Without..

The rich may well be "different from you and me,"  They think everyone else is like them. The richer you are, the more likely you are to think that others are wealthy, too, according to the study published in the journal Psychological Science.

The reason for the misconception is simple,: Since people are more likely to live, work and go to school with others in similar income brackets, when we look around, we come to the (incorrect) conclusion that most other Americans are at least somewhat like us.
  

This isn't usually a deliberate impulse, but it's one that can be hard to shake.

"It is likely that people do not have much conscious insight or control over the processes by which they are making such judgments,".

Wealthier people are more likely to say the status quo of income distribution in the United States is fair, and are less likely to support redistributive policies, 

Low-income Americans and their advocates have an uphill battle getting the country's haves to see the widening gap between them and the have-nots.

The study focused on income, but he said net worth which is skewed even more toward the very rich since many of the wealthiest Americans earn a significant amount from investments rather than income could be an even more telling predictor of these attitudes.

So whatever it is, wealthy or not, please give a hand to the poor.   Just a thought

Out of control??

Health care spending will outpace the nation's overall economic growth over the next decade, the government forecast, highlighting a challenge for the next president, not to mention taxpayers, businesses and individual Americans.

Expanded insurance coverage under President Barack Obama's law, an aging population, and rising demand will be squeezing society's ability to pay.

By 2019, health care spending will be increasing at roughly 6 percent a year, compared to an average annual rise of 4 percent from 2008 through 2013.

The forecast, through 2024, does not foresee a return to pre-recession days of torrid health care inflation, as the government and private employers try to revamp the way they pay hospitals and doctors to emphasize quality over quantity.

"The main point is that the bill will continue to grow faster than the economy, 

The health care law's Medicare cuts helped keep spending in check, as did across-the-board cuts enacted later.

Many working people saw their own medical bills rise, as employers shifted costs to employees and their families.

At the same time, expensive new drugs that can cure hepatitis C are boosting spending on medications. In 2013, prescription drug spending rose by 2.5 percent. For 2014, the projected increase is 12.6 percent, according to the report.  Spending on Medicaid has jumped 6.1 percent in 2013, and projected to grow by 12 percent in 2014.

Solution: It starts with medication cost.
1- Medicaid and Medicare can negotiate with big pharma to get better pricing including Brand and Generic medication.
2- Pharmaceutical companies are free to price their medication in USA  market with no competition with Canada, England and the rest of the world. While pharmaceutical companies are free to merge, reduce their taxes by relocating, in addition to other variety of techniques some of which was penalized by the government.

Just a thought.

The Sunset...

Joyce Mitchell poured her heart out to investigators about her relationships with the convicted murderers she helped escape from an upstate New York prison, detailing her increasing sexual contact with one of them and her deepening involvement in the plot over time, according to police.

Mitchell, a married woman, details her dreams of running off into the sunset with the men, "I enjoyed the attention, the feeling both of them gave me, and the thought of a different life," 

Her relationship with Richard Matt began with seemingly innocent requests for help, but soon escalated into sexual contact, she said, including sending him nude photos.

Matt made her “feel special” and she started doing favors for him. First, she called Matt’s daughter for him and then helped him get a hold of items he couldn't get for himself.

Mitchell said she was alone with Matt in the prison tailor shop when he "grabbed me and kissed me," the statement said. The sexual request from Matt escalated from there over time and Mitchell obliged, she told investigators.

Life is tedious, dull, monotonous, repetitive, unrelieved, unvaried, unimaginative, and uneventful outside a maximum security prison.                Just a thought. 

Get Over it ...???

Most marriages where there’s been infidelity end in divorce sooner or later and a common reaction of the victim spouse is to want the cheater held accountable for their actions, to be punished for the pain and hurt they’ve wrought on the family.

The harsh reality though is that with no-fault divorce laws throughout the U.S, divorce courts don’t care about cheating. The courts are there to administer the law not our moral code.

In the context of divorce, here comes the truth, NO ONE CARES.

My client.  She was young, smart, highly educated and beautiful.  She was also very trusting and naïve.  She literally suffered a nervous breakdown and could not go to work. 

It was a very short marriage, just under two years.  There were no children and no assets.  Other than get her divorced from this cheater, what else did she want? More importantly, what else could I fight for? I was so moved by her plight and believed that having lost her job because of her husband’s cheating, that he should provide some spousal support while she got her life back in order.

