Culture of Life Health News

Warning About Mercury In Multi-year Predator Fish

2006-03-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, the news that eating predator fish a lot is dangerous, makes the news. The latest story ties itself to the issue of sushi, a delicacy I happen to love. This gives the impression that sushi is bad to eat even though the mercury danger is for only tuna or similar sushi.

From Reuters:

Sushi is more popular than ever before but eating it "has become the new Russian roulette" in terms of safety, a group campaigning against mercury in fish said on Monday.

Eli Saddler of gotmercury.org, a campaign of California-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project, went to six top sushi restaurants in Los Angeles to test mercury levels in the fish they serve.

"The level of mercury in tuna these restaurants serve is so high they should be keeping this food off their lists," Saddler said. "Eating sushi has become the new Russian roulette."

Tuna steaks are other menu items. Shark meat is eaten in many forms. Why sushi in particular is being attacked is most irritating since most sushi isn't made with these particular ingredients and one can enjoy sushi without worry if it isn't these few types of fish.

I notice today's food news is being spread all over the place. I have known now for about 30 years not to eat tuna, for example, while pregnant or nursing. So this shouldn't be a big surprise. The fact that stores and eateries won't warn people about this is due to the fact that our government doesn't want to interfer with business.

The hunting of tuna will have to stop, pretty soon, due to simple overfishing. This is why I seldom eat the fish today, mercury or no. Even more so with sharks who are rapidly going extinct due to overfishing.

Here is a PBS story about mercury in fish:

In America one-in-six children born every year have been exposed to mercury levels so high that they are potentially at risk for learning disabilities and motor skill impairment and short-term memory loss. That type of mercury exposure is caused by eating certain kinds of fish, which contain high levels of the toxin from both natural and man-made sources such as emissions from coal-fired power plants One government analysis shows that 630,000 children each year are exposed to potentially unsafe mercury levels in the womb. If the government and its scientists know about the mercury problem, why do so many people continue to be poisoned?

This PBS show is a good source of information.

They report that California passed a law forcing businesses to post warnings about tuna in particular. Only this was dragged into court this year. Like the cigarette folk, these people want business. It is all very odd, this. For example, the eating of eggs dropped drastically due to health fears yet the real problem is sick chickens due to factory farms that abuse the poor birds. I have hens and they are happy birds, free to roam about, eating all sorts of interesting things, grooming each other, dust baths, perches, etc. They lay lovely eggs that are brilliantly golden, high yokes, firm whites, very healthy. But people in general are now spooked about eggs even though they happily ingest industrial waste products made with the most noxious chemical ingredients imaginable!

Even when seeking "health foods" the public blandly buys ready made junk food. "Lo Carbs!" announce cookie boxes, for example. Yech!

The PBS article correctly fingerpoints to the many coal burning plants producing electricity as chief agents of pollution. The smokestacks are very tall to disperse the poisons as far as possible which means the wind picks it up, combines it with rain and then it all falls into the rivers and seas! Great.

And we are building more of these things!

Here is an older article about the same warnings. From the CBC:

Last Updated Wed, 29 May 2002 12:17:22
OTTAWA - Health Canada has sent out a warning to consumers to limit their intake of certain types of fish because of high mercury levels in them.

The department had previously warned consumers last year about eating shark, swordfish and fresh and frozen tuna. A news release from the department says it just wants to reiterate that advice.

A huge industry in Canada is fishing and for their government to do this takes a lot of guts.

A lot of our increasing problems ultimately can be traced back to our desire to live in an anti-ecological bubble. Scientists know that predators don't eat predators. They go lower down in the food chain. Perhaps, this is one more reason why. And is probably why polar bears that eat seals who are high on the food chain are having increasing problems with their health, they are getting the double whammy here from our energy use. Global warming and pollution.

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Bush Is Insane

2006-03-01T09:53:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The latest "interview" with Bush where he bares his sole of his shoes, shows clearly, this man is insane. He should be locked up in a secure facility (or prison).

From ABC News:

BUSH: You know, it's interesting, you said that one of the things that we love doing is to invite our buddies up from Texas. And I think about the time we had Jones, Procter and Selee [sic]. These are guys we grew up with in Midland, Texas. They are down to earth, you know, they have no agenda, except being with their friends Laura and George.

VARGAS: They call you George?

BUSH: No, they call me Mr. President.

VARGAS: I was going to say…

BUSH: They probably don't want to call me Mr. President, but they do call me Mr. President. And we sit up there in the White House. First of all, it's a great joy to see their joy about being here. It's a fantastic experience for people to be able to come here.

VARGAS: To come and visit.

BUSH: Yeah.

VARGAS: That's great

BUSH: They're not jaded. The other thing is that they remind us of what's important in life. And that we're not here in this office — really pretty brief period of time. And yet your friendships which became the foundation of your life last forever. And I'm real pleased that our buddies who were friends before government will be friends after government. No matter what their status is in life. And it's really one of the neat things to do, to welcome people here. Have them come up from West Texas and kind of walk around in their accents and go, "Man, this is something else!"

VARGAS: [With twang] This is great!

BUSH: "This is unbelievable Bush! We can't believe we're here nor can we believe you're here."

Aside from his deteriorating ability to speak English, the astonishing thought processes here are frightening. His laughing about his "down to earth" buddies being totally intimidated by him and despite their desire to be down to earth buddies, they are forced to call him "Mr. President" yet when he makes fun of them being awed by the White House as if this clown didn't haunt the White House during the years his father run the joint!----acting as if this were something new----the fact is, when he pretends to be them, he calls himself, "Bush".

Now, I know no close friends at any time in my life that I or they referred to themselves or myself by the formal last name. Never. Indeed, when we do this, it is to insult each other when someone screws up.

Also, the expressions of disbelief coming from people who are supposed to be his friends is very odd indeed considering that gramps Bush was a Senator and daddy Bush was a Vice President then President, for his comfortable buddies who brook no formality to be astonished by all this is very bizarre. Of course, they aren't around to dispute this but it is all around horrifying.

Why? Because the stilted language, the stilted images of them as if they are shadows moving in front of Bush's nonseeing eyes.

This guy who spent only a short while in Texas in his youth before being shipped to a top private Academy in the Northeast, can't help but sneer at his former playmates who blew up frogs with him during his misspent youth. "It is a great joy to see their joy" is a psychopath talking. Namely, he loves to rub his status in the face of his earliest friends. I am certain they were overjoyed to be invited to the White House and Bush clearly understands they had no business with him, thus the joy in looking down his nose at them. Unlike moneymen who he has to carefully cultivate and pleasure.

There are no pictures of him kissing his childhood friends, unlike the Saudis, for example.

The entire interview is full of misappropriated nouns and verbs, running amock, seeking shelter.

VARGAS: One of the great perks living here.

BUSH: That and having a gym above your bedroom.

VARGAS: Now that's a perk! Do you work out everyday?

BUSH: I do. Six days a week.

The inabilty to understand plain English is glaring here. He works out "everyday" six days a week? What? Of course, he couldn't say, "No, I do it only six days a week, not Sundays" for example though I seriously doubt he spares Sunday. The fact that he has to ride his bike everywhere and work out upstairs, too, nearly every day is a sign of mental distress. He isn't an athlete, he supposedly has pressing work to do, yet he focuses nearly all his remaining brain cells on mindless churning work outs.

Serioiusly, this might be a symptom of his brain dying. When a shark is brain dead, it circles in the water instead of going in a straight line. This is how I caught one once with my bare hands. I knew it was dying.

Animals suffering from rabies or more, deer or cows suffering from MCD walk in circles without resting. When I see animals doing this, this is a sign their brains are expiring.

Another aspect of this bubble interview was the extended part about his girls. Both of them have been caught, drinking while underage, using false IDs, using Secret Service agents to haul them from bar to bar and keep them from being arrested. Neither the interviewer nor Bush mention these sorts of things. The media is still protecting him even when discussing his strange meeting with Cheney where Bush shows great consideration for Cheney's FEELINGS after that guy stupidly shot a money man for the GOP. He doesn't mention any concern for the well being or feelings of the victim, only relief there was no death to cover up.

Indeed, the fact that these same media people parse and pinch anything anyone on the liberal side of politics say, like whenever Dean opens his mouth, the hostile reception in contrast to the careful padding of Bush's ego is probably why he can imagine no one is horrified by his obvious increasing brain damage.

Just like the ports business. First, he said he was determined to give our ports to his family friends in the United Arab Emerites then he claimed he had no idea it was happening until the news hit him then he reverted and said it was a good idea. Either he is insane or he spins like a weathercock in a hurricane. He also claims in this interview that he still has a mandate to spend even though his polls have collapsed. This is way out of touch with reality, isn't it?

I say, he is insane. This is why he couldn't process the information about the hurricane destroying New Orleans though this doesn't explain the brain damage of Chertoff who didn't know anything for days and days, either.

Aaaaaa. Bush isn't insane. He is a criminal. And so is Chertoff. And Rumsfeld. Arrest them all or lock them in an insane asylum with Nurse Ratchet.

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Green Tea Makes Smarty Pants Elderly, Hahaha

2006-02-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yet another study claiming drinking green tea makes one witty, wise, brilliant, all powerful, etc. Of course. A zillion great grannies knew this for many years. Including mine.

From Reuters:

People who regularly drink green tea may have a lesser risk of mental decline as they grow older, researchers have found.

Their study, of more than 1,000 Japanese adults in their 70s and beyond, found that the more green tea men and women drank, the lower their odds of having cognitive impairment.

The findings build on evidence from lab experiments showing that certain compounds in green tea may protect brain cells from the damaging processes that mark conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

The drinking of green tea is dropping in Asia as the youth go off the reservation and drink sugar water filled with chemicals that rot your teeth, your stomach and make one fat and starts diabetes! Well, maybe this is our plan for world conquest, lure people into eating and drinking dreck only it is backfiring since it is killing us, too!

Knew there was a flaw in this plan.

My great godmother lived to be over 100 years old and she drank only green tea and she was tremendously smart, wrote stuff about birds, did the first Condor study way, way back when she had to ride a horse out to the desert to observe them, she was born at the beginning of the Civil War, no less! I loved drinking tea with her for she drank with the birds who would fly around and land on the table outside in Pasadena, and she would pour them drinks and they would eat sunflower seeds and pick at the little cakes she set out, it was like being in a fairy tale. All the birds had names and they would perch on her fingers or the edge of her tea cup.

She also had a wooden woodpecker on her back door and if you pulled the string, it would knock so you can guess, I loved doing this but being a small girl, she would only laugh.

I am not surprised she was one of the smartest people around. She drank lots of green tea which I do, to this day, myself, which is why I can blog all the time and act like a smarty pants, talking about bizarre things and making fun of Bush who drinks diet drink dreck which is like drinking the distillation of a sewage plant with some coloring. Gah.

Do have a sconce with your tea, hmm? One lump of sugar or two?

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Bet You Didn't Know They Treat Meat With Carbon Monoxide To Fool You

2006-02-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I am mostly vegetarian but family members still insist on eating cows so this is interesting news for them: the FDA allows butchers in big stores to treat meat with the toxin, carbon monoxide, so the meat won't oxygenate and thus turn brown, get slimey or smell if it is going bad. Even as microbes take up residence! Yuck.

From Consumer Affairs:

A Michigan company has filed a petition asking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to stop the use of carbon monoxide in supermarket meat.

The use of carbon monoxide deceives consumers and creates an unnecessary risk of food poisoning by enabling meat and ground beef to remain fresh-looking beyond the point at which typical color changes would indicate ageing or bacterial spoilage, according to Kalsec, Inc. of Kalamazoo, Michigan, a privately-held supplier of natural spice, herb, hop, and vegetable extracts for use in food, beverage, and pharmaceutical applications.

This is really disgusting. The meat is going rotten like the State of Denmark in Hamlet and you can't smell or see it! Great. Fake fresh meat.

When I used to eat meat, I would take the subway home and at the 7th Ave exit, hike up to the local butcher. He would cut off the parts of the cow carcass right there on the spot and then wrap it in crisp brown paper and then I cooked it up that same hour at home, down on Prospect Place.

In my village in upstate NY, I used to visit a retired butcher, Fred, who did the same but now he is super retired and now gone so I don't eat any red meat anymore.

No one wants to buy slimey, smelly, brown meat that has been put in a plastic tray and covered with plastic. So, to make a profit, the big supermarkets simply poison the meat and sell garbage, palming it off as fresh. Most if not all states allow no dating of meat cuts. So it is totally "buyer beware". People use their judgement only they aren't told the game is rigged.

Gack.

Time for a zuchini.

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Witless Whittington Wants Us to Weep For CHENEY! Amazing.

2006-02-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Look, if all the lobbyists and lawyers working with Cheney want him to shoot them then all I can say is, pull that trigger! The sight of the nearly deceased money bag man excusing the obvious psychopath, Cheney, is hilarious as well as disgusting. Meanwhile, in Wyoming, Real Fake Manly Men cheer this near killer and think this is all so great fun. If only.

From the NYT:

Declaring that "accidents do and will happen," the 78-year-old man who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney at a weekend quail hunt emerged from the hospital here Friday looking tanned, cheery, robust and speckled with bruises.

Addressing the Wyoming State Legislature today, Dick Cheney said he was thankful Harry M. Whittington was "on the mend and doing very well."

The patient, Harry M. Whittington, an Austin lawyer and well-known figure in the state's Republican Party, thanked his doctors, praised the news media and expressed sorrow that the whole incident had become such a political flashpoint for the vice president.

Excuse me, guys. I happen to have eyeballs attached to my brains and this guy looks as cheerful as a corpse on Halloween. His face, peppered with shot, one of them nearly took out his fool eye!, shades of "A Christmas Story" where the boy is warned, his pop gun might put out his eye.

Look, lying is jolly fun except when murderers and monsters do it. This is so much like the Saddam boys having a laugh riot, shooting up their friends and neighbors before we shot them up, in turn.

We are turning more and more into Iraq each day, it is ridiculous. Aside from giving Laura a green light to kill ex-boyfriends and then actively covering this up and then pretending she is some sort of delicate flower instead of a cold blooded killer who has no shame, all these psychopaths running America have no shame, do they?

The vice president made brief mention of the incident again on Friday while addressing the Wyoming Legislature in Cheyenne. After taking the rostrum before a standing, cheering crowd of lawmakers and guests, Mr. Cheney said the warm greeting was welcome, especially, he added, "when you've had a very long week."

I will never, ever set foot in that state again. The men there are obviously either brain dead or should be.

How dare they cheer this idiot after he broke all the rules of hunting? Never, never, never is "behind a hunter" "in the line of fire." The line of fire isn't any direction one wishes to shoot! I have hunted for years. I never turn around to shoot. If I am walking, it is only to shoot things in front, when sitting, one shoots only in the direction one is sitting. If one hears a noise behind, one has to change postion and then study the forest carefully.

Cheney was spinning around, drunk, blasting away merrily at chest level.

What a moron. Hunting birds. Gads. Are all the men in Wyoming all Yosemite Simpletons? Is this how they hunt? Gads. Pathetic.

Aside from all the lies Whittington and Cheney and their paramours told, one wonders about the beer stories that shift and change hourly, the tale about how Wittless Whittington and Elmer "Fuddy" Cheney ended up in a shoot out morphs and warps with each telling. The main thing is, it is now OK to shoot lobbyists.

So, how much does it cost to buy a lobbyist hunting license? Will it be for only Texas and Wyoming or can one apply for one in DC, the game preserve with the largest flocks? Maybe this is how we will get campaign reform. As Mao liked to say, "Power grows out of the barrel of a double barreled shotgun."

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EPA Wants to Eliminate Many Pollution Reports

2006-02-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The EPA lied about air pollution in Manhattan after 9/11 and now they want to lie about pollution in general. Like NASA, they are not going to monitor the health of Planet Earth where we live and breathe. Silence is literally golden here as lobbyists win yet another corrupt victory.

From the Albany Times Union:

The federal Environmental Protection Agency last month proposed a big change in how companies report pollution data. If the Bush administration gets its way, companies will tell the public a lot less about pollution by reporting less often on fewer chemicals.

In the Capital Region, 16 facilities would no longer have to report anything to the EPA about the toxic substances they emit, according to analysis from OMB Watch, a Washington D.C.-based open government group.

Environmentalists and elected officials, including Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, are urging the feds to back off. They say the TRI has helped communities and researchers investigate threats to local health and safety while encouraging companies to cut pollution.

Again and again, the secrecy, the refusal to collect data, the childish belief that if you can't see something, it can't hurt you, the cultivated ignorance or lying about effects: business as usual in DC as the lobbyists wreck their will upon us all, twisting and changing rules and regulations, making the world a sicker, weaker, more dangerous place.

From tiny hop toads to horses, birds to fishes, squirrels to humans, we all suffer when poisonous chemicals are discharged into the air, the water and the soil. Many of these are heavy metals like lead or mercury. Fatal to all of us, the higher up the food chain, the worse the damage. Humans live at the tippy top of the food chain so we have to be worried about even slight traces of many fatal chemicals in our environment. Worse, we live a long time if we aren't poisoned and so we can accumulate much more stuff in our own bodies. So the need for a protected environment is a blessing to all of us as well as other living things.

Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act in 1987, in the wake of the release of the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate in Bhopal, India, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The TRI data, available at http://www.epa.gov/triexplorer, is heavily used by researchers, community groups, journalists and even state and local officials. The state Department of Environmental Conservation on Tuesday urged the EPA to maintain the current system.

"The DEC believes that changing the reporting requirements under TRI undermines its effectiveness as a tool for trend analysis, making it less useful for the public," the department said in a written statement.

I am glad my state wants to keep these regulations. Pataki worked hard to help install Bush as our dictator. He and Sweeney even went down to Florida to riot or fight the vote counting in 2000. This is how we are paid back.

We are treated like Cheney's hunting partner. Blam.
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Scientists Wonder About Possible Connection of High Education And Alzheimer's Disease

2006-02-16T12:11:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Back when people were either worked to death or died of diseases long before they could reach even middle age, much less, great age, Alzheimers was a very rare condition. Today, it is quite common and many studies have tried to understand how it works and why it happens. We all fear it greatly and for good reason.

From the BBC:

Alzheimer's disease progresses more rapidly in highly educated people, research suggests.
It is thought high levels of education may ward off Alzheimer's by helping the brain better tolerate damaging changes.

But the latest study, involving 312 Alzheimer's patients, suggests once accumulated damage reaches a critical level, decline is relatively swift.

I dropped out of highschool to go the college when 16 but then had to drop out of that when I had my first child, needed to earn hard cash. So maybe I will outwit everyone on "Jeopardy" when I am 100 years old, take that, ya intellectual whippersnappers!

Alas, mere thinking aggravates the condition so I suppose I should stop blogging and stop blabbing and zone out. Time to smoke a lot of pot. Ommmmm.

This holds that highly educated people either have a greater number of nerve connections in their brains, or the nerve connections that they have are more efficient.

Therefore, when the damaging changes associated with Alzheimer's - such as the deposition of toxic protein clumps - start to take place, educated people are better placed to resist their effect at first.

However, the subsequent impact is likely to be greater than it would be in less educated brains, because of the higher levels of accumulated damage.

Maybe it is merely, smart people look a lot stupider when sick with Alzheimers but normally stupid people, it is a moot point? I mean, how much lower can Bush's IQ fall? Can it fall further? And Reagan?

I thought he was a puppet from day one so when the puppet had some difficulties, only a smarty pants like myself could see the obvious?

Alzheimers ravages people I love and hold dear. One of the saddest elements of this disease is, no one wants to have it, so in order to hold it at bay, they pretend nothing is happening and then they are puzzled when everyone looks at them funny. One response I have noticed is, many Alzheimer patients don't want their own families anywhere around them. This is because it is obvious one is doing really poorly whereas, with total strangers, it doesn't matter if one says, "Who are you?" So they have a tendency to seek out strangers for company since this also means, the strangers won't refer to things one can't remember anymore which is why so many Alzheimers patients tend to wander off, not because they forgot where they were going, they actively slip out of the house as silently as possible, to go out where everyone will be friendly in a vague sort of way and when one asks, "What time is it?" they won't say, "I told you ten minutes ago."

The more intelligent the patient was, the more frustrating this brain malfunction is and the harder they struggle and the worse it gets on every level. Geniuses are in very dire straights if they get this disease.

This is one reason why very few elderly are any good for getting information about the deep past. Either they are living as if they are there and are puzzled as to why you inquire about things that are too obvious, or they can't remember any details at all except maybe a sketchy one or two stray memories.

Since all humans deal with unhappy memories by deep sixing them, the brain is very efficient at deprogramming itself and this action has a downside, namely, it erases everything in the end. I know that even stupid, small mistakes irk me no end and embarrass me beyond words, faux pas are full irritants. The littlest mischance can annoy the innermost parts of the memory system and shaking it off is difficult, actually easy for most people.

This sensibility is a gold mine for novelists.

I pour out words in huge volume but my misspellings haunt me. Grammatical errors abound and annoy. Grinding teeth over syntax. The only reason I don't have writer's block is because in the end, I shrug it off. If someone doesn't like me or my babblings, fine. They can go to another place and hang out.

The main thing is, you can't outwit or outthink Alzheimers. You have to live with it, alas. This is one disease I pray they find some solution for aside from locking oneself in an ashram and chanting everyday which is, I assure you, pleasant. Actually.

Hmm. A solution shows itself. You do have to rise before dawn but I am used to that. Ommmm.

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Hunting Information For Everyone--How Not To Shoot Your Friends and Neighbors

2006-02-14T16:28:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I notice the media and numbnuts are trying to fake us out over the Cheney shooting. I have hunted/shot stuff all my life. Now a vegetarian, but seriously. What Cheney did was unforgivable as well as stupid. The diagram above illustrates how one hunts upland fowl.

You do it in pairs. If there are more hunters, you start at a starting point and everyone goes in an ever-increasing semi-circle, the "fan outwards" move so at no point, one is moving into the line of fire. Note the red zone in my diagram. You never ever, no, not ever, shoot behind. Period. Always forwards. If any of the blessed little birdies fly past you or into you, they get to be "home free" and you move forwards, this isn't like little boys chasing fireflies. This is serious business.

I don't know if these dumb clowns butchering helpless little birds had any dogs with them. Old Yeller would have bitten Cheney if he shot him in the rump. You don't shoot little quail just as they rise up. The shot Cheney fired was barely chest-high. All skeet shooters know, you don't shoot the clay pigeon until it is quite aloft.

My husband, who was a good skeet shooter with his university and one day, a newbie wanted to shoot the birds so he fired directly into the "Low house" and blew up all the clay pigeons. This was very upsetting not to mention crummy as well as messy.

This is what Cheney is. A bozo who can't wait to pull and rushes it all and wrecks everything. Shooting little birds on the ground is like fishing with dynamite. Real class, dude. How can Texans look up to this idiot? Seriously. He shoots like a girly-girl. "Oooh! I just have to do it now!". Well, real hunters like to show their skill which is why we all practice hard. I would shoot 300 arrows a day whenever I was limbering up for some 100 yd longbow competition. None of this "spray everything in sight and hope it sticks" kind of garbage.

Aside from the sort of personality that has to do this to domestic quail that have no sense of where they are, no hidden places they can run to, are not a flock but a disjointed group that is clueless of where to fly. Tracking and flushing wild birds is an art for they are all, turkeys or quail, wary and suspicious. Long before you arrive, they are looking for you. I used to be, when young, a great turkey caller.

I know all sorts of calls especially the 'I am a lovesick hen who is lost, oh please save me!" call which is a plaintive, "Whoop whoop wheep" cry. You have to put your heart into it. I have had wild turkeys come right up to me, looking sideways, when I do this. But then, I raised many bronze turkeys and learned from them.

Quail, on the other hand, they are such cute little birds. I make friends with them, well, my house is beloved by the mourning doves who perch on the crown of the roof and coo softly and then make a mess at the bird feeder and then the chicken hens come out and pick up all the dropped seeds.

Then there are the chickadees. They hate Cheney and plan to spy on him and scold him wherever he goes. They will put the Mark of Chickadee upon his forehead. And next time he goes out, "Chickadee dee dee DEEs" will mock him from every corner.

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Time To Show What Cheney Shot Into The Heart

2006-02-14T12:54:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

So much speculation and so little information. We took some birdshot and shot it with the camera. No, the dish didn't die and it won't run off with the spoon, either, or I will plug it.

Anyway, the shot is very small. The discharge from Cheney was pretty close to get this to penetrate not only the clothing but the skin and slipping past the rib cage and into the heart.

But then, Cheney probably though, everyone's heart is as vacuous as his and just as tiny and hard as rock. He is still sweating bullets, worried that the man might die and he get charged.

Well, he has been the chief agent in the deaths of thousands. So might as well nail him on this one, too. And to think, these are the clowns who thought Clinton should be impeached over a blow job! Well, what about a "blow them away" job? After all, Monica didn't want Bill to go to trail yet the prosecutor threatened her unless she testify to the truth rather than covering up everything!

So, where is Kenn Starr? And the rest of the GOP impeachment crew? Shouldn't they be writing up charges now?

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Bush Cutting Both Medicade AND Medicare, Will Hit Hospitals And Clinics Hard

2006-02-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Now that reporters can read the fine print on the recently passed Bush budget plus his latest statements, it is obvious the plan to pay for our many wars and adventures and tax cuts is to nuke healthcare and drive so many hospitals and clinics into bankruptcy, we will have very little access to healthcare. Way to go, red America. We will all be "New Orleans".

From the New York Times:

In his budget next week, President Bush will propose substantial savings in Medicare, stepping up his efforts to rein in the growing costs of social insurance programs, administration officials and health care lobbyists said Friday.

For the first time since taking office five years ago, they said, Mr. Bush will try to reduce projected Medicare payments to hospitals and other health care providers by billions of dollars over the next five years. In addition, they said, Mr. Bush intends to seek further increases in Medicare premiums for high-income people, beyond those already scheduled to take effect next year.

Many liberal pundits warned that if the government starts charging the better off elderly fees, this would be spread downwards relentlessly and in typical camel nose fashion, so it is happening.

One reason why healthcare is such a mess today is because of union successes at extending health care at work and to bridge the gap, liberals in Congress and LBJ created a seperate health care system for the elderly and then the poor. This made right wingers furious and they couldn't wait to undo both the union health care and the LBJ Medicare/Medicaid system.

What these clowns are offering us is very stark: DEATH. And this shouldn't surprise anyone, Bush worships "the Executioner that is death, the devil that is death and death that is death" at his favorite Crypt at Yale, the well-named "Skull and Bones." He definitely practices what he preaches.

So far, Americans are being told, we can have infinite guns and infinite butter only now, they are removing the butter dish and replacing it with a slice of pig fat.

Despite the failure of his plan to overhaul Social Security last year, Mr. Bush has signaled that he intends to curb rapid increases in federal spending linked to the aging of the population. "The retirement of the baby boom generation will put unprecedented strains on the federal government," Mr. Bush said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Boomer Baby Bubble Boy Bush can't wait to kill his classmates, doesn't he? He hates us. He hates all of us, especially the Christians who worship him. He can't wait to crush them, in particular. Ever see him weep over the war dead? He can barely contain his glee just like on 9/11, laughing in that classroom. Or during hurricane Katrina, yucking it up, absolutely overjoyed.

His handlers try to keep this out of the news and the news owners, in return for favors, don't replay over and over again, him reading "My Pet Goat" while on a split screen secretaries fall, screaming, from the burning WTC! Dean, they had to destroy, which is why they played "the scream" over and over. Well, we will all be screaming, soon enough, and there won't be any media to record it, they will be too busy trumpetting all the victories of fundamentalist Muslim parties whereever we invade and force elections. Whoopee.

The president's 2007 budget also calls for a freeze in Medicare payments to nursing homes and home health agencies, as recommended by the commission. In addition, he proposes to reduce payments for oxygen equipment provided to Medicare beneficiaries.

This proposal is likely to touch off protests from a coalition of patients and oxygen suppliers. The coalition has been running television commercials against a powerful California congressman who has supported such changes.

In one commercial, an Air Force veteran, with an oxygen tube in his nose, asks the congressman, Representative Bill Thomas: "I was proud to fight for my country. Why are you not willing to fight for me?"

Anyone remember the brain dead lady last year and how the hokey pokies in the GOP stopped everything to pass an illegal law that was immediately struck down? And how Bush left his vacation home to sign it, in DC, to show how he and his "Devil is death" buddies really want to keep us alive?

Cut the oxygen! Imagine being told, "Sorry, bud, you got to breathe on yer own"?

Under the law, the income thresholds are increased each year to reflect inflation. Mr. Bush's proposal would eliminate these adjustments, so that more people would have to pay the higher premiums each year.

Already, this year, the premium hike for Medicare was greater than the "rate of inflation" hikes and so the elderly got exactly $0 despite raging inflation especially for essencials.

Now, these sneaky pick pockets are de-indexing inflation so they can drive us all, via reducing the value of the currency to balance our foreign purchases, into penury.

Meanwhile, Bush is touting totally insane programs to fix our economy. From the Washington Post:

Bush has proposed doubling over 10 years the federal aid to basic research programs in the physical sciences and engineering at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Energy Department's Office of Science the and National Science Foundation. The first year would cost $910 million; the 10-year commitment would be $50 billion.

"The increased funding I have proposed will support America's creative minds as they explore promising areas, such as nanotechnology, supercomputing, and alternative energy sources," Bush said.

A second part of Bush's proposal calls for spending $4.6 billion to back tax credits U.S. companies get for investing in research and development projects. The tax credit expired on Dec. 31, and the House and Senate are working on bills to extend it for one year. Bush wants to make it permanent.

Even as the ruling elite warn us to never ever protect our borders, they lie to us about how to fix things so we can survive. We are supposed to create more and newer technologies! Whoopie doop. Guess what?

This won't create a single American factory job! What happened to all the other fine industries we invented or extended? The more techie they are, the swifter they fly out because no one wants to pay high techie prices! Instead, they want us to go to school, go deeply into debt and of course, Bush cut school loans for college this year, and then go out and work for pennies?

Why?

Time for geeks of America to wake up. Bush and the rulers hate you all with a passion. They want a collar around your necks and they want to herd you into small boxes and ship you to wherever they want or even off to war. They would love to see you all dead. These are guys who can't type their way out of a wedding invitation. They can barely read or write. They are really good at conspiring with each other. And they want all of you guys under their boot heels.

The rest of us, they want dead.
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Witless Whitman Sued For Lying About Pollution From WTC

2006-02-03T05:14:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Whitman, the former head of the EPA, conspired with Bush to lie about deadly air quality after 9/11. Getting people back to work and pretending everything was OK was paramount. So now, a mere three years later, many of the trusting people are now dying. This is a grave crime and both Witman and Bush should be put in prison. Arrest them all.

From Associated Press:

A federal judge blasted former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman on Thursday for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was polluting the neighborhood.

U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts refused to grant Whitman immunity against a class-action lawsuit brought in 2004 by residents, students and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who said they were exposed to hazardous materials from the collapse of the World Trade Center.

"No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," the judge said.

She called Whitman's actions "conscience-shocking," saying the EPA chief knew that the fall of the twin towers released tons of hazardous materials into the air.

Well, right after 9/11, I sent letters to the major media, warning them that witless Whitman was lying about air quality. I have some bonafides about construction, especially demolition.

No one printed a single letter. Phone calls to the EPA were ignored. I wrote to the FBI, to everyone, explaining that exposing people to the debrie while not wearing full asbestos rated suits was suicide! The disinigration of the towers was like a nuclear bomb: everything was literally atomized, reduced to smaller than .0001mm which is the sort of thing that lodges deep inside the lungs and into the brain! This sort of fine dust in any circumstance is bad for the lungs and if it contains all the zillions of chemicals and flameretardants and cement and even steel, plastic, human remains, everything! Just from the point of view of diseases from atomized bodies should have called for caution.

If our government was concered about citizens, they would have shut down and evacuated all of lower Manhattan but that would have closed down Wall Street and the government was anxious to get it all rolling and to pretend the attack couldn't stop America so a cynical, evil decision was made to basically shorten the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers instead.

Blood for money.

So America can pretend to be rich and all the people making this possible get 50% of their lives eliminated. If the people sent into this toxic wasteland were told, "You have only 3 to 10 years left in life if you go in here" you can bet, most would have hesitated if not run off. I would have!

The rush to clean it all up and get it out meant handling toxic wastes totally irresponsibly. When the debrie was dumped, it was done in a dusty, toxic way, too. Everyone around the dump sites are also in danger.

Whitman wants to think that she has no responsibility in all this murderous mayhem. She is dead wrong.

If she had any sympathy for the people slated to die, especially the school children of lower Manhattan who were sent into that hellhole to die so they could be used for publicity photos, "Oh, see, even the small children aren't stopped by this attack." Well, there is no money that will assauge the mothers and fathers who will see their children die during the next ten years. May Whitman rot in hell.

