Archive for the ‘Health and wellness’ Category

What the &#@!!@%&&$@!!!

Posted: July 18, 2021 in Health and wellness, News and politics
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Suppose you look at a map indicating which states are highly vaccinated and which are barely vaccinated. In that case, it looks just like a political map of Blue (DEM) and Red (GOP) states just before an election! I’ll let you draw your own conclusions here, but be aware, people are dying, and things are heating up again, plus the variant is becoming more widespread!

This can be checked again and again, city by city. The people now getting sick and having to be hospitalized are almost entirely unvaccinated! The Governor of Arizona has ordered schools with unvaccinated school children who have been directly exposed to COVID- 19 not to be forced to quarantine! The school districts are fighting back and so far have not changed their policy. But this is an example of GOP leadership putting lives at risk for politics! Afraid to lose their fanatical Trump-based support even at the cost of children’s lives! How in the hell have we allowed this to occur!

The false information about the COVID-19 vaccines is rampant! And has been pushed by several GOP members and media companies like FOX News! This information is killing people, plain and simple! The fact that, especially in Florida, they bad-mouth Dr. Anthony Fauci is because the truth hurts! But politicians in the state do not want to disenfranchise themselves from the state’s massive population of Trump zealots. So they put lives in danger! Yes, they will kill you rather than endanger their political future. And that rings true of all GOP-led states!

You will hear people like Pence telling you that since his administration, we have had runaway spending. Well, here is a little truth for you. Trump downplayed the virus and held up spending to make his numbers look better, killing thousands unnecessarily with Pence support, I might add! Our current President did not neglect his duty for the sake of looking good; he attacked the root of our problem, which took money! And with unprecedented success, well, except in GOP-run states! People are dying in more significant numbers in states where the GOP is in charge! That alone should tell you where the truth lies.

So, since Trump and his family are vaccinated, why is he not telling his base that it is safe and necessary? The same reason I have already talked about, his base! He is afraid to antagonize them! And he does not care about people! So as long as he is convinced by letting them die, he will maintain more of their support overall; well, let them die! And this is just plain common sense, not politics! If we had the same misinformation campaign, politically motivated back in the day, we would still be losing the war against polio and other eradicated diseases.

When you don’t mask up, when you do not quarantine when exposed, when you do not get fully vaccinated, you are risking thousands! You only need to do three things. Get vaccinated, wear masks where it is mandated, and isolate if you know you have been exposed! If you do, we win; if you don’t, we die, simple logic. It would help if you were not making life and death decisions based on your politics!

Before You Vote, Look, Listen, and Pay Attention

Posted: September 1, 2020 in Health and wellness, News and politics
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(Info from PBS News Hour) Compared to people in most developed nations, including Canada, Americans have for years paid far more for health care while staying sicker and dying sooner!


“To Canadians, the notion that access to health care should be based on need, not ability to pay, is a defining national value.” Americans simply don’t live with that confidence. Losing a job is bad enough, but imagine that you’re going to have to lose everything you’ve got to qualify for Medicaid. Sell your house. Sell your car and basically be on the bones of your ass before you get any medical coverage! That is our way of dealing with healthcare! In 2019, health expenses drove more Americans into bankruptcy than any other reason, according to the American Journal of Public Health. That same year, health care consumed 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, a greater share than in any other developed country, including Canada!


So here is my take. We need universal healthcare, but we need to design it better than Canada who has long wait periods for elective or none emergency operations. They (Canada) do not cover dental, for example, or drugs that have not been prescribed by a hospital. They are way cheaper even when you do have to pay, however. But Switzerland, for example, has a system where you pay, but if you cannot afford to pay the govt pays your premiums. No one goes uncovered. So what we have in the U.S. sucks, it is more expensive, it will bankrupt you before it will even give you minimal coverage, and you die younger, and are sick more than any other industrialized nation.

So I do not know exactly where Biden is going to be, but it has to be better than Trump’s plan which is to get rid of what we do have with no plan to replace it, at all! And he also wants to permanently get rid of payroll taxes for medicare and social security which will bankrupt SS in three years with no ability to pay us any dollars at all. So consider this when you vote, a vote for Trump means you die sooner, stay sick longer, and if you are like me and depend on my Social Security, I will starve, lose my home, my car, and be on the street in Trump‘s America! And so will you, please look at Trump’s policies, at what he does versus what he says while campaigning! They are never the same, and you and I both suffer, no matter whether we are left or right-leaning! Thank you!

