Underexposed: What If Radiation Is Actually GOOD for You?

By: Ed Hiserodt

There is a very large disconnect between the actual dangers of exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation and the fears of such exposure. A tiny leak at a nuclear power plant is front page news, while there has never been a death or even an injury to the public from escaping radiation. Meanwhile 50,000 deaths from auto accidents go almost unnoticed. 

This fear is particularly ironic since hundreds of studies show that low doses of ionizing radiation result is lower cancer rates and overall mortality. One of these studies examined in some detail was done by Johns-Hopkins involving an initial pool of 700,000 workers, some of whom worked on ships with nuclear propulsion, while others (randomly selected) were employed on non-nuclear ships. The nuclear workers had a standard mortality rate of 0.76 times that of non-nuclear workers.

In largest "ecological" study in history, Professor Bernard Cohen of Pittsburgh University was attempting to correlate level of residential radon with lung cancer. He was astonished to find that the opposite was true -- the more radon, the less cancer. Of course these data, from 1,729 counties (about 90% of the U.S.), didn't faze the Environmental Protection Agency that has continued its crusade against radon exposure.

The positive benefits of low doses of radiation is known as "hormesis" and is identified in over 150 studies and other documented evidence presented in the book.

A new book, ‘Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story Of Wealth, Power, Corruption And Vengeance In Today’s China,’ exposes China’s top leaders as little more than corrupt oligarchs. //

When the CCP launched economic reform in the 1980s, it did so for survival, not because it had an ounce of desire to embrace freedom and democracy. Desmond sees the CCP’s honeymoon with Chinese entrepreneurs “was little more than a Leninist tactic, born in the Bolshevik Revolution, to divide the enemy in order to nihilate it.”

After decades of economic growth, as soon as the Party became confident that its survival was secure, it has again cracked down on private businesses and entrepreneurs and brutally suppressed dissenting voices. //

this book confirms what we already knew but with concrete examples.

First, the book confirmed that corruption is a systemic problem in China, and it begins with the senior leadership of the CCP. This explains why no CCP anti-corruption campaign has successfully stamped out corruption. These campaigns have always been more about purging political rivals than addressing the root cause of corruption.

Second, the book confirms the true nature of the CCP: it’s coldblooded, ruthless, and will do anything to remain in control. //

Third, the book also confirms that western businesses have been complicit in rampant corruption in China. They offered children and relatives of red aristocrats overpaid positions or invested in firms owned by red aristocrats to land Chinese clients or obtain preferential business deals in China. Driven by greed, western businesses have played a disgraceful role in strengthening a corrupt authoritarian regime. //

Desmond said he wanted to write an honest account. Still, he offers no apology and demonstrates no remorse. Had he taken some responsibility for profiting from and strengthening a corrupt dictatorial regime, it would have made his book more trustworthy.

Another shortcoming of the book is that although it promised to tell all, it only named names of those corrupt senior CCP officials that western media already reported about, such as the Wens. Desmond refrained from implicating China’s current leader, Xi Jinping.

In her YouTube video, titled “Reading Makes You Hot,” which has more than 3.8 million views, Chamberlain describes how reading alleviates her anxiety and depression. She explains, “Reading is harmless. Going on social media is not harmless. It makes you sad, it makes you compare yourself to other people, it makes you depressed.” //

Millions of teens and young adults can relate to Chamberlain’s experience, and research has found a definite causal relationship between social media and depression. A study conducted by the University of Arkansas found that young adults who spent more than 300 minutes a day on social media platforms were “2.8 times as likely to become depressed within six months” than those who spent 120 minutes or less on social media.

According to Nicholas Carr’s bestselling book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the exhaustion many users experience after engaging with social media stems from the fact that “our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness — even, at times, fear — magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. That’s true for everyone, but it’s particularly true for the young.”

Thus, trying to relax through social media is a contradiction of terms. //

Reading, on the other hand, is a rather abnormal activity from an evolutionary standpoint. It requires “an unnatural process of thought, one that demand[s] sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object,” as Carr continues.

Strict mental discipline is needed to “resist the urge to let [one’s] focus skip from one sensory cue to another.” But by detaching from the distractions of the outside world, the reader develops the ability to think and process deeply, to digest and internalize the information being read in a way that no amount of internet research can replace.

Although reading thus poses a relaxing alternative to TikTok or Instagram, the transition process is not without its challenges. When she first began reading for leisure, Chamberlain realized that she “actually had forgotten how to read. I would read a whole page, I’d flip to the next page, and then I’d realize, ‘Oh wait, I absorbed no knowledge or information from that page.’ Then I’d go back and read the page again.”

