haha
When your husband is in the military...
"Honey, take out the garbage! Wait...where'd you go?"
( Collapse )
"Honey, take out the garbage! Wait...where'd you go?"
( Collapse )
Aquarius
well lets see if this works...they have the wrong image for the result html, but not the results page, so I fixed it.
Vaccine
Vaccine Skeptics Vs Your Kids
In the last trimester of her pregnancy, Helena Moran caught a cough that she couldn't get rid of. She figured she'd picked up the germ—whatever it was—from one of her patients at a Boulder dentist's office. But the real nightmare began after her daughter, Evelina, was born: The baby began to cough and cough, and then she'd curl up in a little ball and turn blue. At the emergency room, she was diagnosed with whooping cough. She spent the next five weeks in intensive care and suffered permanent lung damage.
It turned out that by working in Boulder—one of the wealthiest, most well-educated towns in the country—Moran had put herself at risk of contracting a disease that largely disappeared after widespread vaccination against it began in the 1950s. Since the early 1990s, whooping cough has periodically whipped through Boulder, where a large percentage of parents do not immunize their children, public health officials say.
There's a Boulder in almost every state. Childhood vaccination rates nationwide are near record levels, in part thanks to a Clinton-era program that guarantees free vaccines for the poor. But as I learned while researching my book, Vaccine, a history of immunization, resistance is also growing, especially among affluent and well-educated people—to the point where living in a place with a high percentage of PhDs is a risk factor for whooping cough. "These are people who know better," ucla whooping cough expert James Cherry told me, "but they don't know enough."
Vaccine resisters are motivated by a range of convictions—immunization isn't "natural" (the wellness set), it's suspect because it's government mandated (Christian home-schoolers), and so on—but the movement got a huge boost from the controversy over the mercury-laden preservative thimerosal, which some theorized might be linked to autism. That link has been disproven—by, if nothing else, the fact that autism rates remained steady after pediatricians and public health authorities told manufacturers to stop making thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines in 1999. But the anti-vaccine movement has kept going, finding ever new reasons to distrust immunization. Some, including celebrity pediatrician Dr. Robert W. Sears, have raised fears about aluminum in the shots, while others—like the 2,000 or so protesters at a Washington rally this June—simply charge that kids get "too many vaccines" full of "dangerous toxins" that overwhelm their immune systems.
The skeptics have many things going for them: our justifiable distrust of medical authority; our admiration for do-it-yourselfers, mavericks, and the self-taught; even a dose of celebrity appeal from the likes of Charlie Sheen, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carrey. What most of them don't have is an understanding of the science. Thanks to vaccines, polio and diphtheria are now pretty well confined to the world's medical backwaters. But tetanus lives everywhere in soil and rusty nails, and as many as 6 million Americans are exposed to whooping cough each year, according to surveys of blood antibodies. This year, measles has returned, with the worst US outbreak since 2001. Most of the patients have been unvaccinated children and adults, and nearly a quarter have been hospitalized. In Third World countries with no measles vaccination, the disease killed nearly a quarter-million children in 2006.
Current medical practice is to vaccinate babies against whooping cough beginning at two months of age. Widespread vaccination creates "herd immunity"—the disease has fewer hosts, which means there are fewer people to spread it to those at serious risk, from immunocompromised adults (think chemotherapy patients) to newborns such as Evelina Moran and Teddy Hickenlooper, the infant son of Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who caught whooping cough from an unvaccinated older child in 2002.
Here's where we get to the deeper, fundamentally progressive reason for vaccination: The point is to protect not merely ourselves, but the community. To not vaccinate is to threaten the immunological commons, the array of trillions of antibodies and T cells that decades of vaccination have built up in our bodies, draping a web of germ-fighting agents around our most vulnerable neighbors. To not vaccinate is to affirm an overweening individuality. It's a form of selfishness.
Right now, in many states, all it takes to get an exemption from vaccine requirements is signing a form. Some, including a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins University, have proposed making it harder—allowing a philosophical exemption only after parents demonstrate a good-faith effort to educate themselves.
