Here again I'm laughing my ass off.....cause Michael Landon looked a lot like my uncle who is and Ingalls. Yup a direct family line to Laura. If I posted pictures which I will not you would think my uncle should be going after the TV industry. Donna might go stir crazy and if not her Sarah might if they saw pictures of him. He is now an old rancher who has a slew of kids and never had a TV until ,Little House on the Prairie was on the Telly.
I did know a woman with the name: Gladis Bottomly...who became known a Happy Ass among friends...
I'm glad people write what the want to here. I was feeling like things were getting derailed here this past week so I went away for a fresh breath of air.
Obsrevant is our Rush Limbaugh Michelle Bauckman all rolled into one... carry on!
Ok, if you say so, but it wouldn't be possible since I'm a Democrat. Bauckman is spelled Bachmann! I can't stand listening to Rush and click him off, and I don't like Michelle's stance. Actually, I like Biden - both a Democrat and crusty.
So, far all my pedigree bullshit, you can imagine that I can interact with contractors fairly well for having that "veneer" you picked up on. LOL.
I could not stand him. There was something very smarmy about him that rubbed me the wrong way from the very beginning. If I recall correctly, I voted for him 1 of the 2 times.
From a practical standpoint, he was President for 8 years, between 2 recessionary periods, which are sort of naturally occurring phenomena. Talk about timing and luck - much like architecture.
From a personal standpoint, two words: Monica Lewinsky.
Those are 2 beautiful states, each in their own way. I have never had the chance to visit either's seafront cities, let alone their beaches. I have only been to the major population centers in each. Another thing I'd like to see are the mountains of North Carolina. Many people are clueless as to the different biogeographic venues in the Southeast.
i grew up on all the michael landon shows. anything else on our tv was considered satanic by gramma so we pretty much had to love him. and the walton's. i was thinking lil house on the prairie though. and i expect we all believe that the mean sprited ol biddy is someone else...i guess we might have better discussions if we all worried we were the gratuitous malignancy that added color to the episodes.
Deregulated the FCC (Telecommunications Act of 1996), allowing monopolization of the media (5 companies now control the vast majority of all US media).
Signed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which removed the protections put in place with the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 after the First Great Depression, paving the way for the Mortgage Crisis, among many other things.
Signed NAFTA, which as we all know eviscerated manufacturing in this country. What many don't know is that it allowed CorpAg to dump overproduced, taxpayer subsidized corn in Mexico for 20% less than it cost a Mexican subsistence farmer to grow it, radically increasing illegal immigration to the US. The US now has a trade deficit with Mexico, before NAFTA there was a trade surplus.
Signed DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).
Signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which led directly to an unregulated derivatives market, ENRON, credit default swaps, etc., as well stuff that we will no doubt be finding out about for decades to come.
Replaced welfare with workfare without raising the minimum wage to a sustainable level, effectively turning the truly poor into really cheap forced labor.
Signed the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, reducing taxes on the rich (capital gains taxes reduced 1/3). The carrot was a $400 child tax credit for the working class. Whoopie!
Signed The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring "telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time" and leading the way to subsequent violations of constitutional rights.
Signed The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which called for regime change in Iraq and was subsequently used as the basis for the Congressional Authorization for use of Military Force Against Iraq in October 2002 (under Bush).
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
In reference to Nader, I like Jill Stein. Especially after she was arrested for showing up at the Obamney Hofstra debate. What do you think they are afraid of?
Observant with that being said, I'm changing parties....Think I will Become a "Nader-Guy."
Most first-gens are conservative Democrats, reflecting their parents' beliefs. You should understand than from the demographics in your purported region. Some are conservative Republicans and, for historical reasons, many first-gen Cubans are often included in that group. First-gens who become loaded (flush with cash) often switch over to being Republicans.
Wow. I only knew some of that. I was buried deep in cutting museum board and calculating beam deflection, finding an internship, and then taking the ARE while that was going on. It's all stuff of which the reverberations would be, and were, felt later. NAFTA - I was naive, well not really. Since I couldn't go job hunting in Montreal, it was useless to me. And I did sense it wasn't the best game plan, either.