Socialism is Alive in the GOP

Posted: March 4, 2019 in climate change, Health and wellness, Life, News and politics, science
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Let’s start with a few facts. There are no true socialist countries in the world, never have been. There are countries that spout socialist ideas and like the Soviet Union, as it was called during the cold war era, mixed socialism and communism ideologies together, but was neither. It was a dictatorship or a monarchy take your pick! The communist party owned everything, controlled everything, and gave the populace enough to sustain the workforce, not much else!

So Trump wants you to believe, and why you would not just automatically assume anything he said was a lie with his record, that the Democratic Party wants us to become a socialist country! That liberals want to destroy capitalism using climate change as its driving force! That his wall and his rule are necessary to keep our country from being overrun and decimated by non-white criminals, and by any green initiatives, again an attack on capitalism, according to Trump! That he is a religious icon and that Christianity is under attack and the Christian Bible should rule our education and our government. In that vein, he states that the Constitution is too restrictive and the rules need to be rewritten! His words, not mine!

So now, let’s look at a few things from a world point of view. If climate change is not happening, and we are not accelerating it (humankind) then why is it that we are the only country, the only one, on the entire planet not to actively engage in the fight to combat it! Or why, on the world stage, are we the only industrial nation not to provide universal health care to its citizens, even though we spend way more than they do on healthcare, have less positive outcomes, a lower life expectancy than all to them! Again, the only one! When everyone else on the planet says one thing, and you are the lone holdout, does that not suggest you may be on the wrong side of a said issue? Especially since our own Pentagon has told us that climate change is the #1 most dangerous threat to our national security! That prestigious organizations across the globe like NASA and our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have said that climate change is real, it is caused in large part by our industry and lack of restraint. And that it will be devastating to our economy, safety, and quality of life. Yes even under the Trump admin they still say the same thing!

Now let us dwell on the title of this article for just a moment. Trump only cares about power, money, and adulation, as do a majority of his fellow Republicans, they just do not take it the edge of lunacy, but they protect their President because he is their scapegoat. Get it while you can and screw the rest mentality exists in our political representatives, and if you are honest, more prolific as a GOP trait. In that pursuit, they have given out corporate welfare by the trillions, including huge perks to the most wealthy among us. At the same time write-offs that policeman, firefighters, and teachers used to get were abolished, in favor of the rich being able to write off the maintenance and storage costs of their private jets! If you block any attempt to barter for the best prices for drugs, what possible moral road have you just gone down, or are we protecting oligarchs and their bottom line? Of course, we are! They never replaced the Affordable Care Act with the big beautiful and so much better plan Trump promised! They, Republicans, are not even trying to create one, they never intended to! The ACA messed with the oligarch’s profit margins and that could not be allowed to happen. And since money now has as much standing as our citizenry, it just stood up and bought what it wanted, or those that have it did, anyway!

I do not know if you are aware, but the countries that inhabit the planet earth do not consider us a capitalist country, but an oligarchy! They no longer trust us, and think we are a threat to the health of the planet and its safety! And no matter what Trump says, he is not respected, but rather he is feared among our allies for his ignorance, his innate fascination with dictators, any so-called strong man, and people who have absolute power over their respective populations. This is power he admires and wants! This is why countries that used to be our allies are looking elsewhere because we are now thought of as a bullying nation, not a bastion of peace or safety for the globe, not any longer!

So Trump, our Liar in Chief, has already started on his campaign of misinformation and outright lies to make the American people think that he is at war and that he is our savior! Just fact check the CPAC speech, there was no truth in anything he said! It was all misdirection, obfuscation, and prevarication! If you cannot bear to vote democratic, at least try and elect someone who has some integrity, some moral values! I am sure there must be a Republican candidate that has not been accused of sexual misconduct, is not under investigation, convicted, or confessed to multiple crimes out there somewhere, find he or she and get rid of the orange menace!

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing — Sparkonit

Posted: November 20, 2017 in Health and wellness, Uncategorized
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If you think you are smarter than everyone around you, you’re definitely not. If you have a colleague who thinks he is much better at his job than everyone, he is definitely not. Well, if you feel this way about yourself, or come across anyone who overestimates their own abilities the same way you do,…

via The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing — Sparkonit

The Facts, Nothing But The Facts!