She could have said, "No." She could have loudly resigned and accused Bush of rushing things and warned everyone of the dangers. She could have read my urgent letters, answered my phone calls. I tried to reach these criminal clowns and they locked me out of their damn bubble.

The iron clad bubble of the Apocalypic GOP.
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"A Million Big Lies" Is What Mr. Frey's Book Should Be Called

2006-01-24T18:40:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I have a sister who made a deal with Spielberg to make a movie about her life only the story she told his writers was about 80% fake. When various people contacted me to confirm her tall tales, I got increasingly angry as they disregarded my hard information making hash of her fantasies. This happens all the time, especially if one has famous or interesting parents like mine. We all make mistakes when telling stories but Mr. Frey, for example, concocted stuff out of thin air just like my sister, sensationalizing things maliciously.

From the NYT:

To Oprah Winfrey, the power of James Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," lay not in whether the author really spent three months in jail, as he claimed, or whether he lost a lover to suicide.

Rather, she said in her now-famous call to CNN's "Larry King Live" on Jan. 11, where Mr. Frey defended himself against accusations that he falsified significant parts of his life story, it was the author's story of recovery, a rebirth that took place within the walls of an addiction treatment center, that provided "the underlying message of redemption" that resonated with her.

Oprah, unrepentant, she is like Dan Rather, a fake who pretends to care about the truth but can't be bothered if it messes with her TV show.

Dan Rather and I had a big row back in 1999 when Sixty Minutes broadcast my sister's lies. I demanded to know why the vaunted 60 Minutes team couldn't spend five minutes looking for background information. It isn't like they never heard of me and I live in NY, am easy to reach and willing to talk on camera.

He told me, "We don't need your side of the story."

The pig.

My sister played this con game where she told her Hollywood friends she was a genius unrecognized by her own family. As the one who chiefly raised her, being the older sister, I had a great record of how many music lessons and tutoring she had over the years. She had a splendid education. I called her, "The Baby Mozart" when she was only three, recognizing her musical skills which were tremendous.

She was also a manic/depressive. But she discovered when she was in her mid thirties that everyone was looking for hidden talents in people of low intelligence but high talents after that movie, Forrest Gump, came out, box of chocolates and all that. So she remade herself into an idiot savant, a girl who skipped highschool to attend a university, pretending to be thought as a weak minded person. I was shocked. When her psychiatrist called me to scold me for not recognizing her hidden talents, I said, 'What? She studied composition at the University of Arizona!" The psychiatrist accused me of lying.

"My sister made her living acting on Star Trek, for crying out loud," I said, in amazement. You wouldn't recognize her, she played an alien. My mother used to joke that she lived in outerspace. Well, telling Hollywood and the publicity machine that they were being conned by an actress only made them dig in their heels worse rather than re-examine their flawed facts.

Well, now my sister, who is very unstable, emotionally, spent all the money Spielberg forwarded her and is now in a mental health clinic...for drug abuse. I wonder if she will tell anyone the truth about that, either. Probably not. For Hollywood prefers fantasy over reality.

The pain this has caused my beloved parents is hard to describe since sensationalism meant she had to villanize them. And me, mostly by pretending I didn't exist. I have seen this in other famous families.

I used to live with one of the sons of the author of a tremendously famous musical and so, was terribly rich, as you can imagine. One day, the elder brother published a book about his childhood. I was at the reception. My friend took his brother's book and looked up his own name in the index, laughing, until he saw, there was only one sentence refering to his existance in the entire book. He complained to papa.

So Papa put down his wine glass and flipped through the book. Within minutes, he was enraged. "What do you mean by THIS!" he roared. This began a fight, papa and the younger son leaving rapidly.

"You should be so lucky he didn't write about you too," said papa as we left.

It took a long time to reconcile the family. What a waste.

With the Frey book, he lashes out at an addict clinic with all sorts of stories about being beaten up. So far, all the stories about him being beaten have been proven false and I am certain his other tales are ditto, though I begin to wonder if maybe he should have had a beating or two to straighten him out.

But then, America is led by liars who pretend to be heroes while really AWOL asses and who mock real warriors with purple bandaids and accusations of cowardice. Ptui on them all.

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Alzheimer's Disease: New Causes Discovered, Nerve Cells Die As They Divide

2006-01-21T17:52:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Alzheimer's disease, the living hell, when the brain's ability to think is destroyed, systematically, is a terrifying disease. Researchers have made a new, startling discovery that the platelets that clog the nerves are due to the nerve cells dividing only half way and then dying. Next: to find the trigger setting this process off.

From Health Day News:

Scientists reporting in the Jan. 18 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience said the neurodegenerative disease may be triggered when adult nerve cells, or neurons, try to divide.
*snip*
Cells divide through a process called the "cell cycle." In most cases, neurons usually do not participate in this process, however.

"In regular cells, like in bone and blood, the cells divide. But brain cells do not normally divide," Tagle explained. "The great majority will not divide. The neurons you're born with are pretty much what you have at end of life."

When adult nerve cells do enter this cycle, however, they will die rather than complete the division. "Cells become stuck in the process of cell division," Tagle explained.

This is very interesting. This disease strikes many, geniuses on down. I have known quite a few people who died of this disease.

One thing I have noticed is the oldest memories are the last to go. One case, I was helping the wife of a sufferer of that disease pack things as they prepared to move to a nursing home. Her husband barely spoke now. But when I walked into the room with his teddy bear which he put in the attic in the 1920s, his eyes lit up. "Teddy!" he said, and like a child, he took his teddy into his lap and began to play with him. He told me several stories about how he tore Teddy's ear, how the nursie sewed it back on again, how they snuck outside to play. As soon as he spoke all this, it seemed to close down and that is the last he remembered.

Within a year, he died, age 96.

I find it interesting that even with the breakdown of the mind, the earliest memories remain, sometimes, a person recognizes no one but maybe one person and nearly always, that person is someone who is very much like an earlier replication. My grandfather was convinced I was someone in the family from 1890. He would wonder why I was dressed so oddly but decided this was just his imagination. He refused to recognize his own daughter for he thought, towards the end, he was a young 14 year old.

Some people try to cope by constantly asking for information which they desperately try to cling to, in many cases, these are people who ran the house in earlier days and can't change the habit of always being "in the know." Then there are roamers who think, since they went out every day to work, they should do this with urgency.

So far, there is no medication or fix for this disease but knowing what events lead up to the breakdown is a clue, like following the thread through the dense maze, there, in the center is the Minotaur, the cause of this whole thing, the trigger, the break in normalacy.

I have known more than one sharp 100+ year old, they are rare, very rare, but there is no reason why we can't all live the same way, no reason at all. Which is why stem-cell research is so important, not that pre-alzheimer brain dead people like Bush can figure this out.
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Millions of Mentally Ill Get No Meds, Must Now Pay If Poor

2006-01-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

My husband is brain damaged from work, poisoned by toxic chemicals. He is well covered by our lawsuits and our medical insurance. But he knows many men who depend on Medicaid for meds at the hospital and they are all suffering from this stupid program started by the GOP and the corrupt lobbyists in DC. This is an unfolding tragedy deliberately created by greedy monsters.

From the New York Times:

Mix-ups in the first weeks of the Medicare drug benefit have vexed many beneficiaries and pharmacists. Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said the transition from Medicaid to Medicare had had a particularly severe impact on low-income patients with serious, persistent mental illnesses.

"Relapse, rehospitalization and disruption of essential treatment are some of the consequences," Dr. Sharfstein said.

My husband's hospital was prepared for this disaster since the people running the program there seem to all be pretty liberal. But this is costing the hospital dearly, of course. They didn't lobby for this dumb bill. They didn't want it! The entire system is on the verge of collapse. Back in the Reagan days, they swiftly closed most asylums across the nation and the die off of the mentally ill was ferocious for a decade. It is still ongoing. If one can't find safety in a strong family like my husband has with his loving parents and loving wife and step children carrying him along day to day, they die. It is that simple.

In my husband's circle, the men get help from various agencies like the Catholic Church or various daycare facilities run by the county or the state, this being a blue state, we still have a social safety net despite Republican attempts at destroying it.

But they need these meds. One day, half a day, without them, and the collapse can be pretty steep, I assure you. Living alone is dangerous because it is easy to miss meds or not tell if one is falling apart. To have to cope with a ridiculous system that is deliberately designed to be impossible to penetrate is pure evil.

The elderly and the poor are being deliberately destroyed here. This is not accidental, it is part of the Great Die Off when our rulers throw overboard anyone and everyone who can't fulfill slave duties.

At Dayspring Village, in the northeast corner of Florida near Jacksonville, the 80 residents depend heavily on medications. They line up for their medicines three times a day. Members of the staff, standing at a counter, dispense the pills through a window that looks like the ticket booth at a movie theater.

Most of the residents are on Medicare, because they have disabilities, and Medicaid, because they have low incomes. Before Jan. 1, the state's Medicaid program covered their drugs at no charge. Since then, the residents have been covered by a private insurance company under contract to Medicare.

For the first time, residents of Dayspring Village found this month that they were being charged co-payments for their drugs, typically $3 for each prescription. The residents take an average of eight or nine drugs, so the co-payments can take a large share of their cash allowance, which is $54 a month.

Even after the insurer agreed to relax "prior authorization" requirements for a month, it was charging high co-payments for some drugs - $52 apiece for Abilify, an anti-psychotic medicine, and Depakote, a mood stabilizer used in treating bipolar disorder.

Nickle and diming the very poor to death. How charming. Like cannibals, the K Street lobbyists and their super rich clients, the big insurance and drug companies who have huge towers like in Mordor, gazing balefully over the DC landscape, their multi-multi millionaire CEOs flying around in mega jets and sailing their mega yachts, they need every penny they can squeeze from the very poor or ditch them into pits after extracting any gold from the teeth, this monstrous attitude is what I call "Naziism".

The patient tax payer paying for this farce is being fleeced, too, and is being tossed onto the scrap heap of history only we will get a taxpayer revolt which these revolting men will turn onto the victims of this scam: the mentally ill, the poor, the elderly.

Hitler did this. He killed them first, even before killing Jews and then killing everyone in his path. Once these monsters unleash their own inner insane beasts, they can kill many, many people.

And no, they won't take their meds, either.
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Locked Up In A Room Alone: The Hidden Psychological Collapse Haunts Japanese And Americans

2006-01-18T10:46:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The New York Times ran an interesting but incomplete article this week about Japanese children and young adults locking themselves in a room for years and years and refusing to even see their own parents. This is not just a Japanese problem, I know of cases here in America. It is simply hidden from view, obviously.

From the New York Times:

Next to us was Shuichi, who, like Takeshi, asked that I use only his first name to protect his privacy. He was 20, wore low-slung jeans on his lanky body and a 1970's Rod Stewart shag and had dreams of being a guitarist. Three years ago, he dropped out of high school and became a recluse for a miserable year before a counselor persuaded him to join New Start. Behind him a young man sat on the couch wearing small wire-frame glasses and a shy smile. He ducked his head as he spoke, and his voice was so quiet that I had to lean in to hear him. After years of being bullied at school and having no friends, Y.S., who asked to be identified by his initials, retreated to his room at age 14, and proceeded to watch TV, surf the Internet and build model cars - for 13 years. When he finally left his room one April afternoon last year, he had spent half of his life as a shut-in. Like Takeshi and Shuichi, Y.S. suffered from a problem known in Japan as hikikomori, which translates as "withdrawal" and refers to a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home. (The word is a noun that describes both the problem and the person suffering from it and is also an adjective, like "alcoholic.") Some hikikomori do occasionally emerge from their rooms for meals with their parents, late-night runs to convenience stores or, in Takeshi's case, once-a-month trips to buy CD's. And though female hikikomori exist and may be undercounted, experts estimate that about 80 percent of the hikikomori are male, some as young as 13 or 14 and some who live in their rooms for 15 years or more.

Many teens have this problem---starting in Jr. High, the vicious ones prey on the weaker ones, the sudden surge of harmones emboldens those who have social powers to go on the hunt to destroy or at least intimidate the weaker children. We all remember Jr High, don't we? I recall a girl who had to sew her own clothes being teased by rich, spoiled Country Club girls who lived in a semiresort in Arizona called..."Country Club Estates". Natch.

My solution was simple. I told the rich girls to lay off or I would punch them out after school.

I hated Jr. High, didn't think High School was much better, when I left on my 16th birthday, scholarship in hand to go to an university, I couldn't leave fast enough. Looooved the university! But all these transitions are difficult for many young people. And one can see why. Children can be very esquisitely cruel and their parents secretly encourage this. As an adult, when I had to deal with these same kids when my own went to school, it was infuriating, how nasty well to do adults could be. No wonder many of their children were cruel brats.

Our children tend to commit suicide or better still, shoot up the school and blow themselves away, too, or they use drugs which are easy to get. In Japan, drugs are hard to get so they resort to suicide or shut themselves away and live on the very rich fantasy world outsider Japanese artists have painstakingly constructed. Being psychological/social outcasts, the animators and writers of the alternate world fearlessly draw and make stories about all sorts of matters, especially magical/technical matrixes.

There is a lot of longing and wishful thinking in Japan due to the near total social collapse of the nuclear family. Many anime stories deal with this collapse, unlike the general population which tries hard to pretend it isn't happening. Despite a rich library of stories and artwork concerning the derth of children, loss of potential brothers and sisters, bullying in school, fear of being trapped as a cog in the bureauocracy, Japanese society churns along its set path heading towards disaster without deviation or examination by those running this vast, deadly machinery.

The illustration for this story I made are scenes from this lovely and funny anime about a shut in boy who is forced to begin interacting with the world by the efforts of some very self-centered and sometimes quite violent but tremendously loving dolls: Rozen Maiden Like many shut-ins, the boy, Jun, communicates with the outer world only through his computer and this is how he ends up with a magical set of dolls who can enter into his dream world and interact there as well as his waking world.

They force him to confront his psychological fears, one battle is him killing a monster which turns out to be made all of paper---the tests he took over the years. He is a very bright child like most hikikmori, and as he looks at the tests as he picks them off the ground, he remembers what happened.

He did very well in the beginning and the teachers praised him so the other students attacked him behind the teacher's backs so his scores could drop to their level. As someone who aced tests easily from day one, I can assure you, this process is very much at work in America, too, and the refusal of both the Japanese and American systems to deal with this in a creative way never ceases to amaze me.

Anyway, there is another well animated scene in Jun's dreamworld where he climbs a mountain of school desks and then they collapse. And talking flowers attack him, mocking his learning efforts. When he wakens and must venture into the real world, they show his torment and struggles to even go out the front doorin an amazingly true way, his increasing weakness and head spinning, crawling the last few feet to the front door.

Obviously, Japanese animators are interested in this mental illness. As usual, the NYT makes no mention of this, talking only to doctors and families of victims. I know from families here, they often just hope the young person will come out of the room and be "normal" suddenly without either themselves or their families changing.

Well, I can tell you this, I dealt with my difficulties by going out with a vengence. I took up political activism with a determination to use it to cease being isolated, cease being alone, cease being a victim. I decided to take action and take it to the streets.

Japan used to have activism, too, but it was smothered to death and now there is nearly none, just atomized, lonely, helplessness. Reminds me about here. When we had the few antiwar demonstrations in DC, I noted the energy, joy, running literally around, back and forth, of so many young people, dressed up for action and primed to make a loud noise, drumming drums and yelling.

South Korea doesn't have nearly so bad a problem with hikikmori as Japan and no wonder. The youth there go to many demonstrations, they will travel thousands of miles to demonstrate and they do this with verve, energy and lots of noise. They even fight! And the Chinese!

Watch out. They are very energized now. Ready and raring to go. Europe is waking up from soft dreams, too, but then, look at the Muslim world.

It is abroil. Literally fighting tooth and nail and dying in great numbers because they believe it is very important to go out and do something, anything, everything. The world wants to lock them into rooms and throw away the key. But they are taking the doors off the hinges.
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9/11 Heroes Are Now Rapidly Dying of Lung Disease And Mercury Poisoning

2006-01-17T19:49:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The 9/11 heroes are now rapidly dying, one after the other, of black lung disease and mercury poisoning. All this could have been avoided if we did the right things during the clean-up but the EPA was ordered to lie about toxic dust.

From Associated Press:

James Zadroga spent 16 hours a day toiling in the World Trade Center ruins for a month, breathing in debris-choked air. Timothy Keller said he coughed up bits of gravel from his lungs after the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. Felix Hernandez spent days at the site helping to search for victims.

All three men died in the past seven months of what their families and colleagues say were persistent respiratory illnesses directly caused by their work at ground zero.

While thousands of people who either worked at or lived near the site have reported ailments such as "trade center cough" since the terrorist attacks, some say that only now are the consequences of working at the site becoming heartbreakingly clear.

So many Americans, especially the right wingers and the Republicans, screamed they would never ever forget 9/11. Alas, they have already forgotten.

You see, aside from Bush's inner circle who well know they are awfully complicit in this great crime, are also even more obviously complicit in this developing tragedy. Namely, I remember very clearly, the EPA doing a few feeble air quality tests several blocks away from that death disaster and saying, all was well, which was a rank lie even at that point.

And the air at the WTC itself was hideous. Not only did it burn for many days, the frantic efforts to remove everything, typical when a crime is committed and people want to hide the evidence, the Feds encouraged everyone to work swiftly to remove absolutely everything without any environmental studies, nothing, no planning, just remove it all, pronto.

Frantic to do something, anything, the real heroes, the simple people who worked day after sad day, digging and digging even though, rationally, no one could have survived the utter disintigrating, broiling mess, after day five, the rescue work should have been stopped and everyone stepping back to reconsider how to deal with this unprecedented situation.

So far, all the 9/11 dogs are dead. They set their brave noses to the debrie and sucked in all the filth. Their passing has been hardly noted by the media. Their handlers are in hardly better prospects! They, too, took in all this dangerous dust and one by one, they, too, are becoming sicker. The firemen and police who worked there for several months, they are dying rapidly, too.

Mercury poisoning is very bad. Unlike ordinary buildings demolished by explosives, which are totally empty and many dangerous things stripped out first, this was a fully occupied group of buildings that were chock full of hundreds of thousands of computers. These have many toxic chemicals and when the building turned to dust, so did everything and everyone inside, nearly nothing was larger than a teacup when the collapse was done except for some exterior strut work.

More than one person on the outside begged the government to stop the hasty work, no orders were given to force workers to wear appropriate gear, namely, asbestos removal suits! These men, covered with dust, returned home and scattered it all about and lord alone knows how many of them with small children will see them die of lung or cancer diseases in the next 20 years?

Even the truck drivers who took this dust to Staten Island and New Jersey are falling ill rapidly. Like a pebble dropped in a pond, the ripples of death will move remorselessly outwards, taking more and more people. Like the nuclear tests that were the equivelent of WWIII during the fifties to the early sixties, today's cancer epidemics are distant ripples of that reign of terror.

And the depleted uranium we spewed all over the Middle East: that, too, is spreading death to Iraqis and Americans, deformed babies to each and all, in evil unison.
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Old King Niall (O'Neill) Was A Merry Old Soul...Many Children, Too

2006-01-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Genetic researchers have discovered that many Irish people have descended from one legendary king. This means they are all royalty, or at least, a royal pain in the ass. Genghis Khan left many kids behinds, too. Then there is Abraham, and look at how his children do quarrel!

From Reuters:

Scientists in Ireland may have found the country's most fertile male, with more than 3 million men worldwide among his offspring.

The scientists, from Trinity College Dublin, have discovered that as many as one in twelve Irish men could be descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 5th-century warlord who was head of the most powerful dynasty in ancient Ireland.

His genetic legacy is almost as impressive as Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who conquered most of Asia in the 13th century and has nearly 16 million descendants, said Dan Bradley, who supervised the research.

First of all, he must have been one busy hostage. Back then, they set the women guard over hostages. Bet the men wondered about all those redhead tots running around.

Then he became King and the red heads went bezerk, too. The Vikings, 500 years later, were very fond of the redheads and often took them away as slaves and often ended up, even with the male slaves, making close relations because they admired their cleverness and quick minds. As well as other things which extended the genetic field.

My son said, "Well, my ancestor had 12 sons just like the legendary king, too." Speaking of Abraham's son. Actually, old Abraham had only one son and all the people in the Middle East deserts trace their lineage back to either son, so out of two came many bitter rivals from the very beginning, no less.

As genetic studies probe ever deeper, it is amazing how many legends and tales end up being proven true. One funny example was a village in England, they found a bog body and used the genetic markers from it to see if that person had any descendants and lo and behold, within the very same village, 2,500 years later, the school teacher was exactly that person! In other words, his family had lived there since the Ice Ages. Genetic studies of inhabitants of the Alps has the same results. Many of the families still there were nearly always there.

The Basque people of Spain are such a grouping, probably living there since 30,000 BC or earlier. Genetically as well as linguistically seperate from the Plains People who speak the various Indoeuropean languages.

Niall reportedly had 12 sons, many of whom became powerful Irish kings themselves. But because he lived in the 5th century, there have been doubts the king -- who is said to have brought the country's patron saint, Patrick, to Ireland -- even existed.

"Before I would have said that characters like Niall were almost mythological, like King Arthur, but this actually puts flesh on the bones," Bradley said.

When international databases were checked, the chromosome also turned up in roughly 2 percent of all male New Yorkers.

And you can find them all on St. Patty's day, in Manhattan.

Another interesting genetic study: From the Independent:

Spanish scientists are to test the DNA of hundreds of Catalans with the surname Colom to determine whether Christopher Columbus, far from the Italian gentleman he has long been believed to be, was in fact a pirate born in Catalonia.

The experiment, in determining whether any of the participants are related to the pioneering explorer, is designed to clarify the disputed origins of the man who made landfall in America in 1492.

While historians have mostly assumed that Columbus was an Italian born in 1451 in Genoa, a persuasive counter-lobby argues that the mariner who pioneered the Spanish conquista was in reality the Catalan Cristofol Colom, who airbrushed his past to conceal his activities as a pirate and conspirator against the king.

About 120 Catalans are to donate samples of their saliva this week to a team of geneticists headed by José Antonio Lorente Acosta, the head of the laboratory of genetic identification at Granada University.

Well, on the Pettit side of my family, I, too, have pirate blood. Shows up sometimes in odd ways, do love hip high boots and swinging swords. Columbus certainly acted like a pirate, wherever he went, he demanded gold. He kidnapped natives. He was a pretty nasty character.

My ancestor enjoyed the Caribbean, too. All those Spanish gold, too. Didn't do him any good, of course. Did pay for some property in Western Massachussetts, town of Peru.

Ever wonder why a town was named after the processing place where gold was stamped before being carried to the shores of the Caribbean? Heh. Avast, matey.
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The Drug Lobbyists' Lovely Drug Bill Is Belly Flopping Badly

2006-01-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The insane drug bill with many provisions to funnel money to insurance companies and drug dealers who lobby Congress so heavily is now seen universally as a total failure. So it will bankrupt America while not providing any real services. Way to go!

From the NYT:

With tens of thousands of people unable to get medicines promised by Medicare, the Bush administration has told insurers that they must provide a 30-day supply of any drug that a beneficiary was previously taking, and it said that poor people must not be charged more than $5 for a covered drug.

The actions came after several states declared public health emergencies, and many states announced that they would step in to pay for prescriptions that should have been covered by the federal Medicare program.

The program was supposed to get health care to Americans but in reality, it was designed to thwart Americans and in the end, kill them. The red states in particular, seem to want all those pesky people who can't work because they are ill, dead. More charitable, mostly blue states, want to at least appear as if they are helping people and the great mass of American people probably are wondering why we can't do what Chile has done recently.

Namely, vote for something better.

From Zmag:

(Noam Chomsky speaking) "Democrats read the polls way more than I do, their leadership. They know what public opinion is. They could take a stand that's supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party. But then they're going to have to change their position on just about everything.

Take your pick, say for example health care. Probably the major domestic problem for people. A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. And that's been true for a long time. But whenever that comes up -- it's occasionally mentioned in the press -- it's called politically impossible, or "lacking political support," which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn't want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don't want it, and so on. Okay, so a large majority of the population wants it, but who cares about them? Well, Democrats are the same. Clinton came up with some cockamamie scheme which was so complicated you couldn't figure it out, and it collapsed."

Single payer plans which much of the civilized world uses is o-u-t in America. This is because the sharks feeding on the body politic want more flesh and blood. Whether we live or die is immaterial to them.

Lobbyists have tremendous power in the USA system. The media and businesses that lobby all have a very strong, vested interest in this corrupt system. The Abramoff scandal freaks them out because it exposes their underhanded ways and they are anxious to make him sound as if he were singular, the lone bad guy in this den of thieves and prostitutes. The media refuses to connect any dots or uncover any connections that lead back to them and their own agendas.

Meanwhile, people are dying.

One thing about medicines: they are being touted as the cure-all and end all of most therapy. The desire to simply pop a pill has undermined sane, healthy lifestyles. Even heath nuts love to pop pills. Magic, magic, who has the magic bean?

Living a healthy, strong life is difficult in this culture. This is why a diseases which are entirely due to bad lifestyle choices are raging through the community, raising the cost of health care. Popping pills won't stop unhealthy eating or living from killing oneself! As an organic gardener, I assure you, what you eat matters. Instead of curbing the use of heavily processed corn sugar to sweeten things, the law can mandate the end of this practice since the obesity epidemic pretty much began with the heavy use of corn syrup and hygrogenated fats in processed foods.

Fat chance this will change!
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I Remember Franco's Death: Like Sharon, They Pretended He Was Alive

2006-01-13T20:31:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

When powerful people face Death, the Great Leveler, they and their followers usually go to extraordinary lengths to pretend they didn't really die. Jesus' devoted followers are a classic example of this. Many religious groups cling to this sort of thing. Many political leaders end up in the same eternal boat, never dying.

From Yahoo:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's failure to wake up from a coma nine days after suffering a massive stroke does not bode well for his recovery, some doctors said Friday.

It is interesting, watching the doctors and all the people involved in Sharon's power base, refusing to look at reality. Every day, the same bulletin was issued that he was waking up because he jerked and arm and a leg which is just plain silly, even snakes do this hours after dying. Chickens can run in circles with their heads cut off before dropping.

Large mammals, and I have put down some in the past, move quite a bit even after a .45 blows out the brainstem, even. This is the nervous system reacting to final electrical charges.

The heart can beat long after the brain is dead. One can keep a very badly damaged brain dead person alive for a very long time and they will possibly blink or jerk around, even as they have no real brain left as we all saw last year with the Schiavo affair.

Or Bush, for that matter.

Anyway, when Sharon, a very overweight old man, had his first stroke, the pretense that he could continue his bloody passage through life was a fool's dream. Now, after massive hemmorages, it was lunacy to think he would simply leap out of bed and be hale and hearty.

I nursed a child who had a brain hemmorage. He was saved and grew up and did well in life but was in a coma for six weeks but he was young and very fit when the hemmorage occured. Old people, well, we got to play the game of life, we wear out our welcome and eventually, no matter how much we may like to continue forever, the Grim Reaper comes a'calling. And you can't lock him out.

Since ancient times, rulers tried to lock him out, even trying to kill their entire entourage to go with them if they went, ahem, warning to all loonies who want to worship people, it is very dangerous! Anyway, they built huge tombs and filled them with loot, all in anticipation of extending their pleasures eternally.

The alternate route is to deny the person died and pretend they live forever, only believers can see them or understand this wonderful event, this desire to have eternity in a specific way is the root of more than one major and many minor religions.

Obviously, no one would like to join my religion. "He's dead, Jim."
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Ballet Dancers On Strike In DC--Refuse To Be Danced To Death

2006-01-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The tragic fairy tale of the Red Shoes whereby the girl is forced to dance to death inspired a movie called "The Red Shoes" with Moira Shearer in the lead role. Many girls who watched this movie wanted to be a dancer like her. But not the "dances to death" part.

From the Washington Post

Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser has offered to mediate the bitter and drawn-out contract negotiations between the shut-down Washington Ballet and its dancers' union, but the ballet's leadership has rejected the idea, an official confirmed yesterday.
*snip*
Dancers and management returned to the bargaining table this week for the first time since the ballet announced Dec. 23 that it would cancel two future Kennedy Center engagements as well as one at New York's Joyce Theater, citing a lack of funds because 12 performances of "The Nutcracker" had been canceled.

The profitable "Nutcracker" run was scrapped beginning Dec. 15 when contract talks broke down and the dancers, frustrated at the slow process, told management they would not dance without agreements on job security and safety issues relating to what they say is a high injury rate. Management refused to negotiate on the dancers' draft of an "interim" agreement and shut down the production, claiming the dancers had threatened to strike.
*snip*
The dancers view management's actions as a lockout, but they recently learned their unemployment claims have been denied, meaning they will be without pay while the company is on hiatus, said AGMA local representative Eleni Kallas.

A major issue for the union is maintaining the size of the company. Dancers view this point as a health issue, arguing that cutting dancers will lead to overwork and increased injuries for the rest. Management's refusal to negotiate on a proposed requirement of a minimum number of dancers is evidence that "nobody really cares" about the dancers, Kallas said.

Good old flat earth productivity! Maybe they could outsource the Nutcracker to India! Let them be sugarplum fairies.

Really, this "productivity" stuff is just another way of saying, "work them to death, this way we can force them to eat the effects of inflation!" Namely, not only do you get paid less and less due to money becoming more and more worthless, you have to double the work to make up the loss of income for the corporation!

One way of doing this is to hire ever cheaper labor. Of course, musicians and dancers can't be easily replaced at the top ranks of the profession and the Kennedy ballet dancers are up there, not as high as NYC but close. Strikes are breaking out all over the performing arts thanks to inflation.

From CBS News:

A showdown devoid of holiday cheer loomed at Radio City Music Hall, where management debuted its annual "Christmas Spectacular" Thursday with recorded music amid a bitter labor dispute with its orchestra.

Some patrons emerging from the debut told WCBS-TV they weren't even aware the orchestra wasn't there and the music wasn't live.

"We didn't even realize it was canned until we asked somebody at intermission," one said. "I couldn’t tell, and we come here almost every year."

That is pretty sad. I certainly can tell if an orchestra is real and not a recording but then, I am trained to be on the stage (and had to use canned music which isn't nearly so much joy as a live orchestra!). Broadway musicals and plays have been ruthlessly reducing the number of musicians and they fight with the unions all the time, the goal is to have zero human input on a daily basis, might as well make robots to play the roles, too.

Heck, the Japanese are hard at work on that very thing.

There have been other dance strikes and this causes a lot of bitterness between the performers and the choreographers. Right now, ballet is in the doldrums, no great creators anywhere as far as I can tell, some fine dancers but no real guiding light like Balanchine or Martha Graham, just to give two of the brighter lights that no longer shine.

Dancing is hard work. The hours of preparation before a performance, tuning down afterwards, the sacrifices and hardships of ballet dancers are legendary. Literally bleeding as they remove the toe shoes. Just like in the movie. Dedication, the stringent ban on eating pretty much anything, like models, their refrigerators often have only yogurt and bottled water! All this and now they will be asked to dance double performances!

A good way to shorten their careers.

Meanwhile, sports stars rake in ever more cash. While the grinding need to cut expenses are inflicted upon the lower ranks there, too. As inflation increases, this will get worse for all of us.
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Bush Is Cockeyed Drunk

2006-01-02T11:29:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yesterday, after drinking heavily alone at home, Bush went to a hospital to hand out Purple Bandaids to all the soldiers who really went to war unlike himself or Cheney. Look at the picture here. He is obviously stewed to the gills, literally cockeyed.

From Catch.com

President Bush began the new year on Sunday at the bedsides of wounded servicemen and women, and awarded nine Purple Hearts to U.S. troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
....
Bush spent the past week relaxing at his ranch where he rode his bike, cleared brush and prepared for his sixth year in office. He and his wife, Laura, and her mother, Jenna Welch, stayed at the ranch on New Year's Eve and had a steak dinner.
The president had a two-inch scratch across the left side of his brow.

"As you can probably see I was injured myself, not here at the hospital but in combat with a cedar," Bush quipped. "I eventually won."

All his private times, when he is under stress and goes off to hide in his spider hole, Bush always, always, always gets "hurt" in the head. He "falls" or "doors hit him" or "food causes him to faint" but every time, look at the photos, he is smashed on drink.

Here is the defintion of the word "Cockeyed":

Foolish; ridiculous; absurd: a cockeyed idea.
Askew; crooked.
Intoxicated; drunk.

Yes, drunk. And in this photo, I drew lines since the photo is square-on, showing he is significantly cockeyed! The two corners of his mouth are even and the bottom of the eyelids are even but the pupils are way off. And as usual, he conked his head while staggering about because his eyes can't focus.

His drooling, hanging mouth is just like after all the other famous drinking binges like the pretzel incident which happened when he was watching the Super Bowl alone.

