tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55410550107828196262024-03-06T12:01:12.651-08:00 Journal of Humanitarian AffairsMagazine features about human culture, fairness and equityAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.comBlogger2323125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-16064687265015254952015-11-12T13:53:00.002-08:002015-11-12T13:53:50.896-08:00Pocketbook poison created by monopolies?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCDIWzTTSmWS8TmO9JsN-BA9SsiNa6biKUApHiqgF4LvQ5LFL3UQWLUjO0tlsyrk4FzCELUdU-h90uxoz0pP5b2r2DsND7uksr3Bmvbpyd2SDSwFKtCYyw5cWws212RB-Br8fL3SpI3i0/s1600/IPhone_San_Jose.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCDIWzTTSmWS8TmO9JsN-BA9SsiNa6biKUApHiqgF4LvQ5LFL3UQWLUjO0tlsyrk4FzCELUdU-h90uxoz0pP5b2r2DsND7uksr3Bmvbpyd2SDSwFKtCYyw5cWws212RB-Br8fL3SpI3i0/s320/IPhone_San_Jose.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Alison, Wikimedia Commons, showing young people waiting outside Apple store</td></tr>
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Carol Forsloff---Do you search or Google? Are you convinced that Apple products are more lasting than others? Do you long for the next great gadget, with all its complexities and promises? Monopolies created by corporate chiefs bring self-perpetuating behaviors that are poison to the pocketbook and a humanitarian concern in maintaining the gap between rich and poor.<br />
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Google has brought a rich array of free and time-saving programs to their search engine and other products around the world. While this benefits consumers, there is a cost to them too.. Ask the Internet user how research is accomplished, and the response is likely, "I Google what I want to find." Search terms create a mindset that continues it be "googling", as people respond to what they learn is the best and most comprehensive search engine. Competition suffers as a result.<br />
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One of the greatest problems brought about by Google's search and use monopolies is how sites are rewarded and punished. It is often the prosperous who survive Penguin updates, a terminology used to evaluate sites and demote those operating outside Google guidelines. While these updates are said to be used to prevent unfair competition and toxic material, the net Google uses to catch those who purposefully abuse those guidelines often catches the innocent as well. The fix costs money, so those who pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for it survive, while those unsuspecting site developers without the right technical knowledge, or money to buy it, may not. This means Professor Smith's blog on earth sciences may lose ranking and readers, while a political one with factual errors survives.<br />
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Google also tracks the way people buy products as well as where and how. So businesses are provided a mechanism for targeting sales. This encourages the unsuspecting consumers to buy items they may neither need or want, until some advertisement tells them they do.<br />
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When a computer is shown in movies and television it is apt to be an Apple. The local drugstore reflects the monopoly of Apple as well, with displays for items specific to Apple products over others. These product placements encourage people to believe that to be in step with the rest of the world one must pay the extra fees Apple charges for their products and then the classes necessary to learn them. The cost to the ordinary consumer is much greater than the costs of more affordable products that may be just as useful and also easier to use. But it does not stop there, as Apple presents its products in a secretive, almost cult-like fashion meant to create and maintain consumer passion to join its Apple ranks. And these are often the young or the poor who are more easily seduced into believing that social and financial success comes with Apple membership<br />
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Competition thwarted by corporations created by an ever-widening chasm between company and consumer allows money to continue to grow in the hands of the few who support government entities and politicians who keep them in control.<br />
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Monopolies in the modern world flourish for lack of objection. Perhaps it is time to use "search" instead of "googling" and to buy tech products easy to use and not costly to replace.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-81235583698153647732015-10-11T17:11:00.005-07:002015-10-11T18:34:19.159-07:00Aged crippled by home mortgage process<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ_SHjzpPlq1h0-3WcgjyPLnTPf54gt1mx0aQeIGJzd3j7B7DjhpcAFNRN9p5zleze6-thDJNY3GKW4fXL02XFH6Ii_73saQlKj8TbieOPwF8SwAxGIgGfyvAhOG2897XWhKCsBQMOmko/s1600/Senior+clients.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ_SHjzpPlq1h0-3WcgjyPLnTPf54gt1mx0aQeIGJzd3j7B7DjhpcAFNRN9p5zleze6-thDJNY3GKW4fXL02XFH6Ii_73saQlKj8TbieOPwF8SwAxGIgGfyvAhOG2897XWhKCsBQMOmko/s320/Senior+clients.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;"> Photo by </span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ulflarsen" style="background: none rgb(249, 249, 249); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.3px; line-height: 21.28px; text-align: start;" title="User:Ulflarsen">Ulflarsen</a>--Senior clients</td></tr>
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Carol Forsloff--The mortgage process has been made more difficult in general following the economic stresses that helped to create the downturn of housing values during the most recent recession. However, the mortgage process is even more of a problem in aging given the fact seniors often differ in how income is calculated and how the issues of time and circumstance are unique for the elderly..<br />
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A mortgage broker sees the age on the application. There is an immediate curiosity when a senior applies for a mortgage. The older the senior may be, the more apt there are errors in judgment, status and the details that make a difference in the elderly borrowers.<br />
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Decades ago mortgages were processed by lenders with an application that showed a financial inventory of assets and liabilities, self-constructed by the applicant. It was this summary that formed the basis for decision-making, after verification information that was less extensive given the sources of income and liabilities may be more diverse in the era of technology.<br />
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VA loans are among the many that are particularly cumbersome and often problematic for the elderly. Again many of the issues related to sources of income and assets. Some of the concerns can be particularly stressful because the kind of verification process presumes knowledge of the various individuals outside of the applicant who are involved in that process layers down. The fact the applicant can bundle closing costs and down payment offer opportunities for seniors who have been in the military to purchase a suitable home that may be necessary or especially desirable for the elderly with less house and yard to maintain.<br />
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The problem with loans from the Veterans Administration (VA) also may come during the final stages of the loan when an explanation may be especially a problem if the senior has another home that may be paid off, therefore a major asset, that the elderly applicant is keeping as income by renting or to pass along to heirs.<br />
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The problem becomes the mortgage broker's practices may not include the senior whose tax statements may not reflect assets and liabilities given the fact many seniors and others have savings that could be used to pay off much if not all of a mortgage. Yet they may choose not to given certain estate issues along with the needs and wishes of the applicant and his or her family. <br />
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The broker, not seeing the usual documentation received by someone with a salary, or income used outside of savings that are not reflected on tax returns, is more likely to make major errors in determining qualification for loans. The concepts used in the kind of financial statements once required by lenders and from which decisions were made is lost in the bureaucratic snafus. Add to that any prejudgment or misconceptions by one of those involved in approving a loan, and the senior is left with a far more complicated process than necessary and potentially the refusal of a loan.<br />
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Besides the paper work errors and misconceptions about the elderly, or the requirements of a loan that may not reflect a senior's situation and information, the entire mortgage process can take more time for them than for other applicants.<br />
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There is also the possible assumption that asks the question: why does the senior need to borrow and why do they not pay in cash, as some others often do. Again the reasons are often personal and may be because of estate planning needs, the need to maintain other property as income or the applicant's concerns about future health care costs that increase during advancing age.<br />
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An example may illustrate some of these issues. A couple with net assets of $625,000 nearly is refused a loan because of tax statements that allowed deductions for medical expenses that were short term and other unique expenses during the two years prior to the application. During that time two years, and to the date of the application, the elderly couple had substantial savings to augment income that could pay the requested $150,000 loan in full. Still loan administrators continued to labor over income sources because of the income limitations on the application. <br />
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The elderly are among those who have been bankrupted by poor decision-making, or who have health problems and other issues. It might be sad that the more streamlined the process of buying and selling a home can be, by using thoughtful measures applied to elderly groups whose needs are different than others the less strenuous and stressful the results might be and the more likely they will be just. . <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ulflarsen" style="background: none rgb(249, 249, 249); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.3px; line-height: 21.28px;" title="User:Ulflarsen">Ulflarsen</a> ,<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-44958819811115386032015-03-13T13:33:00.000-07:002015-03-19T20:30:37.856-07:00Ebola epidemic increases susceptibility to measles<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6jsQdk6zep1m5U0JA-t0-mNyyCuUxeUe80GEpVBqV1Z8Nk1cduu2UqsaGLvC7Dq5aWsGAAzk3uOjXa9TmSj_JPvWWBnpTqoF9YZirGFbbuHtoqZElZLJfcdvE809wKlpHDgeyjwLVXg/s1600/EbolaCycle.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6jsQdk6zep1m5U0JA-t0-mNyyCuUxeUe80GEpVBqV1Z8Nk1cduu2UqsaGLvC7Dq5aWsGAAzk3uOjXa9TmSj_JPvWWBnpTqoF9YZirGFbbuHtoqZElZLJfcdvE809wKlpHDgeyjwLVXg/s1600/EbolaCycle.png" height="225" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ebola cycle</td></tr>
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Experts from John Hopkins have found the Ebola epidemic has increased susceptibility to measles, with the rate of increase seen to potentially double in the wake of the problems related to the virus that continues to spread in parts of Africa.<br />
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The principal problem related to the Ebola virus is the disruption in the health care system, <a href="http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/630813/?sc=dwhn">according to the experts</a>. Much of the public health focus in areas of Africa is on Ebola, so that fewer people are being vaccinated against measles. This problem may increase the rate of measles as a consequence of resources having been diverted to the greater problem faced by Ebola. But measles also has the potential to disable and to cause death, so health authorities are particularly concerned about the problem.<br />
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In the United States, many hospitals are concerned about the problems related to infectious diseases. <a href="http://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/index.ssf/2015/03/from_the_flu_to_ebola_nj_hospitals_have_to_prepare_for_every_infectious_disease.html">In New Jerse</a>y the health care agencies are gearing up to deal with an ever-increasing concern about the consequences related to diseases that are spread from region to region. These included everything from influenza to Ebola, as well as measles where a recent outbreak occurred in California, then spread to other states.<br />
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New Jersey hospitals are asked to be especially vigilant about health problems that occur because of our multicultural society and the fact people now travel back and forth around the world to conduct business or to visit friends and family.<br />
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Pat Lafaro, Director of the infection prevention program in New Jersey tells us: "It's a fact of life today--the spread of disease by people, food-borne outbreaks and other sources is unfortunately inevitable and something hospitals need to be ready to address at any time. With an increase in the number of companies with foreign holdings and active health care groups in the U.S. reaching out to others worldwide, people are constantly going back and forth, especially in a diverse population like New Jersey's."<br />
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Tracy Carlino, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Virtua in South Jersey further underlines the fact that the spread of infectious diseases is a worldwide problem not just an issue in West Africa, as she says, "We've become a multicultural society and you can be anywhere within 24 hours."<br />
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Hawaii, the islands that are most distant from any other land mass, has a high rate of tourist travel and people moving from Asia and the Pacific regions to the United States and other countries. Even in a small Kaiser clinic on the West Coast of Oahu, a sign greets people as they arrive at the clinic to report certain symptoms of Ebola they might be experiencing. It is the kind of warning of a concern about health that is now seen as potentially impacting everyone.<br />
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The poorest people in the world remain at the greatest risk to infectious diseases of many kinds, according to<a href="http://www.globalissues.org/issue/587/health-issues"> international health expert</a>s.<br />
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One billion people lack access to health care. And in 2008 more than 6 million people died from infectious diseases, greater than the number who died from natural disasters.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-49937391643919848962015-03-10T10:56:00.002-07:002015-03-20T17:10:13.164-07:00Leeward 'watering hole' offers Hawaii's best of aloha<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyr-Q-SThoaqNoIFsyWmjCkUlveonXSePeO-_V8U2JgMz7MLIetryCKuNLYCKlqkA66yxG5fWJEsqVP5iw4Cc6LEWdXTGszafxqTsew6jwuFXH75emSS0d30qXmjbBtUFaiRoIkMm25oI/s1600/Spinners.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyr-Q-SThoaqNoIFsyWmjCkUlveonXSePeO-_V8U2JgMz7MLIetryCKuNLYCKlqkA66yxG5fWJEsqVP5iw4Cc6LEWdXTGszafxqTsew6jwuFXH75emSS0d30qXmjbBtUFaiRoIkMm25oI/s1600/Spinners.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spinners cafe on the Waianae Coast</td></tr>
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"Come on and sit down and join us here. We have plenty of food to share after you have picked up your plate. Lots of people to meet, and just sit and watch the ocean with the rest of us."<br />