Posted: October 12, 2017 in Health and wellness, Life, News and politics, science
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This is in response to a post about how Democrats were originally for slavery and were opposed to civil rights! Well I had to respond, actually a friend asked for my opinion, and she got a little more than she bargained for, I am sure! So here goes! 

If you look at history and the platforms of both parties they have completely switched ideologies since the days of Lincoln. So what used to be the democrats is actually represented by republicans, and vice-versa. It of course is not as simple as just switching names, but the Democratic Party of old does not exist as such anymore, has not probably in our lifetime! So what is claimed is accurate, just not accurate to ascribe those attributes to the current party. The democrats have lots of problems which they need to solve, but if you look at what Republicans are trying to do right now, for example getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, trying to completely shut down the education and environmental agencies in total, trying to open up open pit mining in the heart of the last remaining natural Salmon fishery, closing down or vastly reducing our park systems and opening them up to mining and oil interests, I cannot see this as in our interest. The premise of the Republican Party is a solid one, but Republicans now in power are not abiding by or even resembling such a premise. I used to be a staunch Republican, but when they became bought and paid for, I had to leave. Not saying there are not bought and paid for Democrats, but way less in my opinion. If you dig into social security, it is income deduction based, does not affect the debt, and would be solvent if left alone and not the Fed piggy bank. But employers, especially large ones, have to match the Soc. Sec. contribution. Now they figure all that in when deciding how much salary to pay an individual, along with 401k matching, health care, vacation time, etc. But that is the driving force to the GOP hatred of this particular program, and in other forms of imagined attacks on their bottom line tend to foment hatred for all healthcare programs! Why after seven or eight years did the Republicans not build their own healthcare bill instead of trying to shove a hastily thrown together bill down our throats in secret to try and fool us into thinking they had our interest at heart! Because they never intended to offer a healthcare plan. They thought we would let them  get rid of the ACA and then they would just ignore cries for a new program until it faded away!  Big business, pharmaceuticals, petroleum companies, and others, all make billions, even trillions in profit, and they need to keep increasing profit or their stockholders get nasty! So that is what is being legislated, not our needs or wants or desires. Politicians get their money for re-election from these sources so you and I do not figure into their machinations in congress anymore. We have always been a socialist democracy. Otherwise there would be no fire, police, emergency response teams, paramedics, interstate highways, and the list goes on. So you have to decide if backing a person who acts like a bully in a grade school sandbox, who lies every single day, tells you exactly what you want to hear but has no intention of actually doing any of it, who changes horses midstream on policy weekly, and who cannot let any slight go no matter how insignificant it is! So he undermines his own secretary, his cabinet members flee in disgust, almost all of his appointments are still empty, he has no takers, despite his blaming democrats or Obama for everything. Tillerson almost left this summer! The buck stops at the Presidents desk, but he does not know that! Sorry for going postal here, but I have a lot of pent up rage at what is going on. I spend long hours reading bills, studying history, and looking at foreign news, even Russian outlets along with British, Irish, etc., to try and get the real picture of our world and our place in it. We are not the jewel of the earth anymore, we are more like a cancer! Education and science are scoffed at right now, and we are going to be sorry for letting those two slip our grasp. We need to start paying attention to science and education again or we are going to fail as a country! Our esteem in the world by our peers has diminished by leaps and bounds. This is not my opinion, it is a fact! You cannot replace a scientist with multiple degrees with a used car salesmen in an agency based on science and expect him to make the right choices for our well being. I am talking about the Environmental Protection Agency, oh and NASA as well! Anyway, I will shut up now, but I was asked!

 

I Look and Listen Differently, then Think!