You sure did leave out a lot of partisan information on the origin or at least the bi-partisan role on those acts/bills. It's almost as if you are trying to spin it in favor of some sort of ideology...
@jla-x, "flu shot is complete bs"
Not necessarily complete bs, just less effective than expected by the general populous.
I don't bother with the flu vaccine. But childhood vaccines are getting safer and safer while simultaneously instances of childhood diseases we thought were pretty much gone are now on the rise. I don't especially trust big pharma either, but if they thought they could make more money TREATING measles, pertussis etc. than preventing them they would be supporting the anti-vaxxers instead of the opposite.
Observant please go on...and on and on....then tell us some more.
You need to go on as well. I'm sure New England and Brazil make for some cool stories. School, too. I look for humor in everything. I always come back from my travels with crazy stories.
how about chicken pox? when i was kid, parents wanted their kids to get it young and get it over with. not getting chicken pox when you were young meant you could get it when you're older and the risk of bad side effects were greater.
now there is concern over scarring (even though everyone i knew my age had chicken pox and none of them, to the best of my recollection, had permanent scarring) and things like that so kids are vaccinated against it. i'm not making that choice for any children, so i'm not really on one side of the fence or the other. was there no vaccine available when i was a kid?
if someone doesn't like vaccines, i support their right not get vaccinated as long as it only effects them. some vaccinations are to prevent widespread outbreaks, and you're not doing it for yourself but for you community. i don't think people should be selfish and hurt their communities because of fabricated pseudo-science. i know for myself, doctors sometimes say i should take antibiotics when there is a potential for infection, but i typically don't. i'm not against antibiotics, and if i have an infection of some sort i will take them, i'm just not comfortable with over-use.
i would think the argument for big-pharma is that you can vaccinate everyone, and probably get a government subsidy on top of it, whereas treating the illness you're limited to those that actually get the virus.
There was no reliable chicken pox vaccine until about 12 years ago. My sister is a doctor; her oldest son got chicken pox the disease and she kept him with his slightly younger brother so they would both have it at the same time (my mom did this with my sister and I when we were young, too) and then be done with it. By the time the third child came along the vaccine was improved to the point hat it is now considered safer to have the vaccine than the disease. Now we are seeing older people - because we live longer? - with a higher incidence of shingles, which is a late-life response to the chickenpox virus being in your system, so they are recommending that over-50 year olds get a second vaccine against shingles. I intend to as soon as my doc will let me as I hear shingles SUCKS.
When I was a kid everyone had a dimpled scar on their arm (from the smallpox vaccination, I think) that I always thought was cool, because I never developed one.
curtkram, you said: if someone doesn't like vaccines, i support their right not get vaccinated as long as it only effects them.
What this would mean is they could never leave the house or interact physically with any other human. So that's fine by me, too, if they want to go to those lengths because they're afraid of conspiracy theories.
With all this talk I'll announce that I think my pneumonia is relapsing. Going to the doc tomorrow. curt if you ever get pneumonia *please* take the antibiotics and do all you can to get better - I've never felt so awful and miserable as when I had pneumonia three weeks ago.
observant I don't know about funny but I can tell you about one of the most uncomfortable moments I have had in the last ten years. I will most likely make you laugh. I setting up for a public meeting for a project and my clients lawyer was there also scurrying around the room helping set up. I was just sorta standing in one place when I was bumped and both hands went back in an attempt to catch my balance. Well they did come to rest hard, square on the backside of the young female lawyer. I must have turned a million shades of red. She looked at me and winked, and then said it is ok.....knowing full well it was an accident.
Yes, vaccines are weird things. I always opt to get them, having received a tetanus booster. I've never gotten sick from a vaccine. I had the Hep A/Hep B vaccine. They say that, if you travel, you should have that one. There is currently no Hep C vaccine and there is a national push for testing, irrespective of risk factors.
Fortunately, they've come up with a vaccine for HPV and it is administered to kids prior to high school. It's carried on the skin and some 40% of the adult U.S. population has it, though in a dormant state. The vaccine doesn't reportedly hit the many strains, though. It's only a few strains that are problematic, in that they can cause cervical and ovarian cancer and, more rarely, penile cancer.
