The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth. Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.
To placate the Praetorians of Germany, Nerva of Rome adopts Trajan, the Spanish-born governor of lower Germany.
1553
Michael Servetus, who discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood, is burned for heresy in Switzerland.
1612
A Polish army that invaded Russia capitulates to Prince Dimitri Pojarski and his Cossacks.
1791
President George Washington transmits to
Congress the results of the first US census, exclusive of South Carolina
which had not yet submitted its findings.
1806
Emperor Napoleon enters Berlin.
1809
President James Madison orders the
annexation of the western part of West Florida. Settlers there had
rebelled against Spanish authority.
1862
A Confederate force is routed at the Battle of Georgia Landing, near Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana.
1870
The French fortress of Metz surrenders to the Prussian Army.
1873
Farmer Joseph F. Glidden applies for a
patent on barbed wire. Glidden eventually received five patents and is
generally considered the inventor of barbed wire.
1891
D. B. Downing, inventor, is awarded a patent for the street letter (mail) box.
1904
The New York subway officially opens running from the Brooklyn Bridge uptown to Broadway at 145th Street.
1907
The first trial in the Eulenberg Affair ends in Germany.
1917
20,000 women march in a suffrage
parade in New York. As the largest state and the first on the East
Coast to do so, New York has an important effect on the movement to
grant all women the vote in all elections.
1922
In Italy, liberal Luigi Facta's cabinet
resigns after threats from Mussolini that "either the government will
be given to us or we will seize it by marching on Rome." Mussolini
calls for a general mobilization of all Fascists.
1927
Fox Movie-tone news, the first sound news film, is released.
1941
In a broadcast to the nation on Navy Day,
President Franklin Roosevelt declares: "America has been attacked, the
shooting has started." He does not ask for full-scale war yet,
realizing that many Americans are not yet ready for such a step.
1954
Benjamin O. Davis Jr. becomes the first African-American general in the US Air Force.
1962
American U-2 reconnaissance plane shot
down by a surface-to-air missile over Cuba, killing the pilot, Maj.
Rudolf Anderson, the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
1962
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offers to remove Soviet missile bases in Cuba if the U.S. removes its missile bases in Turkey.
1964
The political career of future US
president Ronald Reagan is launched when he delivers a speech on behalf
of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
1971
The Democratic Republic of the Congo renamed Zaire.
1986
London Stock Exchange rules change as Britain suddenly deregulates financial markets, an event called the Big Bang.
1988
US President Ronald Reagan decides to tear
down a new US Embassy in Moscow because Soviet listening devices were
built into the structure.
1997
Stock markets crash around the world over fears of a global economic meltdown.
Saudi female activists are gearing up to test a long-standing driving ban, with more defiant women already getting behind the wheel as the authorities seem to be taking a more lenient approach.
Under the slogan "women's driving is a choice," they have called on
social networks for a turn-out on Saturday in a campaign in the world's
only country that bans women from driving.
"October 26 is a day on which women in Saudi Arabia will say they are
serious about driving and that this matter must be resolved," said
Manal al-Sharif, who was arrested and held for nine days in May 2011 for
posting online a video of herself behind the wheel.
In a protest she led the following month, a number of women were
stopped by police and forced to sign a pledge not to drive again.
The 34-year-old computer engineer who now lives in Dubai told AFP
women have already begun responding to the call, and "more than 50
videos showing women currently driving" have been posted online during
the past two weeks.
With the exception of two women who were briefly stopped by police,
authorities have so far not intervened to halt any of the female
motorists.
This, combined with what seems to be more social acceptance to the
new phenomenon is encouraging more women to get behind the wheel along
major roads across the kingdom.
A video posted on social networks this month shows a fully veiled
woman driving in Riyadh as male motorists and families give her the
"thumbs up" in support.
"There will be a November 26, December 26, a January 26, until
authorities issue the first driving permit to a Saudi woman," said
Sharif.
To reduce the risk of accidents, only women who have driving licences
issued abroad are being invited to participate in the campaign.
Obviously, none are issued in Saudi Arabia.
Dangerous for the ovaries?
But conservative religious figures are still opposed to women driving.
A Saudi cleric's warning last month that driving was dangerous to the
health of women and of their children sparked an online wave of
mockery.
"Physiological science" has found that driving "automatically affects
the ovaries and pushes up the pelvis," Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaydan warned
in remarks to news website Sabq.org.
