There are no government standards that regulate the use of the words “natural” or “all natural.” I'm stunned...

Mouth Map:

Here is the link to the article...thanks, Rich http://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i44/Call-Food-Fixers.html?h=1718028921

An ice floe for every town...

Put the elderly on ice? By Amitai Etzioni, Special to CNN Amitai Etzioni says proposals to reduce spending on end of life care for people in their 80s are a slippery slope We're coming close to saying old people should be cast off, says Amitai Etzioni Some are arguing for a cease-fire in America's "war against death," he writes Etzioni: Capacity to recover and return to a meaningful life is the proper criterion for intervention We should accept death and stop aggressive interventions when there's little hope, he says Editor's note: Amitai Etzioni is a sociologist and professor of international relations at George Washington University and the author of several books, including "Security First" and "New Common Ground." He was a senior adviser to the Carter administration and has taught at Columbia and Harvard universities and the University of California, Berkeley. (CNN) -- No one has come out yet and explicitly suggested that old folks like me (I am about to turn 83) should be treated the way the Eskimos, as folklore has it, used to treat theirs: put on an ice floe and left to float away into the sunset. We are, however, coming dangerously close. A recent study by Dr. Alvin C. Kwok and his colleagues finds that surgery is common in the last year, month and week of life. Eighty-year-olds had a 35% chance of going under the knife in the last year of their lives; nearly one out of five Medicare recipients had surgery in their last month and one in 10 in their last week. Nobody doubts that some of these surgeries were necessary. But major medical and ethical figures argue that they reflect our reluctance to accept death or let go, the surgeons' activist interventionist orientation and the way the incentives are aligned. As the surgeon Atul Gawande put it in The New Yorker: "Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop." It remained for Daniel Callahan, an influential bioethicist and co-founder of the prestigious Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institute in New York, to take the next step. In a May article in The New Republic, Callahan (with co-author Sherwin B. Nuland) argues for a cease-fire in America's "war against death," calling on us to surrender gracefully; Americans thus "may die earlier than [is now common], but they will die better deaths." Focusing on care for the elderly, Callahan and Nuland warn that our present attitudes "doom most of us to an old age that will end badly: with our declining bodies falling apart as they always have but devilishly -- and expensively -- stretching out the suffering and decay." They hence call on us to abandon the "traditional open-ended model" (which assumes medical advances will continue unabated) in favor of more realistic priorities, namely reducing early death and improving the quality of life for everyone. They further advocate age-based prioritization, giving the highest to children and "the lowest to those over 80." The journalist Beth Baker summed up this position: "After people have lived a reasonably full life of, say, 70 to 80 years, they should be offered high quality long-term care, home care, rehabilitation and income support, but not extraordinary and expensive medical procedures." Baker's interview with Callahan reveals one reason this line of argument should be watched with great concern: Once we set an age after which we shall provide mainly palliative care, economic pressures may well push us to ratchet down the age. If 80 was a good number a few years ago, given the huge deficit and the pressure to cut Medicare expenditures, there seems no obvious reason not to lower the cut-off age to, say, 70. And nations that have weaker economies, the logic would follow, should cut off interventionist care at an even younger age. Say, 50 for Guatemala? Above all, age is the wrong criterion. The capacity to recover and return to a meaningful life is the proper criterion. Thus, if a person is young but has a terminal disease, say, advanced pancreatic cancer, and physicians determine that he has but a few months, maybe weeks, to live (a determination doctors often make), he may be spared aggressive interventions and be provided with mainly palliative care. In contrast, an 80-year-old with, say, pneumonia -- who can return to his family and friends to be loved and give love, contribute to the community through his volunteering and enjoy his retirement he earned with decades of work -- should be given all the treatments needed to return him to his life (which in my case includes a full-time job and some work on the side). We should learn to accept death more readily; we should stop aggressive interventions when there is little hope; we should provide dying people with palliative care to make their passing less painful and less traumatic. Such a case may not just be that of an elderly person succumbing to a terminal illness -- it can be that of a preemie born too early to survive, a youngster following a car wreck, a worker following a tragic accident. We should learn from the Eskimos -- they long ago stopped abandoning their elderly just because they got "too" old. The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Amitai Etzioni.

Prescription Painkiller Overdose Deaths on the Rise - ABC News

Prescription Painkiller Overdose Deaths on the Rise - ABC News:

'via Blog this'

For Rich's team...

For Doug: C'mon meat, throw me that weak ass shit...

Alas, if only I could eat chicken...

Farm to Fridge...

Thoughts on planning home defense...

Batting Practice video for upcoming season...

Lunch at the Pub...well, maybe next week

Benford's law...

"here are the distribution of first digits vs. Benford's law's prediction for total assets and total revenues."

