Category Archives: indiana

ALEC and Fossil Fuels

by

PRWatch has this up on ALEC continuing its dirty campaigns against everything that is logical.

From the piece:

ALEC is even going after people who want to generate solar power for their homes. The boom in home solar energy generation—there has been a 60 percent increase in domestic solar installations in the past year—is a threat to ALEC’s dirty energy producing members, so they have a bill to amend so-called net metering laws that allow homeowners to sell excess electricity back to the grid. It is the ability to do this that makes solar an increasingly affordable possibility for homeowners. ALEC’s bill would charge homeowners additional fees, with ALEC environment task force director John Eick telling The Guardian that these users are “free riders on the system.”

~~~~~~~~

You know, it’s one thing to try to promote your heavy-metal containing pollution, but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to try to prevent people from taking a proactive stance against your dirty fuel.  Unreal.

Solar energy has sooo many benefits–one of which is independence from the greedy energy producers whom have stripped our lands of trees, poisoned our water and soil, and then not paid for the land use nor taxes on top of that.

Sixty percent increase in solar energy use…just in the last year…this is a *huge* threat to them.

Mike Pence, doing ALEC’s bidding, along with the coal industry.

Not long ago, Indiana ranked in the top five for low cost of electricity. Now, thanks to an onslaught of regulations from Washington, Indiana ranks somewhere firmly in the middle of the pack.

~~~~~~~~~~

Reading between the lines, this is as much an admission of guilt for polluting our air, water, and soil with heavy metals (lead, mercury, arsenic) from coal. They were getting away with it until regulations prevented the free-for-all.

I keep thinking about that 17 million pounds of toxins put into our waterways every single year…and BP dumping mercury into Lake Michigan every single year, courtesy of Indiana Dept. of Environmental Mis-Management….and the lack of action when the toxic spill floated down the Ohio…

 

 

 

Everything you (didn’t) want to know about Walmart practices

by

Here.

Note the blatant discrimination against women….paying them less than men in the same positions; pregnancy discrimination; not promoting them.

I try to avoid the place, but with limited access to other stores (that they elbowed out), it’s not easy.  They have destroyed the right to choose, basically, so that folks like myself that don’t agree with their labor practices have limited choices.

I have actually paid more for products at other stores in order to avoid them.  But I know that it is likely that those other options may be gone someday due to the Walmart octopus….but I’m not going down without a fight.  This is another part of doing unto others as you would wish done to you–I want to support stores that pay their workers fairly.

 

Scenes of Summer…

by

…another gorgeous weekend here.  (But I have to say that this summer has been dry.  Not on the scale of the drought a few years ago, but very dry.  As much as I love the gorgeous weather, we need the rain.)

I rode my bike this past week, to one of my favorite places around here…the bridge over the river.  More dead trees have fallen into it, and as I passed over it (a day earlier in the car), a crane was perched on them.  It flew off just as I stopped.

I saw the bright yellow birds again…I’m pretty sure they are finches.  There was one outside our door perched on a sunflower, singing its song.  Gorgeous.

Along the road, someone is building what looks like a huge barn.  I’m hoping it is not a commercial venture, but perhaps a boarding place for horses.  Time will tell.

As I was leaving home, the black and white dog that bit our dog comes running at me, barking.  I yell at him, and he stops…for now.  A couple of weeks ago, he and the boxer bit another dog.  These young girls were walking their dog past the house, and The Dogs came up and bit their dog, too.  My BIL saw it, and told the girls to go home and tell their Mom what happened and to call the animal control officer because they had bit our dog, too.

The animal control officer came out, and was talking to the owners of The Dogs.  Incredibly, the woman stated that those girls should not have been walking their dog past the house.  Seriously.  She actually said that these two little girls should not have been walking their dog on a leash on a public road….so she could let her dogs run all over the place, intimidating and biting other people/dogs.

And the incredible thing is that these people know they can get away with it because nobody will do anything…until a human being is bit.  The animal control officer told us that if we get bit, we need to take a picture of it.  Seriously.  He is going to wait until these dogs bite a human because biting two other dogs is apparently not enough evidence of their aggression.  And nothing is happening to the owners, either.   They couldn’t care less.  The black and white dog was out running around the next day.

And the cherry on top is that there is another dog owner just like them…and we’re in-between the two houses…so they let their dogs roam in-between houses at will, making us right in the center of it.