"This is why we find that children born to most women who
continuously drive suffer from clinical disorders of varying degrees,"
he said.
One female tweeter retorted: "When idiocy marries dogma in the chapel of medieval traditions, this is their prodigal child."
"What a mentality we have. People went to space and you still ban women from driving. Idiots," said another comment.
Women who have been calling for three decades for the right to drive
in the ultra-conservative kingdom have learned that public gatherings
can get them in trouble in the absolute monarchy where any protests are
officially banned.
In 1990, 47 women were arrested and punished after demonstrating in
cars. The minister of interior subsequently banned women from driving
but no law was ever promulgated.
This time, "there will be no demonstrations or rallying points," activist Aziza al-Youssef told AFP.
Youssef spoke of "positive indications" from authorities. In
particular, she cited the chief of the notorious religious police,
Sheikh Abdullatif al-Sheikh, and Justice Minister Mohammed al-Issa
affirming this year that no religious text bans women from driving.
Even so, Saudi Arabia's appointed advisory Shura Consultative Council
rejected on October 10 a move by three female members to put the ban up
for discussion.
Activists argue that driving does not violate Islamic law (sharia) as claimed by conservatives who support the ban.
"Just as wives of the (Muslim) Prophet (Mohammed's) companions
travelled on camel and horseback, it is our right to drive using the
transportation means available during our modern era," activists said in
an online petition linked to Saturday's campaign.
The petition has amassed more than 16,000 signatures since September, despite being blocked only two weeks after its launch.
In another argument, activists point to the kingdom's underdeveloped
public transport system and say many families cannot afford to hire
drivers.
"My salary is 3,500 riyals (around $941/682 euros) and a driver costs
me 1,200 riyals," a divorced mother wrote on the campaign website.
Women's rights have always sparked controversy in the kingdom.
King Abdullah's appointment of 30 women to the 150-member Shura
Council in January drew protests from radical clerics in the kingdom.
His predecessor, king Saud, had to dispatch troops to protect the first girls' school in the 1960s.
For Sharif the campaign aims to push women in the kingdom to demand
"rights which are even more significant than the right to drive."
Diplomats at a UN review of Saudi Arabia's human rights record on
Monday condemned the kingdom's failure to abolish a system requiring
women to seek permission from male relatives to do basic things such as
leave the country, and criticised the ban on driving.
Saudi women, forced to cover from head to toe, still need permission from a male guardian to travel, work and marry.
The examples are
plentiful: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting "You Lie!" to Obama. Rep. Ted
Yoho (FL) responding with "I'm not gonna comment" when asked if Obama's a "born
American." Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) saying he doesn't want to be associated with Obama
because "it's like touching a tar baby." Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) telling supporters "I stood
12 feet away from the guy, and couldn't stand being there." Or Sen. Dick Durbin recalling how
Boner told the president "I can't even stand to look at you." And then there was Newt
Gingrich's bizarre statement that we can only begin to comprehend Obama's actions if we understand
"Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."
Do I even need to bring up Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Trump, Lush Dimbuld
and other repugican leaders?
What does all this point to? A visceral hatred of Obama because he's
black. Anyone who refutes this charge is either a racist themselves, monumentally naive, in supreme
denial or all of the above.
The tea party, and even many "mainstream" repugicans I'm sure, are
sickened by the fact that
a black man lives in the White House. With his black wife. And black
children. These are bigoted people who grew up in an America where the only black people walking
around the White House were servants. They're disgusted, angry, resentful and frustrated that
a black man is the most powerful person in the world; a job that's been reserved for whites
since the birth of America.
Since 2009, repugicans have broken their oath of office
repeatedly by deliberately undermining the government's ability to
function and creating as much economic damage by killing Americans'
jobs.…
At the beginning of each session of Congress, every member swears a
straightforward oath that they will support and defend the Constitution
of the United States and “faithfully discharge the duties of the office.”
One of their duties is keeping the government running and paying its
bills, but since January 2009, repugicans have broken their oath of
office repeatedly by deliberately undermining the government’s ability
to function and creating as much economic damage as possible with an
emphasis on killing Americans’ jobs.
It is likely teabaggers and repugicans do not understand the purpose
of the Constitution, and it is curious because it is concisely stated
in the preamble that says, “We the People, in Order to form a more
perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide
for the common defense, and promote the general Welfare.” Obviously, repugicans violated their oath when they closed the government on October 1st
and threatened to default on its debts that exposed their purpose of
preventing domestic tranquility and undermining the general welfare of
the people and the government. Last week, 18 repugicans in the Senate
and 144 in the House violated their oath again when they voted to
default on the government’s debts and against re-opening the government
that damaged private sector businesses as well as cost the nation $24
billion.
