How to Stop Our Addiction to the Internet

I disagree with Orenstein that everyone has a thirst for knowledge. It is exactly the opposite even in college. I have seen very few read books not assigned by the professor.

I do realize that the Internet can be really addicting. I have been able to ignore what comes over the Internet by not opening my computer until late afternoon and deleting most e-mails not from friends and stop when I have to cook and eat.

In the past when I am writing my blog, sometimes hours could pass before I realize how much time has passed when I am reading on the computer to get more information. I don't hear loud alarms or the loud dryer Buzz or other distractions.

But the reason I want to read more books is that politics has become boring to me because it never seems to change, but as you do, I am very interested in why people behave as they do.

In the Saturday Financial Times, the stupid experts say that we cannot recommend a large increase in the dose of vitamin D based on only epidemiologic studies! The same was done with the treatment of SARS. Instead of doing the double blind study, the Chinese doctors found that sick people who died at a very high rate were now saved because Prednisone attenuates the excessive immune response by younger victims. The goal was to save their patients, not our desire to have a double blind study!

It is nonsense to require a double blind study when we already see that higher levels of vitamin D became even more necessary when we started to use excess sunscreens which did not filter out UVA, but got rid of UVB which burns us and causes some cancers and produces huge amounts of vitamin D which goes to all cells our body. From many studies. It behaves like a hormone for a whole host of health enhancing attributes including reducing all sorts of cancers by 60 percent!

Before extensive use of sunscreens in the 1980s, all cancers were lower and have risen every year since high use of sunscreens. Ideology rules. Brain and neurological problems such as Autism, MS, and even ALS has gone up sharply since the high use of sunscreens. Vitamin D is vital to our best health. Adults need to take 1,000 to 2,000 units of vitamin D to maintain health.

Professor Reinhold Vieth since his graduate student days in 1974 working on vitamin D has been so frustrated those old folks who decide how much vitamin D we need and wants a double blind study which no one will or can afford to do. Big Pharma has no incentive and the medical doctors and oncologist may subconsciously want absolute proof. When we have accepted the study of many people for various illnesses in the past such as the Framingham study on heart disease and other diseases such as diabetes, why do they not do something that at worse will not be harmful because we can store months of vitamin D in our body now. When we are low, we have no storage of vitamin D.

Have to go cook and watch football between USC and Oregon State because USC will play Univ of Oregon next Saturday. I want to see if they are better than their ratings indicate. Oregon is now #11 and USC is #6. USC lost of Washington today and Oregon won easily even though they have been playing very well. Our great defense seems to stop even the best and our top quarterback is back and he played extremely well both running and passing.

I have to cook!

Jim Kawakami, Oct 23

Jim

Is this the conundrum that you are feeling?
Allan

Excerpt from Peggy Orenstein's NY Times Magazine Oct 25, 2009

... Can increased knowledge really destroy us?

Well, yes. According to Elster, there are certainly occasions when choosing ignorance could be smart. ...

When I looked up, three and a half hours had passed.

And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”

Freedom, which runs only on Macs, is downloaded more than 4,000 times a month. Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens,” they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a “wiser man.” That is precisely the draw of the Internet.

It is heartening that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings (though it applies equally to obtaining the wisdom of Zeus or the YouTube video on how to peel a banana like a monkey). Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. ...

I searched for the “Sirens” episode in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I can’t quite recollect how I got to the video for the song “Sirens,” by the alternative rock group AVA, but that put me in mind of Blink-182 (with whom AVA shares a frontman), so I clicked over to that band’s site to check for any updates on the release of its new album, then watched its reunion performance from February’s Grammy Awards. . . . When I looked up, three and a half hours had passed.

Can increased knowledge really destroy us?

Well, yes. According to Elster, there are certainly occasions when choosing ignorance could be smart. ... Sunday Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25FOB-WWLN-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=&st=nyt

Frank Schaeffer, Founder of the Religious Right, Speaks Out Against FOX News Vicious Untrue Comments

Frank Schaeffer's books and lectures gave the Right Wing the theoretical basis for justifying the actions of the Religious Right including even murder by directing them to select contradictions in the Old Testament and ignoring Jesus' Teachings. Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal interviewed the major leaders in the Right Wing and dug into how their personalities and paranoia led to our current religious leaders including the recently deceased Falwell.

I found it very disturbing that almost crazy people with no Christian Ethics are running the disciples of the Religious Right. Schaeffer's teachings misinterpreted or extrapolated led to radicals and crazies who elected the most radical Republicans in their primaries and won elections by using smear tactics and lies with money from multimillionaires and billionaires who wanted to use them for profit and to enhance their wealth and power.

Recent research has shown those who were born in crowded cities became Schizophrenic at more than twice the rate of the general population. Apparently New York City has about 30 percent of the residents in need of psychological or psychiatric care. Those who grew in less conflicted homes are much more sane. Here is a case finally published after many rejections by establishment journals when race is mentioned as an important factor in mental illness with Caribbean Blacks having many more cases of Schizophrenia than the rest of the British population. African based people's in all income brackets seem to have a higher rate of Schizophrenia although no genetic basis has been established.