True, medical experts have failed us before; to make sure they are doing their job, we need to strongly support the public health programs whose job it is to watch out for serious adverse reactions to vaccines. But while questioning authority is healthy, facts are facts. If vaccines really were responsible for autism, it would be too much to ask parents to do the altruistic thing. But more than a dozen studies have failed to discover such a link—and not a single legitimate study has shown that one exists. I have spent many, many hours reading these studies and talking to vaccine scientists. I find no reason to believe Jim Carrey more than I believe them. Call me a dupe of the establishment, but I'd rather trust the doctors.
Arthur Allen
In the last trimester of her pregnancy, Helena Moran caught a cough that she couldn't get rid of. She figured she'd picked up the germ—whatever it was—from one of her patients at a Boulder dentist's office. But the real nightmare began after her daughter, Evelina, was born: The baby began to cough and cough, and then she'd curl up in a little ball and turn blue. At the emergency room, she was diagnosed with whooping cough. She spent the next five weeks in intensive care and suffered permanent lung damage.
It turned out that by working in Boulder—one of the wealthiest, most well-educated towns in the country—Moran had put herself at risk of contracting a disease that largely disappeared after widespread vaccination against it began in the 1950s. Since the early 1990s, whooping cough has periodically whipped through Boulder, where a large percentage of parents do not immunize their children, public health officials say.
There's a Boulder in almost every state. Childhood vaccination rates nationwide are near record levels, in part thanks to a Clinton-era program that guarantees free vaccines for the poor. But as I learned while researching my book, Vaccine, a history of immunization, resistance is also growing, especially among affluent and well-educated people—to the point where living in a place with a high percentage of PhDs is a risk factor for whooping cough. "These are people who know better," ucla whooping cough expert James Cherry told me, "but they don't know enough."
Vaccine resisters are motivated by a range of convictions—immunization isn't "natural" (the wellness set), it's suspect because it's government mandated (Christian home-schoolers), and so on—but the movement got a huge boost from the controversy over the mercury-laden preservative thimerosal, which some theorized might be linked to autism. That link has been disproven—by, if nothing else, the fact that autism rates remained steady after pediatricians and public health authorities told manufacturers to stop making thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines in 1999. But the anti-vaccine movement has kept going, finding ever new reasons to distrust immunization. Some, including celebrity pediatrician Dr. Robert W. Sears, have raised fears about aluminum in the shots, while others—like the 2,000 or so protesters at a Washington rally this June—simply charge that kids get "too many vaccines" full of "dangerous toxins" that overwhelm their immune systems.
The skeptics have many things going for them: our justifiable distrust of medical authority; our admiration for do-it-yourselfers, mavericks, and the self-taught; even a dose of celebrity appeal from the likes of Charlie Sheen, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carrey. What most of them don't have is an understanding of the science. Thanks to vaccines, polio and diphtheria are now pretty well confined to the world's medical backwaters. But tetanus lives everywhere in soil and rusty nails, and as many as 6 million Americans are exposed to whooping cough each year, according to surveys of blood antibodies. This year, measles has returned, with the worst US outbreak since 2001. Most of the patients have been unvaccinated children and adults, and nearly a quarter have been hospitalized. In Third World countries with no measles vaccination, the disease killed nearly a quarter-million children in 2006.
Current medical practice is to vaccinate babies against whooping cough beginning at two months of age. Widespread vaccination creates "herd immunity"—the disease has fewer hosts, which means there are fewer people to spread it to those at serious risk, from immunocompromised adults (think chemotherapy patients) to newborns such as Evelina Moran and Teddy Hickenlooper, the infant son of Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who caught whooping cough from an unvaccinated older child in 2002.
Here's where we get to the deeper, fundamentally progressive reason for vaccination: The point is to protect not merely ourselves, but the community. To not vaccinate is to threaten the immunological commons, the array of trillions of antibodies and T cells that decades of vaccination have built up in our bodies, draping a web of germ-fighting agents around our most vulnerable neighbors. To not vaccinate is to affirm an overweening individuality. It's a form of selfishness.
Right now, in many states, all it takes to get an exemption from vaccine requirements is signing a form. Some, including a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins University, have proposed making it harder—allowing a philosophical exemption only after parents demonstrate a good-faith effort to educate themselves.
True, medical experts have failed us before; to make sure they are doing their job, we need to strongly support the public health programs whose job it is to watch out for serious adverse reactions to vaccines. But while questioning authority is healthy, facts are facts. If vaccines really were responsible for autism, it would be too much to ask parents to do the altruistic thing. But more than a dozen studies have failed to discover such a link—and not a single legitimate study has shown that one exists. I have spent many, many hours reading these studies and talking to vaccine scientists. I find no reason to believe Jim Carrey more than I believe them. Call me a dupe of the establishment, but I'd rather trust the doctors.