The Judge agreed with the Husband’s attorney, told me my demand was ridiculous and that my client had to “get over it.”  

Cheating is NOT a factor in divorce, and people spend way too much time, energy and money obsessing over it.  You are just too good for that type of life waster!

Just a thought

Curing HIV




A French teenager infected at birth with HIV has shown the ability to control levels of the infection in her body -- without being on antiretroviral treatment.

The finding provides new hope that a "functional" cure for HIV -- where the virus is brought down to low levels but not eradicated in the body -- may one day be possible.

 

The 18-year-old female, whose mother was HIV positive, was given antiretroviral treatment soon after birth but stopped at age six and has since maintained undetectable levels of the virus in her blood -- known as remission -- for 12 years.

 

"This is the first [time] long-term remission has been shown in children, or adolescents," said Asier Saez Cirion from the Institut Pasteur in France, who presented the findings at the 8th IAS conference on HIV pathogenesis, treatment and prevention, in Vancouver this week.

 

Just a thought.

Willing to....*!

Ashley Madison the dating site for married people seeking affairs is riddled with fake profiles for women that encourage men to spend more money subscribing to the site.
The suit dovetails with longtime rumors that have swirled around the site that many of the female profiles on it are fake. The company says the suit is frivolous and provided Business Insider with photographs of the plaintiff to back up its statement that her suit is without merit.

Doriana Silva of Toronto alleges she was hired to write Portuguese-language profiles for the Brazilian version of the site. She was paid $34,000 plus benefits.

Her job consisted of creating 1,000 “fake female profiles” in three weeks, to make men think there were more women willing to cheat with them than actually existed.
“To entice paying heterosexual male members to join and spend money on the website,” the suit says,  “They do not belong to any genuine members of Ashley Madison or any real human beings at all.”

The suit does not allege that creating fake profiles is illegal or unethical. Rather, Silva claims that all the typing hurt her wrists and that therefore the company should compensate her for her injuries. AM responded that Silva posted photos of herself on social media riding a jet ski after her employment with the company.

On the other hand, a North Carolina man has filed a lawsuit accusing the notorious affairs website Ashley Madison of breaking up his 13-year marriage. Robert Schindler's lawsuit, names the infidelity website, and his ex-wife's lover.

Everyone is trying to collect.    Just a thought.

Terror in Tenn.

 

The shooter had a handgun and two long guns in his possession, and another rifle at home, the official said. The 24-year-old engineering graduate wore a "load-bearing vest" that allowed him to carry extra ammunition.

  

Friends described the shooter as a once-devoted, disciplined mixed-martial-arts fighter; a top student known for smarts, charm and humor; and kept in touch with his roots in the Middle East.  He would go shooting as a hobby.

 A picture of a disturbed, suicidal young man using drugs, preparing for bankruptcy and facing an appearance in criminal court.   He abused sleeping pills, opioids, painkillers and marijuana, along with alcohol, with DUI arrest in April. 

It doesn't appear that the weapons were purchased recently, law enforcement   "some were purchased legally and some may not have been."

He had been in Jordan in 2014 and visited Kuwait and Jordan in 2010.  

  

Comment. This individual intended to do harm in a big way. When he failed to join  the Nuclear plant, he came with another evil plan.

Just a thought.

Plenty of protection ?

 

Police investigating the death of a Los Angeles man uncovered an arsenal inside his home and garage more than 1,200 guns and about two tons of ammunition, authorities said Monday. The man's decomposing body was found in a car down the street from his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

LA Police Department Cmdr. Andrew Smith called the number of rifles, pistols and shotguns staggering. Many had never been fired and some were still wrapped in boxes, with price tags still attached. "Our truck couldn't carry it all," Smith told the Los Angeles Times. "We had to go back and make another trip."

There were no signs of foul play and no evidence he was involved in criminal activity. 

Detectives want to find out why he had so many guns and are examining the weapons to determine if they have been linked to any crime.

"It's not a crime to have a large number of weapons so long as they were legal to own and legally obtained," Smith added. "We want to make sure that's the case."

 

More protection.  Just a thought.

"Yellen" up the wrong tree

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to tread lightly when it comes to overhauling the central bank, warning that proposed changes could undermine its ability to support the economy.
Yellen discouraged lawmakers from pushing their own proposals to bring the Fed under stricter oversight.

Yellen’s testimony before the House Financial Services Committee comes one day after a hearing in which Republicans blasted the Fed as being unaccountable. 

