Vancouver Stanley Cup riots 2011

Happy Anniversary to us! Me and The Nag. Actually, one and the same. Two short years ago today, I launched this baby sibling to my Heart Sisters blog.

My first post here was about how to read the extra-fine print at the bottom of scientific journal articles to see who’s paying for the positive results being reported in research studies. I’d already built up quite a head of steam over at Heart Sisters about what’s known as marketing-based medicine. I was on a roll, except the roll had almost nothing to do with my important focus of women and heart disease – our #1 killer. As a heart attack survivor who now takes a fistful of cardiac meds every day, I realized that I had no clue which of these drugs were being prescribed for me based on industry-influenced medical journal articles and tainted clinical research. And worse – neither did my doctors.

Best to separate the sibs, I decided, so I could easily divide the emerging cardiology updates there and the marketing rants over here. Continue reading →

When I wrote here recently about the strange phenomenon of Facebook’s popularity with the self-absorbed (Why Narcissists Love Facebook), not even I could have guessed the apparent scope of the eye-popping stupidity and utter lack of judgement that some Facebook users are actually capable of openly demonstrating.

During several hours of the shocking Stanley Cup riots in downtown Vancouver, for example, a signature feature of the live television news coverage was the sea of bystanders with arms raised capturing countless images of violence, arson and looting via their cell phone cameras. And when the Vancouver Police Department asked the next morning for help in identifying the thugs who had terrorized their beautiful city, the response from outraged Vancouverites was immediate.

Here’s the unbelievable part, however: not only did bystanders send in their cell phone photos of rioters at work, many of the rioters themselves posted incriminating evidence on their own Facebook pages. Continue reading →