Antibiotic allergies are a frightening thing, though. And they can be in someone's DNA, it seems. There is one family of older, rudimentary antibiotics that I was able to piece together that some of my relatives, both here and abroad, are allergic to ... so if about 3 people in a family tree have a problem, you might too.
That IS funny. It's good she had a sense of humor, too. My funniest travel story was a fight with a restauranteur in Greece who spoke better English than I thought, and a loud drunk local on the economy overnight milk train from Lisbon to the Algarve (the south coast) who made the German guy sitting across from me go medieval at about 3 a.m. and various people in the train car got into it. All good stuff.
stories. most of my better ones come from a summer spent alone in countries where i didn't speak the language. the cast includes danish medical students, russian soldiers, an irish U2-wanna-be rock band, and the lady who took admission money at the restroom entrance in the brno train station.
@orhan - any insight into what's currently happening in Turkey? from what I understand it started off as a peaceful protest against developing one of the last remaining green spaces in a neighborhood into a shopping mall and now tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets.
oops - never mind - just saw your news post. will comment there.
there is a lot of spin in those clinton comments. it was a more innocent time in spite of those nasty bits of legislation that got through. i would take those years all back anyday. even newt. the ray-gun days might even be better than today, if not by much.
my kids all had vaccinations this year. somehow we don't have many of those curious claims that preventing disease is a form of mind control or whatever.
google should be able to point you towards a bunch of more similar articles.
there was a whole thing between britian and japan about vaccinations causing autism. in 1993 japan stopped encouraging MMR vaccinations, or something along those lines. i think this has been largely discredited since then, but still, this is not a US thing.
The vaccine=autism link has not only been thoroughly discredited, the doctor who published the study has been relieved of his license and The Lancet printed a retraction. The "study" was pure bunk.
I did read recently that Japan thought they had reached herd immunity for smallpox (in the early 70s, I think?) and stopped giving the inoculation but then had another significant outbreak. So they had to restart the program. That story is a good example of what we now face here in the US: a high enough percentage of people are refusing to vaccinate that our herd immunity is compromised. Add in the explosion of international travel in the past decade and we see things like an outbreak of measles or an upsurge in whooping cough - diseases we thought were pretty much eradicated.
Those "nasty bits" of legislation led directly to the mortgage crisis and the Iraq invasion. If it was a more innocent time, it's simply because you had no idea what was going on.
Sorry to be on and on about this, but disease vectors and contagion are really interesting to me. Which is why I loved 28 Days Later and all those other contagious disease flicks. I blame an issue of Wired from about 1994 that explored a worldwide outbreak and quickly and unpreventably it could spread across the globe in just a few days. That issue scared the crap out of me!
There is a board game called Pandemic. It was really fun. After I played it, I dreamed about pandemics all night! You should check it out, get it for Angus...
all the good movies have a few survivors. i loved steven king's the stand (more the movie than the book. it was really long) kinda delved well outside the disease part, but as i recall it was still a pandemic that killed off everyone. the walking dead, when they went to the CDC in atlanta, was kind of cool too.
all i was saying before is that the immunization paranoia isn't limited to somewhat wealthy middle aged paranoid white men like most of america's problems. this one came from outside.
TINT, I will look for the board game immediately!!
curt I think The Stand (I only read the book, not the movie) and 28 Days Later are interesting because they look at what will happen after and how people will try to create a new society. It seems inevitable that the psychopaths would be able to take control pretty quickly because everyone is scared and getting people to organize responsibly and thoughtfully is a lot harder than forcing people to comply through brute force and scare tactics.
Which is a neat little parallel to the anti-vax debate, huh?
Wow I didn't know that about Japan. It's never ever come up. My daughter just had the vaccine for cancer that the republicans think girls shouldn't get cuz it encourages promiscuity. I was thinking more about that to be honest. But maybe its also condemned here for all I know. In my experience on the ground Japanese are pro health prevention measures in any form. Maybe it's one if those fads that swept through and out and I missed it. Our doctors never said boo and our friends certainly didn't either.
