Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”, also known as “Let It Snow“, is a song written by lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne in July 1945. It was written in Hollywood, California during a heat wave as Cahn and Styne imagined cooler conditions.
One of the best-selling songs of all time, “Let It Snow!” has been covered countless times. Due to its seasonal theme, it is commonly regarded as a Christmas song. However, the song makes no reference to the holiday in its lyrics.
Our First Princesses are sooooo lovely! President is a proud daddy. First lady is a proud mommy.
Here’s my thoughts
1. That man has NEGROID FEATURES
2. I can see the resemblance.
………………………
Historic photograph of Obama’s Irish ancestor is discovered
Sheila Langan @SheiLangan December 20,2014 03:39 AM
In historic photo of Fulmoth Kearney, President Obama’s Irish ancestor from Moneygall, Co, Offaly, has at last been found.
Merlyn White, Obama’s third cousin once removed, recently learned of her connection to the president while visiting a distant relation in Scotland. The news led her to reconsider an old family photo album she had inherited from her 107-year-old great aunt. In the album’s pages she found portraits of Fulmoth and his wife Charlotte, which she shared with genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who first identified Fulmoth as Obama’s Irish ancestor.
This revelation of the photo comes on the heels of the discovery of Kearney’s final resting place in a Kansas cemetery and his memorialization with a headstone after 136 years.
In 2007, Smolenyak traced then-candidate Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry on his mother’s side, eventually finding that his third great-grandfather, Fulmoth Kearney, left Moneygall for New York in 1850. He and his sister Margaret were bound for Ohio, where their father had inherited land from a brother. Other members of the Kearney family would gradually make their journey to America, but Fulmoth was the most recent immigrant on the maternal side of Obama’s family.
http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/Obamas-Irish-ancestor-gets-a-headstone-after-136-years.html
Chestnuts roastin’ on an open fire
Singin’ my jingle, where is kris kringle
Santa Claus…woooo…is coming straight to the ghetto…
Fox has done a series of background videos for Empire
Part 1
http://youtu.be/dXaSEgR47wQ
Part 2
http://youtu.be/yHatrDAwyng
Part 3
http://youtu.be/iZN4uaqEw6E
Part 4
http://youtu.be/2ssjXPscuKA
How Exercise Changes Our DNA
By Gretchen Reynolds
December 17, 2014 12:01 am
We all know that exercise can make us fitter and reduce our risk for illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. But just how, from start to finish, a run or a bike ride might translate into a healthier life has remained baffling.
Now new research reports that the answer may lie, in part, in our DNA. Exercise, a new study finds, changes the shape and functioning of our genes, an important stop on the way to improved health and fitness.
The human genome is astonishingly complex and dynamic, with genes constantly turning on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from the body. When genes are turned on, they express proteins that prompt physiological responses elsewhere in the body.
Scientists know that certain genes become active or quieter as a result of exercise. But they hadn’t understood how those genes know how to respond to exercise.
Enter epigenetics, a process by which the operation of genes is changed, but not the DNA itself. Epigenetic changes occur on the outside of the gene, mainly through a process called methylation. In methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body.
Scientists know that methylation patterns change in response to lifestyle. Eating certain diets or being exposed to pollutants, for instance, can change methylation patterns on some of the genes in our DNA and affect what proteins those genes express. Depending on which genes are involved, it may also affect our health and risk for disease.
Far less has been known about exercise and methylation. A few small studies have found that a single bout of exercise leads to immediate changes in the methylation patterns of certain genes in muscle cells. But whether longer-term, regular physical training affects methylation, or how it does, has been unclear.
So for a study published this month in Epigenetics, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm recruited 23 young and healthy men and women, brought them to the lab for a series of physical performance and medical tests, including a muscle biopsy, and then asked them to exercise half of their lower bodies for three months.
One of the obstacles in the past to precisely studying epigenetic changes has been that so many aspects of our lives affect our methylation patterns, making it difficult to isolate the effects of exercise from those of diet or other behaviors.
The Karolinska scientists overturned that obstacle by the simple expedient of having their volunteers bicycle using only one leg, leaving the other unexercised. In effect, each person became his or her own control group. Both legs would undergo methylation patterns influenced by his or her entire life; but only the pedaling leg would show changes related to exercise.
