Harper, Britain and Elder Abuse

I have often wondered why Harper wanted to strengthen Canada’ ties to Great Britain, and now I am beginning to see why. It has nothing to do with love of Queen and country, but everything to do with love of Power. It appears to me that Harper loves the idea that the British people are among the most watched and spied upon people in the world. I think he is trying to move  Canadians along the path to accepting the idea that government surveillance is needed and that government can be trusted with the information it keeps on its citizens.

The Following articles from Britain, could be where we are heading in Canada

First Take away Canadians privacy

Pamela Owen wrote a very interesting article on the problem  people in Britain are faced with when going online. She says that details about text messages, phone calls, emails and every website visited by members of the public will be kept on record in a bid to combat terrorism.

The Government will order broadband providers, land line and mobile phone companies to save the information for up to a year under a new security scheme.

So we can see why Harper wants to have closer ties to Great Britain, so he can copy their security protocols  and make Canada the most spied upon country in the world.

But we still have a way to go to beat Britain but under Harper's agenda we may soon get this honour. of being the most spied upon people in the world.

"Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: 'Britain is already one of the most spied on countries off-line and this is a shameful attempt to watch everything we do online in the same way."

According to the Telegraph, the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) is already being attacked by privacy advocates as offering a license for abuse and as raising the “Big Brother” potential for universal surveillance. The British government, however, views it as a “vital” tool against terrorism and serious crime, and the legislation to put it into effect is expected to be proposed in May.

The information to be stored would not include the content of calls or emails but would consist of phone numbers and email addresses. These would would who was communicating with whom on what occasions and could also make it easy for police to track the movements of cellphone and computer users.

The British government is in the process of developing a scheme whereby all phone companies and broadband Internet providers will be required to store customer transaction data for a year and hand it over to security services upon request.

The databases would also include Facebook communications, Twitter posts — including direct messages between subscribers — and even communications between players in online video games.

Second start attacking the elderly and disabled

Disabled people face unlimited unpaid work or cuts in benefit according to this story in the Guardian.

Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Mental health professionals and charities have said they fear those deemed fit to undertake limited amounts of work under a controversial assessment process could suffer further harm to their health if the plans go ahead.

The new policy, outlined by DWP officials in meetings with disabilities groups, is due to be announced after legal changes contained in clause 54 of the welfare reform bill have made their way through parliament.

According to the Daily Mail, 'The Government in England has been clear that because we are living longer, public service workers must work a bit longer and pay a little more for their pensions,' 'But in return we have also made an important commitment - that at retirement, those on low and middle incomes will get at least as good a pension as they do now.

Harper is also planning on committing financial abuse against elderly Canadians and to frame and sell his position, he will be pitting younger Canadians against older Canadians. Canadians who need their rightly earned pensions to live with some dignity. Harper assumes that people in my generation will not care that younger Canadians will be worse off because of his changing the rules. He assumes that the older Boomers will have an "I'm all right Jack"  attitude and will not care about what happens to younger Canadians. Well I think he is wrong, I have younger brothers, cousins and friends, who are going to be affected by his change of rules. I care and find it objectionable that Harper is pitting one group of Canadians against another.

Conservative government plans to broaden its case for changing Old Age Security by emphasizing the higher price younger Canadians will pay to support government programs unless Ottawa moves now to bring down costs.

In her first extensive speech on the topic of demographics since the furor over pensions erupted last month, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley is expected to confirm on Tuesday that the details of proposed changes to OAS – which could include delaying qualification for benefits until the age of 67 – will be revealed in the forthcoming 2012 budget

Thought for the day

It's not from the known, but the unknown, that creativity and inventiveness are born.

 

To be defeat the fear of the unkown:

• Turn away from the predictable, cliché, and reliable.
• Trust the quiet, find the stillness, feel the calm.
• Behave as if your vision were clear.
• Anticipate the emotional rush that will come with your triumph.

All you need is love--to help reduce pain

The following is from Rewiring the brain to ease pain, published November 15, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal Health Journal

One of Dr. Mackey's favorite pain-relieving techniques is love. He and colleagues recruited 15 Stanford undergraduates and had them bring in photos of their beloved and another friend. Then he scanned their brains while applying pain stimuli from a hot probe. On average, the subject reported feeling 44% less pain while focusing on their loved one than on their friend. Brain images showed they had strong activity in the nucleus accumbens, an area deep in the brain involved with dopamine and reward circuits


One technique is attention distraction, simply directing your mind away from the pain. "It's like having a flashlight in the dark—you choose what you want to focus on. We have that same power with our mind," says Ravi Prasad, a pain psychologist at Stanford.