About Clinton, he wasn't in control any more than Obama was. There is a back story to each of those laws that needs to be considered. Ad far as i goes i sm certsinly more aware now but still feek those days were better. My brother in law was piece keeper in Sarajevo instead of fighting in Afghanistan and under fire, just to start. Newt was the tip of a fkuced up point of view about authoritarianism, and now the dems have somehow internalized a lot of that right wing nonsense. Canada's the same except worse cuz we went from Chretien to Harper who is working to dismantle environmental protections and open government process like nobody's business.
The shit all started in the 80's but were really living it now. Not fair to say it was Clinton. It was the whole bloody country starting with Reagan and going downhill ever since. We are in some kinda high consumerist age right now that makes no sense. Before it was just consumerism. Lite even. I think lot of the mistakes and especially the ones clinton made were based on ignorance but now we know better and some folks feel like doubling down. It's a wee bit worrying.
I find it even hard typing on my I-pad....just not the same as a keyboard on a computer. If Steve Jobs had ever figured that aspect of i-pads out he would have sold a lot more of them.
Re: high consumerist age... I agree. We just got back from Paris and while there ran into (what else) a demonstration... but this timeit wasn't about the usual suspects. It was a bunch of young teens / early 20s kids protesting in favor of businesses being opened on Sundays. They were asking to work on Sundays, is what it was. The idea is that supposedly, if businesses are open more on Sundays, there will be a lower teen unemployment rate. We stood there watching for awhile and my partner said he wanted to shout at them "wait, listen to us Americans, don't start down that path! It only leads to you working around the clock non-stop with no guaranteed vacation and the boss will take all the profits anyway! It only leads to an devaluing of the employee!! Don't end up like us!"
...and sure enough, as we looked closer, guess what we saw? All of their tshirts and handouts, everything they were wearing and protesting with, had the name of a business on it. A business was sponsoring the whole thing. Telling the kids "everyone should work more, it will be a better world" and selling it that way, but really ultimately it is always about business wanting more profits. Anyway, we just felt weird to see that there was a business sponsor name on all the tshirts...
(ps while I don't think that working an additional day is in itself is a threat to workers in France, I do think that it contributes in general to an increased sense of the devaluing of labor in France and a higher value on corporations, which is starting to happen... everyone wants to be like America, and that is scary, because the end of that road is not pretty. The entire sensibility of the French society is different - there is a sense of the dignity of the worker, and respect for his/her rights, that becomes entirely lost / intentionally screwed over when you let corporations rule the show. And there are other effects, too. Right now the point of the Sundays off in France is that people spend time with their families- and they DO. Everyone eats together, gathers together, fills up the parks and streets strolling along and window shopping. Once you start to take people out of that equation so they can work, and you open up the businesses, it becomes a day like any other day... and you've lost the one day where collectively, everyone sits together and does nothing but relish each other's company and REST from their work. The societal ramifications of that time are manifold. And frankly I'd rather be an unemployed 20 year old than live in a consumerist society where business is king and the worker is a peon with no respect or agency of any kind. They don't have any student loans or health care costs and they live with their parents through college anyway, what do they need a job so bad for? It just saddened me to see corporations tempt the young with seemingly-good slogans in order to ultimately reap the reward when the culture changes.
anyone ever read Mary Barton? its a novel that my gf teaches in her lit classes and deals with the inequities of the industrial age in england. she works in a little Marx with it and shows a documentary on the triangle building fire and now there is a great deal of discussion about fast fashion and the recent events in Bangladesh. the more things change...
Thread Central
Here again I'm laughing my ass off.....cause Michael Landon looked a lot like my uncle who is and Ingalls. Yup a direct family line to Laura. If I posted pictures which I will not you would think my uncle should be going after the TV industry. Donna might go stir crazy and if not her Sarah might if they saw pictures of him. He is now an old rancher who has a slew of kids and never had a TV until ,Little House on the Prairie was on the Telly.
I did know a woman with the name: Gladis Bottomly...who became known a Happy Ass among friends...
I'm glad people write what the want to here. I was feeling like things were getting derailed here this past week so I went away for a fresh breath of air.
