Watch what you touch: A bad germ gets worse

Something is wrong. Bush is wanting billions more to kill a bunch of Iraqi citizens and we are aproaching a germ that has the potential to kill millions of US citizens.
WTF

Tom


‘C. diff’ rivals MRSA as the next deadly bacteria threat, experts say

C. diff has long been a common, usually benign bug associated with simple, easily treated diarrhea in older patients in hospitals and nursing homes. About 3 percent of healthy adults harbor the bacteria with no problem. But overuse of antibiotics has allowed the germ to develop resistance in recent years, doctors said, creating the toxic new type that stumps traditional treatment.

"This is the one we're scared of," said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection control at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

C. diff produces anaerobic spores transmitted through feces that are able to survive for months on most surfaces. People are infected when they ingest the bacteria, typically by touching contaminated surfaces and then touching their mouths, or by eating contaminated food.

Overall infections caused by C. diff more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to the latest government figures. In 2005, the year of Warren’s illness, 301,200 cases of C. difficile-associated disease (CDAD) were logged in discharge records kept by the nation’s hospitals. Some 28,600 people who had the infection died.

That's only hospitals, however. Counting nursing homes and other care centers, the number of cases nationally is likely closer to 500,000, experts estimate.

Contaminated health care settings remain the main source of C. diff infections, primarily because they treat so many people with serious diarrheal illness. The NAP1 strain has been found in other sites and populations in recent years, infecting young adults and pregnant women with no history of antibiotic use, according to federal sources.

Despite the concern, scientists don't know how many people contract NAP1 infections, or how many die from them. C. diff infection is not a reportable condition in most states, although a rare pilot project that mandated reporting in Ohio in 2006 found more than 14,000 cases in hospitals and nursing homes that year, according to the state health department.

Dark Lord of The Sith

Very interesting comments from Hashkafah.com

Jan 31 2006
From: A long time ago,in a galaxy far far away.
Member No.: 59

South Dakota News

This text was written by a county emergency manager out in the western part of South Dakota shortly after the recent snow storm.
WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here in the Northern Plains we just recovered from a Historic event may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands. FYI:

* George Bush did not come....
* FEMA did nothing....
* No one howled for the government...
* No one blamed the government...
* No one even uttered an expletive on TV...
* Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit...
* Our Mayor's did not blame Bush or anyone else...
* Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else either...
* CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC did not visit - or report on this category 5 snow storm...
* Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.....
* No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House....
* No one looted....
* Nobody - I mean Nobody demanded the government do something...
* Nobody expected the government to do anything, either...
* No Larry King, No Bill O'Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and
*No Geraldo Rivera
* No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found and
* Nope, we just melted the snow for water...
* Sent out caravans of SUV's to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars...
* The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn't ask for a penny...
* Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snow bound families...
* Families took in the stranded people - total strangers...
* We Fired up wood stoves...
* Broke out coal oil lanterns or coleman lanterns...
* We put on an extra layers of clothes because up here it is "Work or Die"...
* We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks...
* Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves...
"In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% most of the world's social problems evaporate."

$150 Billion and Counting: Federal Reserve Announces Another Increase In Its Treasury Auction Facility

Robert Wegner

The housing finance bailout continues. There’s obviously still quite a bit of junk paper out there. And the Fed is going to spread money everywhere, the U.S., the EU and Switzerland, in response.

From the Fed’s statement, today:

The Fed announced today an increase in the amounts auctioned to eligible depository institutions under its biweekly Term Auction Facility (TAF) from $50 billion to $75 billion, beginning with the auction on May 5. This increase will bring the amounts outstanding under the TAF to $150 billion.

Here’s the global angle to the junk buying binge:.

In conjunction with the increase in the size of the TAF, the Federal Open Market Committee has authorized further increases in its existing temporary reciprocal currency arrangements with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB). These arrangements will now provide dollars in amounts of up to $50 billion and $12 billion to the ECB and the SNB, respectively, representing increases of $20 billion and $6 billion. The FOMC extended the term of these reciprocal currency arrangements through January 30, 2009.

And the Fed is going to allow even uglier junk to be used as collateral:

The FOMC authorized an expansion of the collateral that can be pledged in the Federal Reserve’s Schedule 2 Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) auctions.

The Gun Thing

by Tricia Shore

The well-educated, homeschooling, breastfeeding mom at one of the Southern California homeschool park days that we attend, has summed me up as a libertarian. I use the small "l" variety only because I’ve yet to register as an actual Libertarian: "I like what I’ve read about Libertarians," she told me, "but I have a problem with the gun thing."