Posted: October 8, 2017 in Health and wellness, Life
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I look at things differently than most folks. But here is my quarter cuz 2 cents won’t do it! The world is overpopulated, people are just not going to give up sex, just is not gonna happen! Our resources are already strained and our planet being too crowded causes most of our pollution. So, what do you do to lower the world’s population? You make birth control and sex education available everywhere to everyone. Now certain religions harp on you to have a dozen or so kids. This was their effort to make more Catholic babies, or Protestant babies, Muslim, Hindu; you see where I am going here! They wanted a majority, so they mandated large families within their respective religious communities. Going to have to get over that! I am not talking abortion, to hot to handle! If you are going to start talking birth control is a killer, well you are a problem that has to be dealt with. I personally do not believe I have any right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her own body, so I will leave it at that! We are scheduled to double our population in just a few decades, and your children’s children will be living in chaos! Now some white folks are saying that only white people will hold back on large families and babies of color will overrun us, and eventually we will be a minority! So what! I am already a minority in California and it has not hurt me one bit! I say everyone marry outside your race, so in a few generations everyone has a nice light tan and the race issue goes away! If you notice, mixed race marriages make some really beautiful and bright children! It is like Mother Nature said wow, you have finally quit marrying into the same gene pool, and look at me cook now! I would have said to also marry outside your religion, but I did not want to start another war! However, after a few generations, everyone would have a totally different attitude about religion. I mean, how do you wage war on your spouse or your own grandchildren. I guess waging war on a spouse is not unheard of, but you get my drift!

 

Why you should call or write Congress

Posted: September 21, 2017 in Health and wellness, News and politics, Uncategorized
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I am asking my GOP friends to call or write their representatives and senators and tell them you are against rolling back or abolishing the Affordable Care Act and the new GOP tax iniative! Ask them instead to work across the aisle and make both better. We need healthcare that does not murder people so the rich can get richer. How is that Christian, if that is the standard you are using? But these attempts at getting rid of it come with nothing to replace it. This last bid to roll it back is designed specifically to hurt Blue states, but, and you can look this up, Red states are the poorest, most in need of education improvement, and have more people in poverty than blue states, by a large margin. So losing Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act will hurt them in very large numbers! We are talking about Republican voters, core Trump supporters. So all of these multiple attempts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act are because money ordered it! Yes the trillion dollar health insurance industry lobby who have bought and paid for politicians have said get rid of it, we do not want our massive profit margin screwed up by poor people, or the middle class for that matter! Now I myself do not depend on the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid, I have a great private insurance plan provided by Ma Bell plus Medicare! But I am not blind to the what or why that is going on with our healthcare in congress. Paid for politicians who serve money, not you or I, are responsible for taking needed care away from millions. Block grants, give me a break, the states that need the ACA and medicaid the most are so poor that any money they get from block grants will just be like throwing a cup of water in the ocean and expecting to see it rise. Tax reform, sure we need it, but reducing the taxes on the rich when they are already lower than anytime in history drives up the debt! Of course the GOP is preaching trickle down economics again, which has never worked! Ever! Please educate yourselves on this issue, it means the very lives of your children are at stake! If living healthy and even moderately comfortable lives for your children, grandchildren, even yourself, is important, than quit swallowing the swill big money dumps in your trough. And please get off the socialist kick! This has always been a socialist democracy. Police, fire, emergency services, hurricane and flood relief, all social programs. The list goes on and on. Could some be handled better, you bet, but that is where and how our attention needs to used, to make our system work better, not use it to make even more money for the top while the middle class shrinks, the povery level climbs, and education suffers. Convincing you to distrust media, science, education, and hate social programs is how they eventually enslave us. It is how every strongman dictatorship has evolved, it is why history is important. It is why, when all but .5% of scientists warn you that certain things are fact, not fiction, you need to pay attention. And be careful of non-science in your schools, your children will not be able to compete in the world without science, without an understanding of history, without civics. Do you know that most Red state voters, yes voters, cannot even name the three branches of our government! How the hell are they supposed to know when the hoodwinking begins if they do not understand how government works. The executive, for emergencies and national defense, the legislative too hold the executive accountable, make and pass laws, and the judiciary to hold both accountable to the constitution and We The People! None of that can work when money is worshipped over the constitution, or over the wishes of the People!  Congress no longer votes as their constituency tells them, they are paid for politicians. Look at the agenda people, it does you and I no good at all. A tough talking adolescent is not what you need in the White House, mark my words, history will bear me out!

Please access and read the link provided, it will give you important information about what I am talking about!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e

HIV Cure May Have Been Found. Scientists See No Sign Of Virus In Patient’s Blood Following A New Treatment — Sparkonit

Posted: October 7, 2016 in Health and wellness, Uncategorized
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A 44 year-old British man has appeared to be completely free of HIV following a new treatment which has been labelled ‘kick and kill’ to eradicate the virus. Of 50 patients currently taking part in the trial for this new HIV treatment, this man who has remained anonymous, is the first to show remarkable progress…

via HIV Cure May Have Been Found. Scientists See No Sign Of Virus In Patient’s Blood Following A New Treatment — Sparkonit

Posting Bullshit!