I really feel bad for the dogs, because they will probably end up going to the pound because of their idiot owners.  I just don’t understand why these people just don’t put up a fence.  They have plenty of yard to put a fence up so the dogs can run around to their hearts’ content and not bother anybody.  Nor will they get off their arses and take the dogs out on a leash so they can get some exercise….

Frustrating.

Anyway, back to the nice day….

I was admiring the scenic river, but it was time to go, and I hopped back on the bike to peddle home.

I no sooner did that, when I heard…the sound of the plane….

That plane.

That yellow plane that has been spraying chemicals in the air over the corn fields….

I have been buying my eggs from a farmer that believes in free range (not cage-free folks, which isn’t the same thing)…and we just happened on the topic of spraying the fields.  She’s young, and I told her that it had been outlawed in the 70s…so I don’t understand how the ban got lifted and now we have this idiot spraying chemicals (she said it was fungicides) which goes all over the place.

Just as I was leaving her place, I’m zipping down the country road, and just as I approach a corn field, the yellow plane sprays the chemicals clear up to the road….which I pass under just as he sprays. Sh*t.

I got my migraine the next day.

On the day that I was riding my bike, and again was near the stupid plane,  I peddled as fast as my tired legs could take me (not very fast), and tried to get inside.  I could hear the plane make several passes (it’s fairly loud).

All that day and the next, I was tired, achy, nauseated with a headache.  Yep.

But hey, it’s okay, because the chemicals stay right where he sprays them.  /snark

I don’t know how this got started again.

~~~~~~~~~

Today, I went for a nice walk at one of our great state parks.

You know, when I was in New Jersey, my son took me for a drive around Atlantic City.  We traveled through one of their parks, and I just have to say they ain’t got nothin’ on Indiana.  We have the most beautiful, stirring parks.

New Jersey trees were tall…but they were skinny things about ten inches in circumference.  Most of their trees were like that.

Our trees, however, are big and thick…old growth trees with character.  They bend gracefully over the road, giving us a leafy canopy.  The forests here look like forests…not telephone poles with leaves.  (Sorry, New Jersey, not trying to pick on you…but you know….)

I had taken my kids to this park when they were still at home, and I knew that I had taken them to an area with a large pond.  My son and I had been there a couple of times, recently, but I could not find the area I had taken them to previously.

To my delight, I found it today.  Looks a lot different than it did twenty years ago.  The dry summer is showing…pond was nearly dried up.  And there is much, much more growth of bushes than before.

It was mostly water with lilypads on it before, so I was surprised at the growth of the rooted bushes.

The walkway was looking its age, too.  It is leaning a bit and looks like it needs shoring up or replaced.

As I walked along a grass path, toads were leaping in front of me.  Heh.

(It’s getting to be quite a habit now–as I play “frogger” at night when I’m coming home from work–I accidentally hit one the other night, but most nights I can see them in time to avoid them in the roadway.  I also saw a baby deer next to the road–luckily, he/she was good and stayed put, looking at the car, while flipping its tail back and forth.  )

A curious thing at another area of the park–they put up an information sign telling folks that the river had moved 50 feet in the last twenty years, so they were shoring up the bank and putting down landscape materials to keep the erosion down.  And I’m thinking….why don’t they let the river take its own course and work with it, instead of trying to thwart nature?

It was a wonderful summer day.  It even rained a bit–a soft rain–but I didn’t mind at all.  We need the rain…and I’m not going to melt.

And I couldn’t help but think of Climate Change and how all of the beauty and beneficial aspects of nature could be gone in coming years…perhaps even in my lifetime.  Gave me chills….

Hope you all were able to enjoy some beauty somewhere today.

 

 

More on ALEC

by

Reading the post from Diane Ravitch the other day, this caught my eye:

The “Property Insurance Claims Act,” on which both the Civil Justice and Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Forces will vote, tilts the playing field in favor of property insurance companies. It would benefit those companies that are represented by the ALEC member Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCIAA). The bill would restrict the time frame for the insured to bring a claim, require the insured to submit to mandatory appraisal, and cut back existing law protecting property owners in many states. PCIAA’s vice president of state government relations, Joe Woods, is the private sector co-chair of the Financial Services Subcommittee of the Commerce task force, which will vote on the bill first. – See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/07/187796/alec-agenda-dallas-evisceration-medicaid-school-privatization-and-expansion-gas#sthash.yQQZCEtA.dpuf
~~~~~~~~~~
The thing is…they are already doing this.  Like everyone else (that is greedy), they want to up your premiums…and then not pay when there is a claim.
When I still had my house, there was an issue with brand new eaves troughs I had installed by a so-called professional.  They ended up putting water into the house instead of taking it away.  But it was so gradual (and being mercury poisoned, not as “with it” as I would normally be), the damage wasn’t discovered until I noticed mold on several pairs of shoes, a book bag I used in college, and other stuff in a dark closet.
The insurance company refused to pay for the damage, even though the whole house had spots of mold, along with the attic.  The “inspector” they sent used a penlight…read that again: a penlight…to “inspect” the attic.  After which he proclaimed that he “didn’t see anything”.  Lied through his mossy green teeth…
I knew they were lying, but like I said, I was pretty toxic at the time and didn’t have the wherewithal to even think about how to fight back.  Nor could I trust any lawyer in my town, which my ex’s family owned.
I had been with this insurance company for decades, so I trusted them.  They had an A-1 rating by the insurance rating company…
None of that mattered when the fit hit the shan.
So…yeah…this may be news to y’all, but isn’t to me.
It’s a different world, folks.  They take your money and then refuse to pay a legitimate claim….after years of paying premiums.
Now ALEC will make sure they pay even fewer claims.
…because they want it all.
The Koch brothers and their ilk want it all.