Guided imagery, in which a patient imagines, say, floating on a cloud, also works in part by diverting attention away from pain. So does mindfulness meditation. In a study in the Journal of Neuroscience in April, researchers at Wake Forest taught 15 adults how to meditate for 20 minutes a day for four days and subjected them to painful stimuli (a probe heated to 120 degrees Fahrenheit on the leg).


Brain scans before and after showed that while they were meditating, they had less activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain that registers where pain is coming from, and greater activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which plays a role in handling unpleasant feelings. Subjects also reported feeling 40% less pain intensity and 57% less unpleasantness while meditating.


"Our subjects really looked at pain differently after meditating. Some said, 'I didn't need to say ouch,' " says Fadel Zeidan, the lead investigator.


Techniques that help patients "emotionally reappraise" their pain rather than ignore it are particularly helpful when patients are afraid they will suffer further injury and become sedentary, experts say.


Cognitive behavioral therapy, which is offered at many pain-management programs, teaches patients to challenge their negative thoughts about their pain and substitute more positive behaviors.


Even getting therapy by telephone for six months helped British patients with fibromyalgia, according to a study published online this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Nearly 30% of patients receiving the therapy reported less pain, compared with 8% of those getting conventional treatments. The study noted that in the U.K., no drugs are approved for use in fibromyalgia and access to therapy or exercise programs is limited, if available at all.


Anticipating relief also seems to make it happen, research into the placebo effect has shown. In another NCCAM-funded study, 48 subjects were given either real or simulated acupuncture and then exposed to heat stimuli.


Both groups reported similar levels of pain relief—but brain scans showed that actual acupuncture interrupted pain signals in the spinal cord while the sham version, which didn't penetrate the skin, activated parts of the brain associated with mood and expectation, according to a 2009 study in the journal Neuroimage.


Experts stress that much still isn't known about pain and the brain, including whom these mind-body therapies are most appropriate for. They also say it's important that anyone who is in pain get a thorough medical examination. "You can't just say, 'Go take a yoga class.' That's not a thoughtful approach to pain management," says Dr. Briggs.

Optical illusion dampens arthritis pain

A small but interesting study reported By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times/For the Booster Shots blog , on November 15, 2011, 9:23 a.m. gives some hope for those with arthritis.

Seeing the movements of a healthy hand mirroring one's own movements plays a welcome trick on the brains of arthritis sufferers, a new study shows: It reduces the perception of pain. The observation, reported this week at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference, could offer a safe, inexpensive means of dampening chronic pain by enlisting the brain's power of suggestion.

The small arthritis study, which tested just eight subjects, comes from the lab of UC San Diego neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran -- who first used mirror-based trickery to treat phantom-limb pain in patients who have had an amputation. In those studies, pain perceived to come from an absent limb resolved when subjects saw what appeared to be their own missing limb moving smoothly and performing tasks without pain.

In the study presented by UCSD neuroscientist Laura Case this week in Washington, eight subjects suffering from severe osteo- or rheumatoid arthritis sat in front of a mirrored box and extended one of their hands. A researcher extended his hand over the subject's hand and asked the subject to move her hand slowly. The researcher, meanwhile, mimicked the subject's hand movement.

The subject, seeing only the researcher's hand in the mirror, saw a young, healthy hand performing movements fluidly and without pain or difficulty. And when asked about their hands' level of pain after the exercise, subjects rated their pain, on average, 1.5 points lower, on a scale of 1 to 10, than it had been at the outset. Some had a 3-point reduction in pain, said Case.

And there was more than one way to trick the brain's perception of pain, the researchers found. They also saw subjects rate their pain as lower when they held objects in their hands that appeared smaller and lighter than they actually were.

Case said it's not clear what trickery, exactly, made subjects feel less pain; it may have been the sight of "their" hand (actually, the researcher's) as a young, healthy hand with no arthritic deformities that made them feel better. It might have the appearance of the effortless movement that suggested a lack of pain. Then again, it may have been the exercise, which usually loosen's pain's grip, said Case.

Case and her colleagues are currently testing the mirror-based treatment on a larger population of patients with arthritic and other chronic pain. With roughly 50 million Americans suffering the pain and stiffness of arthritis, therapy that enlists the brain's willingness to see and feel a sick body as healthy -- even if it is an illusion -- could be an important treatment. Unlike non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which come with a long list of short- and long-term risks, mirror therapy is non-invasive, safe and relatively cheap. All it takes is a mirror, a healthy body stand-in and a brain