a month and make a lot more money.
There is so much more I learned in the whole three days, of course...things I had no idea even existed, and what I liked about all of the situations we learned about, they were all helpful to people. I learned about dealing with foreclosures. The deals didn't save people their homes, but they did keep the people from actually foreclosing and thus getting a foreclosure on their credit record, which is even worse than a bankruptcy, so the deal is still helping them in that way.
WHAT IT TAKES TO BE WEALTHY
So, all of these methods require learning how to operate the deals (the education part) and the tenacity to go out there and find things on your own and make them happen. This is all it takes to get rich. It's very simple. It's not easy, but it is simple.
One big push from this weekend was to get out of "middle class" thinking:
MIDDLE CLASS: How much does it cost?
THE RICH: How much will I make?
Some of these deals may involve borrowing money at 25% interest. The middle class mentality says, "25%?!? I'm not paying that!" But the rich mentality says, "If I borrow $10,000 at 25% interest so that I can make a $15,000 deal, I still make $2,500 in one deal. Why would I avoid paying $2,500 in interest if I make $2,500?" (Meanwhile, the person loaning the money gets $2,500 without working, just for lending, so both of them get richer.)
SO WHAT ABOUT ME?
So where do I stand after all this? It costs money to take the classes to learn how to do factoring and real estate deals. The classes are very expensive. They will teach me to make so much money that they will definitely pay for themselves many times over. But here was my big issue: Will I do it??? If I am not 100% convinced that I will go out and do it, then it's a lot of money wasted. These things initially involve going out and knocking on doors to find the deals. As you get proficient and knowledgeable, the deals will become easier to find, but starting out, it's really hard work. Since the only way I would be able to take the classes would be to go even deeper in debt, I didn't want to sign up for them until I could prove to myself that I would do it. (Clever marketing: the classes were about 40% cheaper to purchase if you did it before leaving the class this weekend, making it harder to turn down.)
I need to do the same kind of thing for my own current business, teaching English as a second language. I've put off that cold calling because it's terrifying. But this class increased my resolve to get out there and get over the fear. I am in a desperate situation and need to get out of it, and being an employee will never get me out of it. In the short term, I'd be more financially secure, but I would not learn the skills to do what I'd need to do to make the big money deals down the road. Once I prove to myself that I will not be intimidated by getting out there and drumming up business, then I will feel more comfortable about taking the plunge into investing in classes. Meanwhile, I think I'll also learn all I can about the factoring industry.
FROM DESPERATION TO RICHES
By the way, the instructor for the course has an interesting life story. Most of her life, she was a university professor of literature. One time she got a camera for Christmas, and people teased her about not knowing how to use it, so she took a class on how to use a camera. Then people started wanting her to take their portraits. She noticed the portraits were lousy, so she took a class to take professional portraits. Eventually she was doing enough that she opened up her own photography studio. She was doing very well until her son was in a car accident and had serious injuries. She had to spend so much time with him that the photography studio went down and she lost the business because she couldn't be there. Then her husband left her and her three kids. The medical costs were over a million dollars, with $150,000 out of her pocket. To help pay for some of her medical expenses, she bartered with doctors to do professional portraits for publication purposes, and hospitals for promotional materials. But she was in a desperate situation, so had to do something new. That's when she started learning the techniques that I started learning this weekend. Now, 8 years later, as she's in her late fifties, she's making tons of money, yet has time to spend with her family. And, she gets to teach only when she chooses to (although it's financial stuff now, but she is still enjoying herself) instead of being a slave to the university system. In fact, she wrote the curriculum for this course, which is being offered all over the country.
The people in the room had interesting ideas for their businesses. One person wants to start a transportation company for the handicapped, and he wants his business focus to be that the driver will give them the same care that a homecare provider would. Another one wants to start a video resume service so that she can help people find jobs. I heard ideas like this all weekend, where people want to do good in the world, but of course, we all need to make a living, so these ideas are for businesses. And if we want to be able to actually retire--something I cannot see as being possible in my current state--we need to find a way to generate $1,000,000. Being a millionaire is not about saying "Look at me, I'm rich," it's about having enough passive income to have time to enjoy your family, money to help others, and being able to actually retire. Now that's something I can relate to. | | |
| I was delighted to hear the news that Congress decided to defund ACORN. Then Rachel Maddow pointed out last night that it is unconstitutional to make a law that singles out a single entity (No Bill Of Attainder--wow, those Founding Fathers seem to have thought of everything!). Now the issue is, if you make a bill that would not name ACORN specifically but would just address the issues involved, such as fraud, as reasons to defund an organization, then a whole lot of other organizations would fit under the law...organizations that are still being funded and for whom there have been no cries for defunding. In this video clip, Rachel Maddow brings up some other organizations that have done worse things than ACORN...yet are still funded. We'll see how this all turns out in Congress. My prediction is that once they realize some of these other organizations would also be defunded by the bill, the bill will die and ACORN will continue to receive funds. What I hope, though, is that the bill survives and that ACORN PLUS the other organizations lose their funding. Our tax money should not go to organizations that defraud or do other such things. Rachel Maddow claims that one organization even engages in the sex trade.
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| During the 2008 election, there was much desire expressed for a new era of politics where people would act more decently toward each other in the political realm. It seemed like Obama would be a good person to help accomplish this (I'm sure Clinton would NOT have been). And indeed, Obama has tried his best to keep the public discourse on political issues to be constructive.
It has been upsetting to me to see the way people have been acting who have been attending the town hall meetings. Why have they been so rude to their elected officials? Why have they been so combative? There was much light shed on this subject in Rachel Maddow's report last night, where she did some investigating and found that all of this traces back to corporate interests who do not want any health care reform AT ALL. They have front groups with political sounding names that send out stuff to people telling them how to behave at these meetings. It's very disgusting. See the full enlightening report here.
I am certain that not everybody who goes to these things and acts this way have any knowing connection to these groups. I have many right-wing relatives who are terrified of any health care reform. But it makes me angry that such groups try to get people to act this way. It poisons civil discourse where people can actually listen to each other and learn from one another. | | |
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