In other words, corporate numbers behaving precisely as predicted by a purely statistical law! But here is where it gets truly strange. In her words, "Deviations from Benford's law have increased substantially over time, such that today the empirical distribution of each digit is about 3 percentage points off from what Benford's law would predict. The deviation increased sharply between 1982-1986 before leveling off, then zoomed up again from 1998 to 2002. Notably, the deviation from Benford dropped off very slightly in 2003-2004 after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform act in 2002, but this was very tiny and the deviation resumed its increase up to an all-time peak in 2009." Said otherwise, the chronological change in this parameter allows some starting conclusions. As the Economist notes, "This regularity has been used to identify cases of fraud in public documents. Someone cooking books is likely to choose numbers somewhat randomly, generating a distribution of digits far more uniform than Benford's law would predict. Any divergence that shows up sets off alarm bells in those looking for funny business." Visually presented, it looks as follows:

Yes, book-cooking, in the purest statistical "correlation does not imply causation" has hit an all time high! Granted we doubt any regulator, least of all the corrupt criminal SEC, whose own Benford's law chart would look like a lie detector test hooked up to Jamie Dimon during a conference all, would admit this evidence in a court of law, but deluded investors who believe that corporation are being always truthful with data and reporting should probably be aware that that is certainly not the case. Per the Economist: "As Ms Wang notes, this isn't decisive proof of misbehaviour. It is suggestive, however, of the possibility that systematic number-fudging has been on the upswing in recent decades. Moreover, it's an excellent use of clever statistical analysis to provide a new perspective on an economic question." Considering the surge in white collar criminality over the past 3 decades, especially among financial firms, and the fact that this "index" is now at all time highs, we would hardly be as politically correct about the issue as the Economist. But that's us. As for next steps, "What types of firms, and what kind of executives drive the greatest deviations from Benford's law? Does this measure do well in predicting known instances of fraud? How much of these deviations are driven by government deregulation, changes in accounting standards, and traditional measures of corporate governance?" All these are fascinating questions that Wang will answer in the immediate future and we will advise readers when she does. For now, the take home message is this: if it appears that "they" are lying to you, "they" probably are. Just run a numerical regression analysis to prove it.

Mortamins....

SOME vitamins make you stronger. Others make your eyesight sharper, your hair shinier and your nails glossier. Now, though, it seems there are also vitamins which might give you prostate cancer or cut your life short in other ways. Two separate studies published this week sound a cautionary note for vitamin gobblers. Researchers funded by America’s National Institutes of Health set out to study whether vitamin E might decrease the risk of prostate cancer. To their astonishment, they discovered that it seems to do the exact opposite. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, come on the tail of a big cancer-prevention trial. As part of that trial’s follow-up, Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic and his colleagues examined the effects of taking vitamin E supplements. They found a 17% increase in prostate cancer for men who took the vitamin, compared with those who took a placebo. The mechanism for this pernicious effect is unclear, and indeed the findings themselves are controversial. But the paper is the latest in a stream of damning research. Perhaps even more disquieting were results published a few days earlier in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In a study that looked at the health and habits of nearly 40,000 women over two decades, Jaakko Murso of the University of Eastern Finland showed that older women who admitted to taking multivitamins died at higher rates. This was despite the fact that the women who took supplements also tended to be slimmer and boast lower blood pressure than the women who did not. (Since supplement munching was self-reported, Dr Murso's study did not have a placebo control.) None of this is to say that people must immediately bin all vitamin-containing substances; vitamins are, after all, essential nutrients. Moreover, untangling cause and effect in studies like these is notoriously tricky. And it does not help that the boffins themselves seem baffled by the results. That said, they ought to give pause to the most voracious supplement poppers. The Centre for Responsible Nutrition, an American group representing the industry which caters to them, promptly condemned the research as “a hunt for harm”. That response was predictable—more than 150m Americans take vitamins each year, spending about $27 billion on the stuff.

Something for Edmund...and a cultural void

Government regulation may be the only way...or, don't smoke, duh.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/email/html/8936scene3.html

Tobacco Companies Hid Evidence of Radiation in Cigarettes for Decades - ABC News

Remember this conversation???


Tobacco Companies Hid Evidence of Radiation in Cigarettes for Decades - ABC News:

'via Blog this'

Shopping, shopping, shopping...

When you shop, pay close attention to the following "fine" print...

State law may require sales tax to be charged on the pre-discounted price if the product is subject to sales tax.

How's that for a new twist on raising taxes...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/03/global_house_prices&fsrc=nwl

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/03/global_house_prices&fsrc=nwl

J'aime Melanie

Why are there sooooo many new drugs????

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell | The New York Review of Books

Class conflict...

Visual Summary Of The World's High Net Worth Individuals

Another news flash...