Changes….

by

…I know that nothing stays the same, and yet…

I went to Fort Wayne Sunday.  I had the thought of giving some food to the food pantry that our building had.  It was there to help with the gaps between what the gov’t thinks people need in order to eat and what they actually had at the end of the month.

So…I bought about $80 worth of food and called the manager to see if she was available to get in the building and chat awhile.  She didn’t pick up her cell, and I found out why when I arrived at the building–

I had tried the disabled gal that used to run the food pantry.  She would have had the key to get in.  I couldn’t for the life of me remember her apartment number, so I guessed.   A man answered, so yeah, no luck.  He didn’t even know the name so either he was new, or the gal has moved to another place.  She had been there quite a few years, so I was surprised that she wasn’t there.

I tried a few more apartments, but no one was home.  On a final try, I got one of the residents.  Ironically, he was the same one that gave me such grief over there by setting off the fire alarms all the time.  Heh.

He let me in and then said they didn’t have the food pantry anymore.  I was shocked.

He said that everything had changed and that the manager was no longer there.  There had been a big shake up, I guess.  No wonder she didn’t reply to my call.

So…I ended up just putting the food on a table in the main lobby for people to pick up.

It was just surreal.  There used to be folks outside chatting on the benches. No one.  No one inside where a couch and tables are located.

It just felt like the world got a little colder.  Makes me sad.  Really sad leaving the building. What once was a small community, where we looked out for one another, has become a place to exist.

Once our former manager left, it just seemed to take the warmth and light out of the place.  The new maintenance guy did not like the “free” table we had in our rec room…he was somewhat anal and didn’t like the clutter of it…but that table was a life saver for us with little money to buy things.  If someone didn’t want something, but another resident could use it, that just saved it from ending up in the landfill, didn’t it?  But the maintenance guy insisted there were fights over the stuff…and I can say that I never witnessed it nor heard about any such fights.  He just didn’t like it, is my guess….and if there were any fights, he probably blew them out of proportion.

Anyway, what should have been a happy day of giving back was one of sadness.

Not only do hedge fund managers want to profit off of schools…

by

…they also want to profit off of the misery they caused by the housing collapse…to rent out single family homes, at astronomical prices, no doubt.

Does anybody else smell a rat??

Did these scumbags create the crisis of credit default swaps so that people would lose their homes, and then the Wall Street banksters could snap up properties at bargain basement prices…?

It certainly looks that way to me.

 

My own Big Pharm stories

by

I thought I should tell my own stories related to prescription drug reactions–

In 1991, I took a drug called Seldane for sinus issues.  I was also taking a drug called Synarel for endometriosis.  This stupid drug was developed to put a woman’s body into premature menopause…under the misguided notion that the women’s period was the cause of Endometriosis ( I now believe it is related to gluten intolerance and heavy metal poisoning–since the symptoms began around the same time of coal ash exposure.)

As you can probably guess, there was a reaction…

One night, after taking the Synarel and Seldane, I began to get ready for bed.  I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, etc., when I dropped a bottle of rubbing alcohol.  As I reached for it from the cabinet, the bottle just passed through my hand as if I was not gripping it at all.

When I bent over to pick it up, my left arm went numb and began to swing aimlessly–as if I had no control over it.  I knew something was terribly wrong.