The friendly greeting from the group echoes through the small cafe, the Waianae 'watering hole' that is the best kept secret of new and old visitors, in the traditions of many places around the world.<br />
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The sun streams through the windows, with its diamond-like spears coming in with its warmth even as it touches the ocean in the near distance, as strangers and friends gather around a table, sharing what is called "empty your refrigerator" time, as a prelude to friendly chatter and great food.<br />
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No one knows for sure who started this friendly tradition, of people bringing others one by one into the circle of fun that makes a sunny cafe sunny both in spirit and form. We sit down with the group and are quickly part of the conversation that avoids politics and tensions and instead focuses on the now and the beauty of the day.<br />
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The Spinners cafe is located on the Western tip of Oahu, near the boat harbor. Here the fishermen and leisure boaters take their turns sailing along the ocean's rim, to fish or just for fun. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHAFc_vCx5IHl623lfRNSYB5XhMl0s41ZNmURIj08hdG6CPOmZWZz1ToKhZbCHghVrhAv_w-xZ64xzZPk54Kp6NWnOyCrLGt59aTB5FYKMvZXpETge6FBEpYy2jb2C5SJYzCJJM4JD9ag/s1600/boat+harbor.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHAFc_vCx5IHl623lfRNSYB5XhMl0s41ZNmURIj08hdG6CPOmZWZz1ToKhZbCHghVrhAv_w-xZ64xzZPk54Kp6NWnOyCrLGt59aTB5FYKMvZXpETge6FBEpYy2jb2C5SJYzCJJM4JD9ag/s1600/boat+harbor.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here the youth learn how to sail those boats, as the elders bring their wisdom to teach them the how-tos and at the same time offer the advice of the older folk that pass to the youth the best of sailing tips and kindness. <br />
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The aloha spirit is captured at Spinners, representing both nature and man's best gifts of the Hawaiian paradise that is part of the joy of the Waianae Coast. Tourists find the special attraction advertised in many of Oahu's brochures, the dolphin excursions and the whale watching tours that pepper the coast at various seasons of the year. People come from all over the world to marvel over nature's best.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZWrDxBEoczihnenwRR2h1riLte1MMPM8qJlDKK-82WKWQxjstjzE75i5HNCDWxQuR_G5t3yOllMN8n2d-r72lSTO8Qy_HcgELy2s3P5ZWCUkoCFNXrH4p5dzOhBkGT8OghUdfiq1Xn8/s1600/Tracy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZWrDxBEoczihnenwRR2h1riLte1MMPM8qJlDKK-82WKWQxjstjzE75i5HNCDWxQuR_G5t3yOllMN8n2d-r72lSTO8Qy_HcgELy2s3P5ZWCUkoCFNXrH4p5dzOhBkGT8OghUdfiq1Xn8/s1600/Tracy.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tracy Kane, consultant and cafe cook and server, smiles with the spirit of aloha at Spinners</td></tr>
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Stop by if you are in the neighborhood and join the beauty of man and creation, as the food is tasty, inexpensive and the kind that lends itself to the oohs and aaahs of appreciation, as residents share their knowledge of Hawaii with anecdotes that bring the stories of Hawaii that make visitor and resident alike feel welcome, as people form lasting friendships over the best of eats and everything at Spinners all week long.<br />
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It is aloha, the kind people dream about, that represents the old 'watering hole' of nearly every town and place. Only here, however, the weather and the people make this a stunning representation of human and nature's love entwined.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-17918437376292399112015-03-04T15:25:00.000-08:002015-03-10T12:13:28.293-07:00Hawaiian ethics leads to understanding the nature of human love<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Or2owdHZRvyWCqBmtf7voevDNyLBTwwBtqIBA5zfS6qtbvc7QAnWwgocr_fHTpDYf20E1Q4CdXFDWlwByqbcLnKQbXxpMw8oS_oWXIxjq_rDDPzbmUYikcPXF53EpP25g0SMZQqWOWw/s1600/IMG_20130128_120157.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Or2owdHZRvyWCqBmtf7voevDNyLBTwwBtqIBA5zfS6qtbvc7QAnWwgocr_fHTpDYf20E1Q4CdXFDWlwByqbcLnKQbXxpMw8oS_oWXIxjq_rDDPzbmUYikcPXF53EpP25g0SMZQqWOWw/s1600/IMG_20130128_120157.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gardens at Waianae Comprehensive, a healing center with the Hawaiian touch found in the essence of love</td></tr>
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"<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She probably did not have much when she was a kid. Women her age were raised to have babies and be quiet. And she is poor, and her kids don't take good care of her either. So we need to understand."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Michelle Perez is Hawaiian and then some. The "then some" are those mixes with various cultural groups that make up most of the Hawaiian population in modern times. Her philosophy represents the best of Hawaiian ethics, which means to look at all people with the eyes of ohana, or family.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Perez was speaking of a Chinese woman, 80 years old, that she and her husband, Joe, have befriended on many occasions. The elderly Chinese woman has a raft of children, all adults and living on their own and a mentally challenged daughter who is deaf and unable to live independently. Her days are spent caring for the daughter, as she does her household tasks in a townhouse in a multicultural setting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Chinese woman, whom we will call Linn, for the purpose of this discussion, occasionally borrows money from the Perez family in small amounts for laundry or small necessities. She looks at the Valentine's Day gifts other women receive and asks for just a few flowers. She asks for things with the wide-eyed innocence one might expect of a youngster, with a bit of the manipulation that goes with having little and never having much.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Perez family understands that. So despite Linn's idiosyncracies they look past those faults to the old woman's needs and her limitations. And for those theists who recognize the message in all of this, they look at Linn and others like her through the eyes of God, but in an ethical fashion that proves a lesson for us all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Poverty is no sin to Joe and Michelle Perez. They understand poor. They have lived with it. And within their vision is the knowledge that Christ said caring for the poor is the key to heaven. Do they read this in the Bible and then speak of their beliefs in some boastful way? Not at all. It comes from the blissful, innocent way many islanders look at others, as they recognize the fusion of cultures in Hawaii and understand the source of each person's status. It is not an intellectual thing but an emotional and spiritual one instead. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is a lesson on any day, how Christ's message of love is translated into action, teaching the neighbors, you and me, and all they touch, what caring for others is all about.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-24592232147651182872015-03-03T07:38:00.000-08:002015-03-04T15:45:42.765-08:00'That Liquor Ain't Good for You'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY9ZCX4lQW86X6xpajWhpvaUIKrcedL3gU-VkFSlH5t3_hTBioDOcblniCjqo9VTyv6tEPIW7uxEoKyDfb2tvdPnLxmRSaFIHzHl5ti9NmyYj9vJb5MaGdMqJDXUh-0y085j8GK7RAiJY/s1600/alcohol.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY9ZCX4lQW86X6xpajWhpvaUIKrcedL3gU-VkFSlH5t3_hTBioDOcblniCjqo9VTyv6tEPIW7uxEoKyDfb2tvdPnLxmRSaFIHzHl5ti9NmyYj9vJb5MaGdMqJDXUh-0y085j8GK7RAiJY/s1600/alcohol.jpg" height="320" width="215" /></a></div>
Carol Forsloff--While some music performers use their talents to denigrate specific politicians in a toxic way, as does Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, others find ways to elevate one's thinking by examining social issues and elevating the ideas about what matters most in life, as is done often by Gene O'Neill.<br />
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O'Neill has the skills of guitar, vocal performance and writing that fuse ideas into songs that entertain while giving us that something good that makes us feel like we have learned, expanded our hearts and minds. We soar with O'Neill on the wings of the good, looking at man with eyes that see the story and the whole of us, the very heart and soul of us as well, while using a variety of musical techniques and themes as the mechanism for the flight.<br />
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Country music often speaks of good girls gone wrong, the man who done her wrong, or the drunken dude who swaggers and boasts his manhood through the booze and the smoke that spills into whatever bar into which he wanders. The guys gather, smack their women on the backsides with reference to "my old lady," as the band plays into the night.<br />
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O'Neill gives us that something else with his country song, "That Liquor Ain't Good for You." He does it without a religious commentary or a style that just smacks one down for getting drunk again. Indeed, the words and the music take us on a journey that allows us to see the consequences of too much of anything that ends up hurting us in the end.<br />
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Liquor, too much, and too long is that hurt, fun at first; but in an atmosphere where men see nothing else can be the ruin of a strength that goes far beyond the fist, the chest, the power that a lot of liquor saps away in sad and subtle ways. So O'Neil tells us:<br />
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Don't try to drink no whiskey--<br />
If you ain't learned how to drink<br />
Don't want to hear your philosophy<br />
If you ain't learned how to think<br />
You just open that mouth--and stupid falls out.<br />
That's all you seem to do.<br />
Don't try to drink no whiskey--<br />
That liquor ain't good for you.</blockquote>
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O'Neil's song is available at:<a href="http://fandalism.com/geneoneill/duoq"> http://fandalism.com/geneoneill/duoq </a>or<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL5MEVJ7Bjk#t=158"> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL5MEVJ7Bjk#t=158 </a>, leading to songs of various genres composed and performed by this talented musician.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-60406727979102430302015-02-27T14:09:00.000-08:002015-03-04T15:46:21.774-08:00Is the world ready for a cyber 'Pearl Harbor?'<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The man known as Mohammed Emwazi, "Jihadi John"</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol Forsloff--Experts tell us the greatest threat to world security now is cyber terrorism; and with the uncovering of the identity of"Jihadi John," the ISIS member, Mohammed Emwazi, who beheaded citizens from a number of countries, the risk is underlined by the fact that he was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/middleeast/isis-jihadi-john-identity/index.html">studying computer sciences</a> while becoming radicalized in Britain. Is a cyber 'Pearl Harbor' possible?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The horror of beheading reminds us of the extreme measures used by terrorists to create fear. But the perfect storm of problems can be caused by manipulating the money supply, power systems and government agencies by those with the sophistication with computers that can analyze and develop programs that are especially clever and difficult to detect.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Security analysts say that cyberwarfare is the <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/7/defense-leaders-saycyberwarfaregreatestthreattous.html">greatest form of terrorism</a> threatening the United States. In fact they warn of the potential of a cyber "Pearl Harbor," a surprise attack that could create widespread harm that could confuse, frighten and likely kill and injure thousands. Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, warned in 2012 of the risks from cyberwarfare, but many analysts believed at the time it was principally theoretical. However, recent comments from experts tell us it is now more than hypothetical and the possibility of a serious, surprise attack is real.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">An attack of large proportions on the US power grid could cause massive casualties, security analysts tell us. And there are not enough specialists in computer systems with the sophistication to stop any possible threat, which is of special concern to officials who are working hard to recruit students and professionals into the security business. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tara Maller is a former military analyst for the CIA and a research fellow with the National Security Studies program at the New America foundation had this to say about the potential of a major cyber attack.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"The capability is out there to launch a large-scale cyberattack resulting in loss of life or property damage, and potential targets are in some sense infinite, because everything is connected to computers in one way or the other. But I do I think it is very likely another country would launch a cyber attack of this type on the U.S. right now? No, because I think there is some level of cyber deterrence that exists between states."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Experts also tell us that a "cyber" Pearl Harbor could literally launch a world war. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Concerns about cyber terrorism is not new. In fact during the Reagan administration the President signed the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/etc/faqs.html">Computer Security Act of 198</a>7 that was passed to protect federal agencies' computer data.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But since 9/11 those concerns have increased with the bombings and attacks on property and civilians by terrorists in different countries around the world. This has served to heighten worries about cyber terrorism and the potential dangers that might come from a surprise attack.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This month President Barack Obama announced the creation of a new Cybersecurity Agency that will be tasked with developing new and stronger methods of<a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/02/10/new-cybersecurity-agency-to-aid-in-battle-against-hackers"> countering the potential of cyberattacks</a>.</span><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-687728726759306342015-02-26T15:00:00.000-08:002015-03-04T15:46:42.434-08:00Pollyana people not too trusting or easily fooled<br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;">Carol Forsloff -</span><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;"> Do people call you a "Pollyana," assuming you are so innocent you cannot tell when you are being duped? Perhaps it is helpful to know science has found Pollyana people are actually better able to detect liars and not too trusting either.</span><br />