American Electric Power (AEP) sent shock wave last week by suggesting consumers could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40-60% in the next few years due to new air regulations by the EPA.

The Price of Coke...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/06/uns-world-drug-report&fsrc=nwl

Arctic Sea Ice & future oil/gas reserves

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/06/mapping-arctic-sea-ice-thickness&fsrc=nwl

Arizona Burn Scars Seen From Space

NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory - Arizona Burn Scars Seen From Space

Health Care...waste mgmt, what a crock

Estimated waste in American health-care spending

AMERICA has a talent for wasting money on health care. It has devised many ingenious ways to do this. A patient may see many skilled specialists, none of whom co-ordinate with one another. Payment systems are unfathomably complex and highly variable. Doctors order duplicative or unnecessary tests. The country excels at treating sick people and does a horrible job keeping them from getting sick in the first place. All these problems, however, are due to a simple, structural failing: the more services a hospital provides, the more it is paid. Note the *total waste in billions...

Now, now, there's plenty for everyone...

An Unspeakable Word Is the Word That Has to Be Spoken

Warning: This essay does not include the single most reprehensible, shocking, forbidden expletive in the language. Maybe it should.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/an-unspeakable-word-is-the-word-that-has-to-be-spoken.html

The Necessity Of Resisting Financial Tyranny

STARVE THE BEAST...

Guest Post: The Necessity Of Resisting Financial Tyranny

Fǎ Kè Yóu ......Wall Street....dǎ fēi jī

Disaster Capitalism at it's finest...

copy to browser for larger image:

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/images/USDebt.png

The World Needs A Good Plague...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/world_population&fsrc=nwl

Empire of Ilusion

We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

Thoughts on the CTS & Courtesy runners & Tuesday...

"The People Vs. Goldman Sachs" - Taibbi's Magnum Opus

"The People Vs. Goldman Sachs" - Taibbi's Magnum Opus

Chart Of The Day: Currency Devaluation, Old School Style

Chart Of The Day: Currency Devaluation, Old School Style

What can you buy for $2.00???

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/poor_economics&fsrc=nwl

Essentially, we have no inflation in the USA, less than 2%, unless you happen to be one of those people who eat food, or drive in cars

NOTE: While the commonly accepted explanation for hyperinflation is government printing too much money, the real explanation is a concerted attack on a country's currency by foreign speculators and/or foreign governments...gee, wouldn't that be the same as speculation in commodities by the TBTF group???

Dodd-Frank...what a joke

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/geithner-nixed-dodd-frank

Something for Charlie

USAID TOP 20 VENDORS...

Top 20 Vendors for FY 2010 (Foreign Governments Excluded)

Vendor FY 2010
1 World Food Program 1,078,275,437
2 Global Fund 791,252,368
3 Development Alternatives, Inc. 486,592,862
4 IBRD/WBI 460,057,993
5 Chemonics International, Inc 458,591,535
6 Partnership for Supply Chain Management 432,468,295
7 The Louis Berger Group, Inc. 418,408,445
8 International Relief and Development 411,826,830
9 John Snow, Inc. 398,991,227
10 Academy for Education Development 341,205,619
11 Catholic Relief Services 259,951,766
12 Family Health International 247,285,033
13 Deloitte Consulting, LLP 237,868,250
14 International Organization for Migration 218,646,101
15 Management Sciences for Health 207,728,737
16 ABT Associattes, Inc. 202,537,194
17 Research Triangle Institute 192,463,477
18 Associates in Rural Development 185,626,844
19 Mercy Corps 165,584,958
20 Creative Associates International, Inc. 162,954,111

US Taxpayers building Mosques? ...chump change, 2011 USAID budget

Lots of data...take time to flip through the pages and see where your money really goes, numbers are in $000

http://www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2011/2011_CBJ_SummaryTables.pdf

What will happen in Egypt...

That latest entrant to the "whorism" political class...

Saudi Arabia, Suddenly Desperate For More Bribe Cash, Says Will Boost Shipments (As If It Has A Choice)

5 Things You Didn’t Know...click link below picture

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Seafood

Captain Jack Sparrow...

Genetically modified crops

Daily chart: Genetically modified crops: Growth areas | The Economist

Love the PAIN...

Purification by pain: The masochism tango | The Economist

Stunning...

Why there were no WMD's in Iraq...Petro-dollar Cycle rules

Iran is not the enemy

Ah....the American dream

IMF calls for dollar alternative

IMF calls for dollar alternative

Whose next??? Middle East unrest...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/02/daily_chart_arab_unrest_index&fsrc=nwl

Bet you thought they lived in mud huts...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/baobab/2011/02/expensive_angola&fsrc=nwl

The study suggests that Congo is the thinnest country in the world...DUH

For the hard core data types here's the link:

http://www5.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/metabolic_risks/bmi/

Gotta love those Bankers...