Obsrevant is our Rush Limbaugh Michelle Bauckman all rolled into one... carry on!
s-d-d:
Ok, if you say so, but it wouldn't be possible since I'm a Democrat. Bauckman is spelled Bachmann! I can't stand listening to Rush and click him off, and I don't like Michelle's stance. Actually, I like Biden - both a Democrat and crusty.
So, far all my pedigree bullshit, you can imagine that I can interact with contractors fairly well for having that "veneer" you picked up on. LOL.
observant - if you're a dem, what do you think of Clinton (Bill)?
Miles -
I could not stand him. There was something very smarmy about him that rubbed me the wrong way from the very beginning. If I recall correctly, I voted for him 1 of the 2 times.
From a practical standpoint, he was President for 8 years, between 2 recessionary periods, which are sort of naturally occurring phenomena. Talk about timing and luck - much like architecture.
From a personal standpoint, two words: Monica Lewinsky.
Almost as good as Dick Busch.
hi all, been enjoying vacation in NC and SC...
just ate at a great place in Charleston called The Ordinary
Nam,
Those are 2 beautiful states, each in their own way. I have never had the chance to visit either's seafront cities, let alone their beaches. I have only been to the major population centers in each. Another thing I'd like to see are the mountains of North Carolina. Many people are clueless as to the different biogeographic venues in the Southeast.
i grew up on all the michael landon shows. anything else on our tv was considered satanic by gramma so we pretty much had to love him. and the walton's. i was thinking lil house on the prairie though. and i expect we all believe that the mean sprited ol biddy is someone else...i guess we might have better discussions if we all worried we were the gratuitous malignancy that added color to the episodes.
Observant with that being said, I'm changing parties....Think I will Become a "Nader-Guy."
The Clinton Legacy:
Deregulated the FCC (Telecommunications Act of 1996), allowing monopolization of the media (5 companies now control the vast majority of all US media).
Signed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which removed the protections put in place with the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 after the First Great Depression, paving the way for the Mortgage Crisis, among many other things.
Signed NAFTA, which as we all know eviscerated manufacturing in this country. What many don't know is that it allowed CorpAg to dump overproduced, taxpayer subsidized corn in Mexico for 20% less than it cost a Mexican subsistence farmer to grow it, radically increasing illegal immigration to the US. The US now has a trade deficit with Mexico, before NAFTA there was a trade surplus.
Signed DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).
Signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which led directly to an unregulated derivatives market, ENRON, credit default swaps, etc., as well stuff that we will no doubt be finding out about for decades to come.
Replaced welfare with workfare without raising the minimum wage to a sustainable level, effectively turning the truly poor into really cheap forced labor.
Signed the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, reducing taxes on the rich (capital gains taxes reduced 1/3). The carrot was a $400 child tax credit for the working class. Whoopie!
Signed The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring "telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time" and leading the way to subsequent violations of constitutional rights.
Signed The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which called for regime change in Iraq and was subsequently used as the basis for the Congressional Authorization for use of Military Force Against Iraq in October 2002 (under Bush).
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
In reference to Nader, I like Jill Stein. Especially after she was arrested for showing up at the Obamney Hofstra debate. What do you think they are afraid of?
Observant with that being said, I'm changing parties....Think I will Become a "Nader-Guy."
Most first-gens are conservative Democrats, reflecting their parents' beliefs. You should understand than from the demographics in your purported region. Some are conservative Republicans and, for historical reasons, many first-gen Cubans are often included in that group. First-gens who become loaded (flush with cash) often switch over to being Republicans.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Wow. I only knew some of that. I was buried deep in cutting museum board and calculating beam deflection, finding an internship, and then taking the ARE while that was going on. It's all stuff of which the reverberations would be, and were, felt later. NAFTA - I was naive, well not really. Since I couldn't go job hunting in Montreal, it was useless to me. And I did sense it wasn't the best game plan, either.
I'm currently in a FB war with someone posting anti-vaccine hoohah. Man, you just can't argue logically with these people.
@Miles Jaffe
You sure did leave out a lot of partisan information on the origin or at least the bi-partisan role on those acts/bills. It's almost as if you are trying to spin it in favor of some sort of ideology...