The volunteers pedaled one-legged at a moderate pace for 45 minutes, four times per week for three months. Then the scientists repeated the muscle biopsies and other tests with each volunteer.
Not surprisingly, the volunteers’ exercised leg was more powerful now than the other, showing that the exercise had resulted in physical improvements.
But the changes within the muscle cells’ DNA were more intriguing. Using sophisticated genomic analysis, the researchers determined that more than 5,000 sites on the genome of muscle cells from the exercised leg now featured new methylation patterns. Some showed more methyl groups; some fewer. But the changes were significant and not found in the unexercised leg.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/how-exercise-changes-our-dna/?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article
Obama Unbound
DEC. 19, 2014
Timothy Egan
There may not be a lightness to his step, a lilt in his voice or a bit of jauntiness returned to his manner. The office ages everyone prematurely, and makes spontaneity all but impossible. But President Obama is acting like a man who’s been given the political equivalent of a testosterone boost.
Perhaps the best thing to happen to him was the crushing blow his party took in the midterm elections. Come January, Republicans will have their largest House majority in 84 years — since Herbert Hoover was president. Granted, no politician wants to join Hoover and history in the same sentence. But Obama is not cowering or conceding. He’s been liberated by defeat, becoming the president that many of his supporters hoped he would be.
He promised to be transformative. Instead, especially in the last two years, he’s been listless, passive, a spectator to his own presidency. Rather than setting things in motion, he reacted to events. Even Ebola, the great scare that prompted so much media hysteria it was awarded Lie of the Year by PolitiFact, was somehow his fault. No more. Of late, the president who has nothing to lose has discovered that his best friend is the future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/obama-unbound.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Ftimothy-egan&_r=1
Oh, good grief. Here we go again with the listless passive spectator crap. He must have graduated from the Journamilism School of Cut and Paste. These clowns are such hacks.
Cuban economic reforms spur talk of race
By Nora Gámez Torres-
ngameztorres@elNuevoHerald.com
12/20/2014 8:39 AM
| Updated:
12/20/2014 8:56 AM
As Cuba prepares to enter its fifth year of sweeping economic reforms to jump-start its lumbering economy, many say the changes have had an unintended effect: drawing attention to the thorny subject of race.
A recent rally on racial discrimination in Cuba, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, was dubbed “Talking about discrimination hurts. Not talking about it, divides us.”
The government-sanctioned dialogue organized by the Regional Chapter of Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAAC) has taken on an educational tone in the form of book presentations, academic discourse and even music concerts.
Another event, the two-day public forum — entitled “Race and Cuban Identity: Cuba’s Past, Present and Future” — was organized by the opposition’s Committee for the Racial Integration of Citizens (CIR). It focused on inequality of Afro-descendants in Cuba “in the midst of economic adjustments.”
Among the topics: lack of equity for the island’s black community, increased levels of poverty and vulnerability, and the meager number of Afro-Cubans in managerial jobs.
Black Cubans are trapped between “an economy of survival” and “the informal economy,” opposition leader Manuel Cuesta Morúa said during the forum.
Reaction to the historic announcement this week that the U.S. and Cuba plan to normalize relations reflected the sharp divisions within the Afro-Cuban community, with some supporting the deal and others opposed.
“The problem is not the embargo or the U.S. government. The problem is the system in Cuba that does not work,” said Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White dissident group. “There is no benefit for the Cuban people in this deal, only for the government.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article4725627.html#storylink=cpy
Nerdy Wonka@NerdyWonka
POTUS: “More jobs, more people insured, a growing economy. Pick any metric that you want. America’s resurgence is real. We are better off.”
Only4RM @Only4RM
Follow
.@NerdyWonka Now, I weep for the midterm results. This is what idiot Dems should’ve said instead of running from this President’s successes.
1:38 PM – 19 Dec 2014
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/546083538224041985/photo/1
http://youtu.be/NTxRFq0ZKj4
The First Family left and arrived in Hawaii for Christmas Vacation
https://twitter.com/EmilyBethMiller/status/546121697540448256/photo/1
https://twitter.com/keithboykin/status/546305425478782977/photo/1
Good Morning, Everyone :)