The researchers have determined that Epigenetic environmental factors over-write the genes by controlling whether the genes are off or on as we have seen many times among identical twins with one prone to cancer and the other not. Stress, for example, causes one identical twin to have many more wrinkles than her sister.The November 2009 Scientific American has a short summary of these results. http://discussion.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=79040

It is well known that Ireland has a very high rate of Schizophrenia. I suspect most of it is in Northern Ireland where many Scot-Irish who immigrated to the USA South and further spread into the mid-west and California's Orange Country. This probably accounts to some extent to their radical Republican view of the world. Mental illness, I suspect, is not an off or on thing but a gradation to insanity like some of those at FOX news and especially the House Republicans.

Even before he had the final clarity, Schaeffer became increasingly disturbed by the people attracted to his teachings. In Geneva, Switzerland, his colony was somewhat akin to a Hippie colony and even attracted Bono and homosexuals. Schaeffer called Falwell stupid and Robertson crazy in his interviews with Max Blumenthal in "Republican Gomorrah," a book well worth reading to understand the Republican Right.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 23, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Obama vs. FOX

October 23, 2009By Frank Schaeffer
Source: Afterdowningstreet

Frank Schaeffer's ZSpace Page

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22930

... Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism). ...

President Obama is getting criticism for going after Fox News. I fault the White House too: for not going far enough. The real issue is not Fox's right wing "bias." The real issue is that FOX News seems to be trawling for assassins. Here's the letter White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs should write. Or maybe it should come from the head of United States Secret Service.

Dear Rupert Murdoch, since you are responsible for what is on Fox News I have a question for you: Do you ever wonder how you'll be remembered by Americans and the world (not to mention your children) if someone takes a shot at President Obama, and when asked why they did it, quotes the misinformation spouted by Fox News as their "reason?"

You have dozens of far right and dangerous and/or crazy seeming commentators working for you but let's just talk about one as an example of the rest. What of Glenn Beck?

Does the name Father Charles Coughlin ring a bell? Do you want to be remembered as the facilitator of today's version of that deranged radio personality and hater who hounded President Roosevelt? What if a Coughlin devotee had assassinated Roosevelt? Instead of just being a nasty footnote to American history, Coughlin would be remembered as another John Wilkes Booth. What if Coughlin had had someone with money and virtually unlimited influence backing him and amplifying his remarks? How would we feel about his backer?

Glenn Beck is a second rate, not terribly bright Coughlin-type demagogue with rather dimwitted followers. And you are the paymaster making his silliness dangerous by giving him a voice that would otherwise be heard only by those who happened to hear him barking at the moon on some lonely street corner.

You've given today's Coughlins -- the haters -- a national platform. And they have taken the lies of the "birthers", "deathers", "Obama-is-the-Antichristers" etc., nationwide. It was a bad day for America when you became a citizen for the sole purpose of purchasing TV stations and invading us with your far right agenda. But you've gone way past politics, even the politics of hate. You have legitimized actual insanity by widespread repetition of extremist racist and religion-based lies to the sort of people who believe the earth is 6000 years old, that Jesus will come back soon and send everyone not like them to Hell, that Obama is the Antichrist. In other words, you've got the keys to the national asylum, are stirring up the inmates and threatening to unlock the door!

Here's a sample (compiled with the help of Media Matters and the online magazine Crooks and Liars) of just a small stock of the incendiary rhetoric and bare-faced lies your money pays for.

Fox News host Glenn Beck has:

# said President Obama has, "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,"

# flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps,

# suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for AmeriCorps, ...

You can't claim you're not having a baleful impact. How about this? According to the Boston Globe ("Secret Service Strained" October 18, 09),

"The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency's overall mission." ...

Toxic Waters: Regulatory Absence Allows Chemical, Coal and Farm Industries to Pollute US Water Supplies

The Non-Profit and Honest Democracy Now with Amy Goodman www.DemocracyNow.org provides more truthful facts about what is really going on in our country. Even a few conservatives watch it to get the whole truth.

For most homes, the use of carbon filters for water will reduce the amount of toxic stuff in most water supplies because the purification process is inadequate to refuse all toxins from large volumes of water.

Looks like President Obama also loves spying on Americans which seems to be necessary to catch native terrorists in our country. Perhaps the dangerous Far Right Wing can be jailed for sedition and corporate crooks can be caught before they steal too much from us.

Most in the Obama administration seem to be much more competent and honest than we saw in the last 8 years of stolen elections. They are also catching many more terrorists than Bush and will probably prevent another big attack experienced in 2001 where incompetence deliberate or not led to the attack. The Spy agencies did very well, but Bush/Cheney almost seemed to thwarting anyone doing anything. The Best FBI head was fired, all extra security at airports was removed, and the administration even allowed the hijackers who were stopped at the gate to proceed after being contacted. Some of their names were on the terrorist list:

Stealing about 4 percent of the votes by whatever method including taking Democrats off the voting rolls in 2000 and 2004, and compilers of precinct votes and crooked touch screen voting machines seems to enough to win elections in 2000 and 2004, but not in 2006 or 2008. The recount showed, if you read beyond the Front Page headlines, that Gore won in 2000 in spite of widespread fraud without even invalidating the 600 fraudulent overseas votes for Bush. Bush won by just over 500 votes.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 22, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

* Toxic Waters: Regulatory Absence Allows Chemical, Coal and Farm Industries to Pollute US Water Supplies *

We speak to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg about the latest in his investigative series "Toxic Waters," which examines the worsening pollution in the nation's water systems. Duhigg joined us last month to discuss how chemical companies have violated the Clean Water Act more than 500,000 times in the last five years, most without punishment. Since then he has written articles focusing on how coal-fired power plants and large farms are threatening the nation's drinking water.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/22/toxic_waters_regulatory_absence_allows_chemical

* CIA Invests in Software Firm Monitoring Blogs, Twitter *

Wired magazine has revealed the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency has invested in a software firm called Visible Technologies that specializes in monitoring social media sites, including blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Wired reporter Noah Shachtman writes, "America's spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates˜even check out your book reviews on Amazon."

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/22/cia_invests_in_software_firm_monitoring

* Read Amy Goodman's latest column *

"Trick or Treat for Climate Change"

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091020_trick_or_treat_for_climate_change/

Consider writing your local newspaper and asking for them to carry the column, distributed by King Features. Many papers across the US have done so already.

If you see the column in your paper, please mail us a copy of the full page, to:

Democracy Now!
100 Lafayette St., Suite 604
New York, NY 10013

* New Book: Breaking the Sound Barrier by Amy Goodman, with a Foreword by Bill Moyers *

Amy Goodman breaks through the corporate media's lies, sound-bites, and silence in this wide-ranging new collection of articles.

"Amy Goodman is a towering progressive freedom-fighter in the media and the world. Breaking the Sound Barrier is another expression of her vision and courage." ˜Cornel West

Visit http://www.democracynow.org/store to get your signed copy today!

= = = = = = = = =

TODAY'S DEMOCRACY NOW!:

* University of Alaska Scientist Rick Steiner Loses Federal Grant Funding After Criticizing Oil Industry *

University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner says he's lost his federal grant funding for being an outspoken critic of the oil industry. For years, Steiner has criticized what he considered irresponsible actions by the oil industry, beginning with the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Last week, a university lawyer rejected a claim to overturn a decision to pull Steiner's $10,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA. In its decision, a university lawyer wrote if a recipient of grant funding "uses his position and his time to, for example, advocate for or against a particular development project, the funding agency may have a legitimate concern."

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/22/university_of_alaska_scientist_rick_steiner

* Headlines for October 22, 2009 *

US to Order Pay Cuts at Bailed-Out Firms
Dems Advance Repeal of Insurance Industry Antitrust Exemption

Don't Drink the Water: NY City and Eugene, Oregon Superb Clean Water

The regulator for the Coal Industry was also a lobbyist for the Coal Industry! That is why residents living in a town where Coal companies have polluted the ground water with arsenic, lead, and other toxic chemicals has caused a huge upsurge in cancer in many of the residents, skin diseases from showers and baths. Nothing was done until now. http://doctoroz.com/videos/dont-drink-water Every department in the Bush/Cheney regime had crooked or favored industry profits or safety and well being of Americans. Their Reconstructionist Christianity allows them to lie, steal, cheat, deceive,stealth, etc. as we have seen the Bush people do. See Chapter 4, "Republican Gomorrah" by Max Blumenthal who interviewed many of the principals in this movement.

I also heard from an MSNBC news program that the regulators of our nations parks and wilderness knew absolutely nothing about how to do their job except cut people and give industry all they wanted. Natural gas production in dry places such as Montana and Wyoming were depleted of their aquifers from the gas companies using water to get the gas out. They depend greatly on aquifers in many parts of their perpetual drought states.

I also mentioned previously that during the Bush FDA testimony to Congressional Oversight committee I found that no one there seemed to know very much. They had to continually say I will get back to you. Conservative Democrats such as Stupak became livid at the stonewalling and apparent ignorance of those at the FDA. Stupak, D-MI stayed in the C-Street "The Family" house, the same house which is now a tourist spot for the now empty building, as famous sex scandal Republicans such as Stanford and Ensign R-NV. The FDA was basically run by a Monsanto top lobbyists which allowed genetically modified foods to be allowed without any testing which some studies allowed to be published showed serious side effects. When I ate GMO tofu made from GMO soybeans I consistently got diarrhea while switching back and forth with organic Non-GMO made tofu stopped the diarrhea. Japan now uses only organic soybeans for Tofu.

Bush/Cheney Republican Gang practically destroyed the country including our Financial System where the guy running the SEC knew nothing about how the run the place honestly and rejected repeated efforts to investigate the Banks and Madoff. These guys knew in April 2008 that the system will collapse, but did nothing. The guy in charge worked previously for Goldman Sachs. Perhaps Goldman Sachs wanted to dispose of the risky derivatives and short them which they did for sure.

See Sorkin of the New York Times http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1543

Andrew Ross Sorkin is the chief mergers and acquisitions reporter of “The New York Times,” a position he has held since July 2000 after having served as the newspaper’s European mergers and acquisitions reporter based in London, England since July 1999.

Sorkin is also the founding editor of DealBook, an online daily financial report published by “The Times” and he writes a column of the same name for the paper on Sundays. Sorkin has been named one of the 30 most influential financial journalists in the nation under the age of 30 by TJFR/NewsBios for the past 4 years. He began writing for “The Times” in 1995 under unusual circumstances; at the time he started writing for the paper, he hadn’t yet graduated from high school.

Source -UCLA http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x8873.xml

Jim Kawakami, October 22, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Charlie Rose Discusses Swine Flu, OverEating, and Deadly e-coli 0157-H7

Video: http://www.charlierose.com/

Deadly E-Coli 0157-H7 cannot be avoided in prepared hamburgers because of the means of production, the diet of cows, and unchecked imports of scrap meats.

The whole program is well worth watching. Michael Moss has a good article in the NY Times about how deadly e-coli 0157-H7 which grows so fast that only one bacteria is needed to cause havoc. His study shows that we should all follow his advice of not eating pre-made hamburger. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Michael%20Moss&st=cse

Hamburger is made from combining all the waste scrap products, much of it not inspected because they do not want responsibility for deaths and kidney failures in children and even paralysis of a girl and six months in the hospital as Moss writes about from occurring. They also buy who knows where such as the contents of hamburger intermediates from places such as Uruguay run by a dictator. The do not test many of these scrap meats for hamburgers to avoid future liability.

When 400 cows are processed each hour, it is impossible to avoid getting cow shit from contaminating the product. They did not talk about why this acid resistant form of e-coli develops. Eating cheap heavily subsidized by taxpayers nutrition-less Corn totally disrupts their digestive system which becomes less acidic so the e-coli that survives is more acid resistance and can survive your stomach acids.

Over-the-counter acid reduction pills such as Prilosec when combined with the blood thinner Plavix kills the patients with a heart attack. Their ads don't mention heart attacks when combined with Prilosec! The more drugs you take, the greater the chance of getting dementia. Drugs if they are the right size and chemical structure can block the body's ability to produce enzymes that get rid of excess proteins in the brain. These proteins can block the hippocampus to prevent memory formation. Talk with your doctor and tell them about the new research that shows that drugs similar to antihistamine are especially bad. One antihistamine was so bad that it prevented the destruction of excess proteins in our muscles because it blocked enzyme that gets rid of excess protein from being released.

The health insurance companies can save $500,000 per patient if diabetes can be prevented.

Swine Flu: Experts discuss why a safe vaccine produced the same way as seasonal flu in eggs and did not use large batch process. Each egg produces three doses. Purity is higher than in the past so side reactions. When you take the vaccine, you will feel a little lousy because your body thinks a virus has invaded your body and may give you a slight fever, but will be gone in a day.

Now demand exceeding supply and injectables running out faster now than attenuated virus applied in the nose. If you and your children are healthy, this may be the best to get it earlier. As I suggested earlier, it seems to be a very good idea to take the pneumonia vaccine because 30 percent dead patients die from this in hospitals because the inflamed lungs are easily invaded by bacteria. Call and ask your doctor and if they refuse, ask them for a referral to a specialist. This was not discussed on the Charlie Rose Show on Tuesday, October 21, 2009.

The good news is that the Swine Flu does not seem to be mutating. As I said before, most of the speculation about the vaccines not working is based on bad science where the workers or journalists just looked for information at supported their assumptions. For example many site old Russia studies to say that microwave ovens change the structure of the food to make them toxic, or fluoride scare by citing high concentrations 4 ppm of fluoride in water supply that has harmed the teeth of some people.

The way good scientists work on confirming a theory is to try to disprove their hypothesis. In the political area we see FOX News either make-up facts or use non-proven facts to prove their radical views in support of corporations. If you read "Republican Gomorrah," you will see that the founders and followers can be diagnosed as mentally ill or mentally challenged developed around a bogus 19th Century version of Christianity to justify greed, selfishness, lying for the cause, etc. as we had seen in the sex scandals by three prominent Republicans, two of them considering running for President. See http://rachel.msnbc.com Show with Sharlet as the guest in his book "The Family." It was #20 on the recent New York Best Seller non-fiction paperback list.

Why Americans are Obese and Overweight? Former FDA chief Kessler says stopping overeating is impossible to do. All we can do is change what we eat such as switching to a Mediterranean Diet which is probably one of the best. Don't go on diet, but eat much more slowly and don't watch television while eating. Family meals are the best.

Fat, sugar, and salt as Kessler found from research being done at Universities are similar to illegal drugs. Lots of pleasure by increasing the output of dopamine! So when we eat what we get especially at Fast Food restaurants and regular restaurants, we want more and more food. That is why McDonalds was able to super-size their portions. We also eat at all times of the day instead of eating largely at our regular meal times.

By eating slowing, our brain has time to catch up and tell us we are satiated or full and we extract more of the healthy nutrients in food, especially in vegetables. Eating slowing also helps you taste the food and Fast Foods become less palatable.

All Americans eat to fast and many are doing something else while eating so they don't chew their food well. By really slowing down our eating process by eating with people and having fun conversations and not solving conflicts during meals will help you eat more slowly. Tell your kids that everyone has to stay at the table until the adults are finished.

Jim Kawakami, October 22, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Do We Over Test and Treat Prostate and Breast Cancers? American Cancer Society Says Yes!

Even though I have objected to taking the PSA test for years and take the C-Reactive Protein test instead, the doctors compromise and gave me both tests. Both the deadly aggressive breast and prostate cancers grow so fast that taking routine yearly tests do not catch them in time. Only self exams fairly frequently by women trained well at centers to detect growths should be implemented. Most radiologists are not good at reading x-rays well enough to detect breast cancer anyway. Perhaps we could determine what part of the year does deadly breast cancer proceed.

I know one that may prevent many breast and prostate cancers. Several thousand units of Vitamin D3 seems to be necessary because we use sunscreen so much that we don't get vitamin D from the sun. Women should spend 10-15 minutes in the sun between 10 AM and 4 PM in most places. I read in Consumer Reports On Health health letter and can be subscribed at www.consumerReportsonHealth.org that Vitamin D in present in every tissue in the human body. The body can store two months worth of Vitamin D3 so large amounts of supplements can be taken. Consumer Reports estimated that 10,000 units can be taken daily. For White persons, only about 15 minutes at times but not in the early morning or late afternoons when the sun is not strong enough to produce vitamin D.

States in the Northern half of the USA do not provide enough sun to help us produce enough vitamin D without supplements. Surprisingly New Jersey residents are in the states with the lowest levels of vitamin D. Surprisingly Florida and Oregon get about the same amount of sun and are in the middle range. Oregon has many sunny days during the summer and due to little pollution the sun seems to be very hot and burns fairly quickly without sunscreen.

Scientific studies have shown Vitamin D helps prevent breast, colon, and many other cancers. Even darker people living in the South seem to survive melanoma better than those in the richer South. Too poor to use sunscreen!

The stoppage of allowing the use of menopause hormones to stop hot flashes based on a fraudulent study at Wyeth, previous home of CEO Donald Rumsfeld has greatly and rapidly reduced breast cancer in the last several years. Do not use them.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 21, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Do We Over Test and Treat Prostate and Breast Cancers? American Cancer Society Says Yes! NY Times Gina Kolata Oct 21, 2009 ... The new analysis — by Dr. Laura Esserman, a professor of surgery and radiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the Carol Frank Buck Breast Care Center there, and Dr. Ian Thompson, professor and chairman of the department of urology at The University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio — finds that prostate cancer screening and breast cancer screening are not so different.

Both have a problem that runs counter to everything people have been told about cancer: They are finding cancers that do not need to be found because they would never spread and kill or even be noticed if left alone. That has led to a huge increase in cancer diagnoses because, without screening, those innocuous cancers would go undetected.

At the same time, both screening tests are not making much of a dent in the number of cancers that are deadly. That may be because many lethal breast cancers grow so fast they spring up between mammograms. And the deadly prostate ones have already spread at the time of cancer screening. The dilemma for breast and prostate screening is that it is not usually clear which tumors need aggressive treatment and which can be left alone. And one reason that is not clear, some say, is that studying it has not been much of a priority.

“The issue here is, as we look at cancer medicine over the last 35 or 40 years, we have always worked to treat cancer or to find cancer early,” Dr. Brawley said. “And we never sat back and actually thought, ‘Are we treating the cancers that need to be treated?’ ”

The very idea that some cancers are not dangerous and some might actually go away on their own can be hard to swallow, researchers say.

“It is so counterintuitive that it raises debate every time it comes up and every time it has been observed,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health.

It was first raised as a theoretical possibility in the 1970s, Dr. Kramer said. Then it was documented in a rare pediatric cancer, but was dismissed as something peculiar to that cancer. Then it was discovered in common cancers as well, but it is still not always accepted or appreciated, he said.

But finding those insignificant cancers is the reason the breast and prostate cancer rates soared when screening was introduced, Dr. Kramer said. And those cancers, he said, are the reason screening has the problem called overdiagnosis — labeling innocuous tumors cancer and treating them as though they could be lethal when in fact they are not dangerous.

“Overdiagnosis is pure, unadulterated harm,” he said.

Dr. Peter Albertsen, chief and program director of the urology division at the University of Connecticut Health Center, said that had not been an easy message to get across. “Politically, it’s almost unacceptable,” Dr. Albertsen said. “If you question overdiagnosis in breast cancer, you are against women. If you question overdiagnosis in prostate cancer, you are against men.” ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/health/21cancer.html

Some Medical Researchers Doubt the Flu Vaccine Helps Many People

Some Medical Researchers Doubt the Flu Vaccine Helps Many People and Concluded that the Flu Vaccine is Obtained Only by the Most Healthy Older Patients based on Looking at Flu Vaccinations Data http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3

Shannon Brownlee is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Overtreated (2007). Jeanne Lenzer is an investigative journalist and a frequent contributor to the British medical journal BMJ.

"Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and AIDS combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?"

by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer

Comments by Jim Kawakami, Scientist: Facts not disputed are that the effectiveness of vaccines on older people is less than young people with stronger immunity. Since older people do not seem to be affected very much by the Swine Flu, either prior infection or vaccines may still be working. Younger people with stronger immune responses over-react and flood the lungs with Cytokines and Water which can lead to pneumonia. I recommend a pneumonia vaccine to prevent the most common type of bacteria causing it.

In the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the first Bird Flu attack did not kill many, but the second phase killed a large number of children whose small coffins were seen in photos stacked high for blocks in many towns. That is the chief concern with the current flu. So far the mutation rate seems to have been small and only a few people who had the vaccine came down with the flu. So far it seems to attack the healthiest. One Swine Flu victim on a football team passed on the flu to all members of both teams. The first victim was close to death after at first seeming to recover. He may still survive. Although pre-existing conditions do exacerbate the illness, otherwise very healthy young kids and adults also die.