@jla-x, "flu shot is complete bs"
Not necessarily complete bs, just less effective than expected by the general populous.
On a lighter note:
I hired movers solely for furniture and books. I'm taking care of everything else. Archi-nerd problems.
How many books are we talking?
You know, Josh, buying pizza always makes for "free" moving help. It has worked for me!
Those U-Haul trucks can be cheap on weekends, if you don't put many miles on them. I've had some $31 moves, plus feeding my friends, of course.
Observant please go on...and on and on....then tell us some more.
that wasn't Observant that was Miles....sorry....Observant...guess I will have to be more observant.
I don't bother with the flu vaccine. But childhood vaccines are getting safer and safer while simultaneously instances of childhood diseases we thought were pretty much gone are now on the rise. I don't especially trust big pharma either, but if they thought they could make more money TREATING measles, pertussis etc. than preventing them they would be supporting the anti-vaxxers instead of the opposite.
Observant please go on...and on and on....then tell us some more.
You need to go on as well. I'm sure New England and Brazil make for some cool stories. School, too. I look for humor in everything. I always come back from my travels with crazy stories.
how about chicken pox? when i was kid, parents wanted their kids to get it young and get it over with. not getting chicken pox when you were young meant you could get it when you're older and the risk of bad side effects were greater.
now there is concern over scarring (even though everyone i knew my age had chicken pox and none of them, to the best of my recollection, had permanent scarring) and things like that so kids are vaccinated against it. i'm not making that choice for any children, so i'm not really on one side of the fence or the other. was there no vaccine available when i was a kid?
if someone doesn't like vaccines, i support their right not get vaccinated as long as it only effects them. some vaccinations are to prevent widespread outbreaks, and you're not doing it for yourself but for you community. i don't think people should be selfish and hurt their communities because of fabricated pseudo-science. i know for myself, doctors sometimes say i should take antibiotics when there is a potential for infection, but i typically don't. i'm not against antibiotics, and if i have an infection of some sort i will take them, i'm just not comfortable with over-use.
i would think the argument for big-pharma is that you can vaccinate everyone, and probably get a government subsidy on top of it, whereas treating the illness you're limited to those that actually get the virus.
There was no reliable chicken pox vaccine until about 12 years ago. My sister is a doctor; her oldest son got chicken pox the disease and she kept him with his slightly younger brother so they would both have it at the same time (my mom did this with my sister and I when we were young, too) and then be done with it. By the time the third child came along the vaccine was improved to the point hat it is now considered safer to have the vaccine than the disease. Now we are seeing older people - because we live longer? - with a higher incidence of shingles, which is a late-life response to the chickenpox virus being in your system, so they are recommending that over-50 year olds get a second vaccine against shingles. I intend to as soon as my doc will let me as I hear shingles SUCKS.
When I was a kid everyone had a dimpled scar on their arm (from the smallpox vaccination, I think) that I always thought was cool, because I never developed one.
curtkram, you said: if someone doesn't like vaccines, i support their right not get vaccinated as long as it only effects them.
What this would mean is they could never leave the house or interact physically with any other human. So that's fine by me, too, if they want to go to those lengths because they're afraid of conspiracy theories.
With all this talk I'll announce that I think my pneumonia is relapsing. Going to the doc tomorrow. curt if you ever get pneumonia *please* take the antibiotics and do all you can to get better - I've never felt so awful and miserable as when I had pneumonia three weeks ago.
observant I don't know about funny but I can tell you about one of the most uncomfortable moments I have had in the last ten years. I will most likely make you laugh. I setting up for a public meeting for a project and my clients lawyer was there also scurrying around the room helping set up. I was just sorta standing in one place when I was bumped and both hands went back in an attempt to catch my balance. Well they did come to rest hard, square on the backside of the young female lawyer. I must have turned a million shades of red. She looked at me and winked, and then said it is ok.....knowing full well it was an accident.
Yes, vaccines are weird things. I always opt to get them, having received a tetanus booster. I've never gotten sick from a vaccine. I had the Hep A/Hep B vaccine. They say that, if you travel, you should have that one. There is currently no Hep C vaccine and there is a national push for testing, irrespective of risk factors.