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/stock-hedging-lets-bankers-skirt-efforts-to-overhaul-pay/

how can a man be expected to settle his obligations when he is imprisoned for them?

Guest Post: The Great Global Debt Prison

Overdose...

Is Egypt A Preview of 2015 America?

Is Egypt A Preview of 2015 America?

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

Gee, let's travel to...Mexico???

A history lesson...why we are all slaves to debt, 5 parts

Control...

VH1 TV Shows | Music Videos | Celebrity Photos | News & Gossip

Bankers

Inflationary Tuesday: If Economics is a Science, Why Are the GDP Numbers a Total Fiction?

Inflationary Tuesday: If Economics is a Science, Why Are the GDP Numbers a Total Fiction?

Gotta let the Bankers unwind their positions...

"In an action unprecedented in internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the internet," James Cowie of Renesys said.

Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr were all off air but Cowie said one exception was the Noor Group, which still has 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers.

He said it was not clear why the Noor Group was apparently unaffected "but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address."

It's about the DEBT...Banks want Nations & Individuals to be SLAVES to DEBT

Review the Economy pages, especially the debt to GDP, consumer inflation, prime lending rates in Egypt and you'll have a feel for the pain of the "common man" not the radicals...AND, if you happened to watch Zeitgeist:Moving Forward you can sense the falsity of pursuing GDP increase for it's own sake...aka, American economic theory as promulgated by the Fed.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/eg.html

The Face of the Enemy, yeah right.....who do you trust?

So who's the real fiscal conservative?

Now, imagine 40 of them checking you out at feeding time...Jurassic Park

Zeitgeist...You must watch

Guest Post: Dirty Little Secrets About Goldman's Collateral Calls on AIG

Guest Post: Dirty Little Secrets About Goldman's Collateral Calls on AIG

GDP US states vs World...

What country/state do you move to? Next comparison, state debt vs sovereign debt and why states/countries SHOULD default on their debt...

Why the "F" word is appropriate...

Dream big, win big...

You never can tell...

While we watched her dogs, our friend was off skydiving...

Gotta love Dexter...

Something for slo-mo garceauwitz...

Emmy Rossum...

A Slice of Americana...

Domino...

Carrie-Ann Moss...edgy

Spank that monkey...

We need more...

I've Seen Things...

we don't know how much time she has, but then who does...

By Request...

Purrrfection...

I guarantee you she sleeps upside down...

Dresden/Tokyo Firebombing

I Love Marla...

Name this City...hint, we fire bombed it to rubble in WW2

Quips for the Pub...

Competite's final jukebox request...

TRANSIT OF THE ISS DURING THE SOLAR ECLIPSE OF JANUARY 4 2011 FROM OMAN

Fabulous shot...

http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/eclipse110104_solar_transit.html

Ode to Competite!

#5 Retires
I wandered back to Saddlebrooke, Roy, where you and I were old men,
And where we drew in days gone by our fill of childish joys;
Alas! The field is deserted now, and only rank weeds grow
Where mighty Roy pitched through the air, just a year ago.

Remember the Pub, where in the afternoon shade,
The Pubratz would gather and discuss the home runs Roy gave up?
Dog fennel now grows thick around that "joint" we used to know
When old Roy shot the breeze, just a year ago.

The stadium seating, too, not yet built; no bleachers met my gaze
Where you and I were wont to sit in happy bygone days
The peanuts which we fumbled there have sprouted in a row
Where mighty Roy swung in vain, just a year ago.

O how we used to cheer you, Roy, each time you came to bat!
And how we held our breath in awe when on the plate you spat
And when you landed on the ball, how loud we yelped! But O
How loud we cursed when you struck out, just a year ago!

The diamond is a corn patch now; the outfield's overgrown
With pumpkin vines and weedy plots; the roosters all have flown -
They couldn't bear to live on there, for nothing is the same
Where they had been so happy once before Roy’s last game.

The village band disbanded soon; the mayor, too resigned.
The CTS even jumped its graft, and in seclusion opined;
The commish caught the next train out,and those we used to know
Began to leave in flocks and droves, since just a year ago.

For after Roy pitched that day the retirees all left,
And one by one they sought new lands, heartbroken and bereft;
The joyous shout no more rang out of old men at their play;
The village batsmith closed his shop; the druggist moved away.

Alas for Saddlebrooke’s vanished pomp when mighty Roy reigned!
Her grandeur has departed now; her glory's long since waned.
Her place upon the map is lost, and no one seems to know
A whit about the game since Roy pitched, just a year ago.

In case your wife won't let you watch the whole movie...

Happy New Year!!!