Category Archives: healthcare

The history of pipeline spills

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Really hard to deny the massive incidents when you see this.

You can’t even see Indiana from all the “incidents”.  Nor Illinois nor Ohio.  And Texas!  A state that size that is practically obliterated by the dots should be up in arms about this.    Some folks are wisening up, though–unfortunately, it’s after they become sick and unable to put up much of a fight.

I found this timeline on wikipedia.  It’s pretty hard to deny how dirty this business is and how careless they are.  Why should they care?  They have Congress bought off….

Not only that, here are nuclear and radiation accidents…

…makes you feel all warm and cozy, doesn’t it?  No?

Koch cloud over Detroit

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Holy Crap. 

My worst fears that  I blogged about on that pile of pet coke in Detroit…Good God.  And the Koch brothers get away with murder….oh, it doesn’t look like murder because people die more slowly from emphysema, heart disease, and lung disease and God-knows-what-else….but it’s murder just the same.  Just because one doesn’t see blood spurting doesn’t mean the guilty are innocent.  Unconscionable.

 

High levels of arsenic found in wells near fracking sites

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(hat tip to organic consumers)

From the Texas Tribune.

University of Texas at Arlington researchers tested 100 private water wells in 2011 …

Those with dangerously high levels of arsenic — about one-third of the wells — tended to be much closer to natural gas wells than those that were not contaminated.

 

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The study’s authors were cautious but I think this is pretty solid.  What would be better is if the wells were tested by the university BEFORE fracking began.   Then it would be pretty hard to deny that fracking is the cause of the high levels of arsenic.   That absolutely should be a requirement before fracking is allowed in an area–the wells should be tested by independent labs (universities are great, as long as they’re not being bankrolled by corporate interests such as Halliburton) .  And they should be re-tested after fracking has commenced.

And the water usage in fracking is rarely brought up–that concerns me as much as poisoning the water.  How many gallons of precious water is used for this dirty process?  How much does this drain the aquifers?

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Biotech food launches new website

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Propaganda...gotta love it. Not.   Ninety-three percent of Americans want GMO labeling…why isn’t Congress doing what the American people want??  I mean, they keep stating “the American people want…” so they must be concerned with honoring our wishes….right?   /just a little sarcasm there, folks

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One really has to wonder if the folks at the FDA have too much time on their hands or have completely lost their minds when you read stories like this. 

I think we should all live in bubbles so there is no way that we could ever, ever, ever come in contact with salmonella or any other bad bug.  /snark

I want eggs by free range chickens, but I can’t always get them.    It makes sense that the nutrition is better with free range eggs–look at the variety in their diet.  Clearly, the FDA is infiltrated with Big Ag  corporations that want to squeeze out the organic farmer.

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Speaking of organic food–I am starting to see the fruits of my labor with the heirloom tomato, Cosmonaut Volkov.  I had one the other night with mayonnaise on it…and OMG, it was delicious!  It tasted like tomatoes used to taste like before the hybridized the taste out of them!  Oh, wow, it was just like they tasted back in the 60s.  I kid you not.

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More on the GMO war–of course, it always comes down to who is funding  it.   Gah, the “NO” list reads like a list of defense contractors.

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Organic food sales are increasing.  People are waking up to the poison in their food.  Good for them.

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Michael Pollan and Mark Hertsgaard on how sustainable farming practices can help with climate change.

What tainted food?

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Spocko has this up on the ultra-secret of who poisoned people.  WTH?  This is effing crazy that people are not told who and what made them sick.  Really disturbing.

Keep in mind, folks, that when I briefly worked for the state’s health dept, they were not telling people about the link between DEET and seizures when they were pushing folks to use it to repel mosquitoes.  They also did not tell them that citronella (along with other natural  things) can do just as good a job of repelling them.  When I questioned the health dept. director why folks were not told this, his lame excuse was that citronella had to be applied every thirty minutes.  So they denied folks their own autonomy in giving them the information and letting them decide whether they wanted to take that risk or be a little inconvenienced.

The Crazy Amy link is something to behold.  Wow.  Her eyes are “off” which makes me wonder if she has mercury/heavy metal poisoning…I’ve noticed that the eyes are affected a lot with it.

 

PR Watch

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…has a few links up:

ALEC anniversary being celebrated in Chicago.  A few folks thought they’d drop by….

MOVIE SCREENING: On Wednesday, August 7, at 6 p.m. Common Cause, the Center for Media and Democracy, and others will host a screening of the Bill Moyers documentary the “United States of ALEC” followed by a panel discussion. The screening will be held at the University Center, 525 South State Street in Chicago.

RALLY: At noon on Thursday, August 8, a coalition of groups, spearheaded by the Chicago Federation of Labor, is calling on people to gather outside the ALEC conference at the Palmer House Hotel, located at 17 East Monroe Street for a march and rally. You can tell them you are coming here.

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ALEC, Big Oil, and Big Ag…

 

ALEC and low wages…

 

Public Television pulls funding for documentary on the Kochs…because the Kochs are million dollar contributors.   Selling their soul doesn’t come cheap, you know…

 

 

Searching for Soul Food…

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Michael Twitty has a link up to an article about the loss of soul food recipes…sadly, the history seems to be lost in Asheville.   I think the diet dictocrats that insisted margarine was “good” for us…have scared many people away from food with animal fat in it.  If you recall, the book Nourishing Traditions blows those myths away, along with the myth that raw milk is baaaad for you.  Just the opposite–the enzymes that are removed in the pasteurization process are beneficial.  Folks who have difficulty digesting milk products find that they have no difficulty with raw milk.  But if you want raw milk, you have to go about it in a clandestine way because the food nazis are out to make it illegal.