Fortunately, they've come up with a vaccine for HPV and it is administered to kids prior to high school. It's carried on the skin and some 40% of the adult U.S. population has it, though in a dormant state. The vaccine doesn't reportedly hit the many strains, though. It's only a few strains that are problematic, in that they can cause cervical and ovarian cancer and, more rarely, penile cancer.
Antibiotic allergies are a frightening thing, though. And they can be in someone's DNA, it seems. There is one family of older, rudimentary antibiotics that I was able to piece together that some of my relatives, both here and abroad, are allergic to ... so if about 3 people in a family tree have a problem, you might too.
My temperature was 99 this afternoon and now 100. Dammit. Pneumonia bites the big donkey dong.
Some of the craziest things happen to me...
s-d-d:
That IS funny. It's good she had a sense of humor, too. My funniest travel story was a fight with a restauranteur in Greece who spoke better English than I thought, and a loud drunk local on the economy overnight milk train from Lisbon to the Algarve (the south coast) who made the German guy sitting across from me go medieval at about 3 a.m. and various people in the train car got into it. All good stuff.
@ Randall Holmes
re: partisan. There are two parties. One consists of corporate-sponsored and corporate-serving politicians, the other of citizens.
stories. most of my better ones come from a summer spent alone in countries where i didn't speak the language. the cast includes danish medical students, russian soldiers, an irish U2-wanna-be rock band, and the lady who took admission money at the restroom entrance in the brno train station.
@orhan - any insight into what's currently happening in Turkey? from what I understand it started off as a peaceful protest against developing one of the last remaining green spaces in a neighborhood into a shopping mall and now tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets.
oops - never mind - just saw your news post. will comment there.
there is a lot of spin in those clinton comments. it was a more innocent time in spite of those nasty bits of legislation that got through. i would take those years all back anyday. even newt. the ray-gun days might even be better than today, if not by much.
my kids all had vaccinations this year. somehow we don't have many of those curious claims that preventing disease is a form of mind control or whatever.
anyway, get well donna. sucks being sick.
in japan or canada will?
the anti-innoculation thing is, or at least was at some point, bigger in japan than the US.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/japanese-measles-epidemic-brings-campuses-to-standstill/2007/05/27/1180205052602.html
google should be able to point you towards a bunch of more similar articles.
there was a whole thing between britian and japan about vaccinations causing autism. in 1993 japan stopped encouraging MMR vaccinations, or something along those lines. i think this has been largely discredited since then, but still, this is not a US thing.
The vaccine=autism link has not only been thoroughly discredited, the doctor who published the study has been relieved of his license and The Lancet printed a retraction. The "study" was pure bunk.
I did read recently that Japan thought they had reached herd immunity for smallpox (in the early 70s, I think?) and stopped giving the inoculation but then had another significant outbreak. So they had to restart the program. That story is a good example of what we now face here in the US: a high enough percentage of people are refusing to vaccinate that our herd immunity is compromised. Add in the explosion of international travel in the past decade and we see things like an outbreak of measles or an upsurge in whooping cough - diseases we thought were pretty much eradicated.
Will, care to despin those comments?
Those "nasty bits" of legislation led directly to the mortgage crisis and the Iraq invasion. If it was a more innocent time, it's simply because you had no idea what was going on.
Sorry to be on and on about this, but disease vectors and contagion are really interesting to me. Which is why I loved 28 Days Later and all those other contagious disease flicks. I blame an issue of Wired from about 1994 that explored a worldwide outbreak and quickly and unpreventably it could spread across the globe in just a few days. That issue scared the crap out of me!
There is a board game called Pandemic. It was really fun. After I played it, I dreamed about pandemics all night! You should check it out, get it for Angus...
all the good movies have a few survivors. i loved steven king's the stand (more the movie than the book. it was really long) kinda delved well outside the disease part, but as i recall it was still a pandemic that killed off everyone. the walking dead, when they went to the CDC in atlanta, was kind of cool too.
all i was saying before is that the immunization paranoia isn't limited to somewhat wealthy middle aged paranoid white men like most of america's problems. this one came from outside.