Arthur Allen
hahahahahahaha
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I create the best drama.
I'm going to go laugh at rape victims and punch a pit bull in the face while wearing a fursuit.
Because that's what I do right?
HAHAHAHAHA!
what a bunch of morons.
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amused
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burn in hell
This family needs to burn in hell.
that's the sort of thing my family would do. :-(
that's the sort of thing my family would do. :-(
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley
POLL!!!
Everyone answer please!!
How much would you be willing to pay for 'all natural' 'free range' 'local' eggs?
The eggs come in green, white, and brown (which is appealing to a lot of people for some reason, lol).
The chickens are spoiled rotten, given ample room to roam and forage, fresh vegetables and lettuce from the garden everyday (which are organic), however do not receive organic feed crumbles (me, my dogs, cockatiels, and cats don't even get 'organic feed', lol).
I've seen prices for 'rainbow dozens' like I have for $6 a dozen!!! But that just seems too much in this market.
So, what would you pay? Would you be willing to pay more for local humanely produced eggs?
The going rate at the grocery store is more than $2 a dozen currently. (battery raised)
More than $3.50 per dozen for free range.
How much would you be willing to pay for 'all natural' 'free range' 'local' eggs?
The eggs come in green, white, and brown (which is appealing to a lot of people for some reason, lol).
The chickens are spoiled rotten, given ample room to roam and forage, fresh vegetables and lettuce from the garden everyday (which are organic), however do not receive organic feed crumbles (me, my dogs, cockatiels, and cats don't even get 'organic feed', lol).
I've seen prices for 'rainbow dozens' like I have for $6 a dozen!!! But that just seems too much in this market.
So, what would you pay? Would you be willing to pay more for local humanely produced eggs?
The going rate at the grocery store is more than $2 a dozen currently. (battery raised)
More than $3.50 per dozen for free range.
For anyone unclear on what is happening right now from About.com
Why the Bailout Is Necessary
Tuesday September 23, 2008
Last Wednesday, a record $140 billion was pulled out of money-market accounts, usually considered the safest of investments. That's because investors were moving the funds to U.S. Treasuries, causing yields to drop to zero. In other words, investors were so panicked that they no longer cared if they got any return on their investment...they just didn't want to lose capital.
As described in Thursday's Wall Street Journal:
Huddled in his office Wednesday with top advisers, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson watched his financial-data terminal with alarm as one market after another began go haywire. Investors were fleeing money-market mutual funds, long considered ultra-safe. The market froze for the short-term loans that banks rely on to fund their day-to-day business. Without such mechanisms, the economy would grind to a halt. Companies would be unable to fund their daily operations. Soon, consumers would panic.What caused this unprecedented run on supposedly safe money markets?
On Tuesday, the once-$62.6 billion Reserve Primary Fund, a money-market fund, saw its value fall below $1 a share because of its investments in Lehman's short-term debt. Money-market funds, which yield a bit more than basic cash accounts by buying safe, short-term debt instruments, strive to keep their share prices at exactly $1 -- and "breaking the buck" isn't supposed to happen. Money-market funds are where corporate treasurers put rainy-day funds, where sovereign wealth funds park their excess dollars and where Mom-and-Pop investors stash savings. Now, money-market funds were selling what they could and hoarding cash to meet what they thought might be extraordinary levels of redemptions from investors, said one commercial trading desk head.Banks were also hoarding cash, too panicked to lend to each other or purchase any assets, for fear of taking on bad debt. Normally, financial institutions have about $2 billion on hand at any given time. By Thursday of last week, they had an unprecedented $190 billion, to prepare for further redemptions. In other words, the economy was on the precipice of a full-scale run on the banks - and not by worried depositors as in the 1930's, but by corporate investors.