My heart was racing at an incredible speed–not even during the most strenuous aerobic exercise did I ever feel it beat that hard and that fast.  My chest felt like an elephant was sitting on it.  There was an incredible burning in the center of my chest. I had all the symptoms of a heart attack.

I could not talk for about five minutes.  My brain was screaming “something’s wrong!” but I could not get my mouth to move to tell my ex something was terribly wrong.

The episode subsided–that is, the emergency symptoms subsided, and I was able to call my pharmacist, who was at a party and didn’t really want to be bothered.  He said it was just a reaction and that I should continue taking the drugs! No way.

And being a woman, which the medical profession considers “emotional” and “hypochondriac/psychotic”…it was hard to be believed when I told of my symptoms.

A neurologist actually said that I had a complicated migraine…even though I had the classic symptoms of a heart attack. Every afternoon, when I walked up a small hill to the mailbox, I again was hit with numbness down my left arm.

Two years after this episode, the FDA finally banned Seldane because of the side effects.  It had to take a woman dying of heart arrythmias before the drug was removed.  I later learned that they took the ingredient out that caused the arrythmias, and remarketed it under another name.

Then I find out that Synarel, too, causes heart palpitations, dizziness, chest pain, nausea, etc….

Women are not believed when they present with symptoms of a heart attack.  There are those who say that women don’t always have the same symptoms of men for heart attacks.

I remember sitting in the local hospital’s emergency room when a woman walked in, complaining of chest pain.  She was told to sit down in the waiting area.  Had she been a man, she would have been ushered back to the rooms immediately.

I have read of women who thought they had heart attacks but were not believed.  When they did autopsies after death, the woman had, in fact, had several heart attacks.

As you know, I’ve gone on to overcome this episode–resuming aerobic exercise after a period of rest and recovery.  I was scared sh*tless, I tell you, when I first began exercising again.  But I thought that I couldn’t just give up.  Little did I know that was a precursor of things to come…

And here I am, after struggling through one of the darkest periods of my life, finding the answer that no damn doctor ever diagnosed, and now the Big Pharma run FDA, has taken away one of the chelators that helped me get well.

Somebody please explain it to me…because I don’t understand that prescription drugs that did me a great deal of harm were approved by the FDA, but something that was not that helped me get well, is now by prescription only?  Doctors are not knowledgeable about chemistry, according to Dr. Cutler.  They are not required to take more than a couple of classes in chemistry, so they don’t understand the complicated nature of heavy metal chelation…and yet I’m supposed to trust them, after all I’ve been through?

Not a chance.

 

 

Mystery solved

by

The visitor (s) we had over the weekend were apparently here for the 4th of July celebration at a nearby elite military academy.  The 4th celebration is a big deal, naturally.

The plane, a Embraer Legacy 600, was either owned or leased by a person attending the festivities.

My coworker said that there was another jet parked at the airport over the weekend, as well. They had actually requested the airport expand its runway to accommodate jets.  It is able to take up to 727’s.  Amazing.  I have to give kudos to the pilots, because it still looks to me like a pretty short runway.

I knew there was wealth associated with the elite academy, but I didn’t realize to what extent.

 

Gulen Charters, Ohio, Indiana, and politicians lining their pockets

by

Diane Ravitch has this up on the apparently greased palms of Republican Cliff Rosenberger and how Gulen schools have flourished in Ohio.  The article states that the investigation includes Indiana, as well….

Meanwhile, I’m reading a press release of Governor Mike Pence taking his family to England…on a “jobs creation trip”.  The release I read noted that he is paying for his children’s portion of the trip…but it left off his wife, whom is also going.  They’ll be gone for two weeks.  Unbelievable.  What a snow job–does anybody actually believe this guy is going to create jobs by this trip?  How many hours do you think he’ll devote to schmoozing for jobs?  I’m betting a day.  Half a day.  An hour.  A few minutes on the elevator down to the pool..

This article states that it is funded by the Indiana Economic Development Foundation through private donations.  I want to know who the donors are and what exactly Pence is doing–I don’t trust the tea partier at all.  They are good about saying one thing and doing the exact opposite–such as government being “too big”–and then, as I noticed yesterday in yet another press release, Pence created four more positions in his office for people who are no doubt cronies of his.  So, how does one “shrink government” by creating more useless positions while eliminating important ones, such as child welfare workers?

So, I’m waiting to see the fallout of this investigation and its connection to Indiana.  Pence and his henchmen are trying to wrest away what little control Glenda Ritz, an official elected by the people of Indiana, has on the Dept of Education.