She is not alone in her struggle. Reading comprehension has been declining in America for years, and lockdowns only exacerbated the situation. But Carr reassures us that rewiring your brain is possible. With enough training, those skills of deep concentration and focus can be relearned, or developed for the first time.

Just make sure to hide your smartphone while you practice.

Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources

Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

LOVING MONDAY
You’ll see why I really love Mondays. A final goal. I’ll be pleased if this book becomes your friend. If it gives you hope. If it gives you courage. If it gives you fresh vision for aligning your work world with timeless truth.

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Category: Free Downloads

Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business without Selling Your Soul, is written by John D. Beckett, Chairman and C.E.O. of the R.W. Beckett Corporation. Beckett is the largest manufacturer of residential oil burners in North America. Affiliated companies are leaders in other home appliance components.

In Loving Monday, John Beckett provides a compelling account of how he has integrated his faith and work at Beckett. The result is a business that is respected throughout the heating industry for its integrity and ethics. Within the company, Beckett’s employees find a dynamic work environment where excellence is expected, and where each person is viewed with dignity and a high value on his or her individual worth.

Beckett’s book reveals life-lessons taught him by his father, the company’s founder. These lessons, coupled with insights gained from his decades-long walk of faith, give vivid evidence that high standards and business success can complement each other to the benefit of both. The book’s significance is summed up by industry leader, Archie W. Dunham, President and CEO of ConocoPhillips, Inc.: “Loving Monday is a quick read for busy business people. It portrays John Beckett’s journey of faith and his application of God’s values in the workplace.”

Books to read

This is my interpretation of how the Axis won WW2 in the timeline of The man in the high castle on what is mentioned. It is not the most accurate way the war could have gone but I had to fill in the missing info with the most likely results still in Axis favor.

On February 15, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated by Giuseppe Zangara. Afterward, the United States is subsequently led by John Garner (FDR's vice president) and then by Republican John Bricker. These presidents led to the destabilization of the country and both failed to enact the New Deal to pull the country from the Great Depression. They continued to maintain an isolationist philosophy during the war and, as a result, they were unable to support the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union and they are unable to protect The World from the rise of the Axis threat of the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Empire.

The revolutionary discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938 helped launch the Atomic Age, bringing with it a unique need for secrecy regarding the scientific and technical underpinnings of nuclear weapons. This secrecy evolved into a special category of proscribed information, dubbed "Restricted Data," which is still in place today. Historian Alex Wellerstein spent over 10 years researching various aspects of nuclear secrecy, and his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press), was released earlier this month.

Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where his research centers on the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear history. (Fun fact: he served as a historical consultant on the short-lived TV series Manhattan.) A self-described "dedicated archive rat," Wellerstein maintains several homemade databases to keep track of all the digitized files he has accumulated over the years from official, private, and personal archives. The bits that don't find their way into academic papers typically end up as items on his blog, Restricted Data, where he also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of various types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.

• http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
• https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

The scope of Wellerstein's thought-provoking book spans the scientific origins of the atomic bomb in the late 1930s all the way through the early 21st century. Each chapter chronicles a key shift in how the US approach to nuclear secrecy gradually evolved over the ensuing decades—and how it still shapes our thinking about nuclear weapons and secrecy today. //

Ars Technica: While researching your book, did you learn anything that really surprised you?

Alex Wellerstein: One was the fact that in the US we still have this parallel separate system for nuclear weapons secrets that is different from any other kind of secrecy. "Restricted Data" was a specially created category for nuclear weapons in 1946 because they really just were not sure what to do with this new concept. So we still have a very 1940s-style system. There's a lot of reasons one could imagine for saying, "Maybe we don't need to treat nuclear weapons as a totally parallel system from everything else in the world. Maybe that's not the best way—maybe we're in some ways inflating the value of this information by doing that."

There is an alternative argument, which is that secrets don't control nuclear weapons very well. It seems obvious to most people, and certainly did to me when I started this, that knowledge is power. Nuclear weapons are sort of infinite power, so their knowledge should be infinitely important, right? But the counterargument—and Oppenheimer was one of the first to really put this out there in a strong policy-framed way—is that secrecy is about control of a certain type of information, what philosophers might call "explicit information," stuff you can write down. You can restrict tons of knowledge just by not letting your experts go to another country and show them how to do stuff.