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Several years ago in a study done at the <a href="http://www.research.utoronto.ca/tag/society/" id="ajuf" title="University of Toronto">University of Toronto</a> and published in the <a href="http://www.uk.sagepub.com/journalsProdSoc.nav?prodId=Journal201952" id="g40e" title="Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal">Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal</a> researchers observed being a Pollyana as an intelligence indicator.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Polyanna is a character from a 1960 film that starred Hayley Mills and Jane Wyman. The film's principal were seen as optimistic, with Aunt Polly setting the tone for trust and honesty. Hayley Mills played Polyanna. It was <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054195/" id="lwr0" title="a film">a film</a> of good cheer with the message of hope and trust that resonated with</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">viewers at the time. At the same time, some folks over the years point to these characters as cliches, representing naivete. It was adapted from a well-known children's story by Eleanor H. Porter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the study, participants who had answered questionnaires about their level of trust in other people looked at tapes of people undergoing job interviews and had to decide which ones were being truthful. Some of the sample items were like these: "Most people are basically honest,"and "Most people are basically good-natured and kind." They then watched the videos, and rated the interviewees based on the perception they had of truthfulness and honesty.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The study found people high in trust more accurately identified liars than others. The more trust they had in people, the better able they were to distinguish lies from truth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Co-authors Nancy Carter and Mark Weber of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto concluded from this research, <span style="color: black; font-size: small;">"People </span>who trust others are not pie-in-the-sky Pollyannas, their interpersonal accuracy may make them particularly good at hiring, recruitment, and identifying good friends and worthy business partners."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And what are some of the cues people use to detect lying. Bette DePaulo and co-author Wendy Morris examined characteristics of liars, that Pollyana people and others might observe in detecting liars. <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/detecting.aspx">What they found</a> in recent research is that liars take longer to answer questions than truth-tellers do. They tend to start their answers faster and talk less as well. They also seem more negative, complaining and nervous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> So that friend or co-worker people tend to judge as too innocent or lacking ability to discern truth or reality may not only be able to detect liars better than average. It might also be they are more apt to tell the truth as well, but that's something another Pollyana might be able to determine.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-74973928681557922392015-02-23T15:30:00.004-08:002015-03-04T15:46:57.101-08:00What everyone wants is a 'Window in Heaven'<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Window of Heaven--a vision in nature and in life</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol Forsloff---The loss of a loved one can create initial confusion and grief, along with a mix of other emotions; yet most of us believe there is continuity in life, even as we wish we could have just a peek through a <i>Window in Heaven</i>, to see each other as we once were, expressed in the musical eloquence of Kenny Herbert and Roy Mathews.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Herbert and Mathews reminds us of what many people believe is true, that there is something beyond the grave where peace and love are infinite. His vision of the <i>Window in Heaven</i> is the glimpse of eternity, where there is no time but now, even if that is forever, And his desire to have that window to see the life of the loved one unfold again behind the veil of death is what most of us wish we too could have when we lose someone especially dear to us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Herbert and Mathews write, "Like a rose in the winter, that withers and dies. Like the passing of time, through an older man's eyes, You stay in my memory, that I know won't fade. You'll always be with me. You're never away."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The lyrics dance with the soothing melody as we find our own memories seem to pass through our minds as we listen to Herbert and Mathews' song and wish we too could have that </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Window in Heaven</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> as well to see those we miss, yet trust we will see again in some special and wonderful place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"If I had a <i>Window in Heaven</i> for a day; if I could see you just one last time. Oh, I would be happy to know you're okay. Yes, a window would be fine."</span> </blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These words take our wishes and give them special meaning, for often we say, at the death of a friend, a loved one, a family member, "If I could only see (him/her) one last time." This common expression is shared by many, whether a death is sudden or prolonged.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yes, a <i>Window in Heaven</i> would be fine encapsulates the idea that the lives we touch can be meaningful, that our connections continue and that we see in our memories the loved ones who have died through the eyes of eternal youth. For in life, and in death, there is no age, no time, and the once more can be a minute, a day, a year or a lifetime. We can feel the dead in all of nature that surrounds us, for that too is part of life, the kind that lasts forever.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Listen and love again, feel again and be embraced by the tenderness of word and melody of a talented composer who expresses for all of us what we most want, as we travel through our own lives, to have that <i>Window of Heaven</i> for ourselves and all we love.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zafnvK6Ew6c" width="560"></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-33364064403074014512015-02-22T09:58:00.000-08:002015-03-05T16:23:08.209-08:00Greatest generation: Financial setbacks hurt most at end of life<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol Forsloff - People in their 80’s and older who went through WWII and the Great Depression and who have been called the Greatest Generation, have seen their plight worsen with health and financial burdens. Is it time to get back to remembering this group, when we think of patriotism?</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The Greatest Generation is suffering despite their often-lauded status and having been defined great because of their sacrifices and suffering, all done without complaint. But it isn’t just the financial downturns that will cause many of them to suffer more than just a little bit. ” It’s money and the “me first philosophy” that experts warn will cause many seniors to struggle now and in the years ahead. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"> </span></span>As homelessness and state funding is cutback in the wake of the recession, and as states worry about their budgets, social service agencies and charitable organizations observe a reported increase in the number of seniors in upper age brackets seeking help. Due to the housing crisis many are unable to sell their homes and move to where their children live. So they turn to public agencies, to state governments, church and private groups for aid. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> But local governments complain about financial burdens already too heavy for them to move forward on critical needs, namely paying salaries, while the impact of so many people out of work has created growing concern over charitable options for everyone. Also as working people try to keep their jobs and homes, it’s easy to forget those who are neither seen nor heard daily because they are tucked in some corner in an apartment complex, retirement center, or home away from those who in decades past were called upon to care for elders during hard times. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"> </span></span>Seniors struggle around the world now. In Toronto The Star stated in December 2008 that 30% of Canadians believe they will have to work past 65. But most folks in their 80’s would neither be hired nor have the health or other resources to allow them to get out of their easy chairs, and more likely beds, and return to the workforce, as health professionals maintain. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"> </span></span>The Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel several years ago wrote that those over 70 are likely to feel bleak by their next birthdays because few resources exist for upper age seniors during this recession. The Journal calls these people “the forgotten people” because no bail outs have been planned for them. This comes at a time when pension plans that do not provide fixed benefits, are seen likely to decline while 401K retirement plans already have declined. So the small, average $63/month Social Security increases at the turn of a year likely won’t do seniors very much good.'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Hawaii the long-term residents who are past 80 find their property values have soared, so they fare fairly well. On the other hand, the price of medicine and necessities for living still make budgets tight for people. Those people who decide to retire in Hawaii find their money drained with housing costs, unless they know the best places on the islands to live, something not always readily available in the tourist brochures.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Some seniors are faring worse than they thought because they lost even more of their savings in the great upheavals of the stock market of several years ago. The fact many of them did not remain in the stock market, or reenter it, means they may not have regained what they lost.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"> </span></span>But it’s the fact that seniors can’t rely on their last hope, their children, that is the saddest cut, according to elders across the country who bemoan the fact that they can’t move and don’t have the financial resources to pay for the kind of help they need. Furthermore folks lament that they will be unable to regain economic stability any time soon.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Economic experts tell us that it took until 1954 for the stock market to reach the level it had in 1929 at the time of the stock market crash. Folks in their 80’s don’t have 25 years to wait for help to arrive. So our greatest generation is rapidly becoming the forgotten generation by the culture that is predominated by baby boomer leadership, the “me first” folks, the group with the upper age senior parents, even though this greatest generation, people in their 80’s, was declared the best for doing all the right things. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The Greatest Generation sacrificed a great deal during the Depression and war years. Those sacrifices might well be remembered every day, for the Greatest Generation to live out their remaining years with the respect and consideration it deserves.</span><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-34006063468851260072015-02-21T22:56:00.003-08:002015-03-04T15:47:30.847-08:00U.S. citizens live with 'emotional terrorism'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_nuELqfqs3hyphenhyphen2nZiaFzKHMpPlXxnJI_rCQS66dW8SFt0e9SC-bW-MCKOqPHhdISYkXT7kELTbVtZy7b7pSaxX2wQBSwhctncB1xVd7gIXb29Qi368WZ6zVz-_wuNzef30HE71Ac2SwLU/s1600/homeland-security+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_nuELqfqs3hyphenhyphen2nZiaFzKHMpPlXxnJI_rCQS66dW8SFt0e9SC-bW-MCKOqPHhdISYkXT7kELTbVtZy7b7pSaxX2wQBSwhctncB1xVd7gIXb29Qi368WZ6zVz-_wuNzef30HE71Ac2SwLU/s1600/homeland-security+(1).jpg" height="214" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Officers at DHS</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol Forsloff---For years Homeland
Security, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation have said right-wing
extremist groups and militias are a serious threat, as some of their
members attempt recruitment online, even on blogger and newspaper
sites, creating a form of “emotional terrorism.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After<a href="http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/op-ed-how-giuliani-s-statements-about-obama-make-us-less-safe/article/426588#ixzz3SSDqwATs"> an article on this site</a>, a reader wrote in the comment section:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">There is one issue that he has initiated (although inadvertently) that will make a percentage of the population of the U.S. safer sumdum, and I suggest you find your state branch.</span><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span> <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism" style="color: #556699; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">The 'Patriot' Movement Explodes.</a><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;"> There were only 149 Militia groups/patriot groups in 2008. The American trust in obama has sent that number into a chain reaction of epic proportions and is growing momentum by the day. There are now as of 2011 </span><strong style="font-size: 14px;">1,274</strong><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;"> and counting. Many have networked and are merging.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">obama really is bringing True Americans closer together!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Experts on violence see verbal abuse
part of the intimidation used by groups to cause people to withdraw
from opposing anyone he or she believes might pose a threat to
themselves. This is why officials ask Muslims to report verbal
abuses that come from people in these groups as this form of abuse is considered <a href="http://passia.org/meetings/2006/Islamophobia.htm">significant for Islamophobi</a>a with the potential for violence. It also is considered a threat to the
community at large, as prejudice and verbal abuses can become
widespread, as has happened in many places around the world where
Muslims live and work, heightening tensions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In a family verbal abuse is seen as<a href="http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/hr/hrdepts/asap/Documents/Domestic_Violence.pdf"> a form of domestic violenc</a>e.
Victims may respond with apathy or despair. Few want to counter an
angry, name-calling individual, as verbal abuse is known to be a
warning sign of the potential for physical violence and experts
remind us abusers do not play fair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On a national level, and at times
internationally as well, groups like ISIS are able to create fear by
public beheadings, videos of butchery and threats that fill the
airwaves. The right-wing domestic terrorists, however, may recognize
the way to victory over a perceived “enemy” is to demoralize its
leadership and to confront anyone who opposes them verbally or in
print with veiled threats and name-calling abuses. They also know
that a lie can be told, and when the truth is discovered most people
will continue to believe the lie. So it is not uncommon for
extremists to lie, then respond, “I misspoke” or to be even more
insistent on their version of the truth, if they find there is enough
support for it. It is also difficult to counter individuals who are
glib enough to be convincing, even when their facts are wrong and
whose name-calling tempers bring about verbal abuses or veiled
threats in response to being challenged.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They also have their<a href="http://www.teapartypatriots.org/"> own militia groups</a>, as observed on the Tea Party Patriots site. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This has led to a apathy and despair
among many citizens, the type that occurs in families. Many people
believe the new Republican Congress will not get much done and are
therefore apathetic about change. When they see injustice in their
communities, they consequently<a href="http://natmonitor.com/2015/01/06/americans-apathetic-about-new-republican-leadership-new-poll/"> blame the governmen</a>t for not doing
something about it, yet are apathetic at the same time because of the
inertia they have seen in
Washington.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is a form of emotional terrorism, an
abuse that is just as bad as any form of violence, as it attacks the
mind, leading it to acquiesce and therefore be free of the challenge.