This lunatic is worse than Yeltsin, who was obviously rolling out the barrel all the time, too. And since Bush can launch WWIII or drive us into a Great Depression, allowing him to blast away the last remaining stem cells, drinking, isn't a smart choice and indeed, are grounds for removing him from office.

He should be impeached for gross incompetence. Not to mention war crimes, treason (selling us to the Japanese, for example, is high treason no matter how you slice it!) and of course, the spying and outing CIA agents and all the rest.

Arrest him. Put him in an insane asylum. Ship him to Bagdad.
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Pill Popping Rush Limbaugh Still Free While Cops Arrest Little Old Ladies Selling Pain Pills

2005-12-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Prosecutors lose in court right to see Rush Limbaugh's medical records. Meanwhile, the same authorities who can't find the anthrax killer or bin Laden concentrate on the real terror in America: little old ladies selling some of their pain pills so they can pay the heating bills.

From CNN:

Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.

The woman -- who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December -- is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts.

"When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they'll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries," Floyd County jailer Roger Webb said.

Since April 2004, Operation UNITE, a Kentucky anti-drug task force created largely in response to rampant abuse of the powerful and sometimes lethal painkiller OxyContin, has charged more than 40 people 60 or older with selling primarily prescription drugs in the mountains.

"It used to be a rare occasion to have an elderly inmate," Webb said. "Five years ago it was a rarity."

Well, many, many criminals go free but not little old ladies! Can't have them hobbling about the countryside, whispering, "Hey, wippersnapper, want to pop a pill?" Nope. America will collapse, Christmas will be called off, the anthrax killer will laugh even harder than he is laughing right now if we don't capture and handcuff these dangerous 90 year old women!

The War on Drugs continues to grind onwards, crushing millions of people under its steel wheels. Ever wonder where Rush got those pain pills in Florida? From CNN:

Judge David F. Crow ruled that Florida laws do not prevent doctors from talking with prosecutors if the discussion is relevant to the prosecution of a crime.

The decision gave prosecutors permission to subpoena doctors and their staff, but it also protected confidential material in Limbaugh's medical records.

The judge noted that Florida law prohibits the discussion of a patient's medical condition and information disclosed by a patient during treatment.

From just such ladies. Oh, the humanity. Well, he is making millions on the radio, his show broadcast to our armed forces, even as the cops try to corner his elephantine mass, they are having a hard time of it. But ancient women with walkers: tackle them, mace them, throw them into the slammer and don't let them out.

Time for a rant: If there really is a baby Jesus upstairs, why can't we spend this xmas holiday screaming at him to throw some of that brimestone to Rush? Give him a lightning bolt jolt. At least have the Spirit of Christmas Future visit this blubbering ass and kick him to the curb?

Rich people can break any laws they want, the more connected, the more they can ignore the letter and intent of the law. Rich people don't say, "Shall I toss and turn at night due to the pain in my old joints and sell my meds or should I take my meds and get kicked out of my cheap apartment?" Desperate for some spare money as the monsters and clowns running America have created a fake, lying crappy "inflation index" that deliberately and maliciously excludes nearly everything that old grannies have to buy every month: food, energy, medicine, and then throw them in jail as they try to make ends meet?

What the hell is America coming to? Is this what we want to be? Shall we throw old women into prison for public begging? Or if they are too proud to beg, will we look the other way as they starve to death or eat dog food? The rip-off perpetrated by the GOP in changing the way we calculate inflation is going to KILL PEOPLE.

We are murdering people for oil, for money, for power and we are watching our rulers murder us as they, safe in their vast, expensive, inflation indexed bubble float over our heads, ordering cops to arrest little old ladies trying desperately to stretch a dying dollar.

Let them eat pain killers.

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Another Win For Us Tea Drinking Old Ladies: It Prevents Ovian Cancer

2005-12-12T19:26:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As a lifetime big time tea drinker who drinks cups and cups of tea while babbling away at this blog, it pleases me immensely to hear this good news: tea drinking protects women from ovian cancer. I have had my ovaries operated on when only 13 years old and my doctor told me to consume vast quantities of tea to ease the pain and so, he was right. I still have both ovaries and lots of tea kettles and tea cups and tea cozies. Would you like one or two lumps of sugar?

From Yahoo:

Swedish researchers have found tantalizing but far-from-conclusive evidence that drinking a couple of cups of tea every day might help reduce the risk of developing ovarian cancer.

The study involved 61,057 Swedish women who answered a questionnaire about their diets and then were tracked for an average of 15 years through 2004.

During that time, 301 women developed ovarian cancer. Those who reported drinking two or more cups of tea a day were 46 percent less likely to develop the disease than women who drank no tea. Drinking less than two cups also appeared to help, but not as much.

The researchers did not break out the results by tea types, but most of the tea drinkers consumed black tea. Both black and green tea contain polyphenols — substances thought to block cell damage that can lead to cancer.

My mother's godmother who was born at the beginning of the Civil War always had high tea time. She would sup her tea under the verandah, surrounded by her beloved wild birds with the California jay being the most audacious of the tea drinkers. The birds would perch on the lip of the cup and splash tea all over us with their bills. Then they would take the nuts and fly off to the mulberry tree and jay-jay-jay at us.

I am very happy I was surrounded by tea drinkers so drinking it was a natural thing. I collect tea and have many varieties as well as from various countries. Nothing is more wonderful than to participate in a proper Japanese tea ceremony. Drinking Chinese tea while eating peaches is also spiritually pleasing. Sitting on the deck, watching the clouds seethe about the mountains while sipping tea is highly recommended.

So is drinking wine, heh. But not five cups a day. As a five+ a day tea drinker, I assume my ovaries which caused endless problems back when I was very young (that, a long story, not pleasant) will be hearty and hale when I reach 105 years like my mother's godmother, at this rate.

Or maybe not. Next week they will probably come out with a study showing bloggers don't live long because we annoy our readers to death. Argh. Oh well. Rock and hard place and all that. Time for another cup of tea.

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The Family Enjoys Dinner and Thank You, Everyone

2005-11-25T05:16:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It has been only half a year since Culture of Life News was launched and we just want to thank our readers for taking the time to look into this blog. We hope to keep this going, see no reason why not. So many things to say, so many things to do! Enjoy life, for living is the whole point of being alive, no?

My dear husband, Chris, and his parents, Stan and Rosemary, sat at one end of the table. Happy birthday, Rosemary! Live long and prosper (proper Spockian pronouncement).

My son, Dan, peace.

Dan and his sister, Isadora at the opposite end of the table, their dad in the back, checking out the apple pies he and Rosemary, my mother-in-law backed. Everyone made pies so we get to eat them for the next week which is OK with me.

The clean-up crew arrives just in time to clean the floors, wash the dishes and quarrel with each other over the right to lick the turkey bowl. They do a pretty good job. Nothing is missed.

This morning, it is 12 degrees F outside. Ice on everything. The chickadees are all over the peach tree outside my window, each pecking apart their sunflower seeds. The chickens descended upon the remains of dinner, eating the potato peelings and salad left overs. Sparky gets another apple, of course.

I hope everyone enjoyed yesterday as much as we did. Life can be sweet, we enjoy those moments that are like this. And happy birthday, Dad! I love you.

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Thanksgiving Feast Cooked Victorian-style

2005-11-24T05:59:00.001-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

My family has celebrated the end of harvest and beginning of the harsh New England winter since the mid 1600's, The Hudson Valley was rich with hunting, unlike in Europe, anyone could hunt deer and eat venison, without a patent from the Crown, there were wild turkeys and of course, all that wonderful food the natives had tamed and cultivated like potatoes and squash, corn and various beans.

We owe everything we have today to the natives. So today, we should remember who brought the first baskets of bounty in the New World, who saved us when we invaded, generously sharing their skills and knowledge. Thank you. Wish we were nicer about it all.

My husband and son and I plus assorted friends over the years, lived for ten years in a tent complex we built on the side of a mountain. I prepared all our meals and tended the home fires, literally, as if I were a Victorian woman, we even had to carry our water by hand or make it out of snow.

Now we live in a very modern house but I still heat it Victorian style and I love my woodstove for baking and so today, everyone in my clan are coming over to eat a Victorian style turkey dinner.

I got up as usual at 4:30 am to start the cookstove. It involves chopping firewood to really slender girth, matting up paper and some cardboard and throwing a match at the whole thing. Boof! The fire comes to life.

Gradually, it heats up the big cast iron beast. I watch both the chimney thermometer to insure no chimney fires and the woodstove' thermometer on the door which was a fine invention back in 1889 when this fine machine was cast in New York, back when we were an industrial base.

Went outside to feed the animals and surprize!

Next week it is going to be super-warm. But today is a Santa-white-Christmas holiday. Ho ho ho.

Sparky was bred to gad about the Alps. He is an old breed of horse. Thick necked and thick headed. Took a while for him to figure out who is boss. Well, don't ask him. He lies. I am the boss. Sort of. When riding him, if you pull on the reins to turn his head, his neck is thick, he can ignore this. Worse, you can turn his head all the way around until he is nibbling at your boots and he will still go straight ahead. So I have to talk him into going places.

Back in the kitchen, it is time to assmble the ingredients for cooking the turkey, it is about 7:30am.

The turkey, of course. 17 pounds. Must cook for at least six hours, the cooking is a tad slower in old fashioned ovens. They get warm but don't have the intense super hot/no heat cycle that modern oven have. Instead, the temperature slowly goes up, hovers there for as long as one feeds the fire and then slowly declines. No cycling. So cooking times are quite different.

I place a grill at the bottom of my biggest mixing bowl. This is round which is nice because the heat in the oven comes mostly from the left side where the grate is. The fire bricks inside the firebox diffuses the heat but it is still significantly warmer on that side so every 15 or 20 minutes or so, I bast the turkey and rotate the bowl. Spin that wheel!

Here are most of the ingredients: celery, portabello mushrooms, yellow onions, Macintosh apples (organic, not computer!), oysters and potatoes. I dowse the turkey with dill vinegar, rub in olive oil and scatter rosemary on top. I then fine chop the celery, half the mushrooms and one onion and sautee.

They cook over the hottest burner of the woodstove. I then chop and cook the oysters seperately.

I mix it altogether with the breadcrumbs, butter and vegetable soup stock to make the stuffing.

Here is mother's helpers, making the stuffing. I cook it all in the big pot on the woodstove. It doesn't burn because the heat is very diffuse.

I then "rape" the turkey, yes, it is pretty much the same in a Freudian way. Stick my arm deep inside and jam the stuffing there. Ick. The turkey is cold. At least it isn't frozen. I cut up the apples and last onion into quarters and grace them about the turkey in the pan. Throw in the rest of the uncut mushrooms and this bakes along with the turkey and is basted with the juices so they form a sweet, succulent sauce. The flavor is awesome and it is so easy to do.

Kneeling on the floor, I tuck the turkey into the oven. Akamaru wonders why bother cooking it? Why not tear it apart and gulp it down now? The poor dog knows we do dumb things to food but she will eat later with gusto.

"No! Please! Don't put it away! I want it now!" She telegraphs to me. Sorry, chibi-maru, in it goes. I don't do raw turkey. Sushi, yes. Turkey, no way.

Here we can see what the oven looks like inside. I have a pizza stone on the bottom since the turkey is too big to sit on a rack. The stone holds heat really well, too. It helps the heat diffusion. Even in my modern oven, I use the stone for everything for the same reason. If you don't have a pizza stone, try to get one. They are wonderful.
Now we wait for several hours, time to clean the house and prepare for the guests!

I hope your are all having a good Thanksgiving, too, today. Will post about the dinner later.

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Bush is Now Drunk Most of the Time

2005-11-13T18:12:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yeltsin was a notorious drunk. So were the Ford family which is why President Ford's wife started her clinic for drunks. A lot of people in power are alcoholics. The Bush family is so notoriously drunk, they often are in jail for it and drug abuse. Why "sober Christians" think this clan of satanic drunks is a great role model shouldn't baffle us, after all, the devil nearly always wins in the struggle for weaker souls.

From Crooks and Liars:

Bush with Kilgore

Sunday Funnies (party time?)

I was sent this video and received many emails asking C&L to post it. I usually will try to post requests with as many as I received on this video. President Bush tries to help Mr. Kilgore right before the election. How did that work out?

Click here to see movie of Bush's latest drunken exploits

We saw the time Bush and Laura, both drunk, laugh with delight as Bush staggered up to some right wing school kiddies in Texas and dropped his little black dog on its head, knocking it out. The kids cried in horror and the two evil Bushes laughed, they thought this was a big joke, the silly dog looked like it was dead but it sprang back to life, like Jesus, I assume.

This startling episode happened before the last stolen election. Of course, the news media didn't trumpet it all over the place like Monica's dress of Dean yelling. Nope. It got near zero coverage though it went all over the left blogsphere. When Bush clonked himself during the Super Bowl, drinking, they made up the most infantile stories explaining away this obvious mess. Yet the next morning he was so soused he could barely stagger around and he had that goofy drunk grin guys on skid row exhibit.

I once worked in a bar and grill. Not one drunk ever said he or she was drunk. They were always "in control" which is why they run over people all the time (Laura was supposedly sober when she ran a stop sign in her hometown, driving at a high speed, killing her ex-boyfriend). Laura sober...HAHAHAHA. I drank when I wanted when I was 16. All my friends drank. Usually after school but before the parents were home or noticed not that they noticed in the sixties, most parents were pretty drunk too.

The National Enquirer which ran the drunk Jenna photos and the druggie photos of Jeb's sick children, are carrying story after story about how drunk Bush is. They won't talk about how drunk Laura is but if she is sober then I am a monkey's banana.

Drunks hate drinking alone and you can bet Laura keeps up with her buddy bottle for bottle.

The Bush family like the Kennedy family can't keep sober or out of trouble. In and out of jails, worse than the Kennedys, at least the Kennedys, when sober, are smart! No, the Bushes are out of the loop and out of touch with reality and if this is sober and dignified then dead skunks on highways are Cloe' perfume samples.

Drunks are never responsible for anything. Cars drive out of control, they ain't at the wheel. Aides hide stuff, no one tells them vital information, drunks are slackers supreme. From Forward:

A former top official in the Bush administration is suggesting that a White House memo outlining the need for hundreds of thousands of troops for the Iraq invasion was kept from the president. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-secretary of state Colin Powell during President Bush's first term, said in a November 7 speech that the National Security Council had prepared a pre-war memo recommending that hundreds of thousands of troops and other security personnel were needed. “I don't know if the president saw it,” Wilkerson told the audience of military officers and international lawyers, who had gathered at the military for a conference on on international humanitarian law. In response to a follow-up question after his speech, Wilkerson, a retired U.S. army colonel, said he believed that then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice or her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had blocked the memo, but he acknowledged that he had no clear evidence.

"No clear evidence" means he is making stuff up. So why would Condi hide important information from her "husband"? No pillow talk for bubble boy?

I knew about the need for 500,000 troops! More than one general yelled in public about this! All who did so were demoted or took early retirement! If I knew, Bush could have known if he wasn't soused to the gills on Gilligan's Island! The Bushes want to run the world while being out of the loop all the time. Well, they can loop-de-loop at Coney Island, not DC, if they want.

Why do these people want...they want money. The only way to steal from America is to be in power and grab whatever one can. And they have been two-handing the loot, forget being uninformed.

Feeble brained drunks shouldn't conduct wars. Well, only if they are Churchill or Grant. Generally, this is a bad thing.

Giving our White House to a family with a long criminal record is a bad thing, too. Arrest them again, arrest them all, put them all in the drunk tank and dry them out. Then put them on trial, all of them, every last one of them.

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US Military Dumped 75 Years Worth of Poison in Ocean

2005-11-02T04:57:00.000-08:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Pentagon documents show that they dumped much of the toxic gases and fluids inside 55 gallon drums into the oceans all over the planet. This has killed a lot of ocean dwelling creatures and the poisons returned to us with a vengence via eating seafood contaminated by these toxins.

From USA Today:

The Army secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the ocean, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets — either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels, according to an investigation by The (Newport News, Va.) Daily Press.

"We do not claim to know where they all are," said William Brankowitz, a deputy project manager in the Army Chemical Materials Agency and a leading authority on the Army's chemical weapons dumping. "We don't want to be cavalier at all and say this stuff was exposed to water and is OK. It can last for a very, very long time."

The weapons of mass destruction may still be deadly, and were dumped along with more than 500 tons of radioactive waste from World War II until 1970, after which Congress and international treaty banned the practice.

Just like the above ground nuclear bomb tests which have poisoned the entire planet and which is partially responsible for the skyrocketing cancer rates that plague us today, this poison is long living, releases slowly as the forces of nature corrode the containers and hard to stop. It enters the entire food chain from the bottom dwellers to the great whales. This summer, the Gulf of Mexico witnessed giant die-offs of nearly all marine life. Ditto many other places such as the Delta in northern California where the smelt catch collapsed nearly totally.

The harvesting of the seas coupled with the poisoning of the seas equals the death of a huge sector of the planetary eco-system and adding global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, the devastation is very great now and growing.

When the military shoveled all this poison created to murder conscripted soldiers and civilians trapped in cities during wars or peasants who stubbornly refuse to surrender, is dumped into the sea, it didn't disappear. The childish idea that poisoning the world's well wouldn't matter still astonishes me. Since the earliest days of human habitation, nay, when the earliers animal herder tribes moved across the great plains of Asia, the worry about poisoning wells has been a top fear, a fear so great, every time a plague hits or the water goes bad, raging mobs would massacre whoever was a convienent scapegoat as the poor Jews of Medivael Europe endured again and again.

So the excuse, "We couldn't imagine (fill in the obvious blanks here) would happen" is a blatant lie. As a child, I could figure this out. Pour a few drops of toxins in a fish tank and watch them die! Just as we happily flushed our toilets into the rivers and seas, I would ask, "Would you want to drink your own piss?" Today, our piss, even after "purification" is still so toxic, it is destroying water lifeforms at a ferocious rate. Viagra and birth control methods top the list of human generated piss toxins disrupting the sex lives of marine animals all the way up to whales.

All our medicines that pass through the spleen end up in the water and humans are taking so many medicines and are in such great numbers now, this is a tidalwave of toxins that also are changing viruses that fish have to endure.

Just like the Pentagon refusing to record where they dumped their toxins, our entire planetery culture stubbornly refuses to track its toxic wastes, incurious about the effects of all of this. We better wake up for if our entire sea/fresh water life ecosystem collapses, the collapse of all other life forms isn't too far off, too. The fossil record makes this very clear.

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Hurricanes Blow in Mary Poppins Nanny State

2005-10-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I have noticed that the Deep South which often votes against socialistic solutions suddenly clamors for Miss Nanny State whenever a hurricane hits. Meanwhile, we are scolded by these same people for trying to build a social safety net for other times.

My family and I lived in a tent complex for ten years. It is snowing outside tonight. Brrr. I used to say, the refrigerator has turned on when this happened in the past. I had no ice, no matter how hot it was outside in summer, we just lived with it. The airconditioner turned on in January. With a vengence. No one gave us heat, we had to cut up our firewood, split it, stack it, unstack it, set it on fire in the fireplace, jiggle it around until it burned, etc. No one did this for us. We ate fresh veggies from the garden in summer and had meat in the winter when the refrigerator outside turned on. Once, to celebrate New Year's, Van put a bottle of champagne in our outdoor refrigerator by dropping the bottle into a snowbank. We forgot about it until midnight when I remembered to dig it out again. It was nearly frozen since it was -10 degrees outside. Frozen champagne doesn't bubble. We chewed on it instead and laughed.

We weathered terrible storms in that tent complex. Shrieking winds, falling trees, a lightning bolt hit us inside, even! Water ran through it in floods. We lived cheek and jowl with Mother Nature and She was absolutely ferocious with us.

It was also wonderful. We had a toad live inside with us, I made him his own little door. We had wood rats and chickadees live with us. We saw many rainbows and played in mountains of snow, sledding off the roof in winter, down the mountainside.

The main thing is, it wasn't all that terribly hard, living this way. Watching the people screaming for ice in Florida amazes me, frankly. They can't exist for even three days without ice. I have existed without it often. Once, in NYC, we lost electricity for over three days. My neighborhood burned down in the looting riots. I had shopped for two week's worth of food when it happened and what we didn't eat the first 24 hrs, we shared with whoever didn't have food, it was all gone and we just ate unrefrigerated foods and this wasn't a hurricane that took over a week to arrive! After all, then one can plan ahead, no? And store dry food in waterproof containers, right? And store some damn water! Gads!

For ten years, my water was drawn far away and brought home by hand, we lugged water around. "Running water" was rain or someone going fast while carrying a bucket! No one from FEMA brought me a drop of water. I had to plan ahead, how much water to fetch and how to use it. Duh.

When we had no electricity that hot summer in NYC, no one came with ice. FEMA didn't exist and the gov. of NY didn't give one hoot about us, we were in a slum so they just stood there and watched our homes burn. No one replaced my food which was a hardship for me but I copped.

I happen to believe we need a nanny state precisely because I don't need one. But if I were frail or infirm, you bet, I would need one! Young and strong, no. But why do so many people vote to kill the nanny state and then scream like babies when it doesn't come immediately to comfort and coddle them? And further, this refusal to support a nanny state leads right wingers and Bush voters to refuse to pay taxes so that this infantile behavior has to be put on our national credit card which is now over $8 trillion in the red.

Southerners who can't live in the south because it is hot, screaming for ice and water disturbs me greatly for I lived there in my youth and deliberately did without airconditioners because I didn't want to become soft. I deliberately trained myself to live without water for 24 hrs to make my body adapt to hot conditions. I learned to cope with nature down there so I could function in the heat in emergencies. Ditto up north. In winter, when it comes, I deliberately don't wear much, I expose my skin to the bitter cold to habituate it so my body adjusts to the coming cold. By January, I can run around in subzero weather with a medium weight coat and warm boots. If it rises to 25 degrees, I wear a tee shirt, it is so warm to me.

So what is going on here?

All my life, if my roof is ruined, I fixed it myself. Because roofs can get ruined, I always keep a tarp in storage just in case. Any idiot living in hurricane land who doesn't do this deserves to have a leaky roof. Yet I see my tax dollars being used to not only hand out free tarps down there, FEMA is even putting them on roofs at my expense because evidently, southerners are incapable of doing their own work, eh? Never ever no matter how terrible the storm, and I have been hit by tornadoes!--has any government come riding into town to fix my roof for me. Period. Not once.

And lord knows, my tent needed tarps after vicious storms! Heh. It was always tarp city! But never did anyone give me one for free. I had to scrape together my pennies when I was poor and buy one.

So tell me, why are we doing this for free at my expense for people who hate having a helping government do this for me some day? Huh? Now is time for Jeb Bush to call for his brother to raise taxes on the rich so FEMA can buy ice for people in vacationland Florida.

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CONSERVATIVE HATE MAKES ONE STUPID AND SICK

2005-10-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I picked this up at the tag end of a story today. After a great deal of research scientist have discovered that love makes our brains smarter and hate makes one stupid. Got that, Rush Limbaugh? Eh? Robertson? Yoo hoo, Cheney!

From CNN:

Think positive, loving thoughts: Finally, a decade of research at the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior led by neuroscientist Richard Davidson found that choosing specific thoughts and emotions can permanently change the working of the brain.

When participants practiced feeling love and compassion, their brains went into action -- connecting and building new circuitry at high speed.

Davidson has concluded that emotions play a strong role in mental acuity and that spending just 10 minutes a day focusing on feeling loving and kind can make you smarter -- and happier.

So, even 10 minutes of loving, not lust, no Viagra involved in this!---one's brain will function better. Compassionate conservatives were always fake. Note how their only joy comes from watching people drown or get crushed by falling buildings and terrorist attacks are "winning the trifecta" with them!

Being kind to puppies and feeding birds or petting kitty cats makes one's brain better. Being nice to little old ladies works, too. Especially us women over 55. Hear that? You better get hopping, now, or I will whack you with my umbrella, little whippersnappers.

Ooops. My brain is shrinking. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Must enlarge it. Feel the love. Ommmm. Ah. I love...chocolate cake. Will dwell on that. Wait, it will make me fat! Gloom...MY BRAIN IS SHRINKING AGAIN!

Well, I ceased watching American TV about four years ago. My brain certainly grew in the meanwhile. I marvel at people on the left who take on this toil, shrinking their brains, watching angry, scared right wing punditories pound reality to a pulp.

Well, with the inditement looming, I might watch TV again because I will feel great love and happiness from it, no?

Arrest Bush. Help my brain grow.

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REFUGEES WILL NOT BE KICKED TO CURB

2005-10-05T03:53:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Guess I wasn't the only one horrified at the news that our dear Republicans planned to throw half a million homeless Americans into the gutter on my birthday in the middle of October. As usual, when a shocked nation reacts negatively, the Snidely Whiplashes of the GOP backtrack for a tiny bit.

From the WP:

More than 400,000 people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina will remain in hotel rooms beyond the Oct. 15 deadline set for their relocation, the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday, extending a program that is costing an estimated $8.3 million a day.

The agencies said the program, which is in effect in 48 states, with most rooms clustered closest to the devastated area, would be extended indefinitely.

In other words, they will not throw the baby into the dumpster...yet. As per usual, the GOP villains will wait in the dark to do this deed for you know, we all know, they will throw them out eventually.

Of course, the people running these hostels will want to keep on trucking so we will have a lobby for keeping the refugees housed, I am assuming.

But this is all one big train wreck since there is no realistic program to deal with the disaster that is still unfolding. I note today that the NYT noticed there are nearly no names attached to the dead in these storms. What? The simple act of naming bodies can't be done? What is this? Indonesia?

The laughable situation of a so-called first world nation, nay, the Empire that is Number One, God Bless America!--can't ID the dead who were left in the path of an obviously very dangerous storm is one more reason why we are now the laughing stock of the world.

Snidely GOP is still hard at work, kicking people out of housing and denying health care. Yesterday, the news was how the GOP is preventing legislation in Congress to extend Medicaid to the victims of a giant hurricane. If they have no jobs and no health insurance and half a million fall into that catagory!---well, DIE! The dieharder Republicans believe in Nature red in tooth and claw. I wonder if they will start a program to reprocess hair and yank gold teeth, too? And we wonder where Nazis came from.

&spades From the Alaska News:

About 600 low-income individuals and families around Alaska have been sent similar edicts from the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation: Pay more or move.
The cutbacks are due to a drop in federal housing funds this year, said Wes Weir, public housing director of AHFC.
Alaska took a bigger hit than other states because the federal government did not take into account additional expenses due to distances and other factors here, Weir said. The percentages and formulas are "based on a model not accurate for Alaska," he said.
AHFC quit adding new clients for five months this year to save money, leaving thousands on a waiting list. They include mainly low-income people, who may be in substandard housing or staying with relatives.

Another Snidely moment! They can't resist. If you stop their mustache twirling in one place, they just pick on someone else.

What really stews me is that Alaska sends some of the most right wing Snidelies to Congress! Hello, meet thine tormentors! The victims of the New Orleans disaster have voted Democratic so I feel for them. But not the victims in Haley Barbour's state. He is a top GOP Snidely and he and his robber baronettes love to steal from the public weal while wee-weeing like a stuck pig. This is very popular in the South, alas, to demand no safety net and then flinging themselves upon our much tenderer mercies!

Make up your minds, dudes. The desire for no taxes/no services while at the same time exploiting Northern voters' long range, long term support of a generous government helping all citizens is going to end in a very nasty way as we cease supporting the nation via taxes and generous laws. Liberality means to be open handed, not a closed fist. Yet we are much more aware of budgets and limits while the GOP, using its stronghold grip in the Deep South, are the spendthrifts who steal from widows and orphans!

Liberalism=good times. Right wingism=war and death. Why do so many Americans want war and death? This puzzles me because they all yell when Death visits them. Liberals don't run much of any America now and still, cup in hand, the very same people running this joint come to us for help, for sympathy, for love. Then they will mock us and kick sand in our faces and call us wimps.

Well, Alaska has oil. The government there could house their own people. They won't, of course. And the demoralized people of Alaska are surrender monkeys unlike the French people who fight back every time they are pushed around. See? There is a lesson to learn here. The refugees from the hurricanes have to fight for their lives. We have to fight. Everyone has to fight. Expecting Santa Claus to come and shower us with goodies is insane.

At the very least, we should have the same welfare system we built in Israel. See what happens when one lobbies hard, organizes hard, works hard?

Heck, we should have the same safety net Congress enjoys. Self interest wins every time.

&spades Just came across this from Moxie Grrrl From Alaskan news:

So, you landed a big king salmon this summer? It can't compare to the colossal king Alaska Airlines plans to land this morning in Anchorage.
The Seattle-based carrier has painted nearly the full length of a Boeing 737-400 passenger jet as a wild Alaska king, or chinook, salmon. The airline has dubbed its flying fish the "Salmon-Thirty-Salmon."
It's a bold promotional move to celebrate wild Alaska seafood and also the carrier's role in hauling millions of pounds of fresh salmon, halibut, crab, shrimp and other seafood out of the state each year.
The fishy paint job was done on a grand scale, company spokesmen said. A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner.
"There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived," said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president. "People will just be amazed at the detail."
A local nonprofit agency, the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, gave Alaska Airlines a $500,000 grant to paint the jet. The money came out of about $29 million in federal funding U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and his congressional colleagues have appropriated to the marketing board, created in 2003, to promote and enhance the value of Alaska seafood. The senator's son, state Sen. Ben Stevens, is chairman of the agency's board of directors.

Cute, no? Nepotism plus Snidely Whipstevens=raiding our government which is deep in the red, for trivial, stupid things. Generousity towards each other while cutting out widows and orphans. Typical, perfect Snidelyism.

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BUSH/KALI: BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

2005-10-05T03:21:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bubble Boy was forced out of his carefully constructed bomb proof shelter to address an increasingly wary nation. Since he and his minions have unleashed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse upon us, his inner demon decided this is the time to tell us what is in store next: Disease.

He is one of the Fab Four, you know.

From the Seattle Times:

President Bush said yesterday that he is considering the use of military troops to impose a quarantine in the event of a deadly flu pandemic.

Bush, in response to a question at a news conference, echoed warnings from health experts who fear a replay of the 1918 pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. He outlined a series of steps to deal with an illness that could overwhelm the health-care system.

The World Health Organization says an influenza pandemic is "just a matter of time." Some health officials particularly are concerned about avian flu because it seems to be extremely lethal when it jumps from birds to humans. Of 116 known cases in humans since 2003, more than half — 60 — ended in death. There are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission of the flu, also known as bird flu, but that could change because such viruses constantly mutate.

Now guess who has been cutting back access to medical care in the USA? Eh? So, after refusing for years to extend medical care to the masses leaving over 45 million Americans without any care at all, we are being told we might be attacked by troops trying to restrain plagues?

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!

Well. So this is what our hyper-military, gun totting, support the troops America is all about? Locking people into plague cities to die? For this is what it is all about. We watched agast but immoble as an entire city was wrecked and the wretched masses locked inside forced to stay as the sheriffs locked the exit routes? And then paramilitary came in to disarm the pathetic remainders? Hello, America! Is this what we are, a bunch of cows led to the slaughter? Chickens forced to stay home in the roost? Are we surrender monkeys? Think the French would put up with any of this? Cluck cluck.

I don't hear an outcry from the Democrats. Why aren't they making loud noises about public health issues? Rats.

Dead silence. Don't blame them entirely, five years of being shut out of the news except when they "misstep" has trained them well. Now they walk on eggshells rather than stride with confidence.

White House officials said Bush's fears were heightened last summer when he read "The Great Influenza," a nightmarish account of the 1918 pandemic by writer John Barry. In that outbreak, an avian-flu virus passed to humans and left a trail of death around the globe. Most victims developed an extremely virulent form of pneumonia.

Three years ago, his favorite book was about the hurricane that destroyed Galveston! Then he pretended he couldn't understand the effects of a very violent hurricane when one hit New Orleans!

If this clown were to read about nuclear war, expect him to instigate it.

From the WP:

The day after the briefing, led by Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and other senior government health officials, the Senate squeezed $3.9 billion for flu preparations into a Pentagon appropriations bill.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats plan to introduce another bill calling for the creation of a flu pandemic coordinator within the White House and a federal buy-back program for unused flu vaccines, among other measures, according to a draft of the bill. Its authors include the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada; Senator Barack Obama of Illinois; and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Thirty-two Democratic senators sent a letter to President Bush on Tuesday expressing "grave concern that the nation is dangerously unprepared for the serious threat of avian influenza."

Aren't there more than 32 Democratic Senators? I suspect the deadly chicken flu has infected more than one. We don't have a party, we have a partial.

Stopping viruses isn't easy. A virus killed off nearly all humanoids in the distant past. It can do it anytime, our only tool against this is to multiply quickly afterwards. A lot of people find this distasteful but here it is: we are a form of virus, too, and when we multiply, its eco-niche is increased too. So the chances of it sweeping the population increases rather than decreases over time as we eliminate all other forms of dying. Ie: the more we succeed in keeping more humans live the more likely a very virulent virus will erupt skyrockets.

