Skip to main content

Magic Jewelry Makes you Smarter and Bolder!


Peace, love, positive energy. "...it's like a second skin. I don't leave the house without protection and guidance," goes a current radio ad.

The voice actress isn't talking about carrying a map and some condoms. Does the peace, love and positive energy bit mean, for instance, helping homeless youth, or raising awareness about foster care, or fighting city hall? No, all those things are hard. The annoying radio ad is about Alex and Ani jewelry: "positive energy products that adorn the body, enlighten the mind, and empower the spirit."

I love jewelry. What I don't love is the message that wearing jewelry will make you smarter, positive or more courageous. It's a no-effort solution, and like almost all no-effort solutions, it's bunkum. It's the twenty-first century, and yet a big business can be built on a bunch of BS.

Want to empower your spirit--for real? Even where magic really does exist, people (like Harry Potter) need courage and way to get it:

Harry Potter's Five Steps [to Courage]

(1) Prepare for the challenge.
(2) Surround yourself with support.
(3) Engage in positive self-talk.
(4) Focus on what's at stake.
(5) Take appropriate action.(1)

Want to enlighten your mind? Good--there's no substitute for knowledge. Knowing truth from falsehood is hard, but it helps to keep in mind that the burden of proof is on the one making the assertion, and that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Learn about logical fallacies, admit it when you're wrong, gather reliable information, do some N=1 tests on yourself, and probably, you can stop spinning your wheels. At the least, you can stop wasting your time on things that don't work.

As for positive energy, eat some meat or eggs from a pasture-raised animal. The energy is in the form of calories (they're units of energy), and an animal raised with care in its natural environment is a positive thing. It's as close to a no-effort solution as you can get.

1. Harry Potter's Five Steps to Courage by Tom Morris. Huffington Post, April 20, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-morris/harry-potters-five-steps_b_189244.html
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Why I've stopped eating fermented foods

I'm finally getting answers about weird health problems that have kept coming and going over the years for no reason I could ever explain: pounding heart, bloating, insomnia, heat intolerance, intolerance of high-fat meals, and getting winded easily even though I'm physically fit. These health problems all came roaring in at once this spring when I did a huge landscape project, pushing through it even while I had a cold. The yard looks fabulous, but I ended up with A three-week cold Post-viral syndrome for another few weeks An ongoing cough  Insomnia (tired but wired late at night) A puffy face, especially in the morning and after eating foods I’d previously tolerated (including SIBO yogurt) 6 pound weight gain TATT (tired all the time) Being easily winded Having a hard time cooling off Being sensitive to sunlight Grok (X’s AI feature) said this could be mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). Mast cells are immune system cells that put out pathogen-fighting and other substances ...
Post a Comment
Read more