TINT, I will look for the board game immediately!!
curt I think The Stand (I only read the book, not the movie) and 28 Days Later are interesting because they look at what will happen after and how people will try to create a new society. It seems inevitable that the psychopaths would be able to take control pretty quickly because everyone is scared and getting people to organize responsibly and thoughtfully is a lot harder than forcing people to comply through brute force and scare tactics.
Which is a neat little parallel to the anti-vax debate, huh?
About Clinton, he wasn't in control any more than Obama was. There is a back story to each of those laws that needs to be considered. Ad far as i goes i sm certsinly more aware now but still feek those days were better. My brother in law was piece keeper in Sarajevo instead of fighting in Afghanistan and under fire, just to start. Newt was the tip of a fkuced up point of view about authoritarianism, and now the dems have somehow internalized a lot of that right wing nonsense. Canada's the same except worse cuz we went from Chretien to Harper who is working to dismantle environmental protections and open government process like nobody's business.
The shit all started in the 80's but were really living it now. Not fair to say it was Clinton. It was the whole bloody country starting with Reagan and going downhill ever since. We are in some kinda high consumerist age right now that makes no sense. Before it was just consumerism. Lite even. I think lot of the mistakes and especially the ones clinton made were based on ignorance but now we know better and some folks feel like doubling down. It's a wee bit worrying.
iPhone is cool but unruly This is my catchphrase lately. Damn double posts.
I find it even hard typing on my I-pad....just not the same as a keyboard on a computer. If Steve Jobs had ever figured that aspect of i-pads out he would have sold a lot more of them.
Re: high consumerist age... I agree. We just got back from Paris and while there ran into (what else) a demonstration... but this time it wasn't about the usual suspects. It was a bunch of young teens / early 20s kids protesting in favor of businesses being opened on Sundays. They were asking to work on Sundays, is what it was. The idea is that supposedly, if businesses are open more on Sundays, there will be a lower teen unemployment rate. We stood there watching for awhile and my partner said he wanted to shout at them "wait, listen to us Americans, don't start down that path! It only leads to you working around the clock non-stop with no guaranteed vacation and the boss will take all the profits anyway! It only leads to an devaluing of the employee!! Don't end up like us!"
...and sure enough, as we looked closer, guess what we saw? All of their tshirts and handouts, everything they were wearing and protesting with, had the name of a business on it. A business was sponsoring the whole thing. Telling the kids "everyone should work more, it will be a better world" and selling it that way, but really ultimately it is always about business wanting more profits. Anyway, we just felt weird to see that there was a business sponsor name on all the tshirts...
(ps while I don't think that working an additional day is in itself is a threat to workers in France, I do think that it contributes in general to an increased sense of the devaluing of labor in France and a higher value on corporations, which is starting to happen... everyone wants to be like America, and that is scary, because the end of that road is not pretty. The entire sensibility of the French society is different - there is a sense of the dignity of the worker, and respect for his/her rights, that becomes entirely lost / intentionally screwed over when you let corporations rule the show. And there are other effects, too. Right now the point of the Sundays off in France is that people spend time with their families- and they DO. Everyone eats together, gathers together, fills up the parks and streets strolling along and window shopping. Once you start to take people out of that equation so they can work, and you open up the businesses, it becomes a day like any other day... and you've lost the one day where collectively, everyone sits together and does nothing but relish each other's company and REST from their work. The societal ramifications of that time are manifold. And frankly I'd rather be an unemployed 20 year old than live in a consumerist society where business is king and the worker is a peon with no respect or agency of any kind. They don't have any student loans or health care costs and they live with their parents through college anyway, what do they need a job so bad for? It just saddened me to see corporations tempt the young with seemingly-good slogans in order to ultimately reap the reward when the culture changes.
^ Ah, the rewards of globalism.
anyone ever read Mary Barton? its a novel that my gf teaches in her lit classes and deals with the inequities of the industrial age in england. she works in a little Marx with it and shows a documentary on the triangle building fire and now there is a great deal of discussion about fast fashion and the recent events in Bangladesh. the more things change...
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