But that is only a small percentage of what it takes to actually make a weapon, specifically a nuclear weapon. As a result, it might not be the thing you want to focus on to control these weapons. You might want to focus on controlling the processes to make the fuel because that turns out to be the necessary thing. I can draw for you a beautiful sketch of how to make a thermonuclear weapon, but it's not going to help if you don't have the fuel—and you don't because we restrict that.

You could get rid of all of the secrecy tomorrow and the world would not measurably become more dangerous, because it’s other things that are actually keeping these weapons from spreading. To me, it's still a pretty radical idea because it not only goes against our intuitions about the bomb, but it also goes against what we tell ourselves about the way in which technology functions. It's not the equation that gives you the technology; it's the overall socio-political, human system that causes it to exist in the first place.

Gandalf, like all the five wizards of Middle Earth, was a Maia, an angelic spirit of the same order as Sauron. It was the persistence of Sauron’s power into the Third Age that made the Valar of Valinor, a higher order of spirits, wish to send emissaries to aid and inspire those of the Free Peoples who resisted evil. The emissaries would be Maia, clothed in the bodies of Men advanced in age but possessed of great physical and mental power. So embodied, they would lose a great deal of their natural power; they were not meant to exercise force nor to coerce anyone to act. They would also be subject to weariness, hunger, injury, and the risk of death. Possessed of free will, they could also be tempted away from their task.

With his long robes, pointed hat, and immense power, Gandalf the Grey is the archetypal wizard of modern fantasy. Sent to the shores of Middle Earth to contest the influence of Sauron, he was tireless in his task, and the only of the five wizards to hold true to it until the end, according to J.R.R. Tolkien. As the Grey Pilgrim, Gandalf helped to seed the downfall of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings and even in The Hobbit, but along the way, he was transformed into Gandalf the White. This Gandalf was more directly involved in the final conflict of The Lord of the Rings. Yet it is as the Grey that Gandalf is best known, and Ian McKellen and Peter Jackson both preferred the first incarnation of the character. A casual fan may wonder why Tolkien wrote in a change of wardrobe at all.

In Unfinished Tales, a collection of essays and story fragments Tolkien left behind, it was the Maia Olórin who became incarnated as Gandalf. He was proposed for the task by Manwë, wisest of the Valar, though Olórin initially begged not to be sent. He wasn’t up to the task, he insisted, and he feared Sauron. But in Manwë’s eyes, that was all the more reason Olórin should go. Thus ordered, he arrived as the third of the Istari (wizards), appearing the smallest and most aged of them. Yet Círdan the shipwright, who greeted Olórin upon his arrival, perceived him the greatest of the Istari and gave him the Elven Ring of Fire to aid him in his labors. But the ring, and the power he still possessed, were kept veiled in weathered gray robes.

While Saruman the White settled in Orthanc, Radagast the Brown in Rhosgobel, and the two Blue Wizards beyond reach into the East, Gandalf the Grey (as the Men of Middle Earth named him) wandered throughout the West, where the Elves and the descendants of Númenor opposed to Sauron were strongest. He became a good friend to the Elves and to hobbits, while with Men he could be warm and irascible by turns. If Lady Galadriel of Lorien had her way, Gandalf would have been the head of the White Council formed to unite the West against Sauron. But Gandalf refused the position in favor of independence. He did stir the Council to put forth its power to drive the Necromancer – Sauron in disguise – from the fortress of Dol Guldur in Mirkwood, a business which took him away from the dwarves’ quest in The Hobbit. That quest was one he had helped to organize as a means to take Smaug away as a potential ally for Sauron. All this holds true in Tolkien’s books and Jackson’s films, though the timeline and details differ markedly.

For Lt. Commander Colin Maclntyre, it began as a routine training flight over the Moon. For Dahak, a self-aware Imperial battleship, it began millennia ago when that powerful artificial intelligence underwent a mutiny in the face of the enemy. The mutiny was never resolved-Dahak was forced to maroon not just the mutineers but the entire crew on prehistoric Earth.

Last year around this time, I lamented the end of 2020 with the expectation that better times had to be lurking around the corner. Well, I sincerely hope you had a good year, but it seems like the year was defined by inflation, the Afghanistan debacle, lapsing back into more COVID restrictions, and other disasters.

In other words, it was the second year in a row to retreat into a book and at least forget about day-to-day affairs for a while. With that in mind we bring you The Federalist’s notable books of 2021. Bear in mind, this is not a collection of the best books of 2021 — just a collection of what books Federalist writers and those in our orbit read to cope with another trying year.

