Todays Epiphany: it’s a dog’s and congressman’s life

My  dog sleeps about 20 hours a day.   
She  has her food prepared for her. She can eat whenever she wants.  
Her meals are provided at no cost to her.   
She  visits the doctor once a year for her checkup, and again during the year if any medical needs arise.  
For this she pays nothing, and nothing is required of her.  
She lives in a nice neighborhood in a house that is  much larger than she needs, but she is not required to do any upkeep.

If she makes a mess, someone else cleans it up.   
She has his choice of luxurious places to sleep.   
She receives these accommodations absolutely free.   
She is living like a Queen, and has absolutely no expenses whatsoever.  
All of her costs are picked up by others who go out and earn a living every day.  
I was just thinking about all this, and suddenly it hit me like a brick ...

I think my  dog is a  member of Congress!

Smart dog displays math skills, giant rodent on the loose in California, and survey shows tea party less popular than atheists and Muslims

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Daylights breaking and I’ve got the coffee going. Thanks for dropping by. Pull up a seat, grab a cup of freshly brewed, and let’s look at a few headlines to get the day started:

Montana dog becomes local celebrity for his math skills

Labrador Retrievers are known for their hunting skills and friendly dispositions, but Beau, a black Lab who lives in Montana, is winning acclaim for his math abilities.

Owner David Madsen says if he tells Beau there are six dogs at the park and three dogs leave, and then asks him how many are left, the dog replies: "Woof, woof, woof." "He counts, he adds and subtracts, he can do some division and has memorized square roots," Madsen said.               Photo

Giant South American rodent spotted in California

A giant South American rodent weighing at least 100 pounds (45 kgs) was spotted at a waste-water treatment facility in California recently before disappearing in the brush, according to a wildlife official. The animal, which was identified as a capybara, is the world's largest rodent and feeds on vegetation.

The capybara is believed to be an escaped pet, Tognazzini said. It was last seen about two weeks ago at a waste-water treatment facility in Paso Robles, 175 miles northwest of Los Angeles, he said.

Survey’s surprising finding: tea party less popular than atheists and Muslims

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'"

Early tea partiers were described as "nonpartisan political neophytes," Campbell and Putnam write, but their findings showed that tea partiers were "highly partisan Republicans" who were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. "They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do," they went on.            Cartoon

Time to walk on down the road…

‘If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand’

image                                   Quote from Righteous Brothers, "Rock & Roll Heaven"

Expert says sex-crazed insects whip up 'bugnadoes' in Midwest

Tornadoes aren't the only funnels that touch down in the Midwest. "Bugnadoes" — vortexes of swarming bugs — occasionally twist through, too.

On the night of July 4, professional storm chaser and photographer Mike Hollingshead caught sight of an enormous bugnado in southwestern Iowa. The air above the cornfields was so thick with bugs "it looked like it was smoking," Hollingshead told Life's Little Mysteries. He captured the strange sight on camera, and his video has gone viral in recent days.

But what are the bugnadoes? "It’s a mating flight. The males are trying to impress the females, and the females select a mate." No one knows what the females are looking for when they choose a sex partner from among the masses, said Jo Kieper, an entomologist who is executive director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History.

Why some medications are so high, Big Tabacco whines about warnings, and FDA approves new skin cancer drug

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Good to see you this morning. Pull up a chair and grab a cup of my freshly brewed virtual coffee. I have a few tidbits to kick your day off with:

 

Price-gougers hike costs of vital drugs during shortage

Gray-market vendors are part of the so-called “parallel market,” in which drugs are sold outside authorized channels. Drug makers typically distribute medications through large, national suppliers. Sometimes, however, a third-party supplier is able to purchase quantities of drugs and then re-sell them, often at a higher cost, to hospital pharmacists desperate to find drugs to treat patients.

Of the drugs offered by 18 gray market providers, 96 percent were double the normal price, 45 percent were 100 times the normal price and 27 percent were at least 20 times the normal price.

The drug with the highest mark-up was labetalol, a blood pressure medication that has been in shortage for more than a year. Normally priced at $25.90 per unit, the drug was offered at $1,200 a unit, a 4,533 percent increase, the report said.