I was nearly killed by a very virulent virus from Southeast Asia. It was so bad, I and all others exposed to it including the early doctors treating it, were put in isolation and it didn't pass further. The vector wasn't there so it was a one time event, thank goodness. I had a 105 fever for three days and was in a coma and when I came out of it, looked like a skeleton. My teeth and hair began to drop out. All my dental damage comes from that one event.

So why is Congress and Bush destroying the CDC, driving out real scientists, replacing them with idiots, cutting down access to Medicaid? Why?

Only Durga Kali the Great Destroyer knows. She is their God.

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BUSH: THE PSYCHOPATH GOES INSANE

2005-09-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

When trapped in an Iowa cornfield when questions about his past drug abuse were in the news early in 2000, Bush stumbled about, groping for some lie to fling to the dogs baying at his heels. "I haven't used drugs recently" was his storyline. Suddenly, the news media shut off all comment about his drug abuse when his campaign manager met with the media owners and told them they would not only get massive tax cuts but would also be allowed to merge and create monopolies unlike Clinton/Gore who were going after monopoly powers like Microsoft.

This turned the tide and all news stories focused on what Gore wore and said while Bush could yammer like a brain damaged monkey and win praise and all research about his checkered past of law breaking, boozing, drugs, AWOL, insider trading went utterly unreported.

Now that thousands of anonymous Americans have died, and after Rita killed rather a few (after the press crowed that no one died!), Bush is in hot water. Despite the media owners best attempts at clothing this naked psychopath, his popularity has been going straight down for quite a while. Now the media is very nervous. Losing viewers and readers, they know they can't do wall to wall Pravda and survive so they are reluctantly reporting the truth now.

From MSNBC:

The president was hearing mostly good news. The storm, though strong, was not a Category 4 or 5 monster. The vast network of refineries and oil platforms seemed to mostly withstand the 120-mile-an-hour winds and 15-foot storm surge. It would take weeks to get the gulf oil industry fully back online, and fuel prices were sure to go up. But the storm did not appear to have wrecked the economy or claimed hundreds of lives.

The president didn't look all that relieved or happy, however. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep (he had been awakened all through the night with bulletins), and he seemed cranky and fidgety. A group of reporters and photographers had been summoned by White House handlers to capture a photo op of the commander in chief at his post. Bush stared at them balefully. He rocked back and forth in his chair, furiously at times, asked no questions and took no notes. It almost seemed as though he resented having to strike a pose for the press.

You dummies. He always resented striking poses. This is why he drinks. So he can endure the scrutiny of the cameras that don't lie which is why nearly all pictures of Bush are heavily censored...until recently. Now, they pour out via great sites like the Yahoo one I use to scan hundreds of pictures, eight at a time.

The president made no effort to play down hurricanes as natural calamities that are unavoidable and hence uncontrollable. Instead, he reinforced the link between hurricanes and terrorism, suggesting that Osama bin Laden must have been pleased with the havoc wreaked by Katrina. When Rita threatened, Bush took personal control of the disaster preparations. He was so deep in the details that he supervised, via videoconference from his Northcom command post, the evacuation of a single hospital in Beaumont, Texas, to make sure the Feds and the state were taking the right steps and talking to each other. When his briefers reported that local governments were being faxed legal waivers to expedite the cleanup, the president helpfully pointed out that many local officials still don't have working fax machines. (Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff assured him that his people were making follow-up phone calls.)

That famous psychopath, Hitler, as his ship was going down, took more and more "control" over petty details of the war. With similar results.

When the media tried to make the Rita mess look good, minimizing the damage which was enormous but didn't directly hit Houston (or Houston would be a shattered ruin today!), minimizing the deaths, crowing about how it was zero when the rescue/body search had barely begun, crowing about how this wasn't going to impact our gas guzzling. Look at this headline: From the NYT:

President Calls for Less Driving to Conserve Gas

With fears mounting that high energy costs will crimp economic growth, President Bush called on Americans yesterday to conserve gasoline by driving less. He also issued a directive for all federal agencies to cut their own energy use and to encourage employees to use public transportation. What happened to the "they won't make us change the American Way!" rhetoric? And the "there is no oil crisis" lip flapping? Or the "the refineries and rigs in the Gulf are OK" lies?

Down the chute.

"We can all pitch in," Mr. Bush said. "People just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption," he added, and that if Americans are able to avoid going "on a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful."

Mr. Bush promised to dip further into the government's petroleum reserve, if necessary, and to continue relaxing environmental and transportation rules in an effort to get more gasoline flowing.

On Capitol Hill, senior Republicans called for new legislation that they said would lower energy costs by increasing supply and expanding oil refining capacity over the long run.

I read an old Business Week from June that had all these stupid articles about the Hubbert Oil Peak and it said, it isn't here because oil production is at a peak.

Ahem. That is what it is! We pump like mad and it isn't enough so we pump even faster. The rush to use up all the remaining oil immediately is very strong, as I keep saying. Instead of keeping it in the ground for future use, we are sucking it up as fast as possible.

This is how psychotics operate. They don't lead, they flounder. We all know the facts but because this conflicts with our desires, we do psychotic things like try to steal oil in Iraq. A psycho, instead of conserving oil, decides we must rape the earth, pollute everything and make a screaming mess. I have dealt with psychotic people who suffered brain damage, they are unreasonable and violent and will, while screaming, "I am not out of control," will smash through walls and fall down stairs, etc.

Households are on pace to spend an average of $4,500 on energy this year, up about $500 from last year and $900 more than in 2003, according to Global Insight, a research firm.

Mr. Bush's comments, while similar to remarks he made shortly after the disruption from Hurricane Katrina pushed gasoline prices sharply higher, were particularly notable because the administration has long emphasized new production over conservation. It has also opted not to impose higher mileage standards on automakers.

The rational moves to deal with obvious problems were not pursued because psycho Bush was strongly interacting with psycho America, drunk on power and in love with speed.

And speed is a deadly drug.

Mr. Bush, speaking yesterday after he was briefed at the Energy Department, did not use the dour tone or cardigan-wearing imagery that proved politically deadly for Jimmy Carter during the oil crisis of the 1970's. Nor did Mr. Bush propose new policies to encourage conservation. But he was more explicit than in the past that Americans should cut back.

Dummies. I hate it when the news reporters act stupid. Carter made his speech in the middle of fricking winter. It was cold. It is hot right now even for September! Why on earth would Bush dress as if it were winter?

The coming winter will kill many Americans if we don't increase the home heating aid and quess what? As today's earlier article detailed, we are spending like fiends on war and are shipping our manufacturing AND military/industrial jobs to other countries! So it is a double jeopardy gambit. Burning our candle at both ends.

In response to higher energy costs, households are likely to spend less on restaurant meals, clothing and other items. That would slow economic growth in coming months, but economists predicted that other forces - like a continuing housing boom and rising corporate investments in factories and equipment - would keep the economy growing.

"I don't think we're talking about a recession or a near recession," said Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist at MFR, a research company in New York. "I think we're talking about growth that is slower than people expected."

This "research company" should fire the economists working for it. Obviously, they are brain dead. Our "growth" this last five years is 100% due to taking on a towering mountain of debt as we sucked the savings of the entire planet into our maws. Which is now a chain around our neck (attached to a bear trap!). I know for a fact, the only spending I am doing or seeing around me, is people frantically trying to make themselves energy efficient as fast as possible. I have a lot of work lined up in exactly this area.

Being a psychopath dependant upon a psychopath, bin Laden, Bush has set all priorities on insane paths. Here is a typical example: Capitol Hill Blue:

“I didn’t sign on for this,” he said. “The bureau has gone to hell in a hand basket.”

He tells a disturbing story of an agency ripped apart internally by turf battles, emasculated by an attorney general who believes Constitutional rights get in the way of a poorly-managed war on terror and an administration whose focus is marginal at best.

“Our number one priority in law enforcement is supposed to be fighting terrorism,” he says. “So what’s the latest initiative by Justice and the bureau? We’ve declared war on pornography.”

The anthrax killer who attacked only people on the Bush hate list, Bush picks inappropriate targets as well as unconstitutional targets deliberately. He has to keep the FBI nonfunctional because he is a criminal with a criminal past and needs to have them scattered and useless. The real rulers make tons of money peddling porn. You can bet, they aren't going to be controlled, only the open competition from outsiders.

The internet devalued porn by making so much available it became virtually for free if not totally free. This annoys the porn peddlers just as much as legalizing drugs make drug lords pissed off.

The Abramoff gambling/lobbying scandals are still unfolding. One would think the media and the FBI and everyone would be treating this like the press/Federal government's jihad against Clinton because of hair cuts, missing Ws on computers, blue dresses, White water in which he lost money, not gained, and so on.

Thinking about all this, one realizes, America is full of psychopaths who are losing their minds. Time to put them in the asylum to protect US, not them.

Better still, jail.

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FEMA SAYS BRIT FOOD IS DISGUSTING

2005-09-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

Cartoon by Elaine Meinel Supkis

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It never ends, does it? The French spend many an idle hour insulting British cusine, mocking them for lack of taste, poor presentation and all around ickiness. The Brits have grown accustomed to this abuse but when Americans pitch in, watch out.

From the Mirror UK:

HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.

US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.

Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

Sounds pretty effete, non? Maybe because New Orleans was founded by the French and have many Cajuns there that were uprooted by the French from Arcadia, aka, New Foundland, perhaps FEMA felt that it would cause gastronomic distress if humans down there ate British food.

And unless the bureaucratic mess is cleared up soon it could be sent for incineration.

One British aid worker last night called the move "sickening senselessness" and said furious colleagues were "spitting blood".

The food, which cost British taxpayers millions, is sitting idle in a huge warehouse after the Food and Drug Agency recalled it when it had already left to be distributed.

Hey. You are supposed to boil British food, not burn it. Burning food is a French affectation.

What will Blair do? Will he send in the Tommys to rescue the prepackaged dinners? Will they have to airlift it back out again? While shooting at Yanks? Indeed, since it is in Little Rock, just leaflet the city with "Yanks yank Brit Brunches" and see the natives go insane with fury. They hate Yanks even more than the Brits.

The aid worker, who would not be named, said: "This is the most appalling act of sickening senselessness while people starve.

"The FDA has recalled aid from Britain because it has been condemned as unfit for human consumption, despite the fact that these are Nato approved rations of exactly the same type fed to British soldiers in Iraq.

"Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness."

No wonder we are losing the war in Iraq. Some of our troops have been fatally poisoned when in Kosovo and then weak with stomach aches, they entered Iraq and fell apart. Yup. That explains everything, doesn't it? Perfect sense.

Now, maybe we should ship this food to Congress and the White House. Better yet, Blair should serve only Scottish cusine at state dinners attended by Americans. And no Scotch to blunt the effects. Cheap American watery rice beer. That is true punishment.

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ANTHRAX ATTAXS

2005-09-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only person in America who remembers that the anthrax killer is still loose and still able to kill at will. Lo and behold, the story revives from its early grave. From the NYT:

Four years after an unknown bioterrorist dropped letters containing a couple of teaspoons of powder in a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., what began as the largest criminal investigation in American history appears to be stalled, say scientists and former law enforcement officials who have spoken with investigators.

The failure to solve the case that the authorities call "Amerithrax" is a grave disappointment for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Postal Inspection Service, the investigative arm of the Postal Service. The letters were the first major bioterrorist attack in American history and killed five people, sickened 17 others, temporarily crippled mail service and forced the evacuation of federal buildings, including Senate offices and the Supreme Court.

Amerithrax. I remember when I learned about the webpage they started, looking for "clues." Naturally, I visited them and reamed them out. "What sort of lunatic would name a FBI website 'Amerithrax' ? It sounds like a patriotic singing group or a rail system or an anti tax group."

Of course, they didn't answer me back then and won't talk to me now.

Here is their flipping banner off their web page. Could anyone imagine this is a place where one assembles information about a serial killer who had access to top secret military labs? Eh? Wot? No?

No.

Here are two of the letters posted at the merry Ameritrax site:

Looks like the anthrax killer had a confederate who was around age 10. Or maybe Jenna wrote them while drunk? Can't really say who wrote them. All we know is, the person had top secret clearances, knew all about the details of anthrax handling because he didn't die and most importantly, he killed or intimidated people Bush wanted taken care of, namely, he acted like a Bush hit man.

Since this puts Bush into the circle of suspects, one would imagine the FBI would have grilled Bush and given him various voice/lie detector tests...hahahaha! I suggested this. As we all know, Sherlock Holmes wouldn't pass by a suspect merely because that person was "respectable" and god help us.

Bush and all his family, note the latest arrest of a Bush!--are anything but respectable. Bush is a multi-arrested career criminal who didn't hesitate to conspire with judges and the military and foreign entities. The very first victim of the Bush vengence machine was the photo editor in Florida who allowed the publication of the first Jenna drunk photos. This happened the same week Bush and his killer hausfrau, Laura, were launching an attack on us American mothers, scolding us about our children and telling us, noses in air, how to raise good children, using their drunken, fake ID flashing, sexually wild Dionysian duo, their twins.

This screwed up all the speeches and appearances and photo ops.

Bush took care to let the world know, in a rather off-hand and odd way, that he was protected from anthrax and instantly, the attacks began. Another reason to question him for many hours and go over data most carefully. It was an odd statement, "The President has been innoculated against anthrax just in case there is an attack this month" was pretty bizarre and we all marveled at it, at the time.

The "have a merry anthrax" site doesn't talk about the fatal last days of the "investigation"---when they confirmed the anthrax came from a top military facility. The other spook agencies asked the FBI to cool their heels, they obeyed because Bush wanted them to stand down, a la 9/11 and Katrina, to do nothing, say nothing, leak no information, ask no questions, absolve everyone and blame everybody.

So they did.

The website hasn't been updated in years. They have a $2,000,000 bounty for nailing the person who used this so astutely post 9/11 to line up everyone to vote for the Patriot Act without reading it (the Senate being closed down, for example). It killed a gentleman the Bushes wanted to punish. It silenced the press and distracted everyone. And then, when the bloodhounds got too close to homebase, they threw some white powder on the ground, covering up the scent.

The fact that no one seems to give a hoot about this matter is most...hahahahaha. Note how Bush talks about this! Not. Does the press? Well, something is afoot since the NYT brought it up once again! Heh. Nothing like seeing a bunch of dead Americans to get the sleepers at the media to shake awake for a milisecond!

From CNN, 2002

ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) -- One expert predicts it will take a combination of "new science" and "good old-fashioned detective work" to find out who's responsible for the anthrax attacks that claimed five lives in the United States in the weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

In a paper published this week in the journal Science, researchers at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, detail their contribution to the "new science" aspect of the investigation, a genetic comparison of anthrax samples.

Scientists there compared the anthrax that killed newspaper photo editor Bob Stevens in Florida with other samples of what's known as the "Ames strain" of bacillus anthracis, or anthrax. The Ames strain was originally isolated from a dead cow in Texas in 1981. This strain has since been sent to dozens, perhaps hundreds of research and defense facilities in the United States and Europe for study.

The anthrax strain that killed a Florida photo editor in 2001 is yielding clues that may help investigators. CNN's Ann Kellan reports (May 9)

"In different labs over 21 years, they have developed mutations in their DNA sequence," says Claire Fraser, President of TIGR.

"And these are the regions we are focusing on, regions that are different, because that gives us the information we need to try to distinguish one from another," she says.

Identifying the mutations unique to each lab could eventually lead investigators to the source of the anthrax strain that killed Stevens.

"The critical thing about bacillus anthracis is that it has shown very little genetic variability," says Ronald Atlas, president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology.

"That really has been a problem in trying to fingerprint the organism," he says.

TIGR identified 60 markers, or unique genetic differences between the anthrax that killed Stevens and several other Ames samples. Of those 60, Fraser says 11 could help researchers discriminate between the Florida sample and the others. It's at least something to go on, considering that about 5 million pieces of DNA code are being compared.

Finding sources

"The fact we now have a number of sites in the genome to look at helps us eliminate some labs, and concentrate on others," says Atlas.

But even as the science may eventually pinpoint the lab from which the Florida sample or the other deadly anthrax came, it will take law enforcement skills to determine who took the bacteria -- which could have been stolen at any time over the past two decades.

While the TIGR findings may be an early step in finding a biological terrorist, the analysis technique may pay off with less sensational medical detective work.

"It's not just anthrax strains that this is going to help with, but all infectious diseases, in finding their sources," says Atlas, who also heads the Center for Deterrence of Biowarfare and Bioterrorism at the University of Louisville.

"This allows us to compare genomes from a strain that causes disease with any number of other strains, and based on that sort of analysis, begin to differentiate. So it's a very powerful tool for comparison of whole genomes," he says.

When this story hit the net, we all cheered and laughed. About time, we said. Then the lab was ID'ed and that is when Hatfill's name popped up and we researched him, learning he was from South Africa, etc. Funny, how we let foreigners run around in top secret labs! Must be habits picked up after WWII when we took Nazis under our wing.

Dr. Hatfill isn't the anthrax killer. He is the fox thrown to the hunters to lead then into the bog and it worked. Hatfill had zero reason to kill the photoeditor in Florida. Zero. And to pick him first? Insanity, from Hatfill's position!

As Sherlock Holmes said over and over, the person who does the crime has to have some motivation, some reason, some meaning to the crime. You don't just go after anyone.

Two years ago, Dr. Hatfill sued the bureau and the Justice Department, saying leaks to the news media about him and the public description of him by Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the case had destroyed his reputation.

He also has a suit pending against The New York Times and a columnist for the paper, Nicholas D. Kristof, saying Mr. Kristof defamed him.

He can't sue me. I stated after just two days of research, "He isn't the man." I even called the FBI and told them this and told them who to interrogate: KARL ROVE.

Well, he should be interrogated over many subjects, right? Fat chance that.

The anthrax was the Ames strain, most commonly used in American biodefense research. Though agents have pursued leads overseas, the F.B.I. has focused on the possibility of a domestic criminal.

In addition to Dr. Hatfill, agents searched the homes in November 2001 of two Pakistani-born public health officials in Chester, Pa., and in August 2004 of a doctor in Wellsville, N.Y. Like Dr. Hatfill, the physician, Dr. Kenneth M. Berry, lost his job after the search and is fighting to have the bureau publicly clear him, said a friend, the Rev. K. Richard Helms.

"He's struggling," Mr. Helms said. "He needs to get this clearance from the F.B.I. to get work. Otherwise who's going to hire him?"

This year, in a sign that the investigators were still trying to identify a suspect, they contacted a former American intelligence officer who in 2002 provided a tip about a potential suspect. The officer, who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to attract attention, said he was summoned in February to an office of the investigators near Frederick, where he took a four-hour lie detector test. He was told that he had passed but has heard nothing more, he said.

Ah, dear old anonymous! So many of your family in this country, doth reside!

Just laboratory work is unlikely to solve the case, scientists in the fast-developing field of bioforensics said.

"The science can only take them so far," Richard O. Spertzel, a former United Nations bioweapons inspector, said. "It can help to narrow the field. But it won't identify the lab, let alone the individual perpetrator."

Biodefense experts say solving the case, even belatedly, is critical.

"If we can't catch this guy, I'm afraid it's going to encourage others to try an attack," said David W. Siegrist, who studies bioterrorist threats at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies outside Washington.

Claire M. Fraser, president of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., which has helped he F.B.I., said she was frustrated that the attacker was at large.

"If we solve this case, even if it takes five or six years, it might provide some degree of deterrence," Dr. Fraser said. "What everyone's afraid of is another incident before this one is solved."

Yeah. Like, as if you need to know exactly which government lab was used. The anthrax attacks were launched when America was freaking out over an attack that our rulers pretended, took them by surprize...which was all an obvious lie since not one of them appeared even slightly surprized...

And so on. I suppose, when enough bodies are left to rot all over the place, people just might wonder if there is a connection between letting a family of criminals run America is a smart idea.

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ANOTHER BUSH KID ARRESTED

2005-09-17T03:36:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

From CNN:

The youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested early Friday and charged with public intoxication and resisting arrest, law enforcement officials said.

John Ellis Bush, 21, was arrested by agents of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission at 2:30 a.m. on a corner of Austin's Sixth Street bar district, said commission spokesman Roger Wade.

Good morning. Thank you for coming here to share some coffee or tea with me. I am Rush the Cyberdog.

We are studying the remarkably messed up Bourbon Bush clan. They are a famous family devoted to getting drunk and robbing graves and stealing from the public weal. A side project is to kill as many people as possible while looking pious.

Today's story is about the youngest Bush generation or shall we say, degeneration? You judge yourself.

John, glad to have you here on our show. I hear you have a history of losing your temper and attacking people. Once, you drove onto your girlfriend's front yard and threatened her in Florida. But you were not put in prison, were you?

Bugger off, doggie. I don't have to answer any snivvilling peon's questions. My daddy is gonna smack you around, see?

I see.

I think I will get my time/space hole ready. This looks like it is going to be a difficult interview.

The nephew of President Bush was released on $2,500 bond for the resisting arrest charge, and on a personal recognizance bond for the public intoxication charge, officials said.

You know, your aunt, Laura, didn't drive onto her boyfriend's front lawn, she ran him over instead. I must commend your *cough* self-control.
I didn't throw any telephones at clerks, either, dog. So the fuck what. Movie stars get arrested all the time. My uncle, W, was arrested a lot and he is President so fuck you, cops. Naaaayyyaaaa.

I see. Your family loves to stick their tongues out at the press as well as flash devil signs and laugh when standing on ruins. Here is a picture that illustrates the sense of privilage and lack of dignity that characterizes this degenerate clan.

The Bush twins are famous drunks and criminals themselves. They have been stopped but not arrested, thanks to the Secret Service who keeps them within the famous Bush Bubble, for using false IDs--which normally leads to prison--and public drunkeness not to mention drinking while underage!

Can you enlighten us as to why your family is all so criminally inclined?

You know, sometimes I want to do what uncle W used to do...put firecrackers in animals and blow them up.

I see. Let's return to your family now.

Gov. Bush and his wife, Columba, appeared Friday evening at a museum reception in Miami.

"My son's doing fine. It's a private matter. We will support him. We're sad for him. But I'm not going to discuss it on the public square with 30 cameras," the governor told reporters.

I remember your sister being arrested for being a notorious pill popper and all around druggie just like her uncle was, might still be. She made the news and your father and mother tried to fluff it all off as a personal family matter. Yet all the Bushes go to churches and other public places, preening themselves on being pious and good. Yet your family has as big an arrest record as the cheapest trailer trash.

How do you all manage to do this trick? Does it contribute to your obvious rage and feeling of entitlement?
Fuck off.

Here is a picture of some of your clan at an official function. The W twins comport themselves as if they are in a whorehouse rather than the White House and you are sitting there, looking murderous, as usual. Aren't you worried about your close resemblance to Saddam's sons? Same facial expression, same barely contained fury waiting to express itself?

I will note here that you are also carrying on the family tradition of being a rank coward as well as a bully. Your uncle called on Americans to show some patriotic frevor and you sit here, doing nothing. Aren't you ashamed?

Where is my beer? It is already 8am and I am not smashed. Oh, and fuck patriotism. That is for chumps and the Bushes are not chumps. Hahaha. We rule, you don't, doggie. Buzz off.

Thank you for joining us, John, and thank you for enduring this interview, dear readers. Now I must repair to another time/space venue to recover.

(cue Purcell music)

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MISSING BLACK PLAGUE MICE

2005-09-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

Hieronymous Bosch

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As usual, we are the agents of our own possible destruction. Back when the black plague came roaring out of the hinterlands of Central Asia to eliminate one third of humanity, this was Mother Nature clearing the decks, using her usual tools. After all, viruses have been around since nearly the very beginning of Life on Earth. Their toils, the colonization of all possible ecological niches, has been an ongoing battle which they win pretty regularily if not always. What looks to us as "ourselves" is to them "For Rent or Sale."

Of course, the demented people protecting America are much more interested in killing humans including us. Note how niggrdly and slow they were in response to people dying this month in New Orleans. Yawning, scratching themselves, dragging their asses along behind everyone screaming, "Do something!" but in private, they spend a lot of energy and time cooking up interesting ways to murder humans. These efforts are fully funded and are running all over the place, mostly hidden on universities and military bases.

From WNBC news:

Three mice infected with the bacteria responsible for bubonic plague apparently disappeared from a laboratory about two weeks ago, and authorities launched a search though health experts said there was scant public risk.

Hahaha! We are safe! Hahaha. Who is the spokesperson for the government anyway, Typhoid Mary?

The mice were unaccounted-for at the Public Health Research Institute, which is on the campus of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and conducts bioterrorism research for the federal government.

Federal official said the mice may never be accounted for. Among other things, the rodents may have been stolen, eaten by other lab animals or just misplaced in a paperwork error.

If the mice got outside the lab, they would have already died from the disease, state Health Commissioner Fred Jacobs said.
The possibility of theft prompted the institute to interrogate two dozen of its employees and conduct lie detector tests, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported Thursday.

The FBI said it was investigating. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also investigating, the newspaper reported.

University officials did not immediately return a call seeking comment Thursday morning.

The mice were injected as part of an inoculation and vaccination experiment, investigators said.

We are trying to reproduce these plagues so we can unleash them upon humanity while we use the vaccinations to protect ourselves. Reminds me of 9/11 again. Right after 9/11, it slipped out by accident that Bush and his buddies were all injected with anti-anthrax vaccinations and Ari Fleischer blurted out that if the anthrax killer came, Bush was aleady safe.

This public announcement was done to signal to the agent within the government who had access to secret anthrax material that it was now OK to attack through the mail and the attack followed this announcement.

Oh, remember him? He is still on the lam, still operational, still lurking. He is never ever ever ever mentioned by the media, our rulers or anyone except for us kooks in blogland.

It looks like similar stuff in New Orleans was released by the floods, too. And other stuff.

&spades From the Guardian:

The oil pollution in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could be among the worst recorded in North America, officials trying to coordinate the clean-up say. The US coastguard, which is responsible for the marine environment, said yesterday more than 6.5 million gallons of crude oil had been spilt in at least seven major incidents. The previous worst spill in US waters was the 11m gallons in Alaskan waters from the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

This is much worse than Valdez, actually. It is over a much greater area. It is all over a major city. It is much more churned up, it isn't coming ashore in lumps and masses, it is mixed up with the soil, sand, ocean bottom, farmland, everything. Like Alaska with an egg beater.

"This is a major event," said Lieutenant Colonel Glynn Smith of the coastguard in New Orleans. "Things are going well, but three-quarters of the oil from the spills has not yet been recovered."
The figure does not include petrol and oil spilt from up to 250,000 cars which have been submerged, or that spilt from hundreds of petrol stations. The coastguard says it has received almost 400 reports of spills, the vast majority of which have not been assessed.

Our country bristles with all sort of chemicals and toxins and plagues all barely contained. This is why many of us are leery of nuclear power.

Can a crew of careless infantile reckless drunk lunatics run nuclear power plants? Ask Homer Simpson.

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RIGHT WING FATALISM

2005-09-13T06:47:00.001-07:00

Aberich Duerer, the Apocalypse

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

American conservatives have always been fatalists. Indeed, all right wingers suffer from this limited vision of the world, nay, the universe. They have this dual desire to be totally in control while at the same time telling us all that no one can control anything, "shit happens." This childish view of the world, the one in which cookie jars magically fall off the counter, "I was only looking at it," pervades the weltanschauung of the right wing.

Here is a classic example from a particularily brain damaged pundit, Charles Krauthammer: From the Washington Post:

In less enlightened times there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).

Funny, that. The burning of witches is a right wing activity. Bruno, one of the great astronomers in Europe, was burned as a witch and heretic. The Church threatened or burned more than one liberal.

Of course, being Jewish, he mentions attacking Jews. Now one problem with his neo-fascist world view lies in the first sentence. Humans blamed humans for plagues. Why do few plagues sweep our cities anymore? Eh? Huh? Magic? Mother Nature gave up? Or maybe, once humanism, liberalism and science took hold and banished rabid right wing conservatives and forced everyone to live in sanitary, sanely designed city systems with great public services brought in by the leadership, plagues stopped ravaging us?

As liberals and free thinkers persuaded people to not only change but to build governing systems to bring healthier, stronger unions, the conservatives complained bitterly. They were against starting police forces. They didn't want to pay for street lighting. They didn't want sewers or water systems or toilets. They didn't want vaccinations. They didn't want public schools. You name the civilized activity and they didn't want it. And complained bitterly about taxes when forced to join in to make a solid society.

Rich people don't need public schools. They don't need hygine, when plagues swept Europe, it took out virtually none of the ruling class except unless they were besieging someone and got sick too. Generally, they kept themselves clear and safe.

A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed those of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenue would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and that the reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Post noted, "the levees that failed were already completed projects."

Comparing the levees with themselves is a sign of brain rot. One compares failed systems with successful systems. In New Orlean's case, one compares that city with Dutch cities. What sort of levee systems have they created?

A quick review shows theirs is far superior to ours. In 1953, the dams were breached and failed and people died. The same type of dams that we used in New Orleans. Now, the system in the Low Lands is much superior. The government took care of this, it was naturally assumed to be the responsiblity of everyone, even peolple safe on hilltops and in high castles, to protect all the lands and people in their realm.

I like Krauthammer's take on the budget cuts. He pretends that Bush wanted more money but meanies cut it. Well, who were they?

Surprise! Republicans! His own party. The minions like to pretend Bush is a strong leader but when this bubble boy falls flat on his face, it is the fault of everyone including the people who support and surround him..oops. So Krauthammer doesn't name names, does he? Like DeLay and Hastert and Lott and Karl Rove...

We can't control all things but we can control ourselves. And global warming is being made much worse by the pea-brained activities of the right wing in America. Nothing but good can come from us signing the Kyoto Accords. We will have to stop driving big fat gas guzzlers but this is good on so many levels. One is, our roads will be safer without those massive machines careening all over the place, we will balance our trade deficit a tad because we will consume less fossil fuels. Our roads won't wear out so fast thanks to too many heavy vehicles carrying massively fat people.

The air we breathe will improve. The trees will stop dying, after all, my forest struggles these days. I watch the trees with open alarm. All the ancient ones are dying very rapidly now. One sees greenery but most are young trees. There is no reason for the old trees to die. The white birch are dying very rapidly, I went into the woods and saw more 1' diameter trees collapsing, their white bones showing up between the trunks of the oaks. 400 years ago, these trees were 3' or more in diameter and the curling paper bark was pulled off of them in huge sheets to be used to make canoes and roof the long houses.

Now the bark paper is paper thin.

It is hilarious how Krauthammer spreads blame:

The American people. They have made it impossible for any politician to make any responsible energy policy over the past 30 years -- but that is a column for another day.

Typical of a conservative to start off saying people who blame leaders for screwing up are stupid and end with blaming the people for being stupid as the ultimate cause. Pray tell, why are the people "stupid"? When we Hubbert Oil Peak people lectured in the past, the rulers and the right wingers would attack us as hysterics and liberals and yell, "Don't listen to them" and they mock President Carter to this day for his attempts at getting us to change course. Of course, they backed Reagan who thought the world was going to end in 2012 and so he didn't think we should worry about anything, why bother?

Again, the right wing fatalism at work.

And he pulled down all that Carter did! Any time anyone warned America of what was coming next, people like myself were suddenly removed from the news. Only CNN under Ted Turner would cover us and when he sold it to right wingers, off the cliff sailed CNN and now they are as dumb as Krauthammer!

The huge human brain evolve because of the Great Ice Ages which was a terrifying time for humans. Only the smart survived. All the others were eaten by the smart ones. From the BBC:

University scientists say they have found strong proof that the human brain is still evolving.
By comparing modern man with our ancestors of 37,000 years ago, the Chicago team discovered big changes in two genes linked to brain size.

One of the new variants emerged only 5,800 years ago yet is present in 30% of today's humans, they believe.

This is very short in evolutionary terms, suggesting intense selection pressures, they told Science.

Each gene variant emerged around the same time as the advent of so called "cultural" behaviours.

The microcephalin variant appeared along with the emergence of traits such as art and music, religious practices and sophisticated tool-making techniques, which date back to about 50,000 years ago.

It is now present in about 70% of humans alive today.

The other, called the ASPM variant, originated at a time that coincides with the spread of agriculture, settled cities and the first record of written language.

It gives us a clue to perhaps follow up on and try and understand why they emerged
Cognitive neurologist Dr Geraint Rees

Researcher Dr Bruce Lahn said the big question was whether the genetic evolution seen had actually caused the cultural evolution of humans or was merely chance.

Their hunch is that it might have something to do with the important role that these genes play in brain size, but stressed that did not necessarily mean better intelligence.