Writing a novel based on his experiences in Africa allowed the author to reframe his diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. //

My condition has progressed, and I've lost much of my coordination. I had to stop playing racquetball for fear of crashing into the wall. My golf game disintegrated because my hands jerked when I was putting. I continued to walk in the forest with my fox terrier, Molly, but over time my gait became stiff. When I try to walk around the house, my body freezes up and I struggle to get started. Once I do get moving, I am awkward and often bump into furniture.

But my biggest concern is mental. I know the brain is like a muscle: Use it or lose it. I was determined to use it, but I lacked a purpose. It was my wife who suggested I write a novel. During my tenure at the college, I had written some scholarly pieces and even memoirs, but I had never attempted fiction.

Contemplating the idea, I recalled some of my adventures in Africa—hiking to Lake Malawi, wrestling with pythons, living with traditional Murle people in Sudan—and thought I could work them into the book. I decided to set the story in Tanzania and center it on a character with Parkinson's disease. In the novel Karl Lundberg returns to Africa, where he shifts to a plant-based diet, exercises in the open air, interacts with local people, and encounters wildlife—and gradually feels his despair lift.

The lions become a stand-in for his disease, always lurking, always a threat, but also beautiful and impressive in how they inspire him to live fully and joyfully despite the fear and uncertainty of an incurable condition.

Writing the novel encouraged me in a similar way. I've learned to embrace and adjust to the changes brought on by Parkinson's disease instead of fighting them and to be grateful for each day and for the robust memories of my time in Africa.

Brave Books was started by conservative parents as an alternative to the current progressive agenda that is seeded into the culture.

The founders tell the story,

We didn’t want to just create good books that children would enjoy and eventually forget, but instead we wanted to create a learning experience woven into an epic adventure that will forever live in your children’s hearts and minds. This is why we have built the BRAVE Universe which is a world with both a fascinating map and cast of characters. Every month, BRAVE Books partners with a conservative figure to create a story that takes place in this world and teaches children either a topical or foundational conservative lesson.

BRAVE Books is far from your average children’s book company. We have a subscription model and we send a book out every month with every single book delivering a conservative lesson that is so important for our children.

The first book included in this series is Elephants Are Not Birds and covers the sensitive topic of gender identity, and is followed by the books below.

Environmentalism offers emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving its adherents a sense of purpose and transcendence.

There is a recurring puzzle in the history of the environmental movement: Why do green activists keep promoting policies that are harmful not only to humans but also to the environment? Michael Shellenberger is determined to solve this problem, and he is singularly well qualified.

ebooks on Linux topics

"The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature."

Intro to CS using MakeCode & Microbits Course Introduction This is an introduction to coding and computer science by way of making and design, using the revolutionary new micro:bit microcontroller board, and Microsoft’s easy and powerful MakeCode block-based coding environment. It is a project-based curriculum with a maker philosophy at its core; the idea is that by making physical objects, students create a context for learning the coding and computer science concepts.

The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information Hardcover – January 21, 1992
by Jean Francois Revel

A distinguished French philosopher argues that the greatest threat to modern democracy is the dissemination of false information, myths that endanger the viability of freedom and the democratic way of life. //

“Human beings experience all sorts of needs for intellectual activity other than the need to know. The average human being seeks the truth only after having exhausted all other possibilities.’’ //

“For the philosophers of the enlightenment it naturally followed that once the obstacles have been overcome and we are in possession of the truth, we will mold our conduct and the governance of society accordingly.’’ //

“However, the main thesis of this book is exactly the contrary. It is based on the cultural contradiction that separates accessibility to knowledge from the irrationality of human behavior.’’ //

“I do not believe there is an automatic link leading from true knowledge to sound action. I believe this link can be established only through persistent, willful effort, intellectual rigor, mental discipline — in short, that the link is anything but natural.’’ //

“I also think that the hour has struck and that this effort must now be made for the survival of mankind.’’ //

“Knowledge only plays a part when it is not blocked by some sterile prejudice. Error, based on dogmatic ‘principles’ and unworkable ‘solutions’ is generally preferred to effective action based on knowledge and solid information. . . . To understand what is needed to late — at least for taking effective action — is almost the same as not to understand.’’ //

“The history of philosophy can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it. This second period, of which Descartes was the precursor of genius and of which Heidegger has been the most putrid manifestation, entered its heyday with Hegel. Between Descartes and Hegel there were several heirs of the truth seeking epoch, the most pathetically sincere of whom was Kant and the most subtle Hume, who vainly sought a middle way in order to stave off the ineluctable triumph of imposture.’’