Uh-oh.

"The gun thing" is something that I thought I understood until I met my capital "l" Libertarian husband over ten years ago. "Guns protect us from the government," he told me, which I thought at the time was a statement made only by anti-government freakish types. I now respect such supposed freakish types much more than I used to. In any case, I thought he was really nice and that he’d make a great father. Three children later, I still think he makes a great dad and I’m even more fond of him these days, but my ideas on the gun thing have changed.

I grew up in rural North Carolina, close to the mountains, where almost everybody hunts. Indeed, everybody has a gun. When supposed gun safety advocates tell us that our guns should be behind twelve or fourteen locks and placed in a high corner that is only accessible by ladder, I smile. Gun safety at the house I grew up in consisted of saying, "That gun can kill you; don’t touch it." Those eight words were all I really needed. As much as life sometimes got me down, I really liked living. I still do. As a child, I wanted to grow up. I wanted to have my own children. A gun could put a stop to that. So, I never touched it, and it stayed in its place, leaning against a closet wall in the utility room.

That was pretty much it as far as gun safety went.

When I went to college, I learned that politically correct people don’t like guns. I learned that guns were awful and evil and that I’d grown up in some kind of abusive home, supposedly, because our shotgun wasn’t behind all those locks.

During my last semester of graduate school, I met the man who would become the father of my children. But there was the gun thing that I had to just accept about him. I didn’t understand what he meant about all this guns-protecting-us-from-the-government stuff. Guns were for hunting, I reasoned, and if you have a license for a gun, then you should be happy, right? We didn’t talk much about the gun thing for a while.

Our first son was not quite a year old when the September 11th tragedy occurred. While nursing his younger brother a couple of years later, I began to read on the Internet. I read about freedoms that I had thought I’d always have. I read about the loss of those freedoms, especially after September 11, 2001. I thought about how free we were, even as high school students, to make mistakes, to ride around town, to go through high school without signing a paper that says I have to agree to a random drug test if I want to participate in extracurricular activities.

Only a couple of decades later, a friend’s daughter, who goes to a high school close to the one that my friend and I attended, must sign a paper saying that she’ll agree to a random drug test. The closest town to where we grew up in North Carolina has banned cruising and signs tell you that you can now receive a ticket if you drive through town more than once; I noticed a similar sign near the ever-communist West Hollywood the other day. There is now zero tolerance for mistakes.

Things have definitely changed since I was in high school; freedoms are being lost faster than Confederate flags are being banned. People watch television and don’t put up too much of a fight about these freedoms.

But what about guns? As I read more, I saw that Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other such tragedies, including the recent one in which several children were taken from their parents in Texas, are all about government control over people. The mainstream media make the victims of these things look crazy, and sometimes that’s not hard to do, but the reality is that they are people who want to do their own thing while doing no harm to others. Why should the government care?

The more I began to read, the more sense that guns made to me. Would I have to worry, for instance, about a Virginia Tech shooting scenario happening if I carried a gun? If someone came in a classroom with a gun and all the students were armed, how many students would a lone gunman be able to kill before he was killed? Could we not have avoided the campus lockdown thing and many deaths if guns had been encouraged on campus?

Besides the gun thing, there is the other-parts-of-the-Constitution thing. I’m beginning to understand now that many people are not into the Constitution these days; it’s become somewhat passé in our current police state. Another homeschooling mom that I was talking to earlier this week seemed to think that I had a novel idea in citing the Fourth Amendment if a social wrecker comes to my door, asking to come in without a search warrant. Ah, the Constitution is great, when people remember it and apply it in their lives.

Here’s what that wonderful document that men shed blood to write says about guns:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This kind of writing makes the gun permit that many of my friends and family in North Carolina hold so sacred seem silly. Why does anyone need a permit when the right to have a gun should not be infringed? Guns are powerful tools that allow us to defend ourselves and our families. Imagine how those who were alive during biblical times would have loved to have that kind of technology.

I currently live in California, where even those who value the freedom of homeschooling often fail to value the freedom of having a gun. Or twelve. Or a hundred. All owned sans government control. Such a scenario scares far too many folks. Many people in the Southern end of the Golden State believe that guns cause problems and that the world will be a much better place when only government-deemed police officers are able to legally obtain guns. Most people don’t think, although it could easily happen, that if the police break into your house in the middle of the night, a gun might protect you from them. Many people fail to see that if you’re at a traffic light and someone carjacks you and your children, a gun might scare the would-be-thief away much more easily than a scared and desperate call to a 9-1-1 dispatcher. Maybe the problem is that not many people think much about guns anymore; we simply accept what the government and mainstream media tell us.