The spread of genetic markers that are found in the brain is due to the fact that people who populate cities have the means to displace those who remained in the stone ages. So in all clashes of stone age vs metal age people, the stone age ones were pushed out or massacred or worked to death as slaves.

It really isn't a city/countryside thing, it is really a metal/stone thing. Namely, iron and such was utilized and manipulated more aggressively by the herdsmen of the great plains. They then would sweep in and destroy the civilizations and replace them with their own like the Dorians did to the Creteans, for example. Whatever tics the genetic code had in these invaders now show up in areas dominated by them. The evolutionary forces that act upon the herders was far greater than the city peoples. Namely, only the very strong and quick witted prospered and survived. The death rate is ferocious and in turn, they killed safer populations with a vengence! So all the city people in Babylon, when the Mongols swept down upon them, died. Just for example. Time and again, huge cities are wiped out like when we nuked and firebombed Japan and they are reorganized and repopulated by others. Ergo, the survivors who pass on tons of genetic material are often the hardy folk from the countryside who repopulate cities as they are ruthlessly destroyed by the Four Horsemen.

The "genetic code" of the cities survive, some times barely like in the Dark Ages or when the Mediterranean basin slid into barbarism in 1600BC. Again and again, the concept of a city that is civilized and nurtures liberalism, spring up out of the ruins. This desire for order and culture is very strong. Watching our right wingers chopping at the base of this mighty oak is distressing. They are killing the trees as well as the cities. They don't care if the cities die. They hate civilization and want to live in a world with no chairs, only stools for the lower classes and thrones for the rulers.

And Krauthammer has delusions that he will be the ruler's pet jester, entertaining them and being fed by them while he makes fun of the dead and dying lying outside the palace gates.

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&hearts EMPATHY &hearts

2005-09-04T05:36:00.000-07:00

Baby doll left behind from evacuated crisis center. Art by Elaine Meinel Supkis

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Empathy is painful. My mother used to haul us kids on rescue missions in third world countries which she did for personal, religious reasons. She went around, starting schools, dispensing food and medicine, giving hope and love to people who lived far away. She did this at home, too, helping Mexican laborers.

I took it all a step further, working to organize and support laborers. Giving people strength and power is what matters in the end. But first, you must have empathy for them. And the root of empathy is very simple: I am you and you are me. I know that some times, I need the caring love of total strangers. Jesus understood this. This is why he told us about the Good Samaratin, the alien in the Holy Land who paused to help a dying man.

For some reason, only part of humanity is emphatic. I think this is because of evolution, there are genetic as well as social causes for this. I know many people who praise Jesus and think they are Christians but who will cheerfully run over you if you are in their path! Once, when I was little, a Mexican laboror was run over by a car. No one stopped to tend to him or his family, except to gawk. Up swept my mother, she found a blanket and covered him and then comforted the widow and took the family under her generous wings.

Her church adopted the family at her behest.

No one else lifted a finger until she swept in and took charge. I learned this reflex from her and have done it myself many times. The rescuers and the people who held down the fort for the last week in the Gulf are all empaths. They could have cut and run, quit or do as little as possible. Instead, they pushed themselves as hard as possible. Nurses hand pumping the ventilators of the dying. Coast Guards people risking life and limb over and over again. Reporters going where authorities feared to tread. Ordinary people carrying, pushing, holding, tending the weaker, poorer, older, infants. But they were all overwhelmed by the mass of suffering.

I reread my hurricane section of the blog last night. It was sober reading. Starting with my warnings and discussion about the dire effects of the impending disaster. Right now, Bush and his minions in the media are busy bees rewriting history, trying hard to make two points: no one could have known this would happen and we tried our hardest.

Both are rank lies but because this is a racist country, they will get 1/2 of the nation to believe this tripe. The most recent poll clearly shows, half of America either paid no attention to events and can't put two and two together or the propaganda and lies fell in fertile soil and are now growing like kudzu. This nearly universally white part of America thinks the slaggard response and idiotic moves won't ever bite them in the ass. They imagine the response to disaster if they are hurt will be different.

It will not.

We are now entering new, historic times. This is what the Great Die Off will look like. It will test the wills and souls of the empaths. We will have to struggle through this time. How does one do this? By pretending to not see the bodies? When imperial England ruled India, they did this. They drove their carriages over the bodies and tut-tutted about the mess and wondered if they could just clean it up like they were trying to scrub Ireland of pesky people, reducing that poor land from 4 million souls to 1.5 million in a five year span! One reason why so many English speakers have colonized the earth was because the Crown wanted to get rid of them! Get them out of sight, out of mind. Let them fend for themselves elsewhere.

When Mahatma Gandhi went to school in England to become a lawyer, he saw what was wrong in the heart of the empire. He then cast off his privilages and began his long struggle for humanity that ended in assassination. He was an empath who couldn't pass by the beggar, the dead, without doing something. He is my shining star, just like Martin Luther King, whose sad, thoughful face gazes blindly at me from an old photo in my office.

&hearts "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate...Returning violence for violence multiplies the violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." &hearts

I cannot even hope to live up to a tiny bit of those wise words, myself, without great internal struggle, for I, too, want to kill to get my way. As Tolkien had Galadriel say to Frodo, if she were to take the Ring of Power, she would fix everything and everyone would worship her and despair!

Half of the nation is satisfied with this slaggard, poorly coordinated, clueless response to a direct hit from Mother Nature who is now in full warfare mode with the entire human race. We think, the sun is shining, everything is fine now but Mother Nature knows nothing is fine at all. Everything is falling apart rapidly. Half of America wants to believe the lies Bush and his minions spew because they want to not heed the Hurricane warnings Mother Nature is giving us. They imagine this stupidity will protect them from utter destruction but She knows their blind trust is misplaced.

So does Bush and his fellow vultures. They are protected. They don't wander into the eye of danger heedlessly! They spend their lives in a bubble, avoiding contact with reality because they create their own reality whereever they go. And their reality is this: there are too many humans. They don't even view us as part of the same species! This is why, as the apes of this planet are being wiped out, they don't care. They view our cousins as research subjects, to be imprisoned and tortured to death! And annihilated in nature. They view us the same way. Right now, they don't have the tools to do anything overt. But then...

My dad is a huge empath. He was the first officer to enter Buchenwald as the bullets were still flying as the Nazis battled the Soviet forces and my father slipped into the area seeking rocket scientists and their paperwork. As the OSS officer in charge of the rocket discovery program, he went into shock at what he found. He, personally, helped take down the bodies of the dead Jewish workers strung up with barbed wire across the secret cave where the data was hidden. "Into the Valley of Death and utter darkness, I walked," he wrote about this day.

40 years later, I held him in my arms in a hotel room in NYC as he wept, remembering, after NOVA filmed an interview with him about this. Even years later, it hurt him so much! He is an empath.

All my life, I asked myself, how could Nazis even exist? Or the communist totalitarians? What ails them all? Realizing that a good portion of humanity survived the Great Die Off called "the Great Ice Ages" by becoming cannibals explains the genetic survivalist twin thread to empathy: the indifference to "outsiders."

This is why nearly half the nation heartily approved of Bush and the GOP dropping everything and bending common law and common sense to "save" an obviously brain dead white woman. And why, when we bloggers yelled about a little black child in Houston who was not brain dead but was being disconneted from his breathing tubes because his mother ran out of money...didn't make huge headlines, Bush and his cannibals said nothing and did nothing and they all ignored the mother's tears and cries of pain. She is lucky they didn't eat her for dinner.

Empaths in America have opened their hearts and wallets this week. But the cannibals are planning to push for huge tax cuts for the very wealthy so they can accumulate more wealth and feast on our bones. Far from educating us about our fiscal perils and calling for tax hikes to pay for the $100 billion+ it will take to fix this gigantic mess, they are cutting taxes further and further, digging our collective graves!

Right now, the whole world is releasing their oil reserves because America, the biggest wasters of oil on earth, have created a situtation whereby everyone is being pinched, financially, by raging oil price hikes. So this one natural event will empty out the collective storage of world oil supplies and this can't be "refilled" without causing huge price hikes to resume. This is because we are at the Hubbert Oil Peak already.

All governments fear unrest from this. Already, high prices in Nigeria is causing insurrections and riots. Just last month, in Equador, an oil exporting nation, there were riots and insurrections and the President had to flee to Brazil! This is just beginning. Mexico and Canada pour their precious oil into America who wastes it recklessly, and both nations are beggaring their futures doing this. When things get bad, they will be very depleted, themselves, with no hope for a future.

We should be planning for the downside of the Era of Oil only we are ignoring this just like Bush pretended to not notice the hurricane. You can bet, if it were heading his way, he would have paid attention! Anyway, if Americans think the response to this disaster is OK, then it is hard to be very empathic with them when Hurricane Mother Nature's Revenge starts really killing us all.

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HURRICANE MARTI GRAS

2005-08-28T04:43:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Katrina, catagory 4+

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As this storm approached Florida, there was little worry and then, as is characteristic of all large storms these days, it dumped a great deal of rain on people and killed some of them too. The blase attitude exhibited by the authorities is due entirely to them wanting to believe that global warming isn't happening and one of the chief effects of this is a hyper concentration of moisture in the oddest places as well as powerful hurricanes.

When Columbus sailed the oceans blue, he recieved the waves from a hurricane and wondered where these silent moving surges came from since the sky was clear and blue. The Spanish quickly found out about hurricanes which the natives cheerfully told them were the manifestations of their top god, Hurrikan. They all died thanks to disease and slavery. Some thanks we gave them for telling us about this vital matter!

I suppose the colonization of the Caribbean would have proceeded much slower if it weren't for the Little Ice Age which began in 1500. The dynamics of the atmosphere/oceanic systems became very quiet for 300 years as the sun paused in energy output and humans rapidly colonized vast swaths of the earth, sailing merrily about the fairly quiet oceans. Now we, the sun and the earth are in a much more dynamic matrix and if frail little wooden vessels were plying the Seven Seas, they would be doing so with a very high death rate.

Even our vast steel ships struggle in these very powerful storms. Mostly, they use modern technology to avoid them by changing course.

New Orleans is the latest place in the Eye of the Storm. Last year, when one killer hurricane after another struck Florida and the Gulf coast, each storm slid past New Orleans. The one that nearly hit, they evacuated the city...except for the poor and the elderly who have no trasportation and no where to go. The mayor refused to house them and they survived that death trap only because the dice were rolled and the number was seven, not snake eyes.

Many people yelled at the mayor for this and this time, with only hours to go, they are reluctantly opening the stadium to the people. But evacuating the homebound has to be done door to door. I wonder if this is happening. I hope they help the elderly and ill and disabled.

Every weather story comes with the American ritual words that I suspect our rulers force weather comentators and reporters to insert--"This doesn't necessarily mean it has anything to do with global warming." This tics me off because most of the time, it has 100% to do with global warming. The increasing dynamism of the ecosphere is very much a global warming artifact and this includes cold weather being turned into pockets that plunge temperatures whereever they form! Hell on earth indeed. All of southern Europe is on fire thanks to a very bad drought. Here in NY, we spent a hot dry summer, too. I have noticed this pattern now. Every fifth year is a drought summer and on the opposite side, drought winters. Then we get floods. This is so bad, my farm suffers from this and I am slowly terracing it so the water doesn't run off in drought years and in rainy years, breech the barriers to let the water flow. This field has produced hay for three hundred years, pretty reliably. I knew old farmers here who were 100 years old who used to hay my field with a scythe.

Now it struggles thanks to global warming and my great oaks, some of which predate Columbus, they are dying. They shouldn't be dying for they live very long lives but the alternating flood/drought cycle hurts them a lot.

This last week there were terrible floods in the Alps. This is summer time! It isn't supposed to flood. Like here in NY, floods are a spring thing, not August! My German side of the family still lives in the Alpine regions and they say, this is amazing and horrifying. Long family memories, some live in the houses we built 400 years ago.

So while having huge floods in the high mountains of central Europe, there is hopeless drought only 500 miles away! This is yet another sign of the atmosphere becoming very active and heating up meaning the molecules are moving faster and banging into each other and this dynamism acting with the oceans and melting ice sheets is speeding up the winds. China got hit with one powerful typhoon after another just this month alone.

The hurricane about to slam into America is so big and dynamic, it is now drawing energy off the Pacific Ocean as well as the Gulf bath tub. Just last week, I read another story of mass fish die-offs, this dead zone being in Texas rather than Florida (um, the gods really must love both states?) because of the Gulf overheating plus human pollution. Each year, it is worse and worse and yet we sit here, thinking it doesn't matter if we rot the entire planet. This is why, yet again, Bush and his devils attacked any international commission or words about the ecosystem.

Bolton, the man put in the UN over the head of the Senate, ordered the UN to remove all words concerning the planet's health from their declaration of UN principals. This action got little attention from nearly anyone but he did it and we will pay for it. Mother Nature carries a huge veto in the UN. Her veto is final. It is also irreversable if we don't heed Her warnings and listen carefully to Her warnings. If She declares war on us, She will win. Period. We can only form an alliance or endure Her attacks until She annihilates us.

She is a wonderful person if you are nice to Her. She will happily clothe and feed us and let us reproduce if we take great care of Her own needs. If we refuse to love Her, She simply walks away from us, leaving us to our own devices. Which are extrodinarily feeble in comparison to what She has at hand. Hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and volcanoes not to mention tsunamis and metor strikes and suns going nova. Indeed, black holes sucking down each other explosively....my, doesn't She have many amusements!

Best to stay on Her good side, isn't it?

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WAR MEANS CHILDREN DIE

2005-08-26T06:06:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

War is always about killing children. From the oldest of times onwards, destroying the next generation is part of the brutal business of warfare. In the last 100 years, it has been perfected to the point that children are now one of the chief targets of war.

The mothers of dead soldiers still think of their children as children for I assure you, your child never really ceases to be a child deep in a mother's heart. Emotionally, we always harbor the ur-mutter. Here is the latest message from Cindy, our mother of mothers this month: From Buzzflash.com:

I got to Camp Casey and I arrived with a mom whose son, John, was killed on January 26, 2005, and his wife and baby, who never met his dad. We arrived in Waco at about 4:30 to the local press. The White House Press Corps was still with the president.

When I arrived at Camp Casey II this afternoon I was amazed at what has changed since I was gone. Now, we have a huge tent to get out of the sun; caterers; an orientation tent; a medic tent (with medics); a chapel, etc.

The most emotional thing for me though was walking through the main tent and seeing the huge painting on canvas of Casey. Many things hit me all at once: That this huge movement began because of Casey's sacrifice; thousands, if not millions of people know about Casey and how he lived his life and the wrongful way in which he was killed; but the thing that hit me the hardest was how much I miss him. I miss him more everyday. It seems the void in my life grows as time goes on and I realize I am never going to see him again or hear his voice. In addition to all this, the portrait is so beautiful and moving and it captures Casey's spirit so well. I sobbed and sobbed. I was surrounded by photographers, I looked around until I finally found a friendly face, then the news people crushed in on me and I couldn't breathe. I didn't mean to have such a dramatic re-entrance to Camp Casey, but the huge portrait of Casey really surprised me.

It was quite a tribute. Very heartfelt. I will also note that there are no gravestone markers or pictures of all the children who have died since our assaults on Iraq have begun. I suppose this is the old "tribal" effect: we care only about our own.

But death's scythe sweeps onwards. From Capital Times

Every time the wound begins to heal at Ray and Diane Maida's house, something comes along to rub salt into it.

First came news that their son, Mark Maida, a 22-year-old Army sergeant, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb on May 26. Then, a week after his death, the Army gave only hours' notice that the body would be arriving at Gen. Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, forcing the grieving family into a frantic scramble to retrieve it for a funeral two days later.

Letters and packages to Mark from home arrived for a time almost daily, marked "Return to sender." Then a slow trickle of possessions arrived from Iraq and his unit's base at Fort Irwin, Calif. To top it off, despite repeated efforts, Army officials failed to provide details of Mark's death. More than two months later, the Maidas finally got the details of his death, not from the Army, but from the Washington Post.

"It's just been one wound after another," Diane said. "And just about the time you think you're on the upswing, then you get shut down again with another incident."

Another Gold Star Mother wants to bean Bush. Of course, when we were killing Iraqi children and killing their moms, we rejoiced in our great victory. Bush was immensely popular when we reallized how easy it is to kill children and no one, no matter how many people across the globe demonstrated against our war, we got away with it, hardly a causality!

Well, Death's scythe continues to sweep. He won't stop until someone gives up this war.

One of the things we laughed about the most was how helpless the Iraqi army was as it vainly fought against us while being nearly totally stripped of armaments by the UN. The usual bully boy laughter as we used our own WMD against the people of Iraq rang out. Hahaha, look at how cowardly they are, fleeing us as we blow away their tanks, cutting them like butter, killing everyone! Boom!

So we littered Iraq with atomic waste and guess what?

The children are paying. From In These Times

Gerard Matthew thought he was lucky. He returned from his Iraq tour a year and a half ago alive and in one piece. But after the New York State National Guardsman got home, he learned that a bunkmate, Sgt. Ray Ramos, and a group of N.Y. Guard members from another unit had accepted an offer by the New York Daily News and reporter Juan Gonzalez to be tested for depleted uranium (DU) contamination, and had tested positive.

Matthew, 31, decided that since he’d spent much of his time in Iraq lugging around DU-damaged equipment, he’d better get tested too. It turned out he was the most contaminated of them all.

Matthew immediately urged his wife to get an ultrasound check of their unborn baby. They discovered the fetus had a condition common to those with radioactive exposure: atypical syndactyly. The right hand had only two digits.

So far Victoria Claudette, now 13 months old, shows no other genetic disorders and is healthy, but Matthew feels guilty for causing her deformity and angry at a government that never warned him about DU’s dangers.

The children of our soldiers are being born sans body parts or insane or not born at all as mom miscarries. The soldiers have a Darwinian legacy that the rulers don't pay as they cozzen themselves and their own tribal members, carefully protecting them.

I remember during the nuke bomb tests in the fifties and sixties how the government lied and lied about virtually everything concerning nuclear fall out and it was killing children and now kills all of us, note the cancer epidemic!

There would be a lot more premature dead if we didn't have modern medicine. Nearly everyone I know over the age of 40 has had or will soon have cancer! This is NOT NORMAL.

From Chronicle Net:

There are few things worse than seeing images of a child born with birth defects. This month's (November 1995) cover of LIFE magazine captures that horror.

The November LIFE report is certainly not the first of its kind linking service in the Gulf War to possible genetic mutations passed down from veterans to their children. But the LIFE magazine article is certainly the most in-depth report on record by a major news agency.

The latest findings in LIFE paint a harsh picture that the country and the world has abandoned the tiny victims of the Gulf War. The report states that since the war, a growing number of Gulf veterans have fathered offspring with serious birth defects. The curious and still "unproven" link here is that the children's troubles may have the same roots and symptoms as what has come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome. The mysterious symptoms range from unexplained rashes, fatigue and chronic pain to memory-loss and severe gastrointestinal problems. These ailments affect an estimated 45,000 veterans and their families.

"Kennedi" was born without a thyroid. Her disfigured face is grotesquely swollen -- a condition of recurring tumors made of tangled blood vessels. "Lea" has sninal bifida. She cannot move or walk. A tube drains fluid from her skull. "Cedrick" also has a shunt in his head -- if it accidentally falls out, he could suffer brain damage. "Casey" has Goldenhar's syndrome. His left ear is missing and he cannot speak. "Jayce", now three years old, is the unofficial poster boy of these Gulf War babies. He has no legs or arms. His hands and feet are attached to twisted stumps. He also had a hole in his heart.

The list goes on. The images are enough to make anyone turn away and gasp. LIFE makes sure that those images are loud and clear so that no one will forget.

The mother of one child who died from a defective heart, tells her story of what she calls "the run-around" with military doctors and administrators.

One of her complaints -- the response given to her by the Pentagon regarding the deformed children born to veterans -- birth defects normally occur in three percent of American babies. Birth defects are of course a reality, but in a recent report not included in the LIFE magazine article, there are studies on British veterans from the Gulf that show, they too, are giving birth to deformed children at a much higher rate than the non-veteran population. These British soldiers were in similar, if not identical territory and are now experiencing the same ailments as those of American troops.

the Life magaine pictures are horrific. Back when it came out, I thought there would be calls for hearings and Congress would move to do something....hahaha, the chickenhawk GOP won't do a thing. Soldiers are those people who are the losers in the Darwinian race to survive. They are foolish enough to fall for rank propaganda and expend themselves and their entire future on a bunch of mockingbirds who have laid eggs in the nest of honest song birds!

And the Iraqi babies? Guess what. We are destroying them, they can't escape this plutonic mess we left. Pluto is the god of death and it is no accident that plutonium is named after him! Simple Americans are kept this way deliberately by the rulers and the rulers do this by manipulating information via the mass media.

They are losing their iron grip thanks to the web and us bloggers/writers. We link, we talk, we note things down, and we refuse to forget the distant or recent past. We note that this murderous rampage isn't freeing anyone unless you consider death to be freedom.

The Skull and Bonesmen who run America worship death. Like the ugly bullies they are, they want to kill while safe. We think Darwin's laws won't bite us. But it will, it always does in the end. If soldiers want to have deformed or dead babies, they can continue to support the use of DU.

Or they can fight the system! It is simple. STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING NOW! Throughout history, the military rank and file, if they stop, they do stop. Ask Russia. The Czar told them to fight, they turned around and attacked and killed the Czar, instead. This isn't the only example. Often times, the despot leaves the country like Idi Amin or Baby Doc of Haiti or others (often American puppets like the Shah of Iran). In this country, we do it differently. We prepared to impeach Nixon. He was tempted to call out the troops to stop his disgrace only he was informed, the troops didn't support him. So it is with Bush. He can only call upon the troops if they believe in him and I will note, this support is eroding very rapidly. Even when he tries to bolster his already too inflated ego by visiting hand picked families and troops in very red states, he is dogged by questions and demonstrators who are connected with dead soldiers or soldiers stuck in Iraq, playing death lotto with the angry populace.

Our soldiers are not helpless. They can and have a duty to resist ILLEGAL AND IMMORAL ORDERS. The Nuremburg Trials said that quite clearly. It isn't treason to stop an illegal or immoral war. It is a duty to humanity as well as democracy for the majority of Americans are now, at last, against this war. Using nuclear weapons is definitely a crime. It lasts many years and kills babies more than any other group of people.

Our rulers are getting fat and rich off of this feast of children's bodies but we aren't. So it is time for our troops to demand they be brought home and for the homeland bases to not be closed but to close overseas bases. For our rulers are systematically stripping us of our jobs, our military, our future, they are taking it all and shipping it off to other places even as they tell us to die for America.

Well, time for our troops to come home!

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ALZHEIMER'S ATTACKS DREAM CENTERS FIRST

2005-08-25T05:51:00.000-07:00

Painting by Elaine Meinel Supkis

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I am really aggravated by the headline of the article about this vital matter. From Associated Press:

Study Links Daydreaming, Alzheimer's

only because it gives the impression that the activity called day dreaming leads to Alzheimer's when it doesn't. Alzheimer's is a disease that changes the physical shape of the nerve clusters in the mind. Like any virus or parasite, the changes are obvious and are like cancer in that it multiplies out of control rather than shrinks or kills. The web of nerves make the normal path of impulses impossible so they literally short circuit.

I know this disease well for I have watched it take down more than one unfortunate person. It is the ultimate madness for there is no escape but it is no different, in the end, from all the other diseases of the mind, for it is a disease, not a condition. Unlike drinking heavily which literally shrinks the mind due to nutritional problems, Alzheimer's is like syphillus, for example.

A new Washington University study shows the part of the brain used to daydream is the same where Alzheimer's disease develops — in some people — later in life. It suggests the normal brain activity of daydreaming fuels the sequence of events leading to Alzheimer's.

"The implication, albeit a speculative one, is that those activity patterns in young adults are the foothold onto which Alzheimer's disease forms," said lead researcher Randy Buckner, associate professor of psychology. He said they may lead to a life-long cascade that ends in Alzheimer's disease in some people.

"It suggests a new hypothesis and opens an avenue in exploration," Buckner said. "By no means is it definitive."

Various diseases attack various levels of the mind. It so happens, cruel Alzheimer's attacks the part that is the most human: the place where our wishes live! The reason why people with the disease can't recognize loved ones is because they no longer hold the mental image of the loved one in the special chambers of the mind, it is filled with cobwebs. The retreat is slow. First, one forgets those nearest in time, the outer chambers, then the disease wrecks more and more internal rooms until the last room is entered, the one where Mother reigns eternally. When all memory of Her are gone, the spirit has fled and the body rapidly decays and would die instantly if not artificially fed.

The hallmarks of Alzheimer's, which affects 4.5 million Americans, are brain lesions called plaques and tangles, formed from different proteins, that are associated with nerve cells not communicating with each other and eventually dying. The result is a progressive deterioration of memory, learning and language.

The part of the brain involved in daydreaming is always active, even if the mind is at rest, said William Klunk, coauthor of the study and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. "It's like an engine on idle," he said. "It never shuts down. That activity might fuel the sequence of events that could lead to Alzheimer's."

He said the connection is a "problem."

"The answer is not shutting down our brains," Klunk said.

"It means it's very important to identify changes in the brain at early stages of illness, so that as newer interventions come along, we can start them at a time when it makes a difference."

Even the doctor here is worried people will misunderstand this information which is why it puzzles me that the headline writer couldn't get it right, it only increases the confusion.

This part of the mind is the vital core of humanity's soul. That it is attacked first by this disease is interesting since evolution decrees all living things will exploit all possible niches and our bodies are merely an open savannah for germs and they ruggedly invade whereever they can. This disease is only in the elderly or in rare cases, due to genetics, younger people, because if it invaded at a young age, humans wouldn't reproduce and the organism would cease to exist so it doesn't stubbornly exist except as a late life trigger.

In other words, thanks to modern medicine, the potential hosts for this disease have grown hugely in numbers. Since all our other weaknesses haven't killed us, this one will.

Neil Buckholtz, chief of the dementias of aging branch at the National Institute on Aging, which funded the study, said the data are interesting even if the conclusion is speculative.

"A critical question of Alzheimer's disease is why certain parts of the brain have diseased nerve cells and other areas of the brain seem fine. This paper speaks to that question."

Why brains break down is interesting. In the wild, once the brain of an animal surrenders to death, it dies. Keeping living things alive past this time is an artifact of human society since we first began to build communities. There are no senile animals in nature for they get eaten or die of hunger long before then.

From a 1999 article about Freud on CNN:

"The Interpretation of Dreams," published on November 4, 1899, re-created dreams as a powerful probe of the unconscious mind. Suddenly they were messages from a landscape entirely within us, and yet totally unknown.

"Before Freud you would say that dreams were considered as spirits, as otherworldly things, messages from the other world. They were dealt with in religious and philosophical ways," says psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman. "Through his study he came to the idea that the mind worked outside of our awareness and that dreams had meaning."

A century later, science is putting Freud to the test. New brain-imaging technologies allow researchers to see which parts of the brain are active during a dream, and which are dead to the world.

"That is helping in being able to test all of the ideas in a scientific way, in a reproducible scientific way," says Edward Nersessian, a psychoanalyst in New York City.

Freud argued that dreams are a person's most deeply held wishes, expressed in symbolic form. Their purpose? To keep the unconscious drives that constantly pop up within us from waking us in the night.

"That was the essence of Freud's theory, that dreams protect sleep," says Mark Solms, a neuroscientist at St. Bartholomew's and Royal London School of Medicine.

Few psychoanalysts believe that today. But Freud's more basic idea, that dreams are messages from a part of the mind beyond our conscious control, is stronger than ever.

Dreams are more than what any scientist can concieve. They are the Other Realm. We exist because we have minds and our minds are not controlled by our wills. If one exerts one's will ruthlessly over the whole mind, it rebels and you go insane. This is why sleeping is so important. The mind, left to its own devices, runs merrily away to romp in Dreamland. This is where all sorts of things get sorted out, in odd ways. It is also the door to the Other Side, what I call the Outer Darkness. This is where the great heaving mass of spiritual powers reside and it is a very dangerous place. Even in Dream World, you can't enter this without becoming very small and slipping between the barriers of the Dreaming Mind to enter that primal place, the place where nightmares are manufactured.

This is where the really important memories are stored, you know.

The ones the waking Will wants to forget. (Hitler had this big thing about the Will!)

Past that place is yet another place: where Time and Space entangle. This is why dreamers can "see" the future sometimes. Seeing the future within the mind is an important human thing for this evolved as our ancestors coped with a deteriorating environment. As the Ice Ages assaulted us, we tried to figure out the riddles of nature and had to guess what would happen next. Humans that could imagine the future survived more often than those that plodded along, taking each day as it came, thoughtlessly.

The greatest minds survived and even thrived. This growth of the mind was so powerful, it overwhelmed other evolutionary forces like mother survivability from birthing. Giving birth is a very deadly process for us human females! The only reason this destructive brain size that causes babies to jam up in the birth canals like my son with his huge head did, survived is because smart human females were helped by others, giving birth. Cultures that force women to give birth alone and unattended tend to have smaller brain sizes, for example, since large ones die and kill their mothers during childbirth.

Back to the process of dreaming: when one tries to control one's dreams too much, the ability to "see" the future via the deep dreaming process is thwarted and one cannot understand the future or foresee consequences. Bush is brain damaged. He and his fellow con artists, so intent on creating their own reality, have ruthlessly suppressed the parts of their dream world that are connected with the deep unconscious and so they cannot see the obvious even as it unscrolls before them. They are killing people and will kill many more, if allowed to continue.

This lack of inspiration is obvious. Note how poor their language skills are! All of them. I see, on liberal forums and blogs, a flood of words. As we foresee the future and make predictions and explain, we dream collectively, our words inspire more dreams within each other's night worlds, the other Realms, the other half of our existence, and we waken, renewed in our collective alarm at how things are devolving, we see climate change again and we see all the things that the great minds of our ancestors saw and we know that destroying our dreams means death to humanity.

My dream world is very powerful. I am blessed/cursed with the ability to remember all and any dreams and to have waking dreams all the time, being directly hit by a very powerful lightning bolt when young did this, I am guessing.

A heavy price to pay for the Keys to the Outer Darkness.

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WORKING TO DEATH

2005-08-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

From Nostalgia Books, Little Nemo

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

In the never ending battle to work people to death, science delves into all sort of nasty ways to keep us awake. When speed was first introduced, it was very popular with the military and businesses and people in general. Pop a pill and work until you drop...dead. You see, the quaint idea that the human mind and body must rest and reset itself is shrugged off by people seeking to extend labor to the breaking point.

From the BBC:

A drug could reverse the effects of sleep deprivation in the brain, a US study of monkeys has suggested.
The drug comes from a class of molecules called ampakines which enhance how some chemical receptors work in the brain.

It helped monkeys overcome their lack of sleep, the study in the Public Library of Science - Biology showed.

Researchers from North Carolina's Wake Forest University hope it could help people like doctors and shift workers.

The study was partly funded by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of a project to reduce of eliminate the effects of sleep deprivation on soldiers.

DARPA strikes again. They want soldiers to fight nonstop. Human robots. The damage they take should be minimized by preventing their pain centers from communicating with the main frame of the brain. Drugs to short circuit sleep, sex, pain, the goal is to turn humans into killing machines that have no psyche, no counter controls.

Ditto doctors. As they go through the motions of fixing the bodies of the damaged robotic soldiers, they too, must become heartless and cold, working like machines that have hijacked human minds to wrest control of the all important body.

All these drug interventions lead to death of the host body.

Samuel Deadwyler, of who led the Wake Forest University School of Medicine research, said: "The drug didn't cause overall brain arousal, but increased the ability of certain affected areas to become active in a normal, non-sleep-deprived manner."

He added: "It's possible that ampakines could also be used to enhance other cognitive deficits, such as occur in Alzheimer's disease, after a stroke or other forms of dementia."

The researchers said the drug did not appear to be linked to side effects such as hyperactivity, distorted thinking or extended wakefulness.

The drug's manufacturer, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, has also reported positive results from tests on sleep-deprived humans with positive results.

Dr Neil Stanley, of the British Sleep Society, who was involved in the human study, said: "The more we know about the brain, the more medicines can be targeted.
"Ampakines are an exciting class of drug.

"If you can keep the brain thriving, more people may have benefits than shift workers - it may have benefits for people with conditions such as Alzheimer's disease."

There is no need to stimulate sleep deprived brains. The brain shutting down is its way of protecting itself and the body. I also wonder how the monkeys were "sleep deprived." Understanding dementia is a complex science. Helping people who can't access their own thoughts is definitely required. We have to understand evolution and the human brain if we want to understand why some elderly suffer so many different types of brain damage. Fixing it with a drug is nice but not the solution. Besides, the point of this drug is mainly to work people to death. To overcome the body's defences.