Yet it is also, as counselors say to domestic victims, a prelude to
more trouble ahead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Combatting any form of terror requires
vigilance, truth-seeking, courage and focused effort. For democracy
it means incorporating every vote to count and every citizen as
worthy of participation.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-22684781979969817702015-02-20T15:50:00.001-08:002015-02-22T11:05:31.689-08:00Why aging in place is not for everyone<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbIzPkwKHCbBZp37DaPMD2OM2OL_HvUeN0p0FZedwfMSTjm1DEKkb2IGSzdTALtq1frmUpJH_D0cz6CI9siduQ5JXzLTipVe4V64RCBVatWjfJ8cd8i8clSUI3FK2PM5vlIWODfko3h6o/s1600/DSCF9576.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbIzPkwKHCbBZp37DaPMD2OM2OL_HvUeN0p0FZedwfMSTjm1DEKkb2IGSzdTALtq1frmUpJH_D0cz6CI9siduQ5JXzLTipVe4V64RCBVatWjfJ8cd8i8clSUI3FK2PM5vlIWODfko3h6o/s1600/DSCF9576.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laurelhurst Park senior residence in Oregon is for those who need both independence and assistance</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You may be one of those baby boomers who declares you don't want to live in assisted living or in some senior community, and you do not want your parents there either; but aging in place is not for everyone.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/14ba798895d8fa69">Experts tell us</a> that although older people may be attached to their homes and believe it is the best place to live out their lives, the home in place may not be equipped to provide the activities and amenities for people to be able to adapt to the changes as they grow older.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are many things to think about when we age. We need companions. We have to buy products and services to meet our needs. This includes being able to get to a medical facility quickly in an emergency or having to buy groceries when the weather is bad, as is presently occurring in much of the Northeast right now. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The wealthy can pay for whatever they need. The poor can avail themselves of social welfare programs. The middle class, however, have to pay for private services to allow them to live independently, and these services can be expensive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At the same time baby boomers are talking about aging in place and the need for services increasing as a consequence of aging, many lack children who can help out. Many boomers have no children and so must rely on friends or other family members and may ask themselves, as<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/booming/10story-booming.html?_r=0"> a New York Times article</a> points out, "Who will care for me?" But those friends and family members may have financial or health problems or face some other barrier towards helping others in a crisis situation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is better to think things through in terms of what a person needs and wants and what the limitations of any environment might be in providing physical, emotional and mobility support. One of the most important needs is social contact as research has found that <a href="http://social%20isolation%20may%20predict%20mortality%20as%20accurately%20as%20smoking/">social isolation can predict early death</a> as much as smoking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So in spite of what someone might want, the need is likely to be more important in old age, when one is less able to do everything and must ask for help or have the type of environment that lends itself to independent living. Otherwise a senior living center or retirement village might be the better choice.</span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-88338318074355039052015-02-19T15:22:00.000-08:002015-03-10T16:16:29.964-07:00How 'We Shall Overcome' changed America<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9TzAiJU9JNkAm0CD8aT1dJ3O4ogqcviPE37ZIVN_p5pcd2eQ6Y4LA2i97WYzaYsiKPqywQHBPjsdOCiC3aAJ2Fz33jLq05jBRgCnOv0RMgbU_kv1hwLY9TVjXZ9bABfBJfuYqa8RxXWI/s1600/Pete+Seeger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9TzAiJU9JNkAm0CD8aT1dJ3O4ogqcviPE37ZIVN_p5pcd2eQ6Y4LA2i97WYzaYsiKPqywQHBPjsdOCiC3aAJ2Fz33jLq05jBRgCnOv0RMgbU_kv1hwLY9TVjXZ9bABfBJfuYqa8RxXWI/s1600/Pete+Seeger.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pete Seeger, troubadour of the folk music period, "We Shall Overcome"</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><strong>Carol Forsloff </strong>- <span style="color: black;">As the United States struggles with its racist past and the memories of the march on Selma, Alabama that illustrated the harsh realities of segregation, the song "We Shall Overcome" reminds us of how music helped change the country and shape new attitudes. Can this happen again?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Demonstrations in the 1960's often had musicians who championed freedom and civil rights. Woody Guthrie's music about the condition of the poor and Pete Seeger's musical anthems drove much of the folk music of the day.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Folk music was created to arouse feelings, emotions in people according to the author of a book called ,<em><strong>“Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States”</strong></em>in </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">which"We Shall Overcome" is an example of how music relates events.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The book examines the song itself as it came originally from a church hymn in 1901, then was incorporated as part of the labor movement of the 1930's and 1940's.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The American Revolution became “Yankee Doodle,” while abolitionists gather together with African Americans over spirituals. Some of the musical presentations had what we consider now classics such as as “ Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” and <a href="http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0008c0t0">“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”</a> </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Modern times has been encapsulated in American folk music as well, "We Shall Overcome," identified with the civil rights movements of the 1960's. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The 21st century has its movements and its historical events as well,including the recent oil spill in the Gulf and Hurricane Katrina along with other disasters and special issues. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/this-land-is-your-land-lyrics-woody-guthrie.html" id="okmu" title="the song of Woody Guthrie">the song of Woody Guthrie</a>,as it is sung all over the country, recorded by Arlo Gutrie, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and a host of other musicians, came out of the struggles of the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">depression and spoke of the wonders of America, that continues to be thought about today. Who knows where the anthems might lead, but "This Land Is Your Land" is considered by folk music connoisseurs a binding one that was used as the anthem to unite all Americans.</span><br />
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These days folks seldom hear the old anthems, and there are few that people sing together that relate contemporary concerns. And Guthrie's song about America does not include Alaska and Hawaii, both states admitted to the Union years after he created the famous folk anthem.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There were songs to unify the country and make Americans proud, like Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," that has been sung and recorded by both folk and contemporary musicians.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/american-folk-music-s-long-and-169800.aspx">According to the book</a>, written by UCLA sociologist William Roy, "We Shall Overcome" became alive again with Reverend Martin Luther King and the movement of civil rights that sprang up in the 1950's with sit-ins and demonstrations and reached its zenith as civil rights legislation became enacted for both women and minorities in 1964. It became the anthem for that period.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"We Shall Overcome" has been identified with the song ever since.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Roy's chronicles the song and its mission and also looks at the evolution of folk music in the relating of events connected with people's feelings.People even associate certain music with certain events, as they do with "We Shall Overcome."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Roy examines the course of folk music's history and how one movement or another was highlighted by certain songs.</span></span>Indeed, the book indicates how the actual news of the day was chronicled by this special music.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In an interview at the University of South Carolina, Roy, a professor of sociology and chair of UCLA’s sociology department when he wrote the book, said “Doing music —especially in racially mixed groups — became an act of defiance against segregation.” The song still manages to bring tears to the eyes of the sociologist who joined the civil rights movement as an undergraduate in the ’60s at Atlanta’s Emory University. “It’s a powerful reminder of </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">participating in history, of making a difference,” he said. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Roy explains,however, the first people to actually use the term "folk music"identified it with their own and were of European extraction. Out of the intermingling of sounds of English music, the Appalachian form was born again in ballads of <a href="http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz00094q1h">“Barbara Allen.”</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Perhaps it is a time for new beginnings, as many people believe might help people understand, especially given the racial incidents of the past year, the riots in Ferguson and the demonstrations that followed as well as the worries about war on the horizon, as President Obama and the Republicans in Congress square off over a deal with Iran that some say could prevent war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Where is the anthem that can illustrate the feelings of today and the collective wish of peace and brotherhood? Or shall it remain the music of the past brought back again, for people to use when they march together for the sake of man's peace and brotherhood once more.</span><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-72961596440506817782015-02-18T19:42:00.000-08:002015-02-20T16:50:16.257-08:00The truth about breaking the enigma code <div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="File:Enigma 1940.JPG" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Enigma_1940.JPG/524px-Enigma_1940.JPG" height="320" style="background-color: transparent; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="279" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Machine Enigma, wikimedia commons, 1940</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Editor's Note: Hollywood's history sometimes omits salient facts, opting for the broad-brushed version of a story. But the details are often those that enlighten us the most, as they do in this story of the Polish contribution to code-breaking during World War II and given to us by </span><b style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Joseph Boltrukiewicz</b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Boltrukiewicz'</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> article is important history with contemporary lessons. His narrative serves as a reminder of how nations enlist the collaborative efforts of the best talent to solve complex problems during war, no matter where those efforts may come. It also allows us all to acknowledge the contributions of others whom we may not know about who may have the expertise in solving those problems others cannot. as well in winning wars or capturing an enemy that may not be easily found. Boltrukiewicz helps us realize that from </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">someone or some thing outside of one's national borders might come the key to victory when </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">location and tactics of an elusive enemy are needed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Polish code-breakers unlocked the secrets of Hitler's Germany during World War II. And defeating enemies like ISIS, that elusive and terrible foe, may likely need similar collaborations. In any case, Boltrukiewicz brings us a bold, new description of a unique event in world history that guides us to a better understanding of "The Imitation Game"than just what is served by Hollywood. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Joseph Boltrukiewicz</b>--(Reprint with permission) A week before the Oscars are given away and amid growing popularity of one of the most visible candidates for the award, Morten Tyldum’s “The Imitation Game”, let’s take a quick look at how the truth of Enigma code breaking came to be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine" style="color: #556699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Machine Enigma</a><span style="color: black;"> and its coding system were designed and patented for both civil and military service by a German engineer Arthur Scherbius in February 1918. It was a cipher machine based on rotating wired wheels, what is now known as a rotor machine and the purpose of its applications in the military was to avoid human error when coding and decoding secret messages.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As the German power was growing fast after the 1st World War, the French intelligence services were very much interested in deciphering German’s Enigma messages as they had some code breaking traditions and achievements from the time of the previous war.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In June 1931 the French were approached by a German spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt (“Asche”) who was an employee at Armed Forces' cryptographic headquarters and provided them with the book of system code breaking keys along with many technical details of how Enigma was constructed and worked. The problem was that the French couldn’t find people to take the task of deciphering Enigma and had hoped they would have bought the information first. In the early 1930’s they contacted the British secret services but the British side ignored any attempts to cooperate having been fully convinced that the Enigma code was unbreakable and the Asche’s codes without the real machine were useless.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then the French decided to share their information with Polish secret services by contacting Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) and gave them Asche’s information late in 1932. Polish Intelligence Services missed introduction of Enigma to the service in German Navy (Kriegsmarine) in 1926 but when it was introduced by the land forces two years later, the Cipher Bureau started analyzing German communication codes. As soon as it was found out that the code was generated by a machine, there came a decision to hire a team of the best students of mathematics (German speaking) from the University of Poznan (Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski) to undergo a secret cryptography course which was based" on French General Marcel Givièrge's 1925 book, Cours de cryptographie (Course of Cryptography). Another decision was to buy a commercial version of Enigma by a decoy company. There was an assumption that both the military and commercial versions of the machines were somehow similarly designed. There was only one part that made the difference between the two versions - instead of a typical keyboard layout, QWERT…, there was a simple, according to alphabetical order, ABCDE...