The repugicans’ latest legislative malfeasance was a continuance of their three-and-a-half year crusade to keep the government in crisis that has cost Americans over one million
jobs and reduced GDP growth by 0.3% each year that translates into
nearly one percentage point of economic damage since repugicans won
control of the House in 2010. Despite killing jobs and retarding
economic growth with their numerous fiscal crises, wingnuts are
panting to increase economic damage in the future by removing or
replacing any repugican who did not vote for a default and continued
shut down by electing candidates who will “not look to meet in the middle.” Apparently, the shutdown that killed 120,000
American jobs and reduced fourth quarter GDP by at least 0.6% was not
enough damage for extremist wingnuts and they are livid with repugicans that Rafael Cruz said “damaged the repugican brand” by “caving” and fulfilling their oath of office.
If Americans thought freakoid revolutionaries like Ted Cruz (tb-TX)
and Mike Lee (tb-UT) were discouraged by their low approval ratings and damage
they wrought on the repugican cabal, they can rest assured there are
more wing-nuts waiting in the wings to join them and disavow their oath
of office and the U.S. Constitution. The teabaggers’ goal was best
summed up by then-candidate Cruz who said in 2011 that it would “fundamentally
shift the character of the Senate if the five or six strong
conservatives elected to the Senate in 2012 became 10 or 12,” and it
portends more damage to America and its people from wingnut
extremists panting to win seats in the Senate and begin shredding the
Constitution on the way to dismantling the government.
Anti-government wingnuts are lining up at least three Cruz-like
cretins to run against establishment repugicans who voted to re-open
the government and pay the nation’s bills according to the
Constitutional mandate that “the public debt of the United States, authorized by law…shall not be questioned.”
The three challengers said they would have voted in concert with Lee
and Cruz to default on the nation’s debt unless the President paid a
ransom, and would have opposed every deal that settled any of the repugicans’ fiscal crises because as Ben Sasse, a 42-year-old former
Health and Human Services assistant secretary calling himself “the
anti-Obamacare candidate” says; “I’m not looking to meet in the middle.” Sasse
is one of the anti-constitution challengers pledging to break the oath
of office if he is elected to the Senate and was promptly endorsed by
the Senate wingnuts Fund that backed Cruz and Lee. Sasse is running
for retiring Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns’ seat who voted according to
the Constitution to pay the nation’s debts and re-open the government.
The only thing Sasse has not yet touted is how breaking the oath of
office and rejecting the Constitution is tantamount to fighting for
liberty; a claim two other Cruz acolytes and Senate hopefuls say is what
defaulting on the nation’s debt is all about.
The man challenging Senator Thad Cochran (r-MS) is Chris McDaniel, a 41-year-old Mississippi state senator who said, “I
am reminded of that first revolution. I stand here with you, with the
silent majority of Americans who believe we can retake this country, who
still believe in liberty.” According to McDaniel, paying the nation’s debt without “concessions out of the compromise” is untenable and he claims he would have “stood
and fought because you fight every day, you get in the trenches, you
do the right thing for your republic even if it hurts.”
McDaniel, like repugicans who voted for a credit default, reveals
that in his dysfunctional mind rejecting the constitutional mandate to
pay the nation’s debts is good for the republic even though it hurts the
republic, the people, and the world’s financial system. His primary
challenge so excited the wingnut Club for Growth that they
immediately gave him $1 million to unseat “acareer politician bankrupting our country”
by paying the country’s debts. The dysfunctional thinking is only
matched by the probability that a freak-of-nature like McDaniel could
actually unseat an establishment repugican who faithfully discharged
the duties of the office and fulfilled his sworn oath.
A South Carolina state senator, Lee Bright, is challenging Senator
Lindsey Graham because he voted against Cruz and Lee to pay the nation’s
debts. Bright said “I would have voted with Cruz and Lee. There’s
nothing they’ve done up to this point that I disagree with. We lost, but
at least we’ve got a roll call vote in the Senate, and we know which
senators fought for liberty, and which ones put up the white flags
before the battle started. We’ve got a list.” Bright is hopeful that
more wingnut senators will put the fear into “squishy moderates”
the next time Congress is expected fulfