WOW! Had not realised, a part of Human Anatomy and Foreign Policy ( FP ) were so intimately connected!!!
Would it have been possible to achieve better outcomes for all if instead of the bottom, "TOP" was intimately connected to FP?????

Bush is gone and now we have Obama, but liberals are still traumatized by Bush so they still talk about Bush rather than Obama. Well now it's Obama and his policies which have a remarkable likeness to Bush's policies but it would be better not to talk about it. It might be embare-assing.

Yeah, this would have been really funny 10 years ago.

But as long as I'm here, here's a Straight Dope column from a few weeks back for Mistah Charlie.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3129/does-meditation-make-your-brain-work-differently

Because of the links I had in my comment, it didn't post:

"The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy." And of course that is total bullshit. Bush had already bombed Iraq within his first 30 days of taking office in 2001. These guys had a war agenda before he even became president and 9/11 was and is only a BS excuse.

Not only that, we learned last year that it was worse that simply ignoring the intel warning of an attack, there were sons of bitches who argued that the intel was a trick! Look at this: "the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat."

So there was intel warnings of an attack and we had these war hungry freaks arguing that those warnings should be ignored because they were supposedly a trick to get our attention off of Iraq!? We need to hold people accountable, these power hungry freaks got many Americans killed. Bush is still waging around a free man.

It's no surprise that Huffington Post runs the story because it serves the BS war agenda and helps obscure the war industry agenda. "Former Bush Official: We Went Into Iraq Because 'We Were Looking For Somebody's Ass To Kick': Report The Huffington Post | By Paige Lavender Posted: 10/20/2013 1:57 pm EDT | Updated: 10/21/2013 11:27 am EDT"

I posted this at my blog: Huffington Post runs BS Iraq War excuse (click on my name to see it)

The current occupant of the White House does not "waste energy" KICKING ANYONE ANYWHERE.... he just drops BOMBS.....end of the story......"conserving energy" for "bigger things"!!!

the continuity of foreign policy between the bush ii ("w") and bush iii (barry "the rock" o'bomber) regimes was evident prior to the november 2008 election to informed observers and lucky guessers - for example, in october 2008, i published this on my eponymous blog

She thought she saw a candidate
Who'd put an end to war.
She looked again, and found it was
The Same Game as Before.
"If that's the way it goes," she said,
"Then what is voting for?"

in the words of one of our esteemed comrades here, "Third party, folks"

godoggo - thanks for the reference

a somewhat more recent review than the Straight Dope column is relying on finds the following with respect to controlled studies on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction:

"In patients with anxiety and mood disorders, this intervention was associated with effect sizes (Hedges’ g) of 0.97 and 0.95 for improving anxiety and mood symptoms, respectively. These effect sizes were robust, unrelated to publication year or number of treatment sessions, and were maintained over follow-up. These results suggest that mindfulness-based therapy is a promising intervention for treating anxiety and mood problems in clinical populations."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848393/?report=classic

That's fine, I have no reason to want to argue about it.

Oh, well, better late than never...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8qw3oWvDpo

@Weaver
Thank you!LOL......

Why Washington Can’t Stop: The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts

By Tom Engelhardt

In terms of pure projectable power, there’s never been anything like it. Its military has divided the world -- the whole planet -- into six “commands.” Its fleet, with 11 aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has done so largely unchallenged for almost seven decades. Its Air Force has ruled the global skies, and despite being almost continuously in action for years, hasn’t faced an enemy plane since 1991 or been seriously challenged anywhere since the early 1970s. Its fleet of drone aircraft has proven itself capable of targeting and killing suspected enemies in the backlands of the planet from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia with little regard for national boundaries, and none at all for the possibility of being shot down. It funds and trains proxy armies on several continents and has complex aid and training relationships with militaries across the planet. On hundreds of bases, some tiny and others the size of American towns, its soldiers garrison the globe from Italy to Australia, Honduras to Afghanistan, and on islands from Okinawa in the Pacific Ocean to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its weapons makers are the most advanced on Earth and dominate the global arms market. Its nuclear weaponry in silos, on bombers, and on its fleet of submarines would be capable of destroying several planets the size of Earth. Its system of spy satellites is unsurpassed and unchallenged. Its intelligence services can listen in on the phone calls or read the emails of almost anyone in the world from top foreign leaders to obscure insurgents. The CIA and its expanding paramilitary forces are capable of kidnapping people of interest just about anywhere from rural Macedonia to the streets of Rome and Tripoli. For its many prisoners, it has set up (and dismantled) secret jails across the planet and on its naval vessels. It spends more on its military than the next most powerful 13 states combined. Add in the spending for its full national security state and it towers over any conceivable group of other nations.

for the rest

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175763/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_what_planet_are_we_on/

i love it, and by that I do not mean the bags or necklaces, but the post--masterful.