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">In the beginning the Cipher Bureau had achieved little success reading Enigma and in late 1932 set </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski" style="color: #556699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Rejewski</a><span style="color: black;"> for some 3 months to solve the problem. After a few weeks, he figured out the secret internal wiring of the Enigma. For the first time Enigma code was finally deciphered on Dec 31, 1932. Then the team of three developed an assortment of techniques for the regular decryption of Enigma messages. Rejewski's contributions included devising the cryptologic card catalog, derived using his cyclometer, and the cryptologic bomb when working with only mathematical logic, reasoning, setting up the system of equasions, constant checking, evaluating, and verifying them. When working with his own design, cyclometer, which was a sort of anti-Enigma, Rejewski concluded that there could be 105,456 different default settings of Enigma for a day. He was working with only one available and commercial version of Enigma machine but soon after breaking the code, several duplicates of Enigma were built by Warsaw’s radio-telegraph company AVA. These Polish made, more than 10 Enigmas duplicates started working successfully on deciphering the codes as early as 1934. Interesting is the fact that the countries like Sweden and the United States started their cipher bureaus based on mathematical logic exactly at the same time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before the war, both Polish and French intelligence were getting together for quite a times, sharing limited information. The French were plugging into the codes and the Polish side was deciphering them. In the beginning of 1933 almost all Enigma coded pieces of information were fully decoded until the Germans started to introduce more changes to Enigma’s layout of both rotors, wheels, other subparts and coding procedures. In June 1933, during the Night of the Long Knives (Röhm-Putsch), German messages were decoded minutes after they were sent by radio when using the Morse alphabet. The hardest part was messages related to Kriegsmarine as three versions of codes existed there. Until November 1938 the Polish Cipher Bureau achieved average 75% efficiency in deciphering information generated by Enigma working for the German land forces. Soon after, a new Enigma machine was introduced and the efficiency of deciphering dropped down to 10%.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As a result of these combined efforts, Polish code breakers were able to read the German information more than five years before the British came up with the idea for Bletchley Park and six years before the war broke out.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s worth mentioning that as a previous and one of the first lucky coincidence at Okecie airport in Warsaw early in 1929, Polish secret services took over and photographed a commercial version of Enigma (without knowing its real purpose at that time) that was sent to one of German companies in Poland.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In 1938, for the first time in deciphering game, the British came to the stage of coding by setting up their own centre at Bletchley Park. It’s now hard to say if their admiral, Hugh Sinclair, gave the growing Enigma problem a second look and gave up an idea of decoding game based on grammar, syntax and language differences. The fact is that in July 25, 1939, five weeks before the 2nd World War broke out, the Polish, French, and British representatives with Alastair Dennison had gotten together in Pyry near Warsaw where the Polish side revealed the secrets of code breaking and all advanced works that had already been done to the British and French. First they didn’t believe what they saw and Alfred Dillwyn Knox ridiculed when witnessing the results of Enigma code breaking works. Then they were upset that the Polish side hadn’t shared any details of the new war games with them. As a freebie, both visiting sides from Britain and France received a real time presentation in decoding the message that was just intercepted.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As a result of that meeting, a few days after, the British started heavy duty hiring of mathematicians to Government Codes and Cipher School after having seen in Warsaw that maybe grammar differences in languages was not the way to go in the whole decoding game. British intelligence chief, Stewart Menzies, pumped up huge financial funds to develop both new and continue old projects at Bletchley Park. That’s exactly where Alan Turing came up with his skills, wit, previous achievements, and knowledge. At the wake of upcoming war the Poles had to pass over the secret of the code breaking to someone else and couldn’t continue anymore. Soon after Poland was invaded by the Germans, all decoding game stopped, codes and Polish versions (duplicates) of Enigma coding machines were passed over to the French and British along with the documentation and the team of three along with a small group of their supervisors had to leave the country.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is exactly when Polish role in the whole Enigma case finished. There’s a continuation of the story - they came to France where they found a temporary shelter and marked their presence in Britain - but the team of three hadn’t been given a second chance to work as cryptologists the way they worked in Poland. Early in 1940, before the Hitler’s French campaign, all had to leave France for Algeria. In January 1940, Alastair Dennison wrote to Stuart Menzies a letter where he mentioned that the efforts and experience of the team of three (Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski) could save a lot of allied forces in future war against Hitler.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another thing is worth mentioning – the British had never given any credit to the Polish mathematicians working on Enigma code breaking until Poland joined NATO in 1999. Did the history of Enigma change for them because of another country's decision to join this or that organisation? For the facts that history has always been and will always be the same, the simple fact is that it’s not only Alan Turing who deserves recognition but those who laid grounds for pioneering an unimaginably massive work deserve recognition first.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">The imitation game started well before Alan Turing came to Bletchley Park. It’s highly doubtful that “</span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/" style="color: #556699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">The Imitation Game</a><span style="color: black;">” could even accent this simple fact, let alone mentioning about this in any of its scenes. Seeing Alan Turing as an Enigma code breaker without context of Polish contribution to the whole project – not only patriots but also smart, knowledgeable, and wise people – is like missing a point. I wish Morten Tyldum would come up with more accurate idea for the Oscars.</span><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For wars are not just won by the victors but the men and women who may silently give their skills to defeat evil, never asking for acknowledgment, while they deserve it just the same. The following will help the reader understand that truth can come from almost any place at the time we need it most.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-17851007783918606692015-02-17T12:10:00.002-08:002015-02-21T11:46:09.132-08:00Mr. Angel: A tender tale tells everyone the nature of great love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol Forsloff---Loneliness, despair, poverty happen to many people in life with images we see so often in almost every area of the world, now captured by a song in ways that make us feel we are that rejected individual whose special friend embraces without judgment and shows just what love might bring to take the pain away. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The shiny golden retriever seems to glow with joy, that special friend that can greet an old man who goes home to an empty, brooding, dark and chilly place. The dog is there as a safe, soft corner and looks with eyes that see with trust and sympathy. We feel this as the song unfolds, and as we do, the fears, the hurts begin to fade with time, just as we imagine it was for the old man whose dog became the everything that made his life worthwhile.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tenderness and poignancy fill our pockets from Yates melody, even as the feelings from it seep into our own memories, especially if we have been abused or lonely ourselves. The golden retriever represents the love that every woman, child or man must have to hold in times of grief. And as we age, that kind of love brings ever deeper meaning to our lives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Jason Yates, who has won numerous song competitions in the United Kingdom, where he lives, brings his strong vocal and production ability to this music that reminds us of innocent thoughts and hopes we all have for that something or someone who is always there for us even in hard times. For as children we all remember those moments we were sad and something came and filled our empty spaces. Then something came and took it all away. We grew older, and as we did, we learned even though our hearts can be filled again after we have lost, there are those special ones we never will forget. It is an experience that repeats so many times, as surely must have happened with a tired and lonely man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Love like the golden retriever has in this song never dies, as the memory remains. It is something most of us understand, the need for good friends who offer unqualified love and someone like Jason Yates to sing his melodies. It is the kind of love we can visualize in the shared embrace and affection of a boy and his dog, or an old man and a golden retriever, or any soul who needs a friend somewhere, some time or now.</span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-49867359440558127482015-02-16T21:27:00.000-08:002015-02-19T13:25:42.538-08:00'Military officers' use stolen valor to make seductive Facebook contacts<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Purple Heart is offered for valor, something some people steal</td></tr>
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Carol Forsloff--Several times over the past few weeks I have been contacted by middle-aged men in officer's uniforms, complete with medals and paraphernalia and pictures attesting to high rank, which is likely another attempt to win over a woman's confidence fraudulently by using fake ID that could get the fellows prison terms.<br />
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The early news reported on The Today Show via <a href="http://www.today.com/news/fake-soldiers-pretend-be-war-heroes-popularity-profit-2D80464386">Rossen Reports</a> that men using military uniforms and wearing medals in the real world is a frequent occurrence in the confidence game about getting a woman's affection and more. The more is often the money.<br />
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In my case, these were the salutations:"Hello, dear, how are you?" which has to be an unusual way to greet a Facebook user that includes on the home page a picture of the woman with her husband. The greeter, however, was a man in uniform, with a flag draped in the back of the wall in front of his pose and medals on his chest. After blocking him, however, I cannot show his picture. It just might be helpful for the wife, girlfriend, mother or significant woman somewhere in the man's life to know just what the fellow is doing in all of his spare time. For this is what the errant fellow wrote to me after that short introduction:Hello dear; how are You---? how is life over there? You look so nice here in your picture, actually seen your beauty nice appearance its seems You really enjoy your life over there, though we haven't know yet, but due to The feeling of friendship that's really impress me mostly in You, meanwhile take care! my pleasure to hear from you soon. have a nice day."<br />
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And the fellow who called himself Richard Ben (which may not be his name at all) is not the only one to have contacted me, as there was another attempt to get past this Facebook user just a few weeks ago from someone who called himself Harp Campbell Lowrey. I blocked him too and now have found his account has been temporarily removed by Facebook until his identity is properly established. This event was not surprising when the news of The Today Show offered the segment on fraud and solicitation being done by men posing to be officers.<br />
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The fact is you can buy the military clothes and all of the peripheral essentials that will make the women swoon and the other men envious. Or perhaps that's what the perpetrators of fraud and abuse might think when they make their online purchases at places like this one <a href="http://www.militaryuniformsupply.com/">here</a>. Those military uniforms are sold by trusting souls who accept the idea that the person may be ordering a copy of what they may have lost or that uniform that got torn up in the laundry, so now the owner wants another for those sentimental reasons. But sentiment is not what drives the fraud guys who put on the uniform with intent only to deceive.<br />
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Online the case of Jonathan Wade Short who admitted impersonating a soldier, claiming to have won a Purple Heart for Valor, then bilking the unsuspecting woman he found and courted into giving him some money. He pleaded guilty and spent one year in prison. But <a href="http://www.today.com/news/fake-soldiers-pretend-be-war-heroes-popularity-profit-2D80464386">Rossen Report</a>s tells us there are many more men who are using the ploy to deceive others.<br />
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<a href="http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/06/03/obama-signs-new-stolen-valor-act.html">The Stolen Valor Act</a> makes it a crime to fraudulently claim one has been given the Purple Heart or Silver Star in order to gain financially.<br />
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But the crime against the woman, and her broken heart, can surely be hurtful too.<br />