The relationship between the Fed and Republicans has been touchy ever since the Fed embarked on an unprecedented run of monetary stimulus following the recession. 

The Financial Services panel went so far as to issue subpoenas for some documents, at which point the Fed refused to provide them, citing an ongoing criminal probe into the matter by the Department of Justice.

Yellen said the U.S. economy appears to be positioned to improve further in the months ahead, after a disappointing first quarter that saw no economic growth. 

Some of the Republican members blamed the unemployment and problems in the economy on Obama Care.    Shutting down the Government, lack of action for job creations by the Republicans and oppose any from the presidents wasn't mentioned at all. But It was nice to blame someone else.

Just a thought.

New Era, Nuclear Deal.

Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States reached a historic accord on Tuesday to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.

Mr. Obama, in an early morning appearance at the White House that was broadcast live in Iran, began what promised to be an arduous effort to sell the deal to Congress and the American public, saying the agreement is “not built on trust it is built on verification.”   

 Almost as soon as the agreement was announced, to cheers in Vienna and on the streets of Tehran, its harshest critics said it would ultimately empower Iran rather than limit its capability. 

 

The United States preserved and in some cases extended the nuclear restrictions it sketched out with Iran in early April in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

American officials said the core of the agreement, secured in 18 consecutive days of talks here, lies in the restrictions on the amount of nuclear fuel that Iran can keep for the next 15 years. The current stockpile of low enriched uranium will be reduced by 98 percent, most likely by shipping much of it to Russia.

 

Israel, Saudis, Republicans, among others are not happy that Obama's Administration didn't use the military to bomb Iran...... and choose difficult and successful negotiation to achieve a better outcome with No death of Americans, Iranians and others.

 

It is a new era. Deal with it.   Just a thought.

Get Rich or..

Image is not related

In court papers filed in the US Bankruptcy Court in Hartford, Conn., Mr. Jackson reported assets and debts each in the range of $10 to $50 million," The Wall Street Journal reports.

The filing comes just three days after the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" rapper was ordered to pay $5 million to his rival Rick Ross' ex-girlfriend, Lastonia Leviston, who sued him for posting a sex tape online to millions of viewers in an attempt to embarrass Ross.

He is one of the world's wealthiest rappers, largely thanks to his minority stake in Vitamin Water. In 2007.  he continued to act as a spokesman.

Additionally, the rapper's studio albums alone have sold more than 21 million units, and he has starred in a long list of film and TV projects, including Starz's new hit "Power."
In May, Forbes estimated 50 Cent's net worth at $155 million, ranking him No. 4 on the list of the wealthiest hip-hop artists.

The bankruptcy claim comes just days after The New York Times published a glowing profile of the rapper, praising his "exceptional business instincts." Go Figure.

Just a thought.

Flakka

A cheap new designer drug called flakka is causing havoc in cities across America.
It can cause bizarre and violent reactions which include psychotic breakdowns, hallucinations and indiscriminate violence.

Mike Haney, who lives near Chicago, said he doesn't remember what he did for two days after taking flakka. "I was completely out of my mind.  I could have killed myself," Haney said.

Flakka, also known as gravel, is a synthetic stimulant, a cousin of the drug found in baths salts. It's an ever-changing mixture of various substances and can come in a capsule or powder. Users can smoke, or swallow.

 

Stanfill said flakka is often imported from China. It's up to 10-times cheaper than the synthetic drug cocktail "Molly"; just three to five dollars per hit, and easier to get.
It's described as more powerful than heroin or cocaine and users are often numb to pain.

Those who make flakka are constantly changing its makeup, so as to fool common tests.   Patients on this drug are taking several weeks longer to recover than those on other drugs, or even crystal meth.

The DEA's Miami division told CBS News it has already seized over three times the amount of alpha-PVP in the first six months of this year than it seized in all of last year.

Need a scientific replacement that helps the patients and the healthcare professionals. 
Just a thought.

Talking Body..

In a nursing home in Iowa, an elderly couple with dementia had sex, and management took severe measures as a result.

“Very few nursing homes around the country acknowledged the sexual behavior or intimacy of their residents,” Daniel Reingold, president and CEO of the Hebrew Home “
“Our position is very strongly that consenting adults who have capacity, this is a civil right of theirs,” he said. “They do not give up a civil right simply because they are in need of nursing care in a facility. And that our obligation as a nursing facility is to encourage their civil rights, as we would do with respect to voting.”