These researchers dispute the studies on the effectiveness of the flu vaccine for Seasonal Flu for Seniors by looking at the death rates of many seniors who took and did not take the vaccine. The results from previous studied showed 50 percent less death rates when people took the flu vaccine. One valid point the authors made is that many old people do not have a strong immune response so vaccines do not work as well. So healthier ones are more likely to respond and benefit from the vaccines.

I never got the flu until my kidneys and liver were damaged by a malaria drug in the 1980s pre-Internet days which even killed some. Big Pharma is very good in suppressing the bad news even with the more democratic Internet.

Thank you Al Gore getting the highly disputed legislation through a Republican congress to fund wiring schools and college. In the mid-1990s there were only three commercial websites and now there are millions.

Once I started taking the flu vaccine even with a drug depressed immune system have not got the flu yet and got through some bad epidemics where hospitals were overflowing in Los Angeles.

They also speculated that the healthier patients take the vaccine while the older ones who died were too sick to take it, but they neglected to mention that these people see the doctor more often and get their flu shot there.

Their data does not show that not taking the vaccine by older people for seasonal flu would have increased or have similar death rates as seasonal flu does now. I would like to see data before any flu vaccine was developed which I did not see in this long article.

Jim Kawakami, October 21, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Some Medical Researchers Doubt the Flu Vaccine Helps Many People and Concluded that the Flu Vaccine is Obtained Only by the Most Healthy Older Patients based on Looking at Flu Vaccinations Data http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3

… The estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction is based on “cohort studies,” which compare death rates in large groups, or cohorts, of people who choose to be vaccinated, versus death rates in groups who don’t. However, people who choose to be vaccinated may differ in many important respects from people who go unvaccinated—and those differences can influence the chance of death during the flu season. Education, lifestyle, income, and many other “confounding” factors can come into play, and as a result, cohort studies are notoriously prone to bias. When researchers crunch the numbers, they typically try to factor out variables that could bias the results, but, as Jefferson remarks, “you can adjust for the confounders you know about, not for the ones you don’t,” and researchers can’t always anticipate what factors are likely to be important to whether a patient dies from flu. There is always the chance that they might miss some critical confounder that renders their results entirely wrong.

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season. …

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.” …

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.” … http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3

Don't Miss Tonight PBS Frontline: Fight the Big Boys on Wall Street at www.BanksterUSA.org

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/

Brooks Born, head of the Chicago Futures Exchange warned us that these new derivatives are very dangerous for our financial system. She was removed! Shows clearly how ideology trumps clear thinking and analysis. Greenspan's Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged" mind was the leader of the financial meltdown and both Rubin (Goldman Sachs) and Larry Summers (Sec of Treasury) who are brilliant followed him. It shows clearly that very smart people such as McNamara can make horrendous errors in logic based on selecting information that sports their beliefs and rejecting all other good information and analysis. The Current Republican Party members and leaders are superb examples.

A friend recommended the book "Republican Gomorrah," authored by Max Blumenthal who did extensive research how our current radical Republican Party developed. Believe it or not it started in Geneva, Switzerland and was largely based on the New Christianity developed in the 19th century to justify Greed and accumulation of large amounts of wealth. Instead of the New Testament, it selected one of the many versions depicted in the Old Testament. Most Jewish Rabbis in Israel who are almost unanimously skeptical of the contradictory stories in the Old Testament consider they myths, but do realize that it still provides valuable lessons on how to lead our lives. Note which passages radical Republicans favor verses the rest of Americans.

Instead of being amusing as my friend found the book, I found the information horrifying. I read only four chapters so far, but I found the book is well written, very revealing, and easy to read. It shows how they were funded and how the Christian Evangelical movement developed. Falwell based his church on racism and was reluctant to take up abortion pushed by the radical Catholics such as the Justice Scalia type and now essentially dominating the Supreme Court including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. But what I found interesting is that the major tenets of the Christian Evangelical movement was largely conceived by Francis Schaeffer and Rushdoony from Geneva. Schaeffer later in his life largely condemned most of the leaders of the Christian Right as either stupid or wrong headed.

But what launched the abortion movement was the decision by the Supreme Court to make abortion legal. Although Schaeffer was considered liberal about homosexuals and his hippie like complex in Geneva attracted some more liberal celebrities such as Bono. But when abortion which he did not comment much on in the past became legal something in his brain went Kaboom! He went crazy. Most of the Christian Right think of Schaeffer's book and writings as the Bible and even attracted Doctor killers we are well acquainted with now.

What was most revealing about the leaders of the Christian Evangelical movement is that many including the major initial funders who inherited their money had been diagnosed Schizophrenic and spent time in the Mental Hospitals. Many of the founders of new religions as we all have seen in modern times have been a little on the crazy side. Brain studies have shown that the control of behavior by many who founded religions had parietal epilepsy or a head injury which results in a loss of pre-frontal cortical judgement to go out the window. That is why the radical Evangelicals commit fraud, adultery, and even murder in much higher numbers than the Northeast Liberals.

This loss of control is well illustrated by what happened to a supervisor in the railroad building across the US in the 19th century. An explosion put a spike through the pre-frontal cortex of his brain, but he survived. He lost all forms of control and started swearing a lot, stealing money, could not control his temper, and committed adultery, a complete change of character. Research done at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at San Diego confirmed what happens when pre-frontal cortical control is lost due to parietal epilepsy or injury.