With coffee or speed or any stimulant, at first the mind "sharpens" and thinking is so easy but over time it deteriorates because the stresses of not releasing control over the creative parts of the mind finally causes all to blow apart, psychologically. Namely, it isn't merely the sleep but the dreaming that saves our minds from its own delusions and devices! Many people can't remember their dreams, I can and do, maybe because I was struck by lightning so much, I am aware of my dreams all night long, like someone watching TV, it is amusing how my brain processes stuff picked up during the day! The dreamworld is a crazy world where anything and everything can happen. When humans can't dream, and we all dream, we go mad and the dreamworld's ethos becomes the waking world's nightmare.

We need the fantasy retreat of dreamland to function.

BUSH THE SPEED DEMON

2005-08-20T17:40:00.000-07:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bubble Boy bicycles with a bunch of ditto heads and a bike champ. He is fit and happy and having a lark and didn't run over any Bobbies because they were at the Bush ranchette.From AP:

The leader of the free world (sic) and the world's biking master rode for 17 miles on Bush's ranch for about two hours at midmorning. Bush showed Armstrong the sites of the ranch that he calls "a little slice of heaven," including a stop at a waterfall midway through the ride.

They were accompanied by a small group of staff and Secret Service agents and a film crew from the Discovery Channel, Armstrong's Tour de France sponsor, which had exclusive media access for the ride. Footage was shot for a program on Armstrong to air next week.

Neither Bush nor Armstrong spoke to reporters, although White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president was impressed with the seven-time champ's skills.

"Recognizing what the world has known for years, the president said, 'He's a good rider,'" Duffy said.

Yes, he didn't run over any SS guards. Amazed Bush no end. He didn't fall off his bike, either. This pleased our bubble boy no end. Shazzam!

Duffy wouldn't say whether they talked politics, a topic that Armstrong has said he is getting more interested in now that he's retiring from biking at age 34. Armstrong calls Bush a friend, but he has spoken out against the war in Iraq and has said he wants the government to spend more money on cancer research.

As if any human being can talk to Bush about the war. More soldiers blown up, more bereaved moms, more anti Bush demonstrators at the front gates, Bush's polling numbers falling like a Bush on a bike. Yup. No politics from any dang visitors.

From Treason Incorporated:

Instant Nazi; Just add meth!

One symptom of it's use is the perception that one is "working hard" while doing little or nothing like Mr. Bush who often talks about "hard work" while it is evident that he himself doesn't do a hell of a lot and has taken 50 vacations since seizing the White House in January 2001. A false sense of power and the ability to rationalize anything at all are other symptoms of it's use as are diminishing capacity for empathy and raw aggression. Nothing I've said is news and it's effects have been known and used since the Nazis invented it and marched into Poland on the stuff. "Marching Powder" I'm told was it's original name there. I bet.

Interesting. We know Bush was a lush and a cokehead. But his vanity and his need to keep awake now he has no booze (yeah, like, right!) means he needs some stimulation. Now consider this article: From the BBC:

Methamphetamine users had bigger brain areas involved in attention, motivation and the control of movement.

They also fared worse in tests of brain function, the University of California, San Diego team found. snip
Each volunteer had a brain scan taken and completed a battery of tests that examined cognitive skills such as learning and recall, verbal fluency, information processing and motor functioning.

The meth users had increased volumes of the parietal cortex and the basal ganglia in the brain, while those with HIV had smaller than normal volumes of the cerebral cortex, basal ganglia and hippocampus.

I'm not surprised by the findings given the way the drug acts in the brain
Professor Trevor Smart, head of pharmacology at University College London

All of the abnormalities were linked to poorer performance on the cognitive tests. The researchers said these alterations and impairments could cause problems in every day life for the individual.

Head of the team Dr Terry Jernigan said: "In HIV-infected people, the cognitive impairments are associated with decreased employment and vocational abilities, difficulties with medication management, impaired driving performance and problems with general activities of daily living, such as managing money.

Yup, driving a bike over guards, managing money, heck, look at the fiscal mess we are in! Astounding, isn't it? A typical speed freak talks faster than they think and end up babbling nonsense or repeating robotically phrases stuck in the mind and who talks like that!

Fits Bush like a yellow striped shirt, no?

This speed freak wants everyone to be speeding. Here is a disturbing news story that should alarm anyone who goes on highways: From the Seattle Pi:

Truckers can still spend six days on the road during the week and drive for 11 hours at a time, thanks to a rule the Bush administration decided to leave intact even though truckers and safety advocates say it's unsafe.

For 60 years, truckers could drive for 10 consecutive hours. On Jan. 1, 2004, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration changed the rule to allow them another hour behind the wheel.

A federal court, however, threw out the changes.

On Friday, the truck-safety agency announced that a revision to the rule would still allow the big rigs to roll for 11 hours, three hours more than safety advocates say they should.

Freaked out, frenzied, brain shrunken meth using truckers! Just what America needs.

Here is what happens. From the Albany Times Union:

Two women died Friday after a tractor-trailer heading west on I-90 careened across the median and smashed into their cars.
The accident occurred just before noon between exits 9 and 10 in East Greenbush, State Police said.

Gina Gulotty, 45, of Sycamore Street in Albany, was pronounced dead at the scene. Gulotty, an Albany lawyer honored in 1998 as one of the Enterprising Women's Leadership Institute's Enterprising Women of the Year, was taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital for an autopsy. She was driving a 2002 Oldsmobile Alero.

The driver of the second car, identified as Samantha J. Vanalphen, 23, of Johnstown, also was killed, as was a dog riding in her vehicle.

I don't know why a guy driving a huge rig on a segement of highway I use a lot, ran wild. It was a pleasant, normal day. No reason. Look at what he did:
Can't even tell those twisted metal messes were cars with women driving them! Why the government wants to make our roads unsafe is easy: money. The companies are willing to risk this sort of mess if it makes them slightly richer! Doesn't that make you want to get on a bike and peddle around a puddle.

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NO MYSTERY AT ALL

2005-08-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

Hieronymus Bosch

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Forty years ago, when visiting a doctor who loved to paint, I found a book that was all Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. I fell instantly in love. He is my Master.

From Baynews 9:
Dying sea turtle

It's not clear why the various kinds of sea turtles are washing ashore.

"It may or may not be associated with red tide," said Cianciolo. "They tend to show symptoms of what's called a red tide intoxication, but you have to take a lot of samples and they must go through testing to actually determine that."

Dive instructor Michael Miller took underwater video to try to figure out the mystery.

"Right now, anywhere we go from shore to 20 miles offshore, from Sarasota to Tarpon Springs, we can't find a single creature alive on the bottom right now," said Miller.

Miller says he's never seen such death and devastation under water in his 20 years of diving.

"All the coral, all the sponges, all the crabs, not a single living thing, all the star fish, the brittle stars, everything's dead," said Miller.

This is no mystery. We all know why all things are dying, why the dead zones grow larger and larger, alarmingly so. We know perfectly well who caused all this and why. There is no need for more studies. There is a need for change.

I sometimes dream of flying turtles, stretching their pinions, taking to the heavens.

The need to possess is leading us to greater and greater extremes. Much of what we manufacture is useless or harmful. We fill our empty hearts with junk within our homes. Our homes get bigger and bigger and there is less and less room, the overflow of things overwhelming us on every level.

Clutching at objects, we kill our own planet.

The culture of clutter is, like it did at the dawn of the industrial age, is once again being celebrated and extended. Like in this disturbing and unfortunate piece.From the NYT:

Ilse Crawford's new book, "Home Is Where the Heart Is," published by Rizzoli in April, with photography by Martyn Thompson, is full of interiors that at first glance seem almost messy but, of course, look fantastic because they have been designed by a master stylist.

Ms. Crawford comes to clutter with impeccable modernist credentials: she is a former editor of the British magazine Elle Decoration and her firm, Studioilse, based in London, designed, among other things, Soho House, the members-only club in Manhattan's meatpacking district.

In her introduction she rails against the Bauhausian system and embraces the psychology of Abraham Maslow, whose theory of self-actualization became a staple of hot tub conversation in the 1970's. The home should be, in Ms. Crawford's view, "a canvas for self-expression," where we can "come out as ourselves."

Studioilse's motto is "modern and emotional design." In one bedroom photograph a wall is covered with a collage of photos that could have come from National Geographic: giraffes bounding across a savannah, a primitive mask, an atomic-bomb explosion.

The book is filled with such celebrations of random self-actualization. The gap-toothed bookshelves in Ms. Crawford's home intersperse unevenly stacked hardcovers and paperbacks with old photographs, postcards and knickknacks. One spread is an overhead shot of a family crashed out in domestic squalor: a balding dad playing a video game, little boys in Batman get-ups, an emptied bag of chips, Monopoly money everywhere. But all done in what Ms. Crawford calls "a combination of laissez-faire and supreme control, a mix of the relaxed and the precise."

Esthetics reflect society. Giving up on any and all forms of self control, people are now on a literal binge: consuming oil as fast as possible, eating until they burst, extreme sports, wild, ruthless living that kills everything in its path. We have decided to make this whole thing become one great big Götterdämmerung that will probably end with a nuclear war.

This unfortunate choice is just that: a choice. My experience with small children is, they can't let go of things, even string or torn paper, odds and ends, when sweeping the floor, they wail as they try to keep everything just where it had fallen. It seems to me that the esthetics of the Shakers is nearly drowned out by now. As people celebrate filling the world with human junk, one can only wonder.

Every crack in the sidewalk, nature sows her seeds and they try to grow, everywhere, life tries to wrest back Her rule. This Life and Death struggle has to be won by life.

Or we lose. Don't we?

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SUICIDE, DRUGS AND WAR

2005-08-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

From Why we are not like Saddam

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

My dear friend in Britain, this OLD Brit, posted this the other day:The War on....Drugs":

Surprised? Shocked? Well, you shouldn't be. It was reported early on during this illegal Iraq invasion that the USAF officially dished out drugs -- to pilots flying too many hours and/or missions. All legal-like and out in the open too. Do a Google and check it out on the net for yourself; the USAF medical men didn't deny it -- they actually confirmed it.

Over the years, This Old Brit has known a number of galoots with their brains in their biceps, but they were mostly amongst those fond of frequenting football fields, gyms, athletics stadiums and the like. Not forgetting those who worked the doors of clip joints and other such dubious dives, of course.

But, on steroids while wearing the uniform? While flying the flag? While doing their duty? During wartime? While fighting on the front line? Jeepers creepers, most of us thought that sort of shit stopped after Viet Nam. These guys in Iraq must be going crazy.

I used to work at the Berkeley Free Clinic just off Telegraph Ave. Speed was so bad we made up the line, Speed Kills. We also told heroin users they would end up walking as if a broomstick was stuck up their rears. We were rather blunt about many drugs.

Speed and steroids are a particularily noxious combo. Recently, I had a badly injured arm and in the emergency room, the doctor gave me steroid shots directly into my arm. Later, I noticed I was getting rather tempermental. Like, wanting to punch my husband when he asked, "Do you want something to drink?"

La, it was so masculine, the urge to scream, "Ya, bitch, get me a beer...now!" only this was too embarrassing so I simply snarled to myself, sort of.

Gads, it must be hard being a man.

Alas, this drug mess came home yesterday for a poor woman in a terrible way. From the Houston Chronicle

When Stephen S. Sherwood joined the Army a year and a half ago, the former heavy-metal musician was "long-haired and tattooed and about the furthest thing from a military man you could imagine," a neighbor says.

When he came home on leave from Iraq last winter, the difference was dramatic: "Not only had he put on a lot of weight, he was real bulked up and had shaved his long hair and looked like an MP," neighbor Steve Johnson said.
On Wednesday, nine days after Sherwood returned from a tour in Iraq, he apparently shot and killed his wife before turning the gun on himself in their Fort Collins home, Army spokeswoman Dee McNutt said. Sherwood's wife's name was not released.

There is your clue. He was much more muscular. Steroids are a poison. Um, well, certainly it has been useful for human evolution and other things but it, like any enhancers, has a downside when we meddle with nature's balance.

She said Sherwood enlisted in January 2004. Johnson said Sherwood told him he signed up when his wife became pregnant because it was the only way he could get health insurance.

Now I think we can all see why the GOP won't pass any meaningful health insurance. How can they strongarm dispossessed people working for, say, Walmart, if they have a secure income and health care?

Of course. This is why our rulers make certain 45 million Americans do without.

Officials at Fort Hood, Texas, said two soldiers who served in Iraq war killed themselves in separate incidents since Saturday.

Over 90 now. They aren't counted as casualties and certainly their wives and children and neighbors aren't counted, either. Heck, we don't count hardly anyone at this point.

The news today is Bush has been forced via the courts to release pictures of dead in their coffins when they arrive in Dover. He must even allow Democratic politicans access to the airbase! My, isn't that splendid?

And some side news: thanks to all of us refusing to shut up about prisoner abuse at Gitmo, Bush and his tag team of out of the loop torturers have a solution: they are going to ship everyone to prisons in Afghanistan where we will torture them like the poor taxi driver who was kicked to death there. From Xinhuanet:

acing with accusations of prisoner abuses from both home and abroad, the US government plans to transfer the majority of terror suspects in its custody to its allies, the Washington Post said here on Friday.

As part of the plan, nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be turned over to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the report said.

The newspaper quoted US officials as saying that they have reached an agreement with Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul's imprisonment.

At present, some 110 Afghan detainees were jailed at Guantanamo and 350 more at the Bagman airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could start early next year.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, US ambassador at large for war crimes, said he had talked about the issue with Saudi and Yemen officials. Nationals of the two countries make up a significant percentage ofthe Guantanamo prisoners.

So, we have a "ambassador at large for war crimes"? Huh? Why hasn't he frogmarched Rumsfeld and Cheney into the Hague? What is he waiting for?

A taxicab? Or is the driver unable to come, being beaten to death the other day?

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RUNNING IN PLACE

2005-07-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

Bush family flacking killing SS
By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It baffles me how right wing America worships the Bush family. They are so obviously sick but then, birds of a feather etc. Last week's bike crash was echoed by Blair's own son doing the opposite, he ran over a bike rider. It is dangerous whenever any of these sorts of people, ie, those who rule us, go forth in public.

Bush is sallying forth manfully on his Mission Impossible. We all imagine the stupid Social Security reforms were killed off but they are not. Bush is pushing and pushing and his ill tempered, incredibly ugly mother is assisting him in this effort. Medusa would be turned to stone if she were to look upon Bab's face.

From the LA Times:

A week ago, when President Bush met with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III to interview him for a potential Supreme Court nomination, the conversation turned to exercise. When asked by the president of the United States how often he exercised, Wilkinson impressively responded that he runs 3 1/2 miles a day. Bush urged him to adopt more cross-training. "He warned me of impending doom," Wilkinson told the New York Times.

Am I the only person who finds this disturbing? I don't mean the fact that Bush would vet his selection for the highest court in the land in part on something utterly trivial. That's expected. What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.

The entire GOP is creepy but of course, Bush is a text book example of a psychopath acting out alcoholic impulses as his shrunken brain misfires more and more, note his scrambled speech and odd tics and bizarre beliefs.

Of course, anyone looking at California, which recently rashly handed the car keys to yet another drug and drink abusing exercise fanatical fantasy figure psychopath who also abuses women, would wonder why people are attracted to really sick people. Why do obvious psychopaths like Hitler or Bush or Schwarzenegger or Mao end up, like Stalin or Pol Pot or a host of other obvious examples, in great power positions?

The LAT writer is actually quite funny, do read his entire piece. But the real question remains, why do humans happily follow obviously demented, psychopathic, bizarre individuals? This question has exercised my mind all my long life. At first, being a hopeful person, I used to pursue the truth and dig around in leader's past and present and then reveal the information to people in the hopes they will look it all over very carefully before following a dangerous person into folly.

This doesn't work.

So now I have to ask "why?" When I argue issues with people, one thing I have noticed is they become rapidly psychopathic themselves as they try to regurgitate the information they have programmed into their brains. This self-propagandizing is easy to short circuit by using Socratic methods. In the early days of the web, I loved taking a group of people through a long process of questioning, agreeing seemingly then adding a new question. "Oh, you are right about that. What if.." was a standard line.

I quickly learned that when the moment of truth dawned, night fell. In other words, once people were forced to face the truth, the result would be emotional. Namely, rage. And a reaffirmation of whatever it was they held dear. Indeed, if they were very irrational, they were more determined to keep their ideas intact.

A client of mine was lamenting how he couldn't explain to his well to do friends who were Republicans that Bush lies a great deal. They couldn't see it nor were they interested in understanding a word he said to them. Blissfully, they simply ignored everything.

The cult of Bush is floundering, though. Not due to information and understanding but because of deteriorating conditions. Another 6,000 well paying industrial jobs are being killed today by Scott tissues. They are closing 20 factories in the USA and Europe. They are expanding their factories guess where. This makes over 50,000 lost industrial jobs just this month alone. Alarm is sweeping across much of the brainwashed land. The messed up War on Terror which is literally blowing up in our faces has finally caused some alarm. The lies about Rove are taking a small toll, too. The mainstream media is peddling hard and running like heck trying desperately to prop up Bush even as we try to throw his aides overboard.

Like all despots, Bush clings to power more and more. His allies and aides drop all pretense of being moral and simply ignore us as they continue onwards. Their allies dutifully mouth incredibly more and more unbelievable lies, remember Bagdad Ali? Oh, how our own psychopaths mocked him! Yet here they are, aping him completely. In what way is Scottie different from his counterpart, Ali?

Woman's Evolution, by Evelyn Reed, is a very interesting book, one I memorized years ago.

The other clause of the taboo was simply a sex taboo, having nothing whatever to do with incest. As many scholars have pointed out, male sexuality in the animal world - where males fight one another for access to females - is a violent force. Such individualism and competitiveness had to be suppressed since human survival depended upon the closest cooperation of all the members of the group. Thus, it became imperative to overcome animal sexuality and to convert fighting males into the human brotherhood.

This goal was also achieved through totemism and taboo. All males in the totem-kin group were forbidden access to any females of that group. All the older women were classified as the mothers (or older sisters); the women of a man's own generation were his sisters, and the female children were his younger sisters. In this way the antisocial characteristics of animal sexuality were suppressed, and the foundation for the tribal brotherhood was laid. The clan system of social organisation arose as a non-sexual, economic and social association of mothers, sisters, and brothers.

The two clauses of the taboo have an interlocking relationship. Food and sex represent the most imperative hungers in human and animal life; they are the twin driving forces behind the survival of the species. The hunger for food must be satisfied if the organism is to maintain itself., the hunger for sex must be satisfied if the species is to reproduce itself. The double taboo on food and sex therefore represents the earliest social controls over these imperative needs. And without these controls, human organisation could not have gained its start.

Far from being a figment of the imagination of early anthropologists or a non-subject, totemism is in fact one of the most important subjects to be investigated in reconstructing our most ancient history. Totemism and taboo represent the means by which humankind elevated itself out of animality. Totemism is all-inclusive; it not only represents the totem-kin and the totem protectorate against cannibalism but also all the social regulations that were required for humanising the species. Through totemism and taboo, humanity survived and thrived until it could reach a higher stage of social and cultural life.

Those who have turned away from the matriarchy, however, fail to understand totemism because it was the female sex that instituted it. Contrary to current myths about their status, women have not always been the inferior sex as they are today. In the beginning the females were the advantaged sex; they were the mothers, responsible for the survival of the species. Unlike males, who suffered from the biological handicap of incessant striving for dominance over other males, females could band together for the protection of themselves and their offspring. This nurturing, cooperative trait enabled the females to make the great advance from the maternal brood in the animal world to the maternal clan system in the human world.

Then, through the institution of totemism and taboo, the females were able to correct the biological deficiencies of the males. They began by socialising the two basic hungers. They expelled all internal hunting - whether for food or mates - from the group composed of totem-kin mothers, sisters, and brothers. By this means, both cannibalism and fights for dominance were overcome, and males were brought together as the clan brothers. This cooperative association of men - the fratriarchy, as I call it - has no counterpart in the animal world. It represents the crowning achievement of the totemic system, which was instituted by the women.

In other words, just as researchers watching the chimps in the Gombe forests eat each other's young, so all humans descended from cannibals. The ability to recognize faces and talk had a dual purpose. Those who recognized kin and could chat with them, "You are part of our horde, so I better not eat your baby" type conversations probably saved humans from themselves.

It is far easier to hunt nearby especially when the hunted ones are as fangless and clawless as one's self. Further, smarter humanoids could fool the dumber ones and then eat them. This is why we have no near relations. We ate all our kin and this is why there are no walking upright homo habilis anywhere. This is also why I call humans "the mad apes." We took what was a rare thing in the chimp world and made it the basis of our existence.

Over time, the ability to tame and control wild animals reduced the desire to hunt humans. Also, since all humans were now very smart, relative to each other, it was increasingly dangerous to hunt humans. These battles had a very strong downside, namely, one could easily die. Fighting ended up being for greater things like control of territory and other natural resources like water and game. For even as we were cannibals, we ate many other things.

Poor Neanderthal human! They occupied the zone between the glaciers and the sea and happily hunted wild animals. Alas, they were mere animals to the new hunters who exploded out of Africa, hungry and with very evolved speaking/thinking abilities. You can bet, they approached the poor Neanderthaler with a smiling face and soothing words and gestures. You can bet, they invited the gullible natives to feasts and traded beads.

And then killed and ate them. Not one of them survived.

This cannibal attitude is buried deep in the human personality. It is part of all of us. This is why we are so attracted to liars and psychopaths. Who wants to follow some nice person who is inoffensive and kindly?

Not if you are sitting down to a meal of Solyent Green.

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GAMEBOY HEALS MORE THAN PRAYER

2005-07-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

Original art by Elaine Supkis

To the everlasting delight of my adult children who grew up in a video game household with multiple players, multiple systems, here is some interesting news today that shouldn't surprise them. From the BBC:

Mark Griffiths, professor of gambling studies at Nottingham Trent University, says they can be a distraction for children undergoing painful treatment.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he added that games can also help children with attention deficit disorders gain social skills.

Most geeky kids I have known have ADD, meaning often their minds moved fast and they were very swiftly bored and in general, being very much interactive, would go stark bonkers in a classroom where you had to not only sit inert but focus on something that would fuzz in and out of conciousness: the teacher droning like a beehive on a hot summer afternoon....zzzzzz. Or you want to run and scream.

Heh. Don't I remember.

Well, something I vividly remember is childhood pain. My internal organs had been traumatized and I was in and out of hospitals and in tremendous pain periodically. Really nasty pain. I remember trying to alleviate it by trying to make the tiny holes in the medical rooms' sound proof ceilings form patterns. Connecting imaginary dots. Maybe that is why I obsess about this even today (yah!).

Imagine if a doctor walked in and gave me a Gameboy to fiddle with instead of ripping pillows apart and screaming. Like. Wow.

Well, thank goodness today's children who must suffer have something!

Professor Griffiths pointed to studies which had shown children undergoing chemotherapy and treatment for sickle cell anaemia had benefited from being given games to distract then.

He said they needed less pain relief and had less nausea and lower blood pressure than those who were simply told to rest after their treatments.

Professor Griffiths also highlighted specific cases where video games had been used to help treat specific physical conditions, including an eight-year-old boy whose illness caused him to pick his lip, causing scarring.

Previous treatments had failed so the boy was given a hand-held video game to keep his hands occupied.

Two weeks later the affected area had healed. Computer games have even been used as a form of physiotherapy for arm injuries.

My kids probably remember when I got swatted with a poison ivy vine in NJ. I was covered with hideous sores because I am allergic to poison ivy. The itching was a torment. So they hauled in their video games and played them on my bed and I watched and commented. "Yeah! Mario jumped onto the ship and the cannonballs missed this time!" I would try to say.

Truly, the tireless efforts of Mario certainly were distracting.

Now for news that probably won't appear in our cheesy "let's please right wingnut Evangelicals" media. From the BBC:

Praying for patients undergoing heart operations does not improve their outcomes, a US study suggests.
A study found those who were prayed for were as likely to have a setback in hospital, be re-admitted, or die within six months as those not prayed for.

The Duke University Medical Center study of 700 patients, in the Lancet, said music, image and touch therapy did appear to reduce patients' distress.

Heart experts said patients could benefit from feeling more optimistic.

Further evidence is emerging that people with a more positive outlook appear to be less affected by stressful events, such as having surgery
Dr Charmaine Griffiths, British Heart Foundation

Therapies such as prayer and homeopathy are widely used, although past studies looking at the impact of care on patients' health have had mixed results.

The results of this study contradict earlier findings from the same team which suggested a drop of a quarter or more in "adverse outcomes" - including death, heart failure or heart attack.

I remember the silly hooplah over the prayer report earlier. It irritated me greatly because of course, if gods only take notice of prayers and did something then no one would ever die or be sick or anything, no? Unless there are cabals of evil doers praying for the deaths of others!

Sort of like the Skull and Bones kids at Yale. They pray to the Devil that is Death. I suppose, since they run America and are sending our military all over the place to kill people, they are pretty successful, at least their god listens.

So the illogic of all this is patently obvious. The study even had Buddhists praying to keep people alive. I happen to know Buddha and he has this message to everyone: "My dad lied to me and told me no on ever died. One day, I escaped from his palace and saw sick and dying people. This really upset me so I decided to overcome death. One day, while meditating, it came to me. Dying isn't the point. Living right while looking towards Niravana means one overcomes the fear of death and being enlightened, can achieve bliss."

Ok? Got that? The prayers of Buddhists should be for enlightenment and to accept death. Not live forever in the eternally corrupted and corruptible body. That, indeed is hell. There is a Japanese anime called "Hi no Tori" about a series of people seeking to live forever. Each story ended when the character figured out that eternal life is terrible but spiritual oneness was wonderful. One character was caught in a time loop and murdered herself over and over, her younger incarnation driving a sword through her older one which would wait resignedly for execution while chanting the Lotus Sutra.

Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist prayer groups were assigned to pray for 371 of the patients. The rest had no prayer group.

In addition, 374 of the patients were assigned MIT therapy and the rest none.

MIT involved teaching the patients relaxed breathing techniques and playing them easy listening, classical, or country music during their procedure.

The researchers found that neither therapy alone, or combined, showed any measurable treatment effect on serious cardiovascular events, hospital readmission or death.

But those given music, imagery and touch therapy had less emotional distress and had a lower death rate after six months, though this was not seen as statistically significant.

Listening to beautiful music and being held by a loved one when one is going...is a wonderful thing and I highly recommend this to everyone. But the Grim Reaper pays no attention to this. He does what he does.

As the Skull and Bones chant goes: Death is Death.

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ENDING ALZHEIMERS

2005-07-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Oh, I am ever so hopeful about this sort of news! The slow destruction of the mind is horrible to watch and worse to live through. It hits families like a hammer blow. Financially, physically, mentally, it is terrible. My family has seen its ravages and I bet the readers of this blog fear this disease like we do!

From Yahoo:

While a breakthrough for humans could be years away, a new study in mice suggests some memory recovery may be possible in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

"There basically are two prongs and we need to deal with both," said lead researcher Karen Ashe, a University of Minnesota neurologist. "What we're showing is that there are neurons which are affected (by Alzheimer's) but not dead."

New research shows a mutant protein named tau is poisoning brain cells, and that blocking its production may allow some of those sick neurons to recover. It worked in demented mice who, to the scientists' surprise, fairly rapidly regained memory.

There are no drugs yet to block tau, and most of the recent search for Alzheimer's treatments has focused instead on another protein, called beta-amyloid.

But Thursday's study, published in the journal Science, is sure to refocus attention on finding ways to attack this second culprit, too.

This research is great! First, you must understand the enemy, then describe it, then study its living habits and its growth and then find a cure! Sort of like what we should be doing about "terrorism".

I hope more money flows into research like this and a ton more money in finding a cure. I have a very strong vested interest in this matter!

From the Aussie News:

PAINLESS brain scans and simple blood tests might offer ways to predict who had the highest risk of Alzheimer's disease, and it might be possible to lower risks by drinking juice daily, researchers said today.

The occasional alcoholic drink may also help, researchers told a prevention conference sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.
"There is increasing evidence that we can do something for ourselves in terms of preventing this disease," Dr Ron Peterson of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told a news conference.

I'll toast to that! A glass of wine a day keeps the brain bugs at bay!

See? There is some great news out there! I just have to look under the right rocks!

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DEJA VU ALL OVER THE PLACE

2005-07-11T05:59:00.000-07:00

Things like to run in cycles and repeats are common. Thinking up new stuff is difficult so the common tendency is to regurgitate things. During the height of the Vietnam war when it was becoming very unpopular and Nixon promised to bring the troops home by bombing peasants from the air, we had this goofy movie come out, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."

Made in England, it was a very silly movie that poked fun at all sorts of Dickens movies as well as Germans and Americans and other such. The stereotypical children were actually well pegged in this sarcastic movie. The boy/hero was inane and blonde as per usual, also a stereotype. Tiny Tim without a crutch.

From the BBC:

Tim Burton is the second film director to tackle Roald Dahl's classic tale Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But Dahl's hatred of the original 1971 movie almost ended the new project before it began.

Dahl wrote the story of Charlie Bucket's trip to the fantastic factory of sweet inventor Willy Wonka in 1964, inspired by Dahl's brief schoolboy experience as a chocolate taster.

Of course, Dahl was a classic British boy who was sent away to a boarding school where he wrote, "I was cruelly whipped." It was a classic Tom Brown's School Days school in the stern Victorian manner borne. For some odd reason, Cadbury, the confectionaries of England, persuaded the stern school master to let them have the boys scientifically taste the chocolate for them. These were blind taste tests and questionnaires were duly filled and examined. There was no other opportunity for candy. So the boys happily joined in this little quiz time.

Of course, the story mocks overindulged children. They are an easy target. The problem today is, as the virtues of Victorian child raising, the "spare not the rod and spoil the child" is dead and gone. Even more, the Victorians deliberately didn't feed their children very much for fear of making them weak and irresponsible. Food was strictly rationed. When my mother baked us cookies at my grandfather's house, he was very disturbed by this indulgence and would say so in public. Candy was, for him, a biannual gift, not a regular affair.

From the BBC:

A raft of tough measures must be introduced if the child obesity crisis is not to get worse, top doctors say.
The British Medical Association report called for a junk food ad ban and rules for the nutritional balance of school meals and pre-prepared food.

The BMA warned that without strong action, children would increasingly develop adult diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cancer and bone problems.

The government said it was addressing the issues through voluntary codes.

The Victorian middle class had the possibility of huge meals thanks to the hired servants who produced this stuff. Unlike the hard scrabble farmers who needed to eat whatever they could, the bounty of the food revolutions fell to the middle class, extending their diets greatly.

From Victorian Reports:

Parents often used (food) as a tool in disciplining their children. Parents expected children to be thankful for whatever food was put on their plate and to eat it eagerly. If a child did not care for a particular food, such as spinach, a parent might offer it at every meal, forcing the child to eat it or go hungry. In another example, Augustus HareÂ’s aunt forced him to take a huge dose of rhubarb and soda for sucking on a lollipop (Robertson 417). Parents probably wanted their children to realize that in life we must sometimes take the good with the bad.

My parents were very big on the "eat it or else" school. An indulgence was to go out to eat and being allowed to choose food. My grandfather frowned upon this, too. He frowned at many newfangled things. He ate steel cut oatmeal for breakfast every day, for example.

Sometimes children would be deprived of food as punishment for some other offense. They might be forced to miss their desert of fruit or they might be sent to bed without supper for an offense like making an error in their lessons. Once again Augustus HareÂ’s aunt tortured him:

The most delicious puddings were talked of, -dilated on- until I became, not greedy, but exceedingly curious about them. At length le grand moment arrived. They were put on the table before me, and then just as I was going to eat some of them, they were snatched away, and I was told to get up and carry them off to some poor person in the village. (Pollack, FC 182)

I remember this! We did this! We had to give to the poor and in my own childhood there were quite a few literally starving children not to far off, either. The lesson is to not be self centered and to appreciate the good things more since you have to hand them over, voluntarily, with a smile.

Today, this sort of paternalism is frowned upon but the downside is, many youth are self centered and this shows.

In the popular Harry Potter books, the spoiled cousin gets all the toys and candy and petting and he is shown to be the classic children's literature "brat" who is put down by the hero who is denied the dainties but has an all conquering spirit. Only the stories don't do that at all. Right off the bat, when Harry heads to the magic boarding school, he is offered great candies and goodies and eats and...stuffs his face. He magically never gets fat or flustered or red in the face. He remains looking like the standard "unspoilt hero" of yore. The books are popular, I suppose, due to the idea, you can eat your candy and have it tooism that permeates our culture now.

Harry also uses his magic to torment his irritating relatives. He would have been the "good boy spoilt and now evil" in the elder literature but in today's world, he remains a moral virgin despite his many depredations. In the movie about Willy Wonka, the boy hero's reward is to become Willy Wonka who is actually a demon figure. He has all the Faustian characteristics especially tempting weak willed children and then basically destroying them. Why would the good boy want to become that?