 

Poverty and Education; Gates and Broad

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The thing that gets pushed aside with “school reformers” is the link between poverty and lower grades.  I never fully understood this country’s contempt for the poor until now.   You truly have to experience it as a poor person to understand.  You’re worse than criminals because at least criminals get three hots and a cot.  What does Congress do?  Cut funding to the Housing and Urban Development and cut food stamps.

And I found this excellent post by Joanne Barkan  on the fallacy of “school reform” by Gates, Broad, et al.  It is sickening how Gates has manipulated data, ignored poverty, and is stealthily racist when you view the public schools that closed being heavily minority.  Gates shoveled millions upon millions towards this boondoggle when instead he could have paid taxes so that those schools would be well-funded and able to have smaller class size so that teachers could help those that had more difficulty learning, or it could have helped the poor kids get nutritious meals cooked from scratch….the simple solutions that would have the greatest impact.

From the website:

In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).

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Sickening, isn’t it??

 

More:

States were desperate for funds (in the end, thirty-four applied in the two rounds of the contest).

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Enter the Gates Foundation. It reviewed the prospects for reform in every state, picked fifteen favorites, and, in July 2009, offered each up to $250,000 to hire consultants to write the application. Gates even prepared a list of recommended consulting firms.

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That pretty much says it right there.  States were desperate for funds –they had little choice.

In the same article, the Post broke the news that Bill Gates had “secretly bankrolled” Learn-NY, a group campaigning to overturn a term-limit law so that Michael Bloomberg could run for a third term as New York City mayor. Bloomberg’s main argument for deserving another term was that his education reform agenda (identical to the Gates-Broad agenda) was transforming city schools for the better. Gates put $4 million of his personal money into Learn-NY.

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And this should be great cause of concern:

On October 7 and 8, 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a two-part investigation by Robert Fortner into “the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships.” The report focused on the foundation’s grants to the PBS Newshour, ABC News, and the British newspaper the Guardian for reporting on global health.

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Both Gates and Broad funded “NBC News Education Nation,” a week of public events and programming on education reform that began on September 27, 2010. The programs aired on NBC News shows such as “Nightly News” and “Today” and on the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks.

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Gates and Broad also sponsored the documentary film Waiting for Superman

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As a vehicle for their partnership, the foundation and Viacom (with some additional funds from the AT&T Foundation) set up a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization called the Get Schooled Foundation.

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There is a reason that Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s FCC* allowed more consolidation of the media–the press has always been part of the Fourth Estate that kept Congress and the President in check.  If the media was weakened with consolidation, it concentrated ownership which in turn shut off different opinions, viewpoints, and independent voices.  It also stifled competition between media….ironic coming from people who often bring up “encouraging competition”  as a reason for allowing bank deregulation, relaxing EPA rules, and repealing or relaxing antitrust regulation.

The corporate takeover of public schools got a foothold because the media was not doing its job of investigating what was going on and who was behind it….because they were being bankrolled by those very people they should have been investigating.

*The Federal Communications Commission is staffed by presidential appointees.  The American public owns the airwaves, but those rights are being taken away from them by media consolidation.

The link between poverty and how well a child does in school broaches the subject of healthcare.   Children who live in poor areas are more likely to be exposed to toxic environments.  Heavy metals seriously impact one’s ability to learn, one’s ability to remember, and one’s ability towards impulse control–all of these impact a child’s education.  In addition, as anyone who has read this blog knows, ADD is a problem when heavy metals are involved–totally frustrating a child who may get distracted and lose focus during the teacher’s instruction, missing important information.

 

 

 

 

 

Misogyny in all forms

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This post has got to be one of the worst I’ve read in a looong time.  The misogyny coming from someone claiming to be a feminist (well, actually, she doesn’t claim it, but the insinuation is there) is something to behold.

As I said in my comment, the vitriol here against women who make the choice to stay home is one of the reasons I no longer call myself a feminist, even though I very much believe in equality.

The feminists in the 70s railed against women staying home…I understand the historical context–their mothers were forced to stay home after WWII, and forcing anyone to do anything will inevitably result in resentment…especially when staying home is characterized as “doing nothing” and “contributing nothing to society…”

Not only that, but the stance that abortions should be allowed at any time–even at the eighth month–are the reasons that feminists lost many women who were against that but believed in equality.

And sadly, that is still true today.  Women who believe in equality but are against abortion or want to stay home are marginalized by feminists such as nonny mouse.

It seems to miss the point that it’s not the staying home part, but how culture values it.  Our culture doesn’t value much of what women do…whether it is at home or in the corporate world.  It’s the culture that needs changing, and that’s not going to happen by minimizing women’s role at home.

As I posted previously, other cultures, such as in Europe, provide support to women. They try to prevent abortions by preventing pregnancy in the first place–the ideal, for me.   And guess what–they don’t have mothers having baby after baby (as the repubs and some dems like to argue.)

Many of those arguments are tenuous at best, but it is the continued reference to European abortion laws that most represent a convenient cherry-picking of facts to support the rollback of women’s rights. Many European countries do indeed regulate abortion with gestational limits, but what SB1 supporters conveniently ignore is that those laws are entrenched in progressive public health systems that provide quality, affordable (sometimes free) health care to all individuals and prioritize the sexual and reproductive health of their citizens. Most SB1 advocates would scoff at the very programs and policies that are credited with Europe’s low unintended pregnancy and abortion rates.

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More here on the women’s right to decide how she will give birth.  I love this–midwives have been targets of a well-run campaign against them since medieval times when they have as good a record of healthy childbirth as physicians.

This will give one moment to pause…when you look at the statistics for the U.S. at the bottom– the maternal death rate in this country is 1 in 2,100.  The article states it’s typically 1 in 7,600.

Pretty sobering in a country that likes to think of itself as such a beacon of healthcare.