The Hebrew Home has had several residents who have become romantically involved, and those relationship have generally been good for the residents and acceptable to the families, Reingold said.

Growing old is a process of loss: losing your friends, losing your spouse, losing your mobility, losing your memory. But the sense of touch is the last to go.
“Some research shows that the sense of touch never goes, even if a person is in a coma,”    Listen to the beautiful song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzRyxGBGiAE

Just a thought.

Intact.....

A resident of a nearby apartment building who was concerned that there was a security breach snapped the pictures of "sexual activities" and sent them to WHTM-TV in Harrisburg, which alerted authorities.

The U.S. Marshals Service says one of its employees was photographed having sex on the roof of a federal courthouse in Pennsylvania. 

U.S. Marshal Martin J. Pane issued a statement Thursday confirming the employee's involvement. He said the matter is under investigation.

The photos depict a couple engaged in sex acts on the roof of the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Harrisburg.

Pane said the Marshals Service is confident that the security integrity of the courthouse is intact. The question is what wasn't intact?

Just a thought.

Kids and Guns

A 12-year-old suspect was arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in connection with a deadly shooting in Omaha, Nebraska, officials told ABC News today.

Jarrell Milton will be charged with first-degree murder alongside 15-year-old and his 17-year-old brother. All three are being charged as adults, the Douglas County Attorney’s office confirmed.

The three suspects allegedly got Jamymell Ray, 31, to meet them at the Miller Park in North Omaha for a marijuana deal, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine told ABC affiliate KETV.

 

"All three suspects had guns. There were shell casings from two different types of guns at the scene," Kleine told KETV.
 

The three juveniles allegedly attempted a robbery during the drug deal and shot Ray at close range, police said.  Authorities are still investigating how the 12-year-old got from Omaha to Minneapolis, and authorities know he did not get there himself.

Where were the parents of these kids and where  did they get the guns?

Just a thought.

Unpaid..?

Search for “unpaid internship” on job listing aggregation site Indeed.com and you will find a staggering 2,300 listings. Among them: “analyst intern” at an outfit in Cambridge, MA called Cloud Spectator, which advises cloud companies on marketing and helps companies choose cloud providers.

Michael Harper, a Boston University labor law professor who has written casebooks on employment law, and he says it’s clearly illegal, given courts’ interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). 

In the ruling last week, the court wiped out that standard and applied a totally new test, a requirement that the “Primary beneficiary” of the internship must be the intern rather than the employer.  The ruling seems to open the floodgates to internships that deliver school credit, a factor that was irrelevant before the ruling.

Ross Perlin, author of a book on internships, argued eloquently in the New York Times that “these very same institutions have been complicit in the internship boom by ignoring abuses, requiring internships for graduation and charging students for academic credit when they go off campus to do unpaid work.”

The ruling sends the Black Swan case back to the district court for a decision, where it’s likely that plaintiffs Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, who aren’t seeking class status, will prevail, since it’s clear that the primary beneficiary of their work was the production, not them as interns. It’s tough to argue that emptying the garbage and fetching a pillow is educational.

The ruling paves the way for employers to make deals with educational institutions for school credit, perpetuating a system that exploits student labor, takes jobs from would-be entry-level workers, favors the privileged who can afford to make no money and flouts the basic tenet of the FLSA, that people who work deserve to get paid at least a minimum wage.

Just a thought.

Heroin instead?

The maker of OxyContin released an abuse-resistant formulation of the drug to deter addicts from crushing it and inhaling or injecting it.  As abuse of OxyContin fell, other opioids moved in to fill the gap: drug users choosing high-potency fentanyl and hydromorphone rose.  A new abuse-resistant version of Opana hit the U.S. 

[A]n abuse-deterrent formulation successfully reduced abuse of a specific drug but also generated an unanticipated outcome: replacement of the abuse-deterrent formulation with alternative opioid medications and heroin, a drug that may pose a much greater overall risk to public health than OxyContin. Thus, abuse-deterrent formulations may not be the “magic bullets” that many hoped they would be in solving the growing problem of opioid abuse.

The dirty secret is that prescription drug misuse is safer than heroin use  not because the inherent overdose or addiction risk is any lower with prescription opioids, but because these drugs come in known doses with specific ingredients and often involve contact with a medical doctor.

The most effective known treatment for opioid addiction is maintenance treatment with another opioid, typically methadone or buprenorphine (Suboxone, Subutex). Such treatment reduces the spread of blood-borne disease, cuts crime and saves lives better than any other known method. It may be that the maintenance opioids help treat depression or act as a salve for some other underlying problem, allowing some people to function better on the drugs than off.