Unless he is also evil.

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PAGING DR. WHO

2005-07-06T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Asminovian robotic revolution continues apace. Robots to comfort and care for the elderly in Japan, for example. Manga-style Gundums. Robots build many things for us already. The news about the robot that can assemble replicas of itself has been created in labs.

The applications grow apace. From the Washington Post:

"Well, let's see how you are feeling later on today," Kavoussi said . "If you're feeling better, we'll send you home, all right?"

After telling Daniel that he was ordering a chest X-ray and other tests, Kavoussi tweaked a joystick to maneuver the robot back to the hallway.

Such robot-assisted exchanges are being repeated in dozens of hospitals across the country by doctors who use the machines to make their rounds, monitor intensive-care units, respond to emergency calls and consult with other physicians.

Proponents say this and other new "telemedicine" technologies are allowing doctors to use their time more efficiently and serve more patients, often at odd hours or in remote places where the sick would otherwise have a hard time seeing a doctor.

"There's a tremendous amount of medical care being provided from a distance today through technology like this," said Jonathan D. Linkous, executive director of the American Telemedicine Association.

Skeptics, however, fear that the technology is further depersonalizing health care, accelerating the trend of doctors spending less and less time with their patients, and eroding what remains of the doctor-patient relationship.

Hate to say this, AMA, but many of my interfacings with doctors may as well be with robots. The chief impression I have gotten over the years is they want to breeze by as fast as possible. If I want to live or die, I got to do it myself, pretty much. No hand holding, lingering help, as far as I can see. The pressure to perform as many visits as fast as possible have pretty much killed the medical beside method anyway. Pretending it is robots vs human interaction is rather funny since our medical apparatus is a factory-style set up in the first place.

Maybe, while robots administer various things, a doctor can find time to chat for more than three minutes!

Of course, one can fanasize various proceedures and probes done by robots in the future. Sort of like all those alien abduction fantasies people are prone to imagine in idle half wakening hours!

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TEMPEST IN A TEA KETTLE

2005-07-06T03:56:00.000-07:00

Jaque Chirac, le Prez de France, was overheard joking with the ever humourous Putin, known for his smiling face in public, a face trained by years of KGB interrogations and spying to be oh so expressive...from the Euro Observer:

"One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad", French daily Le Monde quoted him as saying in hushed tones to the laughing German and Russian leaders.

"The only thing they (the Brits) have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease", added Mr Chirac. "After Finland, it is the country with the worst food".

OK! Making fun of British cooks---most don't cook, they boil everything---(a very old joke, that!) is normal for the French, to say the least. But the dig at Finland?

What did they do, make Chirac a blue plate special of reindeer jerky and old birch bark? I wonder.

My mother's family is old English stock. Even when they fled England after the Glorious Revolution went up in flames they brought to the New World Old World cooking habits. Namely, they boiled everything to death.

I remember this from my own childhood. If a vegetable showed any spine or stiffness, back into the pot! We even added oil to the hamburgers, another fun thing from our Brit cusine. My mother kept a beaker of oil next to the stove which was next to the sink. One day, she left the country on her many (mysterious) journeys and told me to cook for my brothers. She didn't tell me she switched the soap and oil beakers on a whim. So I put the oil in the pan to cook hamburgers, my brothers took one bite and spat it out at me. Pfui. Hey!

I took a bite and yeowled. My mother had quite a laugh over that one. She also had a stiff upper lip.

Back to international food relations: at no time has Britain been hailed as a destination for gourmands. Indeed, the same was true of American cooking until ethnic foods became a big hit. Many ethnic foods have many spices. British cooking is very spice-low. Bland.

My son loves bland food. He adores British cooking. He also loves Japanese minimalist food preparation, a fancy way of saying "sushi!" He would be repelled by much of French cusine. Maybe there is a Brit bland gene? If so, it definitely runs in my own family. All my siblings love boiled, bland foods. I do say, it doesn't bother me that much, though I tend towards the French in this matter.

When I was growing up within the Lutheran Church, all socials featured various forms of jello. Mixed with odd things like carrots and marshmallows. This was done by Scandinavians. Did poor Chirac get served this dish when in Finland?

Time to pray.

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BREATHING IS IMPORTANT!

2005-06-24T18:18:00.000-07:00

Trapped by the Berkshire mountains, polluted air will build up this week....(choking badly).

OK. This blog is called, "Culture of Life News" and one thing this editor loves is living. I want to live, I want everyone to be living and happy.

Breathing air is important to living. Three little boys died yesterday and were found today because they suffocated to death in New Jersey. Getting air is vital to living. So while planning my weekend, this is what I learned:

The National Weather Service is warning us we won't have oxygen this weekend!

AIR QUALITY LEVELS IN OUTDOOR AIR ARE PREDICTED TO BE GREATER THAN AN AQI VALUE OF 100. THE AIR QUALITY INDEX, OR AQI, WAS CREATED AS AN EASY WAY TO CORRELATE LEVELS OF DIFFERENT POLLUTANTS TO ONE SCALE. THE HIGHER THE AQI VALUE, THE GREATER THE HEALTH CONCERN.

SUMMER HEAT CAN LEAD TO THE FORMATION OF GROUND LEVEL OZONE...A MAJOR COMPONENT OF SMOG. AUTOMOBILE EXHAUST IS THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF GROUND-LEVEL OZONE AND IS THE MOST SERIOUS AIR POLLUTION PROBLEM IN THE NORTHEAST. OZONE EXPOSURE HAS BEEN LINKED TO ADVERSE HEALTH EFFECTS. NOSE AND THROAT IRRITATION, RESPIRATORY SYMPTOMS, AND DECREASED LUNG FUNCTION HAVE BEEN OBSERVED IN HEALTHY, EXERCISING PERSONS BREATHING AIR CONTAINING ELEVATED LEVELS OF POLLUTANTS. THE RESPIRATORY SYMPTOMS INCLUDE SHORTNESS OF BREATH, CHEST PAIN, THROAT IRRITATION, COUGHING AND WHEEZING IN BOTH ADULTS AND CHILDREN. OZONE LEVELS GENERALLY DECREASE DURING THE EVENING HOURS.

FINE PARTICULATE MATTER, OR PM 2.5, CONSISTS OF TINY SOLID PARTICLES OR LIQUID DROPLETS IN THE AIR THAT ARE 2.5 MICRONS OR LESS IN DIAMETER. PM 2.5 CAN BE MADE UP OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF PARTICLES AND OFTEN COME FROM PROCESSES THAT INVOLVE COMBUSTION AND FROM CHEMICAL REACTIONS IN THE ATMOSPHERE. EXPOSURE TO ELEVATED LEVELS OF PM 2.5 CAN CAUSE SHORT-TERM HEALTH EFFECTS SUCH AS IRRITATION EYE, NOSE, THROAT, LUNG AND SHORTNESS OF BREATH. EXPOSURE TO ELEVATED LEVELS CAN ALSO WORSEN EXISTING MEDICAL CONDITIONS SUCH AS ASTHMA AND HEART DISEASE. PM 2.5 LEVELS CAN BE ELEVATED AT ANY TIME OF THE
DAY.

WHEN POLLUTION LEVELS ARE ELEVATED, THE NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH RECOMMENDS THAT INDIVIDUALS CONSIDER LIMITING STRENUOUS OUTDOOR PHYSICAL ACTIVITY TO REDUCE THE RISK OF ADVERSE HEALTH EFFECTS. PEOPLE WHO MAY BE ESPECIALLY SENSITIVE TO THE EFFECTS OF ELEVATED LEVELS OF POLLUTANTS INCLUDE THE VERY YOUNG, AND THOSE WITH PRE-EXISTING RESPIRATORY PROBLEMS SUCH AS ASTHMA OR HEART DISEASE.
THOSE WITH SYMPTOMS SHOULD CONSIDER CONSULTING THEIR PERSONAL PHYSICIAN.

Excuse me, but this really aggrevates me. My son has asthma and my daughter has allergies and I just like being able to breathe and do things like work and now we are going to suffocate? Huh? This ties everything together.

In the news today is this horror that pisses me off very greatly because this is why I will spend the weekend wondering how to breathe air: From the NYT, just in at 7:30pm:

The Bush administration's plan to let aging industrial plants modernize without buying expensive new pollution controls was upheld Friday by a federal appeals court.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the Environmental Protection Agency, saying New York and a dozen other states failed to show how key areas of the administration's new regulations violate the 1970 Clean Air Act.

But the unanimous decision also came down against the EPA on two parts of the rule changes, and told the agency to review a third, giving environmentalists some reason for optimism within the 73-page decision.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said the decision prevents further reductions in harmful emissions that would lower the rates for a number of diseases including asthma and cancer. He said his office would review the ruling and decide whether to pursue further legal action.

''The court affirmed that Congress intended the Clean Air Act to protect public health and air quality and repudiated Bush administration attempts to roll back those protections,'' Blumenthal said. ''Unfortunately, the decision upheld parts of the new rule that allow polluters to avoid installing pollution controls in some instances.''

If people want cheap power that is produced with crappy methods that will destroy not only our lives but maybe the whole planet, the least they could do is build a huge dome and confine their crap inside so I can live in peace on my mountain. My mountain has clean air and I want to keep it that way.

Spain and Portugal are suffering from a heroic drought and high temperatures. In Fairbanks, Alaska, my brother-in-law tells me it goes about 90 degrees this year! Glaciers are melting at a mad rate. The Alps might have no glaciers at all in 25 years. The Swiss are trying to cover the glaciers with blankets to keep them from melting! The number one polluter of this planet of these hydrocarbons is the USA. We are number one indeed. And who refuses to sign the Kyoto Accords?

But environmental critics say the changes also will increase sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that contribute to acid rain and public health woes such as pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, leading to thousands of premature deaths a year.

The judges' ruling said it is not clear if the administration's changes in ''new source review'' regulations -- rules governing industrial sources of pollution -- will lead to greater pollution, or if leaving the old rules in place would deter companies from modernizing.

What if someone I love very much dies from this sort of poison? Eh? This lacsidasical attitude about life and death matters pisses me off since many of the polluter's staff and the people using the cheaper energy are supposed to be worried sick about fetuses!

Even fetuses will die if mommy has no oxygen, you twits. Solar energy pollutes nothing. I can walk by a solar array on a hot summer day and not choke to death. When the sun shines, people put on air conditioners which then need more dirty energy which pollutes the air which forces everyone to turn on more air conditioners. The trees sag and the leaves curl as the pollution drives deep into their cells, killing them. Who makes our oxygen? Guess what, everyone!

Trees.

I have been forced to flee my homes more than once thanks to pollution. Choking, I pack up and take the kids and run literally for my life. The air, thick and brown and worse, the invisible ozone molecules. If you plug your vents and run your heater, you will die thanks to carbon monoxide poisoning. Here we are, turning vast swaths of open land into carbon monoxide death chambers!

On days like these, I wish there was no more gasoline....

BRAVE NEW WORLD

2005-06-21T07:03:00.000-07:00

A. Huxley

During the fifties, Orwell's famous "1984" novel seemed to be the model for future police states. We could call it "the Soviet model". There was another English novel about the future, Huxley's "Brave New World" that was about a society with wall sized TV entertainment and TVs for every bed in the hospitals and genetic engineering with Alphas to Gammas produced to run the system and soma was doled out to the lower level humans to keep them peaceful and biddable.

Back then, people scoffed at such a future world and thought it was silly. Both worlds seemed excessive and singular. Alas, both are being implimented in varying, staggered ways. No system ever springs forth like Athena, fully grown and fully armed.

The American application of Futurama is two pronged: 1984 for outsiders and rebels and Brave New World for insiders and conformists.

From Smirking Chimp.com:

It's summer, and the sounds of vacationing children can be heard echoing through playgrounds and beaches across the nation. But, when little Johnny and Janie go back to school this fall, BushCo. has arranged for them to have something extra in their book bags. Not only will they be carrying pencils and crayons and notebooks and rulers, but also, bottles of psychotropic drugs!

Yes, thanks to the Orwellian named "New Freedom Initiative," passed by Congress last year, American kids, aged 3 to 18, can be evaluated at school by state-sponsored "advocates" to see if they are mental cases. If they're evaluated as such, they'll be forced to take drugs, possibly without parental consent.

Welcome to Soma-world, where you can watch your kids be reduced to extras in a "Night of the Living Dead" flick.

If this latest assault on families by BushCo. strikes you as being insane, it is. But, a plan such as this has already been implemented, way back in 1995, in (surprise!) Texas. The Governor pushing this plan? George W. Bush.

I will forgive the author mixing up Orwell with Huxley. One of Huxley's books I loved was about the ruling class trying to perfect themselves so they could be easily identifiable with each other and also unable to breed with lesser humans and also live forever to boot. And in the end, they ended up turning into...monkeys. Geeze. This program is well along, isn't it? Bush or Chimpanzee.com let's you decide.

Ten years ago, Bush embraced The Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP, an alliance of individuals from the University of Texas, the pharmaceutical industry and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas. It was, largely funded by a Robert Wood Johnson grant (as in Johnson & Johnson), as well as several other drug companies.

TMAP was hailed as a great "success" in Texas by both political hacks and drug companies. Texas was "chosen," in part, because Bush loves Big Bidness and the state has the largest prison system in the country, with over 150,000 inmates plus a lot of folks in the mental health system to experiment on. There's also an incestuous relationship between state government and universities, hospitals, prisons and schools, with regents and administrators appointed by the governor. When it came time to push TMAP? Big pharmacy lobbyists descended like a swarm of blood-sucking bats and campaign contributions flowed to the governor, state lawmakers and even judges.

And, so, the state of Texas decided who needed to be medicated and who did not. Apparently, a lot of Texans needed meds. Big drug companies raked in the dough. Why? Because the state paid for "new", expensive, "state-of-the-art" drugs. (No cheap generics, puleeze.) One bi-product of this great success story? Today, two out of three foster children in Texas are on meds.

Medicines such as these can be liberating...if one uses them carefully and with full knowledge of what it does and why and if one struggles to retrain the mind to work in a functional way, all things children are fairly incapable of doing. The popping of pills to "fix" behaviors is the first step to a drugged up society. Adults self medicate using alcohol and drugs all the time. Kids do this too, as much as they can, because mental torment is hard to live through even though this is part of the key to Understanding the Cosmos. A dreamless world where one ceases to interact with reality is a living death.

The drug companies give heaps of money to the GOP and some to the Democratic party. They do this to insure they make money with the least effort and have as few controls as possible which is why, after reducing the ability of the FDA to control drugs, allowing them to flood markets with inadequet testing, they now want the GOP to cut down the ability to sue for bad drug side effects.

Speaking of which, the number of young people committing suicide or murder after taking antidepressants is troubling, to say the least. From the Independent:

When the body of a 19-year-old student, Traci Johnson, was found hanging from a shower rod in the laboratories of pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly, US officials were quick to announce that the death could not be linked to a new anti-depressant drug she was helping to test.

During her stay at the hotel-cum-clinic in Indiana known as the Lilly Lab, Johnson had been taking part in trials for a secret new formula called Cymbalta, a chemical cousin of Prozac, which the company hoped would guarantee huge profits for years to come.

For the drugs giant, her death on 7 February last year was an "isolated tragedy" that did not prevent it from pressing ahead with the Cymbalta trials. It is now on sale in the US and - under another name - in Europe and the UK.

But for the scientific community it was another warning bell about a class of medicines already under scrutiny for possible ties to suicide. After all, Johnson was not depressed. Far from it. She enrolled in the clinical trial as a healthy volunteer in order to earn money to pay for her college tuition. Anyone with signs of depression was excluded.

There is no magic pill that will fix things because many of the problems are not social or health but cultural. Namely, the Brave New World model of entertaining mindlessly is destroying young minds pretty relentlessly. It makes a lot of money for people and peddling bad food and bad stuff to people being reprogrammed with mindless entertainment is causing neurological/biological damage. This is why the general population is getting more and more grotesquely shaped and is malfunctioning more and more at work as well as at home.

Of course, the police are responding by tasering people or arresting kindergarden kids.

Back to the Smirking Chimp article:

In 2003, The New Freedom Commission issued its findings. Surprise! The Commission found that: "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children. According to the commission, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders." Schools, wrote the commission, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.

This screening of our children isn't so they can be better cared for, is it? What it means is, children will be forced to take drugs. I suppose, I would have been drugged as a child. I was "acting out" periodically because I was abused when I was raped and this caused all sorts of unhappy problems for my childlike mind. And the routine of school is an aggravation for some children, especially bright ones who are bored. When one meets a child whose favorite activity is visiting the library to read adult books, that child isn't "sick" if they are annoyed with grammar school lessons!

We are losing our children in school because our schools are Victorian artifacts embedded in modern society. Few parents want to face the truth about our culture and so they are unable to battle the giant forces arrayed against them and few want to confront the issue of how entertainment/lifestyle choices are moving our children relentlessly into a strange new world. Playing video games or watching TV doesn't harm a child only if a parent takes the time and energy to innoculate the child from mind control. I did this by watching everything with my kids and talking with them about what they watched so they could learn how to analyse presentation as well as content.

A lot of Monty Python goes a long way, too. I note on the web how many of us, at least on the left, have memorized all the Monty Python venue! It a useful code for dealing with modern politics!

And now for something completely different....

BUSH BULLDOG Won't Let Go of Corpse

2005-06-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

CNN: Jeb Bush
Like a rabid bulldog, Jeb Bush grimly hangs onto Mrs. Schiavo's corpse. Of course, her husband spirited the poor lady away and to keep ghouls like Jeb at bay, he cremated her remains. He wanted to bury her secretly to foil grave robbers. I don't blame him one bit. These people make Dr. Frankenstein look like a humanitarian.

This Bush family really has no shame:

Gov. Jeb Bush asked a state prosecutor on Friday to investigate the circumstances of Terri Schiavo's collapse, saying a new autopsy report revealed a possible gap between when Ms. Schiavo fell unconscious and when her husband called paramedics.

"It's a significant question that during this entire ordeal was never brought up," Governor Bush told reporters in Tallahassee after faxing a letter to Bernie McCabe, the state attorney in Pinellas County, where Ms. Schiavo suffered extreme brain damage when her heart temporarily stopped beating in 1990.

The entire Bush family has a problem with lying. They lie so reflexively, it must physically hurt them to tell the truth so what they do is describe obvious things like, "it is raining" when water if pouring out of the skies but then when asked a direct question about themselves, back to the lying.

The media made a big thing about how other humans occassionally aren't 100% correct when they remember things or note things or use the perfect word, meanwhile, the Bushes can babble insanely or lie outright without any comments from the press.

This dual system is now so out of control, the Bushes can barely touch base with reality anymore since there is zero feed back and they are sheltered from exposure from normal humans like 50% of America.

The question of whether Ms. Schiavo's husband purposely delayed seeking help was never a significant issue in the case. A lawyer for Ms. Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, mentioned it after the autopsy report came out on Wednesday and said he had pointed it out in a letter to Dr. Thogmartin shortly after Ms. Schiavo's death, at age 41, on March 31.

The parents of Terry could have done the world a favor by advocating better diagnosis and care of bulimic patients. It is a terrible mental illness that rots the teeth and destroys the digestive system. It needs more research and analysis since it is a behavior/psychological problem.

The psychological/pathological problem with Jeb Bush, on the other hand, is thornier. His own sister died and the entire family wiped out all mention and memory of her, rather brutally. This is why they all remind me of ghouls when they get all tangled up in talking about or doing things about death.

Yesterday, yet another man was tasered to death in Florida. They taser children. I watched a horrible video of a young woman being tasered twice because she was talking to her husband on the telephone. The indifference to this stuff amazes me. Then they pretend to be interested in saving a brain dead woman.

Not.

This isn't a case of some tenderhearted man interested in saving lives. The Bush brothers hold the American record on executing people, after all. Executioners are not known for their merciful mannerisms. Bush Jr. wanted bin Laden's head frozen so he could gloat over it like some prima dementa Salome.

State Senator Michael S. Bennett, of Bradenton, was among nine Republican senators who helped block legislation in March that could have stopped the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube. He said he was shocked that Mr. McCabe agreed to review the case, adding that any impropriety would have been discovered during the prodigious court review.

"What evidence was there ever presented by anybody," Mr. Bennett asked, "that would even cause them to go on this escapade?"

I am happy to see there are sane people left in Florida. You would think that all the slimy politicians who oozed all over the Schiavo business would crawl back under the rock but obviously, at this point, only repeated frontal attacks are left to such scoundrels.

Terry's mom and dad could call off these attacks but they won't, not ever. This is beyond a tragedy now.

It is a crime.

BAD CHIPS

2005-06-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Rush toking up

We all know junk food is bad for one's health. In California, consumers have passed a law, Proposition 65, that lists all the carcinogenic chemicals in fast foods. One of them is Acrylamide.

Public health attorneys in California have potato chip makers in their sights for not listing a cancer-causing chemical present in many brands.

That chemical is acrylamide. It is an industrial chemical used in plastics, pesticides and sewage treatment that also can occur when starchy foods, such as chips, are processed at high temperatures. The World Health Organization has said acrylamide may be responsible for up to one-third of all cancers caused by diet, as demonstrated by laboratory animal studies. Acrylamide is already on California's list of chemicals known to cause cancer, but some chipmakers haven't listed it on their product packaging as required by Proposition 65 statute.

The attorneys have filed Proposition 65 notices with the manufacturers of Lays, Pringles, Kettle Chips and Cape Cod chips. Research has shown those brands have unsafe levels of acrylamide in some of their chip varieties. The study looked at one ounce servings, which ranged from 11 to 20 chips depending on the brand, and determined the acrylamide content was substantially more than the 0.2 micrograms per day amount which prompts the Proposition 65 warning.

Yummy.

I can see it now, "Pringles will make you sick and ugly! Eat them every day!" Actually, that should be the warning label. Make it truthful as well as informative. Add this to the cigarette warnings:

A new study isn’t intended to be alarming. It has limitations, having only looked at genetic markers in white blood cells of about 1,100 healthy white women.

Still, the researchers don’t pull any punches. “Our findings suggest that obesity and cigarette smoking accelerate human aging,” write professor Tim Spector, MD, and colleagues. Spector directs the Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. The study appears in The Lancet’s online edition.

Obesity and smoking have both repeatedly been shown to be serious health hazards. However, they can also be overcome. If Spector’s study is right, the finding may be one more reason to go for a smoke-free life at a healthy weight, even if it takes hard work and time to get there.

Or to put it in clear English: Smoking will make you old and ugly. So just for vanity's sake, I would expect smoking and eating Pringles at the same time to be the equivalent of popping oxytoxin and talking on right wing radio: both will make you fat and ugly and will make you sick.

Heh. Pull no punches.

Meanwhile, the mega corporate entities fight local food laws like this one in California:

Legislation aiming to prevent counties, towns and cities from making local decisions about our food supply is being introduced in states across the nation. Fifteen states recently have introduced legislation removing local control of plants and seeds. Eleven of these states have already passed the provisions into law.

These highly orchestrated industry actions are in response to recent local decisions to safeguard sustainable food systems. To date, initiatives in three California counties have restricted the cultivation of genetically modified crops, livestock, and other organisms and nearly 100 New England towns have passed various resolutions in support of limits on genetically engineered crops.

These laws are industry’s stealth response to a growing effort by people to protect their communities at the local level. Given the impacts of known ecological contamination from genetic modification, local governments absolutely should be given the power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. Local restrictions against genetically modified crops have provided a positive and hopeful solution and allowed citizens to take meaningful action in their hometown or county.

“Over the past several years in Iowa, we’ve seen local control taken away for the benefit of the corporate hog industry,” said George Naylor, an Iowa farmer and President of the National Family Farm Coalition. “With these pre-emption laws signed into law, we are now losing our ability to protect ourselves from irresponsible corporations aiming to control the agricultural seeds and plants planted throughout the state.”

Yes, they are desperate to have us all under federal controls only so they have to bribe only a few politicians and one party, not two.

Lastly, once again, the Feds try to undo local laws and have no enforcement of Federal laws, all to suit the corporate giants:

The junk food industry won a major victory yesterday, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture rejected a petition that it enforce its own competitive foods rule, which prohibits public schools from selling “foods of minimal nutritional value” during mealtimes in school cafeterias. The rule was designed to promote the health of school children, but enforcement today is lax to non-existent. In the petition, Commercial Alert requested simply that the USDA enforce the rule as written. But the USDA has said “No.”

Stanley C. Garnett, director of USDA’s Child Nutrition Division, wrote to Commercial Alert that “At this time, we do not intend to undertake the activities or measures you recommended in your petition.”

“It is outrageous that the USDA is refusing to enforce its own rules against selling junk food in public schools,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “They have turned their back on American children, who are suffering from an epidemic of obesity.”

The USDA’s decision comes just days after the Justice Department slashed the penalty it seeks in a lawsuit against the tobacco industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

Looks like the huge investment in Bush's inauguration bore fruit! Kraft Food alone gave a quarter million for that little sheebang.

FAMILY TREADMILL

2005-06-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

I have been ill for a week but today it was cooler and pleasant and so I went to the grocery store. While waiting in line, I saw the typical woman's magazine and marveled at the perfection of the cover. It hit every button possible as hard as possible.

As carefully crafted as the most cunningly designed stained glass window or Old Master painting of nymphs and satyrs, this magazine cover hits every possible key, a symphony of jarring cross purposes. Like a marionette on strings, the eye is jerked from one thing to the next.

&spades CPR information. The readers of this women's magazine have to be very alert for any signs of heart attack since the contents of this magazine guarantee a good chance of a heart attack.

&spades Lose weight! This ploy is on the cover of every single women's magazine. All of them have it somewhere. The big bold red letters here are truly, diabolically, in one's face. Talk about chutzpah!

&spades Get rich! Big! Dreams come true! The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are very popular. Everyone wants to strike it rich, win big time, be a millionaire.

&spades Make dinner for the family fast as possible. The less time, the better. We are the fast food nation!

&spades Exercise. Unlike the big, red, bold promise above, this one mentions some effort but tries to make it as minor as possible.

&spades Make your hovel "pretty" with knick knacks. And then eternal happiness is yours.

But looming over all of this, filling the cover is a huge photograph of a huge, honking, gigantic, dwarfing the tiny portraits of slender women in the far corner, the Mt. Everest of Eternal Cholesterol Artery Clogging Dessert! It is not only lovingly photographed, in pornographic detail, it is utterly excessive and over the bounds of sanity and health. It is excessively high calorie. Chiffon covered with whipped cream covered with chocolate shavings surrounded by sugar cookies with a sugar and chocolate filling! Oh, and a sprig of zero calorie mint which won't be eaten, anyway!

What is the calorie content of this concoction? I am guessing it is around 4000. And the fat content? Ahhh...50 grams? On a health index, this dessert rates somewhere in the basement. The cream has some nutrition but that is about it.

This magazine didn't just happen to end up looking like this. It was carefully planned, vetted, examined by the resident psychologist and pitched carefully by professionals who know their targets and how to hook them just as good fly fishermen know how to cast a line, set a lure and reel in those fish.

The point of this cover is to lure women inside. Not to educate them in ways to lose weight or find bliss or feed their families. It is to pepper them with ads selling even more rancid, toxic junk foods. Every ad shows pictures of skinny, happy humans devouring this stuff and the unhappy, mostly overweight women purchasing this tricky magazine will see the pictures and think, "If only I buy Hot Pockets ® for my children, they will love me and I won't have to cook a dinner from scratch after work>"

Too tired to exercise, too worn out to decorate the house, at least she can eat some junk food and a fist full of cookies and some jello and gaze at the dreamy cover artwork, imagining the joys of eating that luscious, ludicrous dessert.

MEDIA ON DIET BINGE/PURGE

2005-06-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

"In a TV ad by Consumer Freedom, Larry Thomas, the "Soup Nazi" from "Seinfeld," orders restaurant customers to go to the salad line."
It seems that the mass media is all over the obesity issue now. Stories and counter stories appear daily. The data is shoved back and forth and confusion reigns because of all the contrary forces at work are creating a veritable hurricane of despair.

Which way to turn? What can we do?

People may think no one really noticed the gradual fattening of the general population but trust me, it is watched very closely. Ever see "Gone With the Wind"? In the opening scenes the fat mammy bustles about the skinny belle preparing her for a dinner by making her eat first so she won't disgrace the family by actually eating at the dinner table! The preservation of this distinction goes back only to the 18th century when sugar came into vogue in Europe. Before then, getting fat was difficult and a sign one was rich. But cheap sugar products from the toil of New World slaves kidnapped from Africa changed all that. Even as the slaves were brutally worked to death, the Europeans grew fat. The very rich noticed it was harder and harder to tell themselves apart from the population at large because the sumptery laws were collapsing, too.

It is very vital for the very powerful and their lower levels of ruling class people to recognize each other from far away. So they came up with the "skinny and pale" scheme which devolved into racism. By the way, when the middle class obtained the pale part, the ruling class switched gears to glorifying the sun tanned look.

In well-to-do homes, food is very strictly regulated. The cook keeps the children out of the kitchen and the governess insures they don't eat on the sly. The food selection process is carefully researched and kept in order. Even so, the fear of fat can turn even princesses into bulimics as they try to cope with all those state dinners with a groaning board.

In the sororities in upper class universities and women's colleges, the selection process involves many things but the number one item is "fatness." You are fat, you are finished.

So why are all the media carrying on about fatness? Well, I suspect the changes in our society are hitting the upper classes and causing even their own kids to gain weight. CNN takes a stab at dieting, for example.

In a no-nonsense approach to weight loss, the American Heart Association's new diet book offers options for the weak. Can't give up pizza? Try eating two slices instead of your regular three. Craving ice cream? Try a sorbet.

"The intent on doing this was to try to get around the faddish diets," said Dr. Robert Eckel, president-elect of the American Heart Association and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "The theme is based on behavior, nutrition and physical activity."

Released this week, "No-Fad Diet: A Personal Plan for Healthy Weight Loss" dismisses trends like the grapefruit diet, the very low-fat diet and the low-carb diet. Although the heart association has published heart-healthy cookbooks before, this is its first all-out diet book with a variety of options.

This is the basic, "don't pig out" and "no seconds" and "chew it twice" and "eat your vegetables first" warnings that I heard every dinner all my childhood. Visitors who aren't raging WASPs are shocked to find out we have only what is served and what is served is rationed very carefully. Back in the fifties there might have been horses in the paddock and three cars and a truck in the carport but there were no seconds for dinner.

In this article they even say, "Lose a pound a week" as the proper way to regain WASP power. I have fallen off the diet wagon several times. Each time, that rule is enforced. One gets it beat into the brains at a young age, if you are WASP.

Now here is the NYT investigating an industry group that is trying to convince people that eating junk food is great.

In recent years, Mr. Berman, who is not a scientist, has emerged as a powerful and controversial voice in the debate over the nation's eating habits. In some ways, he has become the face of the food industry as it tries to beat back regulations and discourage consumer lawsuits. Food and restaurant companies, he says, are being unfairly blamed for making Americans fat and unhealthy; he adds that people are smart enough to make their own well-informed choices.

Formed in 1995 with money from Philip Morris, now known as Altria, to fight bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, Consumer Freedom has gained attention for its provocative tactics. Last year, it ran television ads that featured the Soup Nazi of "Seinfeld" fame ordering overweight people to eat salad - a clear jab at what the group considers pushy nutritionists who are trying to suck the joy out of eating.

I remember when all good rich women smoked. This helped cut their appetites and make them skinny. Now, to their regret, it is considered verboten and smart ones don't smoke. But here is the crux of the issue: rich people who want to be healthy and skinny have to make money selling junk food and cigarettes to lower class people so the rich can be rich. So they have to make all this tempting and good for the poor only the propaganda for this backfires when it seduces their own spawn into eating junkfood and smoking.

Time for the smelling salts!

Along the way, Mr. Berman and his group have earned more than a few enemies. Critics say that Consumer Freedom seizes on statistical errors and other nuances to distract from the substance of the obesity debate. "They make a lot of noise, but nobody in academia takes their arguments seriously," said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston and an occasional target of Mr. Berman's group. "They stand for food industry freedom, not consumer freedom."

Amid the claims and counterclaims, Mr. Berman and his opponents duke it out, taking sides on major questions about obesity, including these: How did Americans become so fat? Who is to be blamed? And how should the problem be solved?

Overweight American workers cost the rulers money. The health problems and the difficulty in doing a day's work thanks to too much fat is becoming a problem for the capitalists running things yet the need to keep the working class consuming mass quantities of junk that is unhealthy is vital to keeping the capitalist system chugging along.

This tension is growing as schools try to stem the tidalwave of obesity problems by reforming their menus and banning soft drinks, for example. To the howls of the industry, of course.

The C.D.C., the government's primary agency for health information, still calls obesity "a very, very important health problem" and "a serious epidemic."