Posted: July 8, 2014 in Health and wellness, News and politics
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Why do we do it? I mean it! They have been talking about the dumbing down of conservatives, so why make it so easy for them to make such claims? Science deniers, history rewriters, with a flat earth mentality are running amuck and we are agreeing with them. I mean we have conservative Christians who have built museums based on the Flintstones as a documentary! People who cannot grasp the difference between the terms weather and climate seem to abound in the conservative world. They also do not know the difference between sheet ice and glacial or permanent ice, which is one example of weather and climate. Maybe they just choose not to in order to conform to what rich and powerful conservatives have been telling them to think! Am I picking on conservatives, well, yes I am. Most of my long-term friends are conservative so I care about them.

A lot of what I see posted can be disproved in about two minutes! Even if I have never heard of the subject before by just making use of the magic called the Internet. Which means the person posting did not bother, just copied and posted from the first thing that made him or her feel superior and better than all of those freeloading commie socialists he or she knows is out to suck them dry. This is a perfect example of “dumb”. It does not mean that you are dumb, but it is an example of a dumb act which fuels the dumbing down of conservatives rhetoric. So I guess a few examples are necessary, so here goes. I will not go into global warming or evolution, just be aware I believe in both. I will admit that the global warming issue is complex and since it is a global phenomenon is too complex for a discussion here. If you do not believe in evolution then nothing I say to you will matter anyway, I believe you will be too hard to reach.

I will start with stuff I saw this morning. Conservatives, or lets call them by a more common name in Washington, Republicans, are just all incensed over the President using the power of the executive order. They act like it is something rare and unheard of, or at least something we rarely have ever done. Well let’s take a look at the actual numbers of a couple of recent Republican presidents! Ronald Reagan used it 381 times. George W. Bush used it 291 times compared to the current 168 of Barack Obama. These are actually low numbers. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued 3,467 executive orders. There are several others in the thousands, for a total of 15,177 issued so far. This is an example of a party redefining anything this president does in a negative way, even to the point of threatening to sue him for doing what Reagan and Bush did at least a hundred times more than he has. Do not be fooled by why these other presidents used the executive order, it was exactly for the same reason Pres. Obama has. They either knew something was not going to get through congress they thought was needed, or they did not want to wait for it. Just because someone does not agree does not now make something illegal that has been legal for over a century. You can bring up SCOTUS if you like, but I am convinced they are, for the most part, bought and paid for, just like most of our politicians, so I am not taking much stock in their rulings. However, if anything President Obama has done were actually illegal, the Republicans would not be confused about what they are suing about or hesitant to file charges. The very fact that they have been going over every action the man has ever taken with a microscope but have never filed any charges is the best proof that he has committed no crimes.

Now do not get it into your head that I am defending everything this President does because I am not. He has plenty of faults to go around. But if you act like the boy who cried wolf too frequently, then when the wolf really shows up who is going to be paying attention!

I firmly believe that most of the reasons everything Obama is being discredited or opposed is for a very special agenda. Why do you think this congress, at least the Republican faction, has practically filibustered congress to a complete standstill. They are taking a hit for these actions but still persist in opposing anything Obama endorses. I mean anything and everything! This agenda is racism, don’t like that, too bad, it is the truth! The plan is fairly simple, make this administration look as bad as can possibly be managed and make sure it is always linked to the President. In this way they hope the voters will not consider another black President anytime in the near future, if ever! I could list at least a hundred photos that have been doctored to show either the President or his wife not respecting the flag, for example. If you look at the info and contact the original photographer and reporter, the pictures are not authentic, not a single one. One of the more popular ones that shows Mrs. Obama disrespecting the flag standing behind her husband while the flag was being lowered at end of day, well she was not even present at the event depicted, the photo had been doctored. Another showing the President, too casually dressed for the event, and hands down at his sides while everyone else had theirs over their hearts, well he was actually standing on a golf green watching someone else hitting away, again doctored photos. It is crap like that that I see every day that makes me ashamed.

Next, very briefly I will discuss Obamacare, or more correctly the Affordable Care Act. A lot of you are mistaking this for actual insurance when it is not. It is merely spelling out some rules to make it more affordable and available. The rule about a fine if you don’t buy in needs some tweaking in my opinion, but the rules for not being able to deny coverage because of a former illness is long overdue. How much they can charge has a cap by how much profit they are making. I don’t have a problem with that, but these last two items are why insurance and drug companies are spending billions to get Obamacare out. It is all about money, theirs, not yours. You are not even required to use the official website. You can get your coverage however you want, it is just easier to see what is out there on the website. California, where I live, does not use the federal website, we set up our own which works way better and is perfectly legal. Small business, well there are enough lies out there about that to blot out the sun. My take is that if you have more than 50 employees you need to be doing something to help them out. Plus you know that raises and bonuses will be calibrated to help defray the cost, but people need this. Plus it takes the strain off of emergency rooms. In rural areas you think so what, but here in heavily populated areas, going to an emergency room is a nightmare. So pick at it, make it better, but talking about repealing it without another plan that incorporates some of the much needed things it includes is wrong. The posts, adds, and commercials that I have investigated about losing insurance and costs going way up have all turned out to be false, every single one. If you are claiming to be a practicing Christian and posting any of this junk, then shame on you! You can’t have it both ways.

I have followers here and in several countries now; not many I admit, but I’ll take what I can get! But the people I really care about, well I have no evidence they actually read my blogs. If I have emailed you this blog, then I care about you and you are special to me. I do not expect you to just fall in line. I know better than that, but I hope you will at least allow my blogs to make you think about the ideas put forth. I promise your brain will not explode and that whatever I have is not catching, I wish it were!

So in closing, check out what you post before you post it. Make sure it is not fiction, if you cannot verify, then do not post it because it is probably made up. Plus use your brain-housing group for more than a hat rack when looking at some of this stuff. Whatever the President is, he is not unintelligent. He is not going to disrespect the flag in front of billions of people and neither is his wife. Even if he is the Muslim terrorist you believe him to be he is not going to make it that easy for you. But that is just another embarrassing piece of crap out there like his birth certificate, no degree, and not being an American. Do I need to say it again? Ok I will let it slide this time. Just please remember the boy who cried wolf example. If you want your opinion to matter you have to post responsibly or you are just making yourself and those you support less, not more!

I would also like to recommend you watch Inequality for All. It is an eye opener. It is done by Robert Reich, former United States Secretary of Labor, Harvard professor, and currently the Professor of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley. You can find it on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, etc. I know some of you consider me a pain. But I believe we must stay engaged and constantly updating our education. If you know me from Council, just remember I love you regardless of whether we see eye to eye on policy.

Global Warming versus Climate Change

Posted: June 7, 2014 in Health and wellness, Life, News and politics
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Forget that big business hires lobbyists to convince us there is no such thing as global warming. Forget that 97% of scientists in the field agree that there is. Forget that if there really weren’t any global warming no one would be spending untold millions to convince us otherwise because the facts would be self-evident. That circumstance alone chaps my hide! Because global warming is just that, self-evident, all you have to do is pull your head out of the sand (or any other place it might have been stuck) and look out at the world.

Water temp in the oceans is up. The earth itself is heating up all around the globe. NASA has been photographing both poles from space for quite some time now, and they show that ice sheets and glaciers are melting at an increasing rate. Now one argument is that this is a natural phenomenon and is not aggravated by what man does or does not do. I myself do not deny that there could be natural cycles that would give us at least some of our symptoms. However, these would occur because of fluctuations in the suns temperature that it is sharing with our planet. We now have the capability to measure how hot the sun is and we have been monitoring it for decades. The temp is staying constant, so it is not the problem. Plus the warming effect would take place during daylight; you know when the sun is actually shining on a portion of the planet!

But satellites show that the earth warms up more at night and winter than in daylight or summer, which supports the supposition that it is being caused by an excess of Co2, not the sun.

What is the best Co2 scrubber we have available for the planet? I think they are called plants, which uses up Co2 in photosynthesis and produces oxygen, which some of us actually need to live. (Well maybe not politicians, I think maybe they are part of an alien plot to just kill us off without a shot being fired.) So where does most photosynthesis take place, why in the ocean by plankton. As a matter of fact if we lose this resource we all die. Not an exaggeration, we all die! So lets keep dumping our sewers into it and making huge trash islands the size of Texas out in the Pacific. What is the next best resource, well any growing plant, but in enough concentration to really make a difference, well that would be a rain forest. So lets keep cutting them down at a hundred plus acres a day.