What will happen to us as a society when we’re completely unarmed and the only armed folks are police officers who have been well-trained by federal officials – as most police officers are these days – the federal officials who, ignoring California state law, for instance, come in and close down perfectly legal and thriving marijuana dispensaries? What will happen when federally-trained police officers, many of whom have been trained to kill in the unconstitutionally declared Iraq war, come to your door demanding your children, as officers did recently in Texas? Do guns look so terrible, so ominous, when these things occur? Does defending ourselves against an out-of-control government seem silly when that government is threatening your family?


Photo Credit: Mr. Comic Mom

Turns out, my husband was right about the gun thing. Although many people have a hard time understanding this idea, government works much better when we are armed, the way that our Founding Fathers intended it. An armed citizenry allows government to truly be by the people: Think about how much the government does what you want; then think about how many people walk around unarmed these days. The fewer armed citizens there are, the more powerful the government.

May 2, 2008

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is the breastfeeding, homeschooling, thinking mama of three sons and the wife of their dad, Mr. Comic Mom. Currently living in Los Angeles, where she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace, she misses the sweet tea and barbecue of North Carolina.

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

High fructose corn syrup takes a hit

Dear Friend,

Hold on to your hats, folks, the FDA did something right for a change. Believe me, I'm just as shocked as you are. Recently, the government agency ruled that products containing high fructose corn syrup can't be labeled as "natural."

This may not sound like a big deal to you, but in the food and beverage industry, this is a huge ruling. I've warned you about the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the past, but it still seems to be everywhere. You can't swing a dead cat in a grocery store (not that you're likely to do such a thing) without hitting dozens of products chock-full of HFCS.

How bad is it? American children are eating and drinking 62 pounds of this one sweetener ever year. There's loads of HFCS in everything kids (and many adults) eat and drink -- soda, "fruit" drinks, cookies, gum, jelly, and baked goods. And that's only a partial list. In fact, the national consumption of this hidden junk food grew from zero in 1966 to 62.6 pounds per person by 2001!

But the controversy isn't whether or not HFCS is healthy; it's whether or not it's natural. The Corn Refiners Association insists that it's a natural sweetener because it's derived from a natural product, but the FDA doesn't buy it.

Good for them.

This new ruling that put the whammy on HFCS was in response to an inquiry by FoodNavigator-USA.com, an online consumer watchdog site. When the FDA checked the composition of HFCS, they discovered that synthetic fixing agents are used in the manufacturing process – and this violates the FDA's standard policy on the term "natural," which states that a natural product "is one that has not had any artificial or synthetic substances added to the product that would not normally be expected to be in the food."

Don't get me wrong – it's not as though people will stop chugging HFCS-laden sodas because of this ruling. And many of the HFCS products out there are not labeled as natural to begin with—no one has ever considered a bottle of soda a health drink. But at least going forward, this ruling will put the brakes on any future "misinterpretations" (read: marketing B.S.) by food manufacturers who have lots of HFCS in their products.

Take my advice – if you're checking labels the next time at the grocery store, when you see high-fructose corn syrup OR sugar near the top of the ingredient list, just put whatever it is back on the shelf. You'll be healthier for it.

Iran dumps U.S. dollars in oil transactions

TEHRAN, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Iran had totally removed U.S. dollars in the country's oil transactions, an Oil Ministry official said on Wednesday.

"The dollar has completely been removed from our oil trade....Crude oil customers have agreed with us to use other currencies (in the trade)," Oil Ministry official Hojjatollah Ghanimifard was quoted as saying by the state television.

"We make our transactions with euros in Europe, but yen in Asia," he added.

Due to the tensions with Washington in the past years over the nuclear disputes and the latest depreciation of dollars, Iran has vowed to decrease the greenback in its foreign trade. Iran central bank also has reduced dollars in the country's foreign reserves. In last November's summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Saudi Arabia, Iran proposed that it was necessary to replace the U.S. dollar with other major hard currencies in oil trading.

But some Arab allies of the United States showed few support to Tehran's advice.

However, Iran's Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari has already declared in last December that Tehran had completely stopped selling its oil in dollars, according a report by the semi-official ISNA news agency at that time.

"In line with the policy of selling crude oil in non dollar currencies, currently selling our country's oil in U.S. dollars has been completely stopped," Nozari was then quoted as saying. Right now it's not clear why there seems to be a contradiction between comments by the two officials over the exact time to stop dollars in Iran's oil trade.