Through Wednesday, money-market fund investors -- including institutional investors such as corporate treasurers, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds -- pulled out a record $144.5 billion, according to AMG Data Services. The industry had $7.1 billion in redemptions the week before. Without these funds' participation, the $1.7 trillion commercial-paper market, which finances automakers' lending arms or banks credit-card units, faced higher costs. The commercial-paper market shrank by $52.1 billion in the week ended Wednesday, according to data from the Federal Reserve, the largest weekly decline since December. Without commercial paper, "factories would have to shut down, people would lose their jobs and there would be an effect on the real economy," says Paul Schott Stevens, president of the Investment Company Institute mutual-fund trade group.Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson conferred with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who agreed that the problem was beyond the scope of monetary policy. The Federal government is the only entity large enough to step in and stop the madness. Let's hope it is enough. Otherwise, as Paulson was overheard to comment, "Heaven help us all." (Source: WSJ, Shock Forces Paulson's Hand, September 20, 2008)
Congress Adding Needed Oversight to Bailout Plan
Tuesday September 23, 2008
- Aid for homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure.
- An oversight structure that will review Treasury's purchase and sale of mortgages.
- A government equity stake in companies that receive bailout assistance.
- Limits on executive compensation of rescued firms.
http://useconomy.about.com/b/2008/…
The Federal government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to guarantee or buy-back subprime mortgage-backed securities in the financial markets to avoid a complete collapse. Here's a chronology of the steps the government took to avoid the crisis, and why it happened anyway.
Why the Bailout is necessary:
Widespread panic in the financial markets continues to threaten overnight lending, needed to keep businesses running. The problem is beyond what monetary policy can do...which means the $700 billion bailout may be the only solution.
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That said, I'm not an economist and I'm not going to pretend like I have some insight on what exactly *should* be done. I just know it's a lot more complicated than a lot of people would like to believe.
There is the anarchist in me that would really like to see the government do nothing, the economy collapse, everyone lose their jobs, and have the country gripped in mass hysteria and panic while I sit back and eat popcorn from the safety of my well stocked, wall armed home.
And what happens if we don't pass the bailout and/or just let these people fail?
Simple.
A Depression.
If the banks fail, the money disappears, you get locked out of the banks, the banks go under and you have no money..the FDIC can insure 52 billion at the moment, but that would be a fraction of what some banks, like Citi, would be in deposits.
Mutual Funds would collapse.
401K's would collapse.
Pensions would collapse.
Tax revenue would drop.
Unemployment would spike.
We would default on our National Debt.
If that is, the situation is as bad as they claim it is. Perhaps they are scaring us into letting them give 700 billion to their buddies, I don't know..
But if you study historical economics, you will see the Great Depression was caused by a culmination of several things..
Restriction of Credit, liquidation of banking assets, equity collapsing, wealthy investors fleeing the markets in droves to save as much net worth as possible.
Of course, the 1929 market crash was a sudden event, the current markets automatically shut down is a certain percentage is lost .. meaning all assets are frozen for a "cool down" period. After the 1929 collapse, it was mostly uphill from there (stock wise)..
In Memory
I'm spending today in quiet contemplation and mourning for all those affected on 9.11.01, and for those whose lives have been changed by the subsequent wars.
My heart goes out to every family, soldier, and spirit involved.
My heart goes out to every family, soldier, and spirit involved.
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sad
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rice
Yesterday I made a fairly tasty low cal dinner from things I dug out of the cupboard.
1 cup white rice (dry)
2 eight oz cans tomato sauce
2 packets sloppy joe seasoning
1 cup tvp (dry)
Cook rice in rice cooker
Hydrate tvp
mix in frying pan with seasoning, sauce, and 2 cups water. Bring to boiling, reduce heat, simmer 10 minutes.
Calories for entire pan: between 1000-1200 depending on which calorie counter you believe (no one can decide how many calories 1.5 cups of cooked white rice has).
Eating as much as I could I couldn't finish 1/2 the pan.
With 0 grams of fat and 67 grams of protein per pan, it really satiates.
1 cup white rice (dry)
2 eight oz cans tomato sauce
2 packets sloppy joe seasoning
1 cup tvp (dry)
Cook rice in rice cooker
Hydrate tvp
mix in frying pan with seasoning, sauce, and 2 cups water. Bring to boiling, reduce heat, simmer 10 minutes.
Calories for entire pan: between 1000-1200 depending on which calorie counter you believe (no one can decide how many calories 1.5 cups of cooked white rice has).
Eating as much as I could I couldn't finish 1/2 the pan.
With 0 grams of fat and 67 grams of protein per pan, it really satiates.