Many who established new religions such as Smith and many others were strongly suspected of either head injuries or parietal epilepsy according to their behavior recorded in historical accounts. At the University of California, San Diego, a patient with Parietal Epilepsy which he gets in 8 hour stretches believed he was God or was speaking to God depending on the day.

Most people who are religious at least one time in their life are not in this category including myself. It is a comfort and provides the glue to keep people from acting only on instinct and function more as a community than a selfish loner which seems to thrive in our current society where real friends seem to be very scarce.

Jim Kawakami, October 20, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

... Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. "Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming," Kirk says. "Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves."

Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one. ...

FRONTLINE INVESTIGATES THE ROOTS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

FRONTLINE Presents
The Warning
Tuesday, October 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS

www.pbs.org/frontline/warning

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown,Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake." ...

Fight the Big Boys on Wall Street at www.BanksterUSA.org

The Banksters have pulled off the biggest heist of all time. They have crashed the global economy, throwing 7.5 million Americans out of work, emptying retirement and college funds and forcing many into hardship and homelessness. Yet they continue to be rewarded with trillions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their Bankster bonuses, they prey upon the vulnerable with ballooning bank fees and macabre investment schemes such as "death bonds" and their taxpayer-subsidized lobbyists swarm Capitol Hill to prevent the passage of any meaningful reform of the financial system. ...

Obama Should Not Ignore Genuine Misplaced White Men Economic Insecurity Directed at Liberals

Over the years I have altered my news briefs and opinions to more closely reflect my audience which has been mostly upper middleclass college educated professionals. My personal inclinations and belief more closely coincides with such websites as www.democracynow.org , www.truthdig.com , and http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/ which counters elitist thinking and comes closer to the ugly truth about America and its well-off professional upper middleclass.

Because of all of the Hitler diatribes, many tend to ignore our society's parallel to what happened in 1930s Germany which suffered both economic hardships and a complete degradation of their currency, a time ripe for a demagogue Adolf Hitler and his elite followers. We need not discuss what happened, but if our large working lower middleclass who first directed their anger toward secularism may now turn against our elitist upper middleclass more directly.

E. J. Dionne, a former religion columnist for the Washington Post is now free to express himself with greater clarity as did Chris Hedges formerly of the New York Times. See how our economic system really works in the film "Capitalism: A Love Story". I think most should see it twice because there is so much stuff to think about in the film. I will probably go for three times as I did SICKO about our sick Healthcare Capitalist System.

As Halderman, Nixon's top advisor explained to his boss, establishing an HMO healthcare system does not go against your capitalism uber alles priority. Nixon smiled when Halderman told him that by Denying Care, the HMOs can make lots of money. That is the basis of our healthcare system now. The news tells us about the "average" salaries of CEOs of our Health Insurance companies, but usually neglect to say that some of the top five so-called healthcare insurance companies make much more than the average. For example the second largest UnitedHealthcare CEO got the "adjusted" $5 billion profit and the CEO made $750,000,000 or $750 million or three-quarters of a Billion Dollars with a B.

Today I will give you a sampling of columns from http:///www.truthdig.com .

Jim Kawakami, Oct 12, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Obama Should Not Ignore Genuine Misplaced White Men Economic Insecurity Directed at Liberals Truthdig.com E.J. Dionne Wash Post Writers Group Oct 11, 2009 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091011_prizing_peace_on_the_home_front/ ... Obama can’t do much about those against him because of his race. Even a 1 percent unemployment rate wouldn’t change the minds most scarred by prejudice. But there is a second level of angry opposition to which Obama needs to pay more attention. It involves the genuine rage of those who felt displaced in our economy even before the great recession, and are now hurting even more.

These Americans are sometimes written off as “angry white men.” In analyzing anti-Obama feeling, commentators have taken to rummaging around the work of historian Richard Hofstadter during the 1950s and ’60s, focusing on his theory that “status anxiety” helps explain the rise of movements on the far right. The idea is that extremism takes hold in groups that feel their “status” is threatened by new groups on the rise in society.

The problem with the status anxiety theory is that it focuses on feelings and psychology, thus easily crossing into condescension. It implies that the victims of status anxiety should be doing a better job of accepting their new situations and downplays the idea that they might have something real to be angry about.

In fact, many who now feel rage have legitimate reasons for it, even if neither Obama nor big government is the real culprit. September’s unemployment numbers told the story in broad terms: Among men 20 and over, unemployment was 10.3 percent; among women, the rate was 7.8 percent.

Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by both globalization and technological transformation. Even before the recession, the decline in the number of well-paying jobs in manufacturing hit the incomes of this group of Americans hard. The trouble in the construction industry since the downturn began has compounded the problem.

This is not a uniquely American problem. Last week, I caught up with Australia’s deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, who was visiting Washington for a conference on education. Though Gillard diplomatically avoided direct comment on American politics, she said what’s happening here reminded her of the rise of Pauline Hanson, a politician who caused a sensation in Australian politics during the 1990s by creating One Nation, a xenophobic and protectionist political party tinged with racism.

Gillard, a leader of Australia’s center-left Labor Party, argues that high unemployment, particularly the displacement of men from previously well-paying jobs, helped unleash Hansonism and “the politics of the ordinary guy versus these elites, the opera-watching, latte-sipping elites.” ... http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091011_prizing_peace_on_the_home_front/

Will the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Reveal the Known Fraud Committed by Wall Street and Banks?