Martin Luther King, Presente!

By Ted Glick
Future Hope, 4/29/2008

"Had he [Dr. King] lived and been confronted with the abject failure of liberal democracy to alleviate the suffering and deprivation of its teeming masses, his formidable conscience might well have required him to advocate root and branch reconstruction of the government of his native land, as, in fact, was urged by Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson as the responsibility of each new generation." William F. Pepper, in "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King"

Over the past weekend, while away at the N.J. shore trying to get over the symptoms of a lingering flu, I read William F. Pepper's book about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was sobering reading.

In An Act of State, Pepper lays out a very strong case that King was killed not by James Earl Ray but, instead, as a result of a wide-ranging assassination plan-a conspiracy-between elements of the U.S. military, the CIA, the FBI, the Memphis police and organized crime. The heart of the book is the chapter about the civil trial which took place in Memphis in November and December, 1999.

In that trial, on behalf of the King family, William Pepper and others working with him presented the details of the conspiracy that they had been able to uncover over the course of decades of investigation. When the case went to the jury for a decision, it took them all of one hour to come back with their verdict:

"After nearly four weeks of trial and some 70 witnesses they found that: yes, Loyd Jowers [a local Memphis resident], participated in a conspiracy to do harm to Martin Luther King; and, yes, others including governmental agencies were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant."

Following this decision, the judge in the case, James Swearingen, "apportioned liability as follows: 30% - defendant Loyd Jowers, 70% - all other co-conspirators."

Pepper-and he has a lot of company-is convinced that the reason King was killed in 1968 was because of the movement he was building. That movement was linking opposition to racial and economic injustice, the war in Vietnam and the structural oppression of the U.S. political and economic system. The powers-that-be were particularly concerned about the leadership King was giving toward the multi-racial and multi-issue Poor People's March on Washington, D.C. The intention of that march was to nonviolently disrupt business as usual over a period of weeks.

Within the 1968 political context of an aroused Black community, a growing anti-war movement and other political ferment at the base of society, government and corporate leaders were worried about the Poor People's March acting as a spark to galvanize a massive uprising for peace and justice.

Today, 40 years later, the conditions which led Martin Luther King to give his life in a struggle to overcome them have not improved. It is true that there are more African Americans and other people of color within the worlds of government, business, education, sports, mass media and other U.S. institutions. But the percentages of people in poverty or close to it and without health insurance are virtually the same. The gulf between the super-rich elite and the vast majority of the people, nationally and internationally, has widened into a tremendous and devastating chasm. The number of Blacks and Latinos within U.S. jails and prisons has skyrocketed over those 40 years. U.S. military spending and U.S. militarism and imperialism is much more extensive. The global warming crisis, a result of the dominance of corporate fossil fuel polluters over government and the media, is threatening all life on earth.

I've been personally involved in two efforts over the past eight months that nonviolently disrupted business as usual in Washington, D.C.-as part of a No War, No Warming action on Capitol Hill on October 22, 2007 and as part of a primarily anti-war action on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War on March 19th, 2008. Both were important. Both got national press coverage. Both were concrete examples that within the peace/justice movement and within the climate movement there are currents of activism growing which are prepared to up the ante, to put our bodies on the line.

I don't know how much of this kind of activism can be expected over the rest of the year. There will be some at the Republican and Democratic conventions. There will probably be some at coal plants, or projected sites of new coal plants. Perhaps there will be nonviolent civil disobedience directed at some of the particularly odious politicians running for office. But in general, my reading of the state of our movement is that most activists are involved or are planning to be involved, one way or the other, in relationship to 2008 electoral campaigns.

Electoral activism can be useful in building a movement and building organization, if it's independent of corporate Democrat and corporate Republican domination. But we also need to be opening up discussions now about how, in the first part of 2009, at the Presidential Inauguration in D.C. and during the first weeks and months of a new President and a new Congress, the demands and needs of the people and our threatened ecosystem can be brought forward loudly and clearly using, as a primary tactic, creative, disruptive, nonviolent direct action.

In the spirit and memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all those who have given their lives in the struggle against oppressive rulers and for a new society, we need a massive, 2009 Peoples March on D.C. next spring, an urgent mobilization of the people against war and global warming and for jobs, justice, clean energy and peace. We must make government of, by and for the people a reality, and we must get organized to bring independent, sustained pressure to bear until we achieve that objective. Martin Luther King, presente!