Big Tobacco sues feds over graphic warnings on cigarette labels

Tobacco companies want a judge to put a stop to new graphic cigarette labels that include the sewn-up corpse of a smoker and pictures of diseased lungs, saying they unfairly urge adults to shun their legal products and will cost millions to produce.

One of nine new warning labels cigarette makers will have to use by the fall of 2012. In the most significant change to U.S. cigarette packs in 25 years, the FDA's the new warning labels depict in graphic detail the negative health effects of tobacco use.

Four of the five largest U.S. tobacco companies sued the federal government Tuesday, saying the warnings violate their free speech rights.

 

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FDA approves gene-targeting skin cancer drug

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-its-kind drug to treat the deadliest form of skin cancer by targeting a particular genetic mutation found in about half of patients.

The pill called Zelboraf, made by Roche, is the first treatment for melanoma that targets a specific gene found in skin-cancer tumors. The FDA also approved a test to screen patients for the mutation.

Time to walk on down the road…

TV can shorten life span, Monkeys overhead trail, and worldwide tourist scams

 

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Another day in Paradise. Glad you could stop by. It’s that time again. Grab a cup of Joe and let’s go:

Study: An hour of TV can shorten your life by 22 minutes

Watching an hour of TV after the age of 25 can shorten the viewer's life by just under 22 minutes, according to researchers in Australia according to scientists at the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland.  image

Monkeys overhead! Philly Zoo unveils new Treetop Trail

A new network of stainless steel mesh tunnels allows adorable monkeys to stray far from their usual cages.

The newest attraction at the Philadelphia Zoo is called the Treetop Trail: It's a network of approximately 700 feet of flexible, transparent tubes made with stainless steel mesh connected by a series of steel rings. The result is that small primates such as blue-eyed black lemurs, Bolivian gray titi monkeys, golden lion tamarins and red-capped mangabeys get to explore up into trees, over walkways, and into closer proximity with zoo visitors. The system allows access strictly to tinier primate species — no chimps, let alone gorillas — that fit within the tubes and are light enough to ensure they won't collapse.

10 popular travel scams around the world

#1 Orlando
Here's a scam so bad even Mickey Mouse took a stand. Guests in hotels around Disney World have been finding pizza delivery menus conveniently slipped under their doors, but place an order-and make the mistake of giving your credit card number-and you'll really pay. The phone number isn't connected to a pizza parlor but to identity thieves. Disney World supported a law designed to crack down on the people handing out the fliers, but Orlando police say the problem persists.

Solution: If you're craving a slice, get a recommendation from the hotel. (Click link above for the rest.) image

Time to walk on down the road…

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars

Quote by Jack Kerouac

Warren Buffet says stop coddling the rich, weird contest week, and frozen squirrels used in crimes

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Good to see you. Grab a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and let’s have a stare…at today’s headlines. 

Stop coddling the super-rich, Warren Buffett says

"My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice," The 80-year-old "Oracle of Omaha" wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times.

Weird Contest Week offers something to chew on

When the going gets weird, the weird get going, putting on events dedicated to the odd, the offbeat and the unusual. And they don’t get any more unusual than Weird Contest Week, in Ocean City, N.J. Running August 15–19, the event is a celebration of silliness.

How weird? Well, chew on this: On Wednesday, August 17, the featured event is “That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles,” in which contestants munch on cookies until they’re mush, disgorge them and then sculpt them into works of art.

Frozen squirrels used for criminal purposes

You may have heard of animals being used in the course of crimes, but I bet you never heard about the use of frozen squirrels to do bad things.

Three men stealing car tire rims used frozen squirrels to keep mean dogs occupied as they did their thing. There’s more nutty uses of squirrels in crime. Just go to this site (link above).

Even when the squirrels aren’t involved in crime, they can still be a hazard:

Iced squirrels are a problem too. One insurance company paid off a claim when a frozen squirrel fell out of a tree and crashed through a man’s windshield!

Time to walk on down the road…

As It Stands: Meet ALEC: a wolf in sheep's clothing

By Dave Stancliff/For the Times-Standard
Posted: 08/14/2011 02:30:25 AM PDT
What is ALEC, and why should you care?
If you're uncomfortable with corporations writing our laws then you'll be interested in ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), a group that pairs legislators with corporate heads to pass laws favoring big business.
The Washington, D.C.-based group of conservative state legislators and corporate leaders drafts “model” legislation to be passed as state laws Recently, they've been accused of under-reporting their lobbying activities. They claim to be a nonprofit, non-partisan organization, but their actions belie that description.
Common Cause, a nonprofit government watchdog group, sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on July 14th, alleging ALEC filed false tax returns and is engaged in lobbying despite its claims to the contrary. ALEC's tax-exempt, charitable status is on the line.
 One obvious counter to their claim of being “non-partisan” is their membership: they have one Democrat and 103 Republican legislators currently in leadership positions.
So exactly what does ALEC do? Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators changes to the law that directly benefit their bottom line, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
It isn't just legislators who have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board. Yeah, right. And Tea Party members believe in compromise.
This partisan stalking horse that calls itself ALEC introduces over 1,000 bills every year through its overwhelmingly conservative legislative members. Consider this: One in every five bills they present is enacted into law.
According to everything I've read about lobbying, handing bills to legislators so they can introduce them is the very definition. ALEC says “no lobbying is taking place.” I'm of the opinion, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
ALEC operates under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which limits lobbying activity and allows corporate backers to deduct their contributions.
Fact: Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators take proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own ideas and important public policy innovations -- without disclosing that corporations crafted and approved the bills.
According to the IRS, more than 98 percent of ALEC's revenues come from sources such as corporations, corporate trade groups and corporate foundations. Getting the picture?
ALEC receives grants from some of the biggest foundations funded by corporate CEOs in the country, like the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Koch-managed Claude R. Lambe Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation, to name a few.
The current chairman of ALEC's corporate board is W. Preston Baldwin III, until recently a lobbyist and vice president of State Government Affairs at UST Inc., a tobacco firm now owned by Altria/Phillip Morris USA.
Guess what? Altria is advancing a very short, specific bill to change the way moist tobacco products (such as fruit-flavored “snus” by companies like Skoal) are taxed -- to make them cheaper and more attractive to young tobacco users.
Fact: 20 of the 24 corporate representatives on ALEC's “Private Enterprise Board” are lobbyists representing major firms such as Koch Industries, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Wal-Mart and Johnson and Johnson.
ALEC is blatantly influencing state laws under the guise of a nonprofit, charitable organization. Their claims at promoting “educational activities” would be laughable if they weren't illegal. ALEC engages in outright power-brokering at the taxpayer's expense.

ALEC's operating model raises many ethical and legal concerns. Each state has a different set of ethics laws or rules. The presence of lobbyists alone may cause ethics problems for some state legislators.
Some examples of ALEC's alumni: Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, Congressman Joe Wilson, Gov. Scott Walker and Gov. Jan Brewer.
Seems to me, they're part of the group of Congressional conservatives who refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations. What a surprise!
As It Stands, they should at least be transparent about their past ALEC memberships. Little alumni badges would be nice, don't you think?
Websites carrying this column:
#1 Lobbyingfirms –Industry directory, news and resources. #2 Interceder – Walmart
#3 Famos - claude wolf #4 God’s Vacation #5 Snus Central #6 Swedish Snus

Allen Ginsberg: ‘Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness’

 

image source

In America we ALL have the right to pursue the religion of our choice without being proscuted

I received this email recently and am sharing it with you because it contains an important message. Muslims in America are treated harshly. It’s not easy staying true to their faith surrounded by a generally hostile public.

While I don’t belong to any organized religion, I strongly believe that everyone is entitled to pursue God in their own fashion. Or not to. I recommend taking a 2-minute break and listening to this video. It’s well done, and reminds us we are all neighbors.

Thanks for the reminder Elizabeth!

“Hello Dave,
My Fellow American is a film project in the United States devoted to recognizing that Muslims are our neighbors. I am reaching out to you because you addressed the recent events in Oslo, Norway, in As It Stands and I am hoping you will share this message of tolerance with your readers. We’ve put together a 2 minute film that I believe you will be interested in sharing, watching, and discussing:

http://myfellowamerican.us

I would love it if you could post or tweet about this and share the video. If you can, please let me know. I am here if you have any questions. Thank you so much.”

Elizabeth Potter
Unity Productions Foundation
myfellowamerican.us
facebook.com/MyFellowAmericanProject
@usmuslimstories