According to the agency, rates of obesity have doubled in the last 25 years among adults and children, and tripled among teenagers. Some scientists and public health officials have suggested that this trend, if left unchecked, could bankrupt the already faltering health care system. A study last year by scientists at the Research Triangle Institute and the C.D.C. found that states' medical expenditures related to obesity were as much as $75 billion a year.

Here it is! The $75 billion.

A watchdog group in Washington, the Center for Media and Democracy, has posted data about Consumer Freedom's financing on its Web site. According to documents they say were obtained from a former Consumer Freedom staff member, corporate contributors to the group as of 2002 included Coca-Cola, Wendy's and Tyson Foods, each of which gave $200,000. Cargill gave $100,000, according to the documents, and Outback Steakhouse gave $164,600.

Just like Cadbury taking over the American Diabetes Association, these companies have a vested interest in turning humans into garbage dumps. They make more money on heavily processed things that use cheap ingredients like the humble potato, corn or rice and of course, salt. Salt is way cheap.

Remember the kids commercials peddling cheap sweet cereals while showing a breakfast of eggs, a glass of milk and bacon? "Part of a healthy breakfast"? Well, that isn't a healthy breakfast on any level. But even back then, years ago, they had to admit the cereal alone was not healthy at all.

I remember the flap when the wife of the owner and founder of Dunkin Donuts said she would never ever allow her husband to eat one. She was hustled off stage and never spoke in public again. As one President of McDonald's after another keels over from heart attacks at age 58-60, at no point does the press or the company speculate about this peculiarity. Wendy's founder floundered and fell to a heart attack, too, at what I consider to be a very young age (under 80).

The founder of the Atkin's diet which is basically all about eating meat with a weak craveat about veggies, he too keels over with a heart attack at a rather young age. They tried to pretend it was something else, but he keeled over nonetheless. He is dead. (heh, sorry, grandmother, had to say it!)

The women who work for women's magazines love to show skinny women on the cover, add some diet blubs and then, in a side box, feature only high calorie desserts. This is rigid as a the designs on a mummy's tomb. The jarring messages are deliberate. The writers and editors took psychology courses at their various elite colleges and they know exactly what they are doing: holding out hope while undermining the victim, keeping her in her place.

Back in the sixties, many women got speed from their doctors, it was legal back then. But soon the addictive side effects became very obvious and I, for one, campaigned against prescribing the drug for weight control. In the hinterlands today, a major industry is the vile meth manufacturing (replacing the departing industries!) which has truly toxic ingredients that eat away at the mouth and gums, destroying the teeth then destroying the person. Yet people take it to be skinny....while eating junk food.

For this is the crux of the problem. You can't just lose weight, look at the poor comatose woman who died so infamously...she starved herself into a coma because she ate mostly junk foods. One can eat a fine, extravagant dinner with fine fruits and vegetables and breads, etc. and keep the weight effortlessly under control. But the deal is, no junk food.

Ever. Period. That is the thing that balks.

BRUTE FORCE FLORIDA

2005-06-09T02:51:00.000-07:00

Note the policeman's huge size.
Police brutallity on film

As many people know, the war on drugs is merely a war on minorities and poor people. This war has been incredibly brutal as both sides engage in bloody battles literally to the death and as in all wars against peasants, the military/police become increasingly brutal to all "peasants" no matter what.

This dreadful downward violent spiral is now showing up as inappropriate use of deadly or very painful force in situations that have no danger at all, the authorities simply using the forceful shortcut to control, in Florida's case, using tasers on even little school children.

As we showed here last month with the video of a very little girl whose behavior was evidence of a need for some loving attention (yes, love does wonders) being arrested and traumatized, so here in this latest video we see a young woman, pulled over for speeding, calling her husband on the cell phone because she is black and wanted to tell him she was being stopped, the cops, instead of talking politely to her and seeing that she is a young lady immediately within one minute of stopping her, yank open the car door and immediately drawing a bead on her and threatening her. She can't believe it, of course, and tells them to wait one minute but they shoot her!

The severe shock causes her to fall to the ground, screaming. They yell at her to put her hands behind her back but she is having convulsions. They shoot her again. Her screams of pain don't move them, she is a you-know-what (peasant/minority) so they poke at the crying woman with their feet!

They then drag the woman doubled over in pain up and order her to stand.

Well, all I can say, at least they didn't spray her with bullets like we do every day in Iraq! I hope Americans realise the police are heavily involved in the National Guard and they go to Iraq and spray bullets at peasants there then they come home and are ready to respond to anyone by being hyperviolent.

The war on drugs compels police into assuming that any and all traffic stops might turn into shoot outs as people try to hide drugs or get away. This lowers the bar to becoming violent nearly to the ground. Instead of making us all safer, the police become a menace. This woman, for example, was no menace to anyone. Her routine traffic stop should never have escalated the way it did. The presumtion of the police was, she didn't immediately obey orders snapped at her so she deserved to be tortured brutally. Next time, she will obey!

Here is the photo of a cop fired for abusing people he stopped in traffic. Look at the obviously brutal face. Like the hulking cop in the Florida video, he outsizes his victims. We are selecting some really nasty characters to "protect" us!

You can bet, if the woman in Florida was a cute white lady, they would have been more patient, more respectful and pleasant. This is one of the millions of silent privilages skin color gives one in America. If she were rich and white and stopped for speeding, they might merely chat with her, joke a bit, and then let her go with a verbal warning.

I know this for a fact. I grew up a rich, white chick.

SELF DEFENSE

2005-06-08T05:37:00.000-07:00

My local paper, the Times Union, ran this article:

Iannuzzi, a town police officer, was showcasing the skills taught in a new, Rape Aggression Defense class that police are offering at no charge to women in Guilderland.

The class, which has been offered for years at the University at Albany, is designed to teach women basic self-defense and, more importantly, they say, how to avoid dangerous situations in the first place.

Consisting of three, four-hour sessions, the secretive classes are held away from the eyes of men and provide women the rare opportunity to defend themselves in full-contact simulated attacks.

I was one of the very first people to be invited by the police in Tucson, Arizona, to talk about self defense for women. I developed a standard lecture which I taught several police women. This is how the class was run here in Albany:

In this scenario, Iannuzzi was alone and vulnerable and had little choice when she was accosted at an ATM. She waited, screaming "No! Get Back!" Until they grabbed her. A slight but powerful woman, she let fly a precision flurry of open-fisted punches, stunning elbows and punishing knee jabs that sent the larger men wilting to the ground.

OK. This ended up being the typical "fist fighting/karate/judo" lesson which is utterly useless for teaching self defense. They did get my lesson number one right: be very loud. The louder the better. "Stop. You are breaking the law. You will be arrested. The police are coming right now!" I always explain, psychological warfare is tons better than trying to muscle your way out of trouble. These people are very paranoid about the police. "Look, they are coming! Ha!" is very effective especially if you point behind them. Works wonders.

I would tell women, once someone touches you it is much more difficult to stop the confrontation so this is why yelling the above is very effective if there is some distance.

Second, arm yourself. With what? Anything near by. I have used garbage cans, chairs, bricks, all sorts of odds and ends. I sweep them up and scream, "You are under arrest". Why that?

Because again, the assaulters are terrified of being arrested. This always causes them to hesitate. Now, where did I get all this experience?

I used to be part of a patrol seeking sexual assaulters. When I was in college, we young women were frequent prey of predator males. At first, I taught some self defense because I am a trained fighter. But then we decided to do night patrols. I took exclusive territory over the "dark alley/near bars" sector. This was very active. We used to laugh over how frequent the attacks on my decoy was. I would wear a miniskirt and heels. I deliberately experimented with different word combinations and things to use. I found the ultimate way to deal with a man was to destroy his car. One guy jumped out af a fancy car to sexually assault me in one very dark alley. Heh.

I ran around his car, swept up a garbage can and began to whale away at it. He screamed, "Stop wrecking my car" and jumped back in, drove around the block and came back to attack me only I followed him and when he left his car, I put a board with a nail in it under the back tire. I then clapped my hands, he ran after me...straight into the police. He ran back, gunned the engine, drove a short ways and had to give up because of the board nailed into his rear tire.

I loved doing this. I called it "cheap thrills". The police terminated this because of lawsuit possibilities so they had me show the new women police "decoys" how to operate. So this one month experiment ended. But I will assure you, each night I was attacked at least three times! Boy.

More psychological warfare: yelling, "I know who you are and where you live!" This plays on paranoia. Swinging the arm out yelling, "back, back, back" is useful. I use this on 2 ton oxen. All my big animals know this order and surprizingly, many humans respond the same way, they automatically step back. Even one step is enough.

The main thing today is to have a cell phone. I have used this with great delight. It is very simple. Someone looks even slightly suspicious, don't be shy. Whip out the cell phone and be ready to dial 911. If, god forbid, you are attacked, hit the 911 and immediately start yelling your location and describe who is attacking you. I have a long record of citizen arrests. One chief tool I used was to rationally ID the criminal suspect. I discovered if I begin to describe them outloud, nearly always, they run away due to paranoia of being caught. The litany runs like this: weight, height, haircolor, pants, shirt/suit and lastly, shoes.

If the person has a gun: there is only so much one can do. One man actually emptied a .45 on me and missed, by inches, each shot. He went to prison, of course. When someone pulls a gun, assume you are going to die. This means, make tremendous noise, yelling. Nothing is lost. And of course, go bezerk. Again, this is literal life and death.

True story: one guy I nailed I tricked. I was painting with red paint when he tried to steal a bicycle chained to the porch. I lunged at him, stabbed him in the chest with the paint brush yelling, "This is a knife!" and he saw the red and fainted. I then got him in an arm/neck lock.

Another time, three of us stopped a kidnapping next to the U of A. The girl screamed, dropped her books as three men hauled her into their car at a stoplight where I was walking. My girlfriends ran to summon the police while I threw a garbage can in front of the car while screaming at other cars to stop, thus tying up the traffic. The men bailed out and ran and I ran after them, ID'ing them. They were caught.

In NYC a man with a baseball bat assaulted a Chinese couple. I happened to be going to sword practice so I drew my sword and forced him at sword point to surrender until the police came and arrested him.

Knowledge is power. And the best protector of a woman is contact with others and the greatest invention for this is the cell phone. I think all people who are vulnerable should have these. When I was doing citizen's arrests, I had a radio so I could contact the 84th Precinct in Brooklyn but a cell phone would have been better by far.

One big mistake all the classes on self defense make is to teach smaller people and women to hit low. All men attacking women expect this and can easily defend from this, they grab a woman's hair nearly always. This is why I tell women that if they are going for blood, they must attack the nose. Yes, the nose. Since one is shorter, a swift upper cut to the nose is very effective and to do this, the man grabs the woman's hair, yanks her forwards and she slices him on the nose, he lets go, reflexively. I know this for a fact because I have won 100% of my hand to hand battles this way. To do an upper cut, one clutches the right fist to the chest and then as the man pulls inwards, shoot upwards. If you hit the jaw, it still causes him to let go so he can hit back.

If you are really horrible like me, this is when you grab both ears. A sudden jerk, twisting the head.

Brutal details. But fighting is a brutal fact. I know of a number of women in the NRA who think carrying a gun in a purse is a good idea. It is not. Purses are often the target of attackers who want the purse. Why arm them, too? Second, if you hae a gun on your body, don't pull it unless you have the will to kill. If you do pull it, you can end up in prison if the person isn't really a danger to yourself and if you panic and pull, all is over. Way too dangerous and I never ever carried a gun.

Again, calling 911 on a cell phone is tons easier and quicker and most highly recommended.

THE DRUG GULAG

2005-06-06T08:39:00.000-07:00

Freak Brother's books for sale..heh

The world's biggest and longest running gulag is right here in America: our prisons bulge with the masses of people put there caught in the maw of the eternal war on drugs. This exercise in puritanism extends only to the poor, minorities or physically ill.

Rush Limbaugh enjoys his freedom still. So did Bush after being snagged with illegal drugs. All our overlords even admit they used pot and they legislate in their pig sty heaven in DC.

Federal authorities may prosecute sick people who smoke pot on doctors' orders, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state medical marijuana laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

Yes indeedee! Can't have people throwing up from cancer medication enjoying food again. No need to pay any attention to the bulk of research in less Talibanistic lands showing clearly that there are a number of healthy applications for using pot to treat various conditions.

Why, you might enjoy the medicine!

No Mary Poppins singing about a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down with these grim Puritans! As they accept bribes from casiono operators and alcoholic beverage makers and cigarette producers, the idea that someone might possibly enjoy and be a little loopy using something that isn't 100% healthy is...pathetic. I can't take this anymore. As our government wastes time putting people in prison for taking drugs it opens the doors for drug companies to make a mint selling a wild number of drugs to the elderly. Arthritis? Take all sorts of drugs that cause heart attacks or liver failure or nausea but do not smoke a joint! You might have fun. That is a no-no.

The side effects of many drugs are very nasty. Pot has side effects, too. But they don't involve kidney nor liver failure nor heart attacks or even strokes. This drug has to be one of the mildest, least prone to side effects of any known drug. Indeed, simple aspirin can cause fatal stomach ulcers, for example.

The problem with pot is the ease of production. Anyone and everyone can simply grow the stuff easily. There is, if it is legalized, no way anyone can profit selling pot which is why the pot dealers are quite happy to leave it illegal too.

Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines.

Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."

Fat chance of that happening with all the hypocrites running around in Congress! How can one have a democratic process if the press is part of the machinery keeping pot illegal?

Guess what?

They make a ton of money on TV and in print selling ads for medicines that will be the last choice of patients rather than the only choice! No mega medicine company wants legalized pot. Nor do the bars and beer pushers or cigarrette people all of whom pay around a trillion dollars together, advertising their crummy, very unhealthy garbage.

Well, I suppose they will return to pondering the riddle, why Americans are suddenly so obese.

FATAL FHAT FLAP

2005-06-02T17:57:00.000-07:00

OK, something is up. Are we ready for Solyent Green, gang? Suddenly our government is all up in arms about fatty, flabby people. What gives? The NYT features this article about the CDC seeking reason for fat people!

For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a team of specialists into a state, West Virginia, to study an outbreak of obesity in the same way it studies an outbreak of an infectious disease.

Heh. I have been to West Virginia. And it is easy to see why people are now fat there! Back years ago, they went without food and a lot else. They lived in shanties and worked like slaves in black mines and coughed up their lungs at a young age, etc.

Now they are sitting around, chewing the old cud and getting fat. Thanks to literal and figurative pork. After all, Federal largesse flows into that state and there are food stamps and all sorts of programs provided by evil blue state voters that make life easier for everyone, dastardly, isn't it?

Now they are pigging out literally as well as figuratively.

Time for Miss Nanny State to step in!

But some statisticians said it was hard to see what could be learned from the agency's investigations.

Dr. Daniel McGee, a professor of statistics at Florida State University who has analyzed obesity data, burst out laughing when he heard about it. "My God, what a strange thing to do," he said.

"They'll find out what we all know - that the country is no longer set up for physical exercise," Dr. McGee said. And that schoolchildren "don't get a nutritious diet." And that "there is a lot of high-fat food on the shelves of every supermarket."

But, he said, "that doesn't tell you much."

Well, guess what? This "study" which is a farce, we all know why people like to pig out already, they do this because it is fun and TV and ads bellow every hour and minute of the day to pig out so they pig out! But the CDC is prime pork.

Namely, a bunch of parasites can collect Federal dollars and spend it all in West Virginia goofing around smoozing all over the place at great expense so they can cough up a useless report. Unless they report that all ads for crummy corporate food be banned and the products removed from stores, this is a monumental waste of time.

I remember when the media went crazy over the anorexia/bulimia issue. Back then, I wryly pointed out that skinny people are outnumbered 1 to 100 by fat people. Many people are very defensive about being overweight. I was once overweight and I know how embarrassed I was until.... I was put on this awful medicine, hormonal, that caused me to gain weight for the first time in my long life. At a little less than 40 lbs over weight, I went to the doctor's office for advice. A nurse came into the room to help me with my diet. She had to turn sideways to come into the room. Jabba the Hutette she was, at over 400 lbs!

"You are too fat," she said.

"How dare you come to me to talk about weight problems," I barked back, pointing at her. "We are going to discuss your gross negligence concerning your own weight."

Crying, she managed to leave the room somehow. She was very sick. I know people reading this might be angry that I am talking this way. But her presumption that she could discuss eating habits with anyone except a psychiatrist irked me no end. I lost the weight the old fashioned way: weighed myself at the same time every morning, counted my calories and eliminated all sugar, period. I could eat anything and everything so long as it was in the right size and had no sugar. Voila! Weight gone.

Laughably simple. You can eat bread, spaghetti, yogurt (with no sugar, not prepackaged with fruit, cut up your own fruits!), rice, etc, all those "carbs" were fine...if you eat the right amount! No beer, by the way (nayaya). Oh well. I didn't say it would be fun...

Nonetheless, the Disney film, Pinnochio, had it right: the Bad Boys went to Pleasure Island and ate candy and gambled and ran amok like crazy and they ended up donkeys.

EAT VEGGIES NOT CORPORATE Government tells kids

2005-06-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

A spoon full of sugar....is a disaster
Children and adults are getting fatter and fatter. What a surprise this is. Corporate America is joining with the government to tell people to eat veggies and exercise, ie, live the way I live. Of course, I buy virtually nothing that corporate food companies advertise at great expense.

Choose food portions no larger than your fist. Eat "go foods" -- like lowfat milk, oatmeal and veggies -- every day and save chips and other "whoa foods" for special occasions.

This advice is part of a new government campaign to use kid-friendly nutrition tips to prevent preteens from getting fat.

Simple training did get 8- to 10-year-olds to eat healthier for three years, concludes the biggest study ever to track the impact of childhood nutrition education. But there's more work to do: Snacks, desserts and pizza still made up an astonishing one-third of those youngsters' diets.

Nevertheless, "kids can learn to take small, positive, healthy steps," said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, chief of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which sponsored the research and on Wednesday begins the "We Can!" program to spread the results. "It suggests that kids who learn to eat healthy during their adolescence will continue to eat healthy."

No need to stop the flood of modified corn sweeteners! No need to stop the flood of commercials on children's shows enticing them to pig out on corporate food that is unhealthy and made out of nonnutritional junk! Just like this week with the candy/soda company corrupting the American Diabetes Association getting them to tone down any anti sweetener campaigns or possible pushes to stop the flood of advertising bad food--now this!

The mind reels, actually. Didn't the GOP squawk about "nanny government"? So we have this nanny campaign to beg people to eat veggies and eat sensibly? Isn't that pretty much a matter of choice? If it is not, and it isn't, then what is going on here?

Is this an attempt at making it look like the government gives a hoot if Jr and Jane are fat little tykes? If the government cares so much, they should immediately outlaw all and any ads for high calorie/low nutrition foods! For example, all sugar laced candy being sold as cereal should be outlawed as deceptive advertising.

The government encourages lying. Go check out the cereal boxes! In the nutrition information they list calories per "serving". All breakfast concoctions fall between 130-200 calories a serving! Huh? But then read what constitutes a serving!

It varies all the way from 1/3 cup to 1 1/2 cups! Not due to density, either! They deliberately game the numbers to make everything the same. They figure smart shoppers will know that certain cereals are low calorie, the numbers game is for "losers" who trust people and can't do very good mathematical gross comparisons.

The new study tracked 595 children, half of whom had received, with their parents, special education on how to make healthier food choices. Three years later, kids who had attended the nutrition classes were eating more "go" foods than their peers in every food group except fruit, Van Horn reports in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. They also ate fewer "whoa" foods, with one exception: pizza. And for desserts, they were more likely to pick lower-fat options like frozen yogurt.

Still, neither group ate enough fruits or vegetables, and the high amount of daily snacking and pizza was stunning, said Van Horn.

Count the number of pizza commercials on TV versus the number of apple or celery commercials. There are one or two generic apple commercials but zero celery commercials. Because raw veggies and fruits are low "value added" items they generate little profit for the corporate machine. Processing animals, for example, using cheap Mexican labor, adds a great deal of value. But making processed food! That is the key. Make it addictive and you can become very rich. Fat is addictive, especially hidden fat. And sugar style sweets are highly addictive! Salt cravings, too. All these together equals bad health if used in excess. Sugar, for example, can be nearly eliminated from a diet and one is the better for it.

The Atkins diet took off because it was all about eating lots of meat with fat. This was supposed to "burn off" by not eating any gluten based products. Of course, this diet is bad for the health unless one is a dog or a lion, but nonetheless, it was embraced happily by hordes of people who want to "pep up" without eating healthy yukkie vegetables.

In the BBC two days ago was the alarming headline that Britain's youth are now around 90% couch potatoes and getting very unhealthy. Yet the assault on young minds continues unabated. Like here, the learned helplessness is puzzling. If this is so very bad, then the nanny state should really step in.

But instead, it opens the umbrella and flies off, goodbye, Mary Poppins!

MORE: This story angers me on several levels:

Casey’s parents had argued that Glenview School District and teacher Kevin Dorken were responsible for the girl’s death because Dorken, who had been supervising the game, was out of the room while the children were stuffing marshmallows in their mouths to see who could hold the most and still say the words “chubby bunny.”

School attorney Thomas DiCianni had argued that because of the way the classrooms were laid out, other teachers could still see into Dorken’s room.

“There would have been no winners had this case gone to the end, regardless of how it turned out,” DiCianni said.

One of Casey’s schoolmates, Elissa Henricks, now 18, took the stand Wednesday and recalled how Casey struggled to breathe. “She tapped my arm and her lips were purple, and I knew she was in trouble,” Henricks said.

According to testimony, the girls ran for help and Dorken tried the Heimlich maneuver on the limp girl, who died a few hours later at a hospital.

Gack. No, telling kids to stuff their mouths with multiple marshmellows...bad, bad, no! Second, bad choice of food. Third--the myth about talking with rocks in the mouth is a myth, not real. Bad, too, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, again, the world never ceases to astonish me.

SECRET MEETINGS About Healthcare

2005-05-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

I am old enough to remember many things. One thing I recall like it was yesterday was Hillary Clinton chairing secret healthcare proposal meetings. The GOP howled like demented bats and crushed her using scary TV ads and accusing her of being secretive.

So, what is in today's health news?

At a time when Congress has been torn by partisan battles, 24 ideologically disparate leaders representing the health care industry, corporations and unions, and conservative and liberal groups have been meeting secretly for months to seek a consensus on proposals to provide coverage for the growing number of people with no health insurance.

Why? Why hide this?

By meeting in secret, the group has tried to shield itself from political pressures.

Excuse me, last time I looked at the propaganda we all swallow daily, this country was supposed to be the leader of the free world and a democracy. This means we should be open to political pressure. The people in this secret cabal are all politically connected up the yin yang. Many are outright politicians. On the far right and from the middle, they have united to stop what?

The left. We want universal health care like all other sane nations have. This means eliminating the various middlemen such as insurance companies and their vast infrastructure which exists to deny health care. So not one person from the left was clued into the existence of this conspiratorial meeting.

The participants, ranging from the liberal Families USA to the conservative Heritage Foundation and the United States Chamber of Commerce, said they had made progress in trying to overcome the ideological impasse that has stymied action on the problem for eight years. The group also includes top executives from AARP, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, America's Health Insurance Plans, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Johnson & Johnson, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association, Pfizer and the Service Employees International Union.

The unions want to protect their gains, the drug companies want to protect their profits, the other entities have many goals none of which involve keeping us alive.

Our rulers want to use a front organization, in this case, working in secret conspiracy, to present us with a do or die choice: their way or the highway. The simple and obvious choice, to copy the systems of all other civilized countries, won't be offered to us, instead, a useless patchwork quilt of half coverage will be tossed to us and those of us who have full insurance and I happen to be one such, will see it greatly reduced while the uninsured will still be kept in a bad state. The goal is to reduce the money flowing through the health system without interfering with profit centers.

The 24-member group takes a pragmatic approach, members said, looking for incremental steps.

"People are uninsured for different reasons," said Dr. Mary E. Frank, the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians and a participant in the talks. "No one solution will work for everyone. We need different solutions for different groups of the uninsured."

One solution can work for everyone! I don't care why someone is without health insurance! There are a million ways to fall between the cracks. A simple single payer plan will eliminate around 100% of these reasons, ipso facto.

So of course, this is the one option no one is entertaining.

DIET OF WORMS

2005-05-28T04:15:00.000-07:00

American Diabetes Association home page picture with logo: "Information you can trust"...but read on...

Hyperfat America grows fatter every year. And everyone wants to lose weight. And there is a huge industry devoted to losing weight and surgical proceedures and such all in quest of the holy grail: to look graceful and slim while eating the wrong foods.
So why did this study appear nowhere in the news headlines?

Tufts researchers recently reported that while the leading source of calories in the average American diet used to be from white bread, that may have changed. Now, according to preliminary research conducted by scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Americans are drinking these calories instead. The research was presented in abstract form at the Experimental Biology Conference in April of this year and a more comprehensive paper is being developed.
Odilia Bermudez, PhD, MPH, studied the reported diets of a large nationwide sample of American adults. Among respondents to the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), more than two thirds reported drinking enough soda and/or sweet drinks to provide them with a greater proportion of daily calories than any other food. In addition, obesity rates were higher among these sweet drink consumers. Consumers of 100% orange juice and low fat milk, on the other hand, tended to be less overweight, on average.

Bermudez, who is also an assistant professor at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, is hopeful that, "by helping to identify the main sources of excess energy in the American diet, this work may contribute to the development of much-needed strategies to combat obesity in the American public."

"These results are startling," she continued, "and indicate that we need a much better understanding of how the American diet has changed. Our paper will look more closely at the issue of sweet drink consumption and its relation to obesity factors among three of the main ethnic groups included in the national surveys: African Americans, Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites."

I printed this news release in full just so it can "see the light of day" so to speak, on Google. It is touching, reading this bulletin. The "much-needed strategies" of course means treating ads for soft drinks including "diet" drinks as toxic and therefore to be eliminated like cigarette ads were eliminated except they were not eliminated. Cigarette ads are all over the print media in huge amounts which is why we seldom see anti tobacco stories. The advertisers determine what is in the news as we detailed here on this blog. There are organizations dedicated to helping people who get diabetes and for preventing this terrible disease. Is the National Diabetes Association going to run this story and demand soft drink companies be banned from advertising and from schools?

Here is an urgent bulletin from the Organic Consumers Association (I recommend this group, by the way, in general): American Diabetes Society Has Been Bought Off By Junk Food & Soft Drink Lobby. After reading this url, I went off to visit the online site run by the NDS.

Seems like the story is true!

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) today announced that Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages (CSAB) is launching a three-year, multi-million dollar alliance to support the Association in its efforts to fight obesity and diabetes in America.

As part of the relationship, CSAB has committed to support ADA programs nationally and locally, including Weight Loss Matters and America's Walk for Diabetes. CSAB will incorporate extensive outreach activities using media, promotions, retail programs and grassroots events to increase consumer awareness of health and wellness, and the importance of making smarter nutritional choices.

"We are thrilled to have Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages join forces with the American Diabetes Association to help deliver crucial messages to consumers about healthy lifestyle changes," said Larry Ellingson, RPh, Chair of the Board of the American Diabetes Association. "Working together, we can get consumers the tools and solutions they need to reach and maintain a healthy weight and incorporate more physical activity into their lives -- all key to the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes."

Since when has exercise stopped diabetes? If you eat sugar all the time and run marathons, you will get diabetes and get it pretty fast, too.

As part of the agreement, CSAB will incorporate Weight Loss Matters healthy living messages in its promotional, advertising and point-of-sale materials. These messages will focus on the importance of reducing calories and controlling portion sizes and will promote the benefits of physical activity, with an emphasis on walking.

"This is a cooperative approach that we believe is necessary if we are really going to make progress in the fight against obesity and diabetes in America," said Jim Trebilcock, CSAB Senior Vice President - Marketing. "Many people with diabetes enjoy drinking soft drinks. We believe that our wide portfolio of calorie free beverages, including well-known brands such as Diet Dr Pepper, Diet Snapple and Diet Rite, give people choice and control in managing their diabetes."

"Many...enjoy drinking soft drinks"! Indeed. This is why they have diabetes! Duh and double duh! You know, heroin addicts like the heroin high. So should this make it OK? Cigarettes are addictive too. And alcoholics love booze.

You can walk until your shoes wear out and it won't do a bit of good if you have diabetes and are abusing your body by eating empty calories. Period. It is also impossible to "walk off the calories" if your legs are amputated. Most amputations in America are due to diabetes. And the whores running the ADA know this and they decided they want to live in beautiful houses and drive fancy cars and go to nice holiday resorts so why not trick people into dying? The Devil that is Death won't punish them in this life! So as millions of Americans succumb to having their legs chopped off, go blind and fall apart in general, these whores running an association that was supposed to save their lives...tells them lies. The terrible thing is, the official government web site on line tells people with diabetes to do to the American Diabetes Association for advice and help!

This is just like the economic realm: we tell ourselves lies and live within lies and we hope this won't bite back. When we get our economic legs amputated and go blind in the dark thanks to being unable to afford to buy energy, we will wonder what went wrong. We are emailing this article to both the American Diabetes Association and to these folk:

Plano, Texas-based Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages (CSAB) is a subsidiary division of Cadbury Schweppes plc (NYSE: CSG - News). CSAB is one of the largest producers of soft drinks and premium beverages in the Americas. CSAB's brand portfolio includes Dr Pepper, 7 UP, Snapple, Mott's Apple Juice, RC Cola, A&W Root Beer, Sunkist Soda, Canada Dry, Hawaiian Punch, Schweppes, Diet Rite, Slush Puppie frozen drinks, Clamato, Mr & Mrs T Mixers, Holland House Mixers, Rose's, Mistic, Yoo-hoo, Orangina, IBC, Stewart's, Nantucket Nectars and other well-known consumer brands. For additional information on CSAB and its products, visit http://www.cadburyschweppes.com/csab.

Ditto these people. They are criminals. Any con man who lies like they lie is a criminal. Of course, they give to the Bushes so they won't be prosecuted for any crimes against humanity.

But if there is a Heaven and a Judge up there, well, the Devil always gets his due.

WHAT KILLS BIRDS Kills humans

2005-05-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

Royal Society for Protection of Birds

Many years ago, I read Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". The book scared me and set me on a life long path to save the birds and harmonize with nature. My great godmother, Mrs. Mitchner (yes, that family!) was an early bird expert in the nineteenth century, she was born just before the Civil War began, and she taugh me all about birds. When she was 100 years old, she lived outside in her verandah surrounded by wild birds that she tamed.

I even had a hummingbird land on my fingers there!

Because of the dangers of pesticides, I dedicated myself to organic gardening. This meant research. Gardening with gooses and such.

Here is another reason to avoid pesticides:

Farmers and amateur gardeners who are exposed to pesticides run a higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease, researchers said yesterday.

Previous evidence that suggested an association with the disease was strengthened by the publication of research covering almost 3,000 people in five European countries.

Scientists found that heavy exposure to pesticides increased the chances of developing Parkinson's by almost 50 per cent.

The incurable disease is characterised by tremors, rigidity, shaking of the limbs and difficulty in walking. It is caused by the degeneration of nerve cells in the brain that send chemical messages to neurons controlling the muscles.

There it is! Another nail in the coffin of "kill bugs so they won't bug us". I was against pesticides because of the the delightful bird species that eat bugs need bugs to stay alive. We turn our farms into bug deserts, the birds die! Just for that alone, I was against pesticides. I built swallow houses on my home for them so they can eat bothersome bugs. I love watching them swooping and dropping coconuts....ooops.

I love swallows. And gentle fly catchers. A pair this week are building a lovely little nest right next to the computer room window. I watched them meet and court each other for two weeks, flitting in and out of the peach tree that grows there. Bugs get into my apples and peaches and I eat them anyway. Guess what?

My great godmother used to say, "Bugs are good for you, they are like vitamin B pills!" For healthy chickens, I feed them bugs by letting them out, guarding them from the fox that frolics across the fields while hunting mice, and we wander about, seeking bugs. They eat the grasshoppers and crickets. The turkey flock is even more vigilant in the quest for bugs. Turkeys love bugs and frogs and snakes. Didn't know that? Ever watch a flock of turkeys corner a large snake and then play tug of war? Or trying to swallow a large toad?

Living in nature is easy. When we lived in a tent (yes, for years, actually) a large toad moved in with us. He lived under the hot tub and I made him a little door. We knew when he went outside by the door creaking as he shoved it open. Sometimes, after a rainstorm, I would stumble over him in the dark outside. He would occassionally serenade us in bed, ribbit ribbit craaak. Our son grew up with Mr. Toad. He got quite large. He ate the crickets which is why I loved him and took care of him.

Now the toads live in the garden. I make little homes for them with rocks and boards and watering dishes. They eat the bugs. Surrounding the garden are plants certain bugs don't like. Marigolds and herbs. Farming with nature is possible. We have to figure out how to do this.

Organic farming means imperfect looking food that is healthy, even with the bugs.