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And women who use social media these days, it appears, must be as careful as those who walk in unfamiliar places and look for signs of mischief for that mischief may be lurking just ahead in Facebook Friends requests.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-90867375402392834102015-02-16T12:59:00.000-08:002015-02-19T13:26:27.049-08:00How 'A Dream' offers us visions for living and dying<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol Forsloff--Sometimes it is from of poetry, that comes from many cultures, that we find the elevated words that bring us ways of inner contemplation, peace, or reason in a sometimes unreasonable world, as William Blake did for us so many years ago, shared in his words and music in this way:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Blake's words, "A Dream" we find the message that reminds us that even in the more difficult times we find that glow worm near, we find the inner light in dreams or in our waking moments when we contemplate their truths.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Once a dream did weave a shade<br />O'er my angel-guarded bed,<br />That an emmet lost its way<br />Where on grass methought I lay.<br /><br />Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,<br />Dark, benighted, travel-worn,<br />Over many a tangle spray,<br />All heart-broke, I heard her say:<br /><br />'Oh my children! do they cry,<br />Do they hear their father sigh?<br />Now they look abroad to see,<br />Now return and weep for me.'<br /><br />Pitying, I dropped a tear:<br />But I saw a glow-worm near,<br />Who replied, 'What wailing wight<br />Calls the watchman of the night?<br /><br />'I am set to light the ground,<br />While the beetle goes his round:<br />Follow now the beetle's hum;<br />Little wanderer, hie thee home!'</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Blake wrote much religious poetry, but for everyone there are messages deep within the rhythm of his work that remind us of humanitarian ideals. A writer of the 19th century, the Romantic period that defined his work is not the only age that can embrace it. For words and artistry combined make Blake one of the world's greatest poets today and every day.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.biography.com/people/william-blake-9214491">The life of Blake</a> teaches us even more about life itself. He was a visionary artist, someone much misunderstood during the time he wrote, yet known now for the great work he added to our cache of literature, that folks now know across the world. His work is taught throughout the English-speaking world, and likely far beyond, as part of the courses in literature almost every student takes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The concept of near death experiences, that Hollywood portrayed in contemporary movies like <i>Heaven is Real</i> may owe a debt to Blake who claimed he saw the spirit of his brother, who had died from tuberculosis, ascend through the ceiling at the moment of his death. The event is said to have influenced Blake's work, both poetry and his engraving artistry.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The poem "A Dream" although shorter than some of Blake's other works, makes a great statement in those few words, about visions and how we perhaps can use them to help us find some resolution, even when life is difficult. That resolution can come at a complex moment, of war, of disease or personal struggles or our understanding and preparation for death.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-4276638456138825492015-02-15T18:46:00.000-08:002015-02-19T13:40:34.745-08:00Whooping cough resurgence from lack of vaccinations, adult misinformation<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXj09DOI_VS5zYet7kFndcuHFTd5j_LUpqgLefZOWu6mGdR67r5vTXNhRLbTR6yS_VmdkisMkQoU4qTXSKP7EkWa3wu7Zp29e7FEWX1XhUi9eWFpJg_NUcZySQhZLig95eTYvjLx_b7Bs/s1600/Vaccinations+in+1947.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXj09DOI_VS5zYet7kFndcuHFTd5j_LUpqgLefZOWu6mGdR67r5vTXNhRLbTR6yS_VmdkisMkQoU4qTXSKP7EkWa3wu7Zp29e7FEWX1XhUi9eWFpJg_NUcZySQhZLig95eTYvjLx_b7Bs/s1600/Vaccinations+in+1947.jpg" height="235" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vaccinations in 1947</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While some parents continue to question vaccinations for fear of autism, and the measles outbreak concerns health officials, medical experts are underlining the seriousness of some preventable conditions like whooping cough, making a resurgence caused by what experts tell us are reduction in vaccinations.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Several years ago The University of Texas Health </span>Science Center reminded us a nagging cough might be whooping cough, as the United States had been experiencing its worst outbreak in 50 years.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">In 2010 six states reported 1,500 cases of whooping cough with six fatalities.</span></span>Public health officials say this is a really serious problem and time for folks to look carefully at their immunization records and those of their children.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"As parents, we should take every opportunity to get immunizations for our children—and ourselves—and get them in a timely fashion," said Lynnette Mazur, MD, professor of pediatrics at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston. "But, first, get your child to a doctor for a proper diagnosis if he or she has a runny nose or cough that lasts more than a<br />week."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Pertussis,or whooping cough came back for three reasons according to Mazur. The vaccine weakens over time. There are also gaps in group immunization and the fact there is a contagious factor is important.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"The vaccine has a limited effectiveness time span, lasting only six to 10 years," Mazur explained. "Outbreaks cycle every three to five years and then settle down. But it's always there." Adults may be ignorant of the fact they need vaccinations after childhood, as is recommended for whooping cough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">She also said that for the pertussis vaccine to be effective against serious outbreak, “at least 92 to 94 percent of the community must be vaccinated.” This is the “herd” in herd immunity: The more contagious the disease, the greater the density needs to be of vaccinated populations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">“Pertussis is so contagious that the average number of secondary infection cases that are produced by a single index [first identified] case is 12 to 17,” Mazur maintained.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.webmd.com/children/guide/whooping-cough-symptoms-treatment">Experts tell us</a> pertussis results from bacteria that invades the nose, mouth and throat. That bacteria is called Bordetella pertussis. When someone with the disease coughs or sneezes it can spread through the air by droplets. It may only mildly affect school-aged children but can be serious in babies under the age of one year. It can also cause seizures, pneumonia and even death. Up to 1% of children who get the whooping cough die from<br />the disease.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The disease shows up 7 to 10 days from the date of exposure, but the incubation can be as much as four to 21 days.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Symptoms might at first be difficult to diagnose because they resemble a cold,<br />with a runny nose, low-grade or no fever and mild cough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But the disease, once it is fully realized by the body can be a violent assault with major coughing spells where people have difficulty taking a breath. The cough can linger for months, and no amount of cough syrup will do any good.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Whooping cough can not only cause problems at the time of the disease outbreak but some long-range problems for those whose symptoms are particularly acute. The journalist writing this had the disease in childhood, which was the cause of a hernia that required surgery at age 15. For <a href="http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/inguinal-hernia/basics/risk-factors/CON-20021456">a hernia in a female</a> is rare enough added to the fact that it can make childbirth more difficult.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The standard preemptive strike is DTaP, a combination vaccine that protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis and remains the vaccine of choice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://search.cdc.gov/search?query=whooping+cough&utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=cdc-main">The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC</a>) recommends that by age<br />7, children should have received DTaP shots at 2, 4 and 6 months and once between 15 and 18 months, and again between 4 and 6 years.</span><br />
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Adults should substitute one of their 10-year tetanus/diphtheria (Td) boosters with a one-time DTaP dose.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">This year Victoria announced<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-18/free-whooping-cough-vaccination-for-new-parents/6023744"> free vaccine</a>s for expectant mothers from the third trimester until the baby reaches six months of age. The announcement came after the government saw a serious increase in whooping cough during the past year.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Why the resurgence in recent years? California experts tell us it has to do with<a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/2015-california-whooping-cough-epidemic-170000757.html"> fewer people getting vaccinated</a> and the fact that adults may fail to get a booster shot since the vaccines only last about ten years or so.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Experts say adults as well as children should be vaccinated.</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-18918444948651318232015-02-15T06:36:00.000-08:002015-02-16T14:12:06.981-08:00Daydreaming has amnesiac effect and a way to explore inner experiences<div style="text-align: left;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daydream</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Daydreaming </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">is something we all do. We look back to something that stood out for </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">us, then when we "wake up," we find we struggle for a few moments to</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"wake up" and remember what we were doing just before the daydream. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">That behavior of not remembering for a short period of time after a daydream is common.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">As children, when we were caught daydreaming, it was then the teacher would ask us what the class had been discussing. And we cannot remember. Now we know the reason why.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">What scientists have found is that the further the distance from the actual episode, that is when the target of the daydream occurred, the more difficult it is to remember what you were doing just before that daydream. So if you were remembering your wonderful Christmas in June, it is likely it would be harder to remember the topic of your lesson than if you were daydreaming about the great time you had playing ball yesterday.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Contextual cues are the keys to remembering, as psychologists have known for awhile. When an individual leaves that context, it becomes harder to remember what happened.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Daydreaming, it has been found, can block memories to the recent past. That is why trying to remember what you were doing at the time the daydream occurred is a bit of a struggle.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;"> Psychological scientists Peter F. Delaney and Lili Sahakyan of the University of North Carolina at Greens boro and Colleen M. Kelley and Carissa A. Zimmerman of Florida State University investigated whether the actual content of the daydreams impacts one's ability to access a recently-acquired memory.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">The experiment involved study participants being asked to look at a list of words, then think about something they had done or where they had been that morning. Those same participants were given the same type of test and afterward asked to remember something they had done a few weeks before.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Results showed subjects of the study were able to remember words better after recalling something that had happened just hours before as opposed to something that had happened weeks earlier.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">The study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the <a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2010/delaney.cfm" id="rilz" title="Association for Psychological Science.">Association for Psychological Science.</a> The results remain a valuable part of understanding why we daydream and what happens when we do and some of the immediate recall that may be lost at the time.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">"If there's something you don't feel like thinking about, you're better off remembering a more distant event than a close event, to try to put it out of your mind for a while," said Delaney, offering the summary that explains the research outcomes.. "It can help you feel like you're in a different situation." That's a good way for people who want to forget about something.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">How common are daydreams? <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201301/why-and-how-you-daydream">Psychologists have found</a> that 96% of us daydream at least once daily.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">So the impact of these daydreams can be important in our reaction with others. The purpose, researchers have concluded, it helps us explore our inner experiences and can be the foundation of how we develop certain moral values. We may be contemplating solutions for certain moral dilemmas and then forget what the people around us may have said while we were daydreaming. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-size: small;">The wife that asks the husband, "Did you hear what I said?" And the husband's response, "Yeh." might be a diversion that allows the husband to locate a context, a clue so that he can answer without letting his wife know he was daydreaming about something important to him and perhaps making some moral decision..</span></div>
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What might that mean for those children in the classroom? It depends on what they daydream about and when. The baseball game that happened yesterday may not interfere with recalling the elements of the lesson the teacher introduced, whereas the new catcher's mitt and baseball bat in a daydream about Christmas of several months ago, may bring that startled reaction from little Jimmy and the laugh from everyone else.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-17075633448952215892015-02-14T15:28:00.000-08:002015-02-15T13:19:54.294-08:00Undressing '50 Shades of Grey' with 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L.James</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What is there about "E.L. James' badly written unapologetically graphic trilogy of novels to sell a whopping 100 million copies in 52 languages worldwide?" Kenneth Turan asks the question perhaps we all should ask.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, offers an observation <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/12/entertainment/feat-fifty-shades-grey-reviews/index.html" style="color: #556699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">made by critics</a> who read the book, then saw a preview of the film, <em>Fifty Shades of Grey</em>. They might be best summarized by Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, " It's too bad the movie also imports James's atrociously written prose and bizarre sexual politics, but then, no one buys a Fifty Shades ticket for the dialogue."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Along with that we might add other questions too, with a perspective on sex and literature, asking ourselves if effective communication and good character development along with a rich story is what we seek in literature. Then we can debate the ethics of our freedom and how far it too can go, asking ourselves a final question: Why do we reinforce the least of us if it is the best we seek?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The questions here are those that get at things people say they want but contemporary behavior surrounding <em>Fifty Shades of Grey</em> reinforce those things that do the opposite instead without ethics and effective language, two things people say they want.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ethics and effective language often are the heart of the freedom debate as well. For what is ethical for one man may not be for another. What is effective language in the heat of passion one might say will differ just as much. How far one goes in extremes of each is like the freedom debate. A comparison of<em> Lady Chatterley's Lover</em> by D.H. Lawrence and <em>Fifty Shades of Grey</em> by E.L. James may allow us to see a spectrum of our culture and to examine the nature of freedom too. It allows us to weigh the extremes against cultural survival that is often reinforced by a society's written word and its expression of the higher good that carries it along. That higher good may simply be some value embedded in the message, with the rest of the dialogue, the story and the content reinforcing the communication of what that value is. And perhaps it is freedom speaking with another voice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Other critics comparing these books do so on the basis of the language itself and whether <em>Fifty Shades of Grey</em> measures up to <em>Lady Chatterley's Lover</em>. But the comparison might be on other levels that include the nature of freedom and the historical context in which both books were written.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><em>Lady Chatterley's Lover</em> has been a must read for students of literature in college for many years. The classic love and steamy sex was written with the passions that are part of humankind. The words made pictures as we watched the story elements unfold. We knew, like many stories, where the story just might lead; but the language gave us flavor as our appetites would grow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But E. L. James does not do that for freedom, nor likely will the film, even as several critics who have seen the film maintain the language of the movie is better than the language of the book.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The language of <em>Lady Chatterley's Lover</em> was a different thing. The literary content of D.H. Lawrence, and its developed studies of the characters themselves, was as much an elegant prose frame for the story itself. It encapsulated the theme of woman's sexuality pitted against the stereotypes of womankind. He examines the human character, how man and woman view each other and how our culture treats them both in words and deeds as well. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Chatterleys-Lover-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/1840224886" style="color: #556699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">D.H. Lawrence examines</a> the mental and emotional conflicts women had, and many still have, in the fashion described by this eloquent author in a passage from the book:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who gloried it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunae thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And a woman had to yield," D.H. Lawrence continued, as the novel unfolds and we see man's appetites conflicting with women's notions of love itself and how the lovers make their way into a sex-befuddled world, the world of the 1930's, that in some ways is like our own. A great war, World War I, had ended to an acting-out phase that lingered awhile, the 1920's, the speakeasy ways of guys and dolls, and the 1930's romantic love of Cary Grant and leading ladies that simply swooned when the lights went dim. It was in this atmosphere, sandwiched between two wars, that D.H. Lawrence stepped in and looked at male-female issues and defined new freedoms that took root with the coming years. And for that <a href="http://d.h./" style="color: #556699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">his critics said</a> he had written pornography.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And women's sexual freedom and part of that conflict is seen in this continuation of D.H. Lawrence words: "but a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self." Then he went on to express that yielding and that freedom in a description of men's climax and woman's later orgasm by holding herself back. The sexual freedom may not be as folks define it now, but the revolutionary way it was described made<em> Lady Chatterley's Lover</em> called pornography by many. D.H. Lawrence brilliant book, his language and his thesis, brought the social and legal conclusion that remains to this day. <em>Lady Chatterley's Lover</em>, is the book, a masterpiece, a literary classic that is said to define the heart of D.H. Lawrence work. After all, he was a poet too; and his expressions took language to describe the basic human act of sex allowing us to see---and almost feel—the passion, the intensity, the feelings men and women struggle themselves to put into words. He did that with the careful ways an author finds to build his characters. He does so with passion, feeling and the care it takes to make the story something the reader can't put down, as one finds oneself absorbed in every word and detail that he brings. The sexual climax is that "final spasm of self assertion," a dimension of description that makes us ponder every word.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">E.L. James looks at this conflict in a way folks may differ in their opinions, male and female, in their thoughts of sex, likes this: "My eyes stray to the piano. Jeez—if I'd kept my mouth shut, we'd have made love on the piano. No, fucked, we would have fucked on the piano. Well I would have made love. The thought lies heavy and sad in my mind and what's left of my heart. He has never made love to me, has he?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What does the one-dimensional, virtuous woman, Ana, the main character of <em>Fifty Shades of Grey</em>, do with this knowledge expressed so directly to us, as she just moves along from one sex encounter to another, all similar enough they could have been done in a single, prolonged scene? And none of those myriad scenes that seem like near-copies of one another are done beautifully and carefully so we see the complexity of character we see in the D.H. Lawrence tale. The freedom exists in the character's participation in the sexual hijinks of the character of Christian, which may be enough for some folks on some levels. Yet one asks the question if that expressed freedom might not be better done in a far better way, with the inclusion of some philosophical or ethical overview as D.H. Lawrence did, in his ability to understand and examine his culture of his time and potentially all time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is the freedom debate we find in almost every place, including what is literature and what are ethics after all. D.H. Lawrence gave us both, by offering us the meaning of how man and woman think of sex and each other in language we can read and feel so deep it touches the soul of what we know about ourselves. E.L. James in her Fifty Shades offers another tabloid story-tale, and we can peek and giggle in our corners after all. Then anticipate the film and wonder what it really is about, and likely leave still wondering, never finding anything at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-19807152308168266342015-02-12T12:58:00.003-08:002015-02-15T09:51:13.810-08:00Hawaii's severe weather different from mainland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8zrZulBSQUNdEml-_CpNferjRJLyKT0XjzGWjsIs-Dbw24ZKDsWt7JH_pK9RIoFV5AlZmhOoJlcRlyqdJcH4hmUrqD5tKS-G44VsiXKsKkn3tk-NpXLc3seytm1q_N9MtqDgOtSYvjWA/s1600/Ocean+storm,+Makaha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8zrZulBSQUNdEml-_CpNferjRJLyKT0XjzGWjsIs-Dbw24ZKDsWt7JH_pK9RIoFV5AlZmhOoJlcRlyqdJcH4hmUrqD5tKS-G44VsiXKsKkn3tk-NpXLc3seytm1q_N9MtqDgOtSYvjWA/s1600/Ocean+storm,+Makaha.jpg" height="238" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">February 3, 2015 ocean at boat harbor, Waianae, Hawaii</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hawaii weather news is seldom seen on the national news maps of severe conditions. Is this because of its remoteness from the mainland or is this Pacific paradise getaway weather different from the mainland?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those who visit Hawaii incidentally, especially during the winter months when the snow is falling in the East Coast and rainy, gray skies fill the news of West Coast weather, will find Hawaii pleasant and a welcome mat of beauty that seems to unfold just for them. Upon returning from that vacation, honeymoon trip or excursion in transition from places like Asia, they will tell of the wonderful time in Hawaii, with its tropical breezes, friendly people and wonderful places to shop. Add to that the wide expanse of beaches and an ocean that appears almost unlimited in its glorious and glowing span, and many people are thrilled just for the respite from severe weather from wherever they have been.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Each region of the earth has weather stories to tell, the good, the bad, the ugly when worst conditions hit the most. Still feelings are as cultural as they are of how folks feel. When winter comes, the old-time residents understand those conditions, minor as they seem to visitors abroad, can cause those bones to ache a bit and swimming put on hold.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But Hawaii has its severe weather, different from the mainland. The snow that the mainland news reports most of the country in white, is not snow in populated areas but atop the high mountain peaks on the Big Island, where people can ski and revel in the newness of a sport few Hawaiians enjoy. For most of the local people, those born and raised on any of the islands,snow packed streets and temperatures below freezing are what they read or see on television, with the consistent exclamation, "Lucky we live Hawaii," that greets folks when the weather seems so bad everywhere else.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In fact weather reporters in Hawaii, like Guy Hagi on the KGMB evening news, nearly every day begins or ends his analysis of the weather with "the best weather on the planet" as the sum of all he said. And he often adds to his report whether the surf is up or down and when it might be wild. The reason for this type of news underlines again Hawaii's standing as one of the world's best places to surf, described as<a href="http://www.to-hawaii.com/surfing.php"> a surfing mecca</a> for those who look for ways to ride the wild and wind-filled waves.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So what is that severe weather Hawaii has that differs from the mainland? After all, there are hurricanes, tropical storms and rains that come at certain seasons, and, of course, the vog, the mix of volcanic material that blows from the active mountain tops on the Big Island in the chain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is winter in Hawaii. Late in November until the beginning of spring, long-time Hawaii residents notice the <a href="http://hawaiiweather.org/">changes in conditions</a> visitors might not see or feel. And that's because in many ways, what drives the weather reports is surf, the kind that people love to ride high atop the waves.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I write this article today, <a href="http://www.weathercity.com/us/hi/oahu/">the predicted temperature for Oahu</a> is a high of 72 degrees and a low of 63. The lower reading is for evening hours, when folks feel a dip, imperceptibly at first, then cover up with blankets when it is time to go to bed. That means the thick one kept under the bed for severe weather times. Today may have some sprinkles, the Hawaii version of rain that comes almost every day, somewhere on the island's chain. But when the rain is focused for more than a little while, it becomes that severe weather that locals talk about. It means the surfers might want to wait for another sunny day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Along with that the winds can come, along with weather conditions that occur in the Pacific waters that surrounds Hawaii, a series of islands in a chain extending further from any other land surface anywhere in the world. So news reports include the trade winds, because they make the difference in just how folks might feel, those sometimes subtle differences when old-time residents will start to speak of cold. When the conversation makes its way to windy island ways, the mainland folks will roll their eyes to think it's funny talk. Yet for the local people, the lack of trade winds means the heat and humidity will be uncomfortable enough to seek a cooling fan. Or even more in keeping with the feelings folks can get, an air conditioner is turned on the hot parts of the day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In winter winds are stronger, rains increase a bit; and temperatures are colder in the night. Relative to other climes, they may not seem so much. However, they can surely make the surfer feel chagrined, despite the fact the intrepid ones are seen in surf and waves. Along Makaha beaches, when the red flags are put up, one sees the surfers floating by as swimmers leave the surf.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The hurricanes the mainland national weather reports that happen in Hawaii, are seldom seen by local folk; and most of them are not at all the way they were predicted. 2014 hurricanes hit some areas of the Big Island, causing them to reach emergency status and apply for Federal funds. The rest of the weather problems happened with far less fervor than reported, even after people stocked their cupboards with weeks of water jugs, while people smiled with some relief, and knowledge all the same. The hurricane or tsunami news is rare enough, but danger signs and signals from the mainland forecast folk</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After 40 years of travel to and from Hawaii and consistent living nearly 28 of those years, a journalist still smiles a bit when it is time for weather news. For listening and watching those who live here clearly know that what is severe weather is likely pleasant for most folks, who visit from the U.S. East and other places in the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> For the sun comes up in the winter, and throughout the year, including January, in months where weather conditions worldwide can often get quite stormy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lucky I live Hawaii. Wish I could share it most of you, today and every day the weather is bad somewhere, for no matter where you live, you would find the climate here just as Guy Hagi, KGMB's weather man says, "best weather on the planet."</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmTtdA7uqGy-8ksxnlBAKWrSImn1VjHfUsafxlKgVi5j9FzT8RZ8HLk0oa2T7rgNCVKg17xRHHk8hsB_Esud1h2JwyvCP9wtf9etpVPgEkVvAOgxrQy5W8bB8d-LB2uSCrc8ifkzPwmwE/s1600/DSCF0056.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmTtdA7uqGy-8ksxnlBAKWrSImn1VjHfUsafxlKgVi5j9FzT8RZ8HLk0oa2T7rgNCVKg17xRHHk8hsB_Esud1h2JwyvCP9wtf9etpVPgEkVvAOgxrQy5W8bB8d-LB2uSCrc8ifkzPwmwE/s1600/DSCF0056.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">January 2013</td></tr>
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. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-77330320629740935182015-02-11T16:55:00.000-08:002015-02-15T09:51:37.111-08:00Broken Heart can be a real and alarming medical condition<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-R4EYKA0EeB0kCypHshAYPNpt8y0OLk2jKDLPwXV0ww3NjlpUAun2zojaUqrFdoZZnJFtTv_XJiVOJUBaFe2r2cbQqA7YE3o5WvbQ8l1OMCAJLIhxkSt6rwx1rxUVL89PDXqI6ofy3N8/s1600/Hearts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-R4EYKA0EeB0kCypHshAYPNpt8y0OLk2jKDLPwXV0ww3NjlpUAun2zojaUqrFdoZZnJFtTv_XJiVOJUBaFe2r2cbQqA7YE3o5WvbQ8l1OMCAJLIhxkSt6rwx1rxUVL89PDXqI6ofy3N8/s1600/Hearts.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hearts are for love, but when broken there can be pain---and real distress</td></tr>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Do you have trouble breathing and chest
pain and did your sweetheart tell you he (or she) is going with
someone else on Valentine's Day, the cowardly way of saying goodbye?
That broken heart may be more than 'just saying.'</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Broken heart can actually refer to a
medical condition that comes about during times of acute stress.
These occasions can be divorce, the death of a spouse or a serious
medical diagnosis, such as cancer. It can also happen with someone
is having severe financial problems.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cardiologist Sara Sima, M.D. Of Loyala
University, tells us there is such a thing as broken heart syndrome
which is also known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy. The actual
cause is unknown but is described as the condition related to stress
and that has many of the features related to a real heart attack.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Dr. Sirna tells us, “Like a heart
attack, broken heart syndrome can be very alarming to patients. But
unlike a heart attack, broken heart syndrome usually is reversible,
with no long-lasting effects on the heart muscle. Most affected
individuals regain cardiac function within a short period of time.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is not uncommon, medical professions
say, that people will have more health problems in general following
a major crisis. The immune system can be compromised during times of
great stress. There is an overload on the body's normal demands, so
one can be at work, doing what may even be pleasurable ordinarily,
then feel extraordinarily tired or apathetic.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.medicinenet.com/stress/related-conditions/index.htm">Problems related to stress</a> include not
just a broken heart but chronic headaches, diabetes and other
conditions that cause a multiple of symptoms have all been tied to
stress.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A broken heart, one thinks, might just
last for a week or two, then will be gone. And whereas, that is
likely true in most cases, it can create pain and problems as well.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But just in case,<a href="http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart-disease-heart-attacks"> if you experiencesymptoms</a> such as chest pain and difficulty breathing, then it's
important to get help right away, even if you are under stress of
some kind and think the pain will just pass. Call 911, doctors like
Dr. Sirna remind us, because you may lose a lover, or your body may
be indeed having a serious health emergency and the pain related to
the lover loss might turn to pleasure once you are cared for
medically—or just find another lover.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-7774213420226829612015-02-10T06:46:00.000-08:002015-02-22T12:29:37.293-08:00Foreign born doctors increase in US, but path to practice difficult<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLsTMMwmj6BdepZkhBGiYR928PldoclQF1Di-u6jsXJEWODYhaiiLoRzUB7furX3DRy7oDUS2kBXM3nitDlLoY5AaurgwvalYcZiqcByCb6hO1Jv_Wdtav33jXyP4ZeIfoy5eQcY4DbFM/s1600/Doctors_Office_in_New_Orleans-225x300+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLsTMMwmj6BdepZkhBGiYR928PldoclQF1Di-u6jsXJEWODYhaiiLoRzUB7furX3DRy7oDUS2kBXM3nitDlLoY5AaurgwvalYcZiqcByCb6hO1Jv_Wdtav33jXyP4ZeIfoy5eQcY4DbFM/s1600/Doctors_Office_in_New_Orleans-225x300+(1).jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><strong>Carol Forsloff </strong>-<span style="color: black;"> "I was looking around for a good doctor, but when I checked the local hospital there seemed to be a lot of foreign ones. Are they are as good?" Research reveals they are.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A clerk at Wal-Mart in Natchitoches, Louisiana once expressed the concerns many people have about foreign-born doctors. That's especially true when the local hospital has a </span>number of foreign-born doctors on staff. While these may be hospital resident doctors still involved in developing skills, research shows these folks to be on par with other doctors when it comes to patient care.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What's been discovered, however, is despite the fact medical schools in the United States are considered to be the best in the world, there are good doctors from international medical schools as well.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This takes away the notion that doctors trained outside the United States are not as good. A recent study in the journal Health Affairs seems to contradict this assumption.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />According to the <a href="http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physicians/physicians.shtml" id="xymp" title="American Medical Association">American Medical Association</a>,graduates of international medical schools have been an important part of the medical community in the United States, as well as other parts of the world, since the 1940s. Today, of the roughly 950,000 doctors practicing in the U.S., there are over 240,000 of them that have been foreign-trained.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />The Health Affairs study found that patients treated by foreign-born doctors who were educated in countries outside the U.S. give treatment to patients on par with American-born, American-educated doctors.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Doctors born in the U.S. who trained at an international medical school and returned home to practice, however, did not do as well. The study found that those doctors ranked last in terms of quality of care.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The study reviewed over 244,000 cases in Pennsylvania, with patients suffering from heart attacks or congestive heart failure, to determine the quality of doctor care. The report looked at level of care by length of hospital stay and mortality rates.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />According to the AMA statistics, graduates of international medical schools make up 25 percent of practicing physicians in the United States. Nearly 20 percent of those international graduates are American citizens who have chosen to go abroad to medical school for one reason<br />or another.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Though doctors born and trained in other countries must pass the same tests and undergo the same residency requirements to be licensed in the United States, they have long faced a reputation of not being as competent as other doctors.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Dr. John J. Norcini, first author of the <a href="http://www.healthaffairs.org/" id="i9gg" title="Health Affairs">Health Affairs</a> study and president of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research, tells us "this assumption was initially based on lower training exam scores. But by the mid-1990s, he notes,foreign-born doctors were outperforming their peers on these tests."</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Many studies have reported the United States will be facing a shortage of doctors, that will be worsening in coming decades even as the population of seniors is increasing. A recent report <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.html" id="y9oq" title="by The Wall Street Journal">by The Wall Street Journal</a> notes that in the U.S. there is expected to be a shortfall of over 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Experts say this is one reason that international medical school graduates are so important to our health care system. They will figure in closing the gaps where American educated doctors cannot.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />This type of information is also helpful for attorneys to understand in looking at medical malpractice, since the aim of bad medical work should fall equally on both American and foreign-born without bias, which seems to be the substantiation in the <a href="http://www.ronaldbua.com/" id="y087" title="presentation of an article">presentation of an article</a> with this information.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />In other words, in towns like Natchitoches, Louisiana, small and mostly rural where doctors often are in short supply, foreign-born doctors may increase in availability. The same is true in Hawaii where there are many foreign-born doctors in medical groups like Kaiser.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But the <a href="http://www.amednews.com/article/20110725/profession/307259952/2/">path for a foreign-born doctor to become a physician</a> in the United States is not easy. Many doctors who were trained in other countries and who have worked as doctors find themselves working at menial jobs when they come to the United States. So a program called Welcome Back was created in order to allow foreign born doctors a path to practicing medicine in the United States.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Studies show that shouldn't worry local citizens, since their patient care has been found just as good.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><br /></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-80438074430513645912015-02-09T13:13:00.000-08:002015-02-11T21:17:11.401-08:00Religion's infusion into politics offers opportunities for verbal abuse <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgDSKuR-i-8UZOgNvzTizogEjAZfMMgMHV7m4quoq0TH5jamBKJAuM8jq1tcNaxq5egWFxVmiWp4pXp9Ro89NDfRRhg8I_GZUDHJ4GGVeINMEWyvYiBijEFJ_eZk-cMv1xi5dCN5IAZWY/s1600/Huckabee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgDSKuR-i-8UZOgNvzTizogEjAZfMMgMHV7m4quoq0TH5jamBKJAuM8jq1tcNaxq5egWFxVmiWp4pXp9Ro89NDfRRhg8I_GZUDHJ4GGVeINMEWyvYiBijEFJ_eZk-cMv1xi5dCN5IAZWY/s1600/Huckabee.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reverend Huckabee who once ran for President of the United States--wikimedia commons</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the more troublesome aspects of religion, many say, is its infusion into politics, especially of the kind that intimates President Obama is part of a plot that includes radical Muslims to downgrade the United States values so the country can be taken over by evil forces.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/">Right Wing Watch</a> is an organization that provides insight into the operations of some of these groups. Their mission is to examine some of the statements of extreme right groups in an aggregate form on a daily basis. This allows readers to see what is being said and written about politics and society that represent right wing ideas.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Presently key entertainers are being used to take the podium and explain the concepts that the right wing people offer. <a href="http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Boone,_Pat/">Pat Boone</a>, for example, <a href="http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/pat-boone-compares-obama-to-dr-strangelove/article/425649">has recently said</a> that the Obama administration can be likened to Dr. Strangelove, a 1964 film starring Peter Sellers that is considered a comedy. Yet Boone maintains it is fact, in a narrative that also relates the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who, on a weekend furlough, committed violent crimes and became the topic of political debate in the Presidential election of 1988. It was a time when Republicans were said to be "swift-boating," which became a phrase used for negative, and questionable, campaign tactics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Religion, however, is one of those areas that brings politics into a particularly troublesome area, as it is woven more and more into articles, speeches and forums that allow the conservative agenda to espouse its cause.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The cause is to continue the process of evangelical missions, that offer values of family, God and patriotism. And while these values as "standalones" may be reasonable ones, many Americans reject how the words are manipulated by both right and left extremes in order to prove a political point.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And although this infusion of religion into politics is welcomed by many Evangelicals, it also offers opportunities for verbal abuse, as observed by Right Wing Watch, and a survey of <a href="http://www.charismanews.com/opinion/48209-president-obama-hijacks-christianity-to-defend-islam">Charisma New</a>s, where those who call themselves Christians may call Obama a traitor for working with Muslims to overthrow the government.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is the kind of speech in the form of writing that psychologists and <a href="http://definitions.uslegal.com/v/verbal-abuse/">legal authorities</a> remind us is verbal abuse, especially when authority is used to downgrade others in the form of manipulations or outright lies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And while many people of religious persuasions become involved in partisan politics, it is often the issue that experts say is more important than that. For focusing on the concerns of the world that impact everyone, like not enough food or water or the new for new ways of cultivating food or creating energy, is what affects everyone and might persuade people to use their energies in positive ways.</span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541055010782819626.post-86200764033622459642015-02-08T00:12:00.000-08:002015-02-09T17:05:27.805-08:00How to spot a liar, charlatan or 'used car salesman' in 60 seconds or less<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIyCuyXHkPvY2jJCmtFBFKpnfUZIu2kAiq2qgtYG9mzbWlX3Cms4HpgNwFvranr58rGF3cHye9bHMAPTd6ORf4aNQQ9yZNTzR4PyJfrI_gzH3a64SEXaMFFjjSq3DJxN7M-YxtF38Iw04/s1600/Pinocchio_5ak-188x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIyCuyXHkPvY2jJCmtFBFKpnfUZIu2kAiq2qgtYG9mzbWlX3Cms4HpgNwFvranr58rGF3cHye9bHMAPTd6ORf4aNQQ9yZNTzR4PyJfrI_gzH3a64SEXaMFFjjSq3DJxN7M-YxtF38Iw04/s1600/Pinocchio_5ak-188x300.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pinocchio, the character who lied so much his nose grew long</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What your doctor won't tell you. What
your government is hiding from you. These are clues to discovering in
60 seconds or less how to uncover a liar, a charlatan or quack or
someone who just wants your money by creating anxiety you did not
have before you started reading those first few words.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For it is often catch phrases, used
over and over again, throughout an article, letter or post that are
misleading you to the wrong conclusion and perhaps to a purchase as
well.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The first phrase in the initial
paragraph, I have used as example, begins your search for yourself:
<a href="http://www.alternative-doctor.com/vaccination/16reasons.htm">what your doctor won't tell you</a>. The message is the doctor refuses
to offer the truth. And why would most doctors want to mislead most
of their patients in very intentional ways?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Surely doctors are wrong, some of the
time, just like everyone else. But if the bulk of them misled all of
their patients, the number of complaints would be skyrocketing far
beyond the numbers right now. The Better Business Bureau would be
bulked up with them and politicians would be screeching for heads.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What information, we might ask, would a
doctor intentionally hide? A cure for cancer? A way to stop endless
pain guaranteed never to return? Why would a doctor hide the truth
about cancer? He knows how to cure it and just won't tell you?
Think of how silly that sounds, unless you already believe you can't
trust anyone these days. And what about pain, an absolute cure for
it that the doctor is keeping from you. Do doctors feel happy when
people hurt most? Would that not be a definition of someone who is
dangerously, mentally ill, who enjoys the pleasure of pain? Would
most doctors fall into that group? If so, how did they pass medical
school or even college if they number in multitudes and are so
obviously mentally ill? And why didn't anyone know?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Skip to the end of that article, post,
or book in your hand. It likely sounds very convincing. At the end
you will find in very large capital letters, bold words, underlined
or italics, the point the writer has made. That's the product,
material or more reading for you with a limited time you can buy at
the reduced price offered right now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And you get the cure because you are
among those who are lucky enough to have found what you need, even
when you don't need it, to get truth you won't find anywhere else.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those folks who track fools, have
research they tell you is evidence proving their words. Look
closely, however, again. It is likely if you follow the small,
winding road filled with little white lies it leads to research they
have done or one that is limited in scope or with numbers you don't
understand. And neither would anyone else.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those who offer you hope when you feel
hopeless with a diagnosis using words of such length you just can't
remember them now, know it is difficult to wait in lines, follow
tests and diagnoses and wait for information that can sometimes come
so slowly when you want your answers now. So you are vulnerable and
easy to convince when someone says the government and/or your doctor
are hiding the facts just to keep them from you in order to make
money for “Big Pharma” or some other catch phrase that will
surely make anyone mad.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The charlatan, quack or 'used car guy'
knows something you might not know now, but is key to avoid being
misled and getting taken for more than a car. For people who want to
trick you into believing things that just are not true know it is
difficult for people to believe the truth when the lie is told first.
It means the more the lie is told over and over again, when you hear
the truth from a friend that tells you what you are doing might hurt
you real bad, you will stay right there on the hook.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which is why we went to Iraq in the
first place and why folks remember it well. After all, some will
say, those <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/voters-lies-midterms-112467.html#.VNcYY_nF_Cs">weapons of mass destruction</a> just had to be found, didn't
they?</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is like that for medicine too. And
politics. And anything someone will sell you and hope you won't
check right upfront.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So it is better to figure out for
yourself when someone is leading you on and if you are being treated
as fool. You can apply some of these notions with so many things, to
political speeches <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/12/16/fox-amp-friends-fox-news-top-misinformer-of-201/185408">and on Fox News</a> almost every day. To do it in
those 60 seconds, just read the first phrases, then skip to the end,
where the pitch is sure to be made. Then you can say no, loud and
clear and prolonged, and multiplied over and over, the folks
“selling” you might one day give up------and get jobs like the
rest of us folk.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03367247306183212060noreply@blogger.com0