Whatever the case, people can and do lead full, productive loving lives of recovery while taking these medications. Add appropriate counseling, job training and psychiatric medication where needed and you can sometimes see even better results.

Rather than driving prescription opioid misusers to the illegal heroin market, then, we should be pushing them in the other direction: trying to get as many opioid addicts as possible into the medical system and using opioids themselves in treatment when necessary. It may seem counterintuitive, but effective strategies often are.

Just a thought.

Zorba, the Dirty Dance

Zorba's Dance is a song by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. It is based on two traditional Cretan songs, "Armenohorianos Syrtos" and "Kritiko syrtaki", composed by Giorgis Koutsourelis. The song featured in the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, for which Theodorakis wrote the soundtrack, and became popular around the world. It is now commonly played and danced to in Greek tavernas. The track has been recorded by many different musicians from around the world.

The current dilemma with Greece is the pensions programs among others in the standoff with IMF, EU and the ECB.

The previous government cut pensions, became better at identifying bogus claims and collecting debt, and had passed legislation to reduce supplementary pensions by preventing the state from subsidising such payments.

There has been some progress on pensions under the leftwing government, however. The current administration has pledged to continue to integrate pension funds to phase out some early retirements and progressively reduce higher pensions. It has also promised to halt legal oddities, including those loopholes enabled by job categories. But Greece need more money than before and no one is an idiot.
Greece's dance now is with itself. .  Enjoy the fabulous music.

Just a thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UgndyMfe-8

Exhausted...

A young Swedish woman who sued her former Wall Street executive boss over lurid allegations of sexual conquest, betrayal and stalking was awarded $18 million by a federal jury.

Hanna Bouveng, 25, accused Benjamin Wey, a Chinese-born American Wall Street financier, and CEO of New York Global Group, in an $850 million lawsuit of using his power as owner of the Group to coerce her into four sexual encounters before firing her after discovering she had a boyfriend.

Bouveng, who was raised in Sweden, testified that soon after Wey hired her, the CEO began a relentless quest to have sex with her. She says he fired her six months later after she refused any more sexual contact and he found a man in her bed in the apartment he helped finance.

Wey, 43, also sought to defame Bouveng by posting articles on his blog accusing her of being a "street walker," a "loose woman" and an extortionist, her lawyers say.

Wey walked into a Stockholm cafe in April 2014 where she was working a few months after she was fired from Global Group, her attorney told jurors. "The message was: 'Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I am going to find you and I am going to get you," Ratner said.

The married financier denied ever having sex with Bouveng. He portrayed her as an opportunist. Wey testified that Bouveng knew nothing about finance before he hired and began mentoring her. She betrayed his generosity by embracing a party-girl lifestyle that left her too exhausted to succeed.  Apparently she did... Just a thought.

Driven Part 4-Pao Pao

Controversy over Pao's handling of the firing of a popular Reddit administrator continued to grow, as the uproar prompted several discussion boards to be taken offline, while the CEO lost more support among Reddit's users.

According to the Change.org petition, Pao is responsible for "a new age of censorship" on the website. The petition began three weeks ago after five forums (known as subreddits) on the site were banned for breaking Reddit's anti-harassment policy.

The appointment of Pao, the plaintiff in a high profile Silicon Valley discrimination lawsuit recently, was polarizing from the start. Some users were concerned that she would censor certain of the site's more freewheeling communities. Reddit's recent clampdown on a number of offensive subreddits led some users to deride her as "Chairman Pao."

"A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top," has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground" the petition says.

At the same time, over 100 of Reddit's most popular forums have been set to "private," locking them off, by their moderators in protest against the company's decision to dismiss Director of Talent Victoria Taylor.

In a Friday interview with Time Magazine, Pao apologized for the abruptness of Taylor's firing, saying the company didn't handle the transition well, although she declined to comment on the reasons behind Taylor's dismissal.

The moderators (unpaid, voluntary web users who help to run the subreddits) relied on Taylor to help arrange Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, a highly popular feature where members of the public or celebrities could answer questions from Reddit users.

Taylor's dismissal is not the only reason moderators are unsatisfied. "There is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits," Gilgamesh added.

An online petition calling for Ellen Pao to step down, signed by over 100,000 people who are deeply critical of her leadership.

Just a thought.