So let me see, we pump billions of metric tons of pollutants into the atmosphere regularly, then we do our best to kill off the two most important resources to combat the harm we are doing, but hey, man is not responsible. Bull, this world is our house, and we my friends, are the damn termites.

Scientists have been warning us that we could cause global warming since the early days of the industrial revolution. As a matter of fact, from what I can tell, scientist did not have differing opinions on this until science started to be funded by industry, then it started to change its mind, who would have thought! If you look closely, only scientists whose main focus is somewhere else but in the study of greenhouse and global warming have changed their minds. If you look even closer, you will notice a pattern of whom they work for, or who funds them, and that pattern is telling.

People also confuse global warming and climate change. You get a cold snap, or way more rain or snow than usual, and people immediately claim this proves there is no such thing as global warming. But it does if you spent your time with me in Mr. Pratt’s class doing something other than hitting on girls and skating by. A few college classes here and there helped, but Mr. Pratt was by far my best teacher. Only people in Council who went to school with me would know who or what I am talking about. We learned a lot of science, way beyond what other schools were doing then or now. I personally took six science classes in four years. Some invented by the same Mr. Pratt so we could continue to learn. The point being is that global warming changes weather patterns. One of the most common to us in the U.S. is the change in atmospheric winds that used to keep the cold air of the arctic in the arctic, or at least mostly contained to Canada and bordering northern states. But the increase in global warming has changed how far south these air currents are now allowed to travel. This causes a huge change in weather, which will be colder and more severe. Same thing for seasonal storms that generate over oceans, global warming makes the interaction of air and water more dramatic, increasing the ferocity of storms, hurricanes, or typhoons, depending on your location. Again, changing climate attitudes, and never for the better!

Now we should talk about the tipping point. Once we get too a certain saturation of Co2 there is no turning back. A new report on permafrost slowly thawing in the Arctic creating methane and carbon dioxide emissions highlights an approaching dangerous climate tipping point. There is a huge amount of organic matter frozen in permafrost, estimated to contain 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon, twice the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. And it is starting to melt. With no way to stop it except indirectly through us reducing the rate of global warming by reducing our own emissions. That means drastically and now! We both know that will never happen. You need to know that most people do not care, as long as they get all they can and the payback will happen after they die, then all is good! But you’re grandkids of our next generation may be living, or dying, in a world no longer fit for humans.

In order for us to turn the tide, we have to have a healthy ocean. We need way more green plants thriving. We will have to not only stop stripping the planet of rain forests, but also encourage growth. And we will have to quit pumping Co2 into the atmosphere. Natural or not, it can kill us off. We are smart enough to change this trend; we just have to be wise enough to do it. They already have a way to make fuel out of seawater. Not in a major way yet, but if it was a priority, it would soon be a way for sea faring vessels to be totally free of harmful emissions. And it also makes oxygen as a by-product. Plus the ocean regenerates these chemicals you take out naturally, so it is an inexhaustible resource. http://www.outsideonline.com/news-from-the-field/Navy-Makes-Fuel-From-Seawater.html There are lots of links I found, so I just picked one, but easy to find.

But for any of this to be done in time, or done at all, first you have to recognize the problem. We have the technology at our fingertips. Enough energy from the sun hits the planet in an hour’s time to run all of todays industry for a year. We just need to convince ourselves to harness it. The wind is always blowing somewhere, especially over the ocean. You can find links to wind generators in the ocean and not taking up an acre of useable land. In even one of the great deserts of the world, using today’s solar tech, we could power every industry in the world. So it is all entirely possible. Problem is, the people making themselves rich on fossil fuels are not about to let that happen as long as the money keeps pouring in. So you get the myth that it is not happening, or at the very least nothing we need to do about it. They are wrong, and I am telling you they know they are wrong they just don’t care. So you and I had better start!

I wrote this while my computer was down; some animal ate my cable off the side of the house last night. But if you have the ability to watch Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey, I think it is the second to the last one. The episode is called; The World Set Free that deals with global warming. The whole series is well worth watching. Carl Sagan originally did this Cosmos series back when I was a teenager. It was great then and great now!

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