Books by Chris Hedges and Ron Suskind "Empire of Illusion" and "A Hope in the Unseen" respectively, talk about the kind of thinking largely absent from our plutocracy and their Ivy League implementers. The soon to be published book by Barbara Ehrenreich, "This Land is Their Land," is about always illusionary positive thinking helping us progress to disaster and death with a smile.

We are a country of illusions since cousins Bernays and Freud introduced to the world a powerful the mechanism of propaganda and public relations to control people as we saw in abundance during our congressional trip to Healthcare Disaster unless we have a miracle. http://www.opensecrets.org tells us the money story and congress. Senator Baucus (D-Mt) and other conservative Senators have made sure that the profits of the Healthcare industry will remain intact and even enhanced.

Thanks to C-SPAN and Book TV http://booktv.org/ vital and current information are available from the thinkers of the world who have not been brainwashed to respect authority or die trying. The Chris Hedges interview by Ron Suskind is an interview you should not miss! During the interview with Suskind, Hedges told of deciding to go his own way at the New York Times and tell the whole truth. The Times gave him a warning and then fired him. http://booktv.org/Program/10883/After+Words+Chris+Hedges+Empire+of+Illusion+Interviewed+by+Ron+Suskind.aspx

I strongly urge you to buy Hedges' book Empire of Illusion. In the book he talks about how Professional Wrestling on television perfectly reflects our society. Even though too many have referred to Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, it is exactly the fear and racism being generated by the crazy Right Wing including Limbaugh and Glen Beck and FOX Cable that is something we should really be worried a lot about. I sometimes think that the Republican leadership has also breathe in the crazy dust too. Do they really understand the consequences of their fear and hate rhetoric leading to? Wall Street and Banks are only one example of our corrupt society which is going downhill very fast.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 11, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Franklin D. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore found a never discovered film of Roosevelt's State of the Union in 1944, a few months before he died. In that State of the Union, he was too ill to come before congress, so he had it filmed during his address on radio. Roosevelt once called in the National Guard to protect the striking workers who were being beaten up and shot by company hired goons and police during the Depression. My how things have changed.

I just saw the Michael Moore masterpiece "Capitalism: A Love Story." I or the audience did not laugh once during the whole film!

What is most revealing is what an executive at the Wall Street Journal said on video and a Citi Group Bank executive wrote in a memo about the State of Our Economy. Both are convinced that we no longer have a Democracy and the Plutocrats on Wall Street and the Banks run the country.

You really need to watch the film to get what I call my visceral feeling in my stomach that I got from watching this film from the plutocrats and their many victims. Here are some highlights of brutal facts about how Reagan started the process of completely changing our society so the those at the top can have it all. The Citi Group document showed that the top One Percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent of the American people.

Citi Group was really worrying that a rebellion from the people is starting. This is well illustrated by the resistance of home owners to move out of their homes and fired workers refusing to leave the factory. Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) a long-serving House member from the Toledo area, encouraged homeowners to stay in their homes after the banks foreclosed and ask the bank to produce a mortgage document which many cannot do.

I saw Marcy Kaptur yesterday as a panelist on the Maher Show on HBO last Friday. She and Janeane Garofalo, an actress and activist, really stuck it to the greedy Capitalists. In Capitalism even Church Bishops were condemning the Greed on Wall Street and Corporations. Moore was able to include fairly recent rebellious movements in our country in the workplace. He also showed that when workers are owners and only work for part of the profits, productivity and ideas are maximized. Moore wondered why Americans talk so much about want Democracy when all the places they work are Dictatorships. My Way or the Highway!

The banks that the taxpayers saved are now taking away our homes that were paid for but many seniors wanted more money and took out these crooked mortgages and are losing their homes left and right throughout the country.

About 80 percent of the mortgage fraud was done by the lenders. Country Wide which committed the greatest amount of fraud did favors for powerful people in Congress such as Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad of North Dakota got extremely low rates at the time the average American was getting these mortgages that was impossible not to default on. Note that some Democrats who killed the public option Baucus (MT) and Kent Conrad (ND) have so few people that they have only ONE HOUSE MEMBER. Normally it takes up to 500,000 people for one House district. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin thought that including the Senate as now constituted will result in a Democracy in name only. How true that has turned out to be. The Republicans after 2006 stopped well over one hundred bills coming out of the House.

I think many liberals including myself are not giving President Obama enough time to do what he said he wants to do. We must remember that he is a master politician to win the election and even gave us a hope of having a decent Health Care and Reform bill. I still trust him to do the right thing until he betrays our trust.

As I said before, my biggest worry is about some of the people around him. I have the impression that Lawrence Summers whom I do not trust is having less influence than I thought. Geithner who has been a person who always followed orders may have come into his own and may be acting more independently due the influence of Bernanke who seems to me to be the best of the bunch. But I always worry because Bush appointed him.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 5, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Second Bill of Rights

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Second Bill of Rights was a proposal made by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944to suggest that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill of rights. Roosevelt did not argue for any change to the United States Constitution; he argued that the second bill of rights was to be implemented politically, not by federal judges. Roosevelt's stated justification was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to create an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee:

• A job with a living wage
• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
• A home
• Medical care
• Education
• Recreation

Roosevelt stated that having these rights would guarantee American security, and that America's place in the world depended upon how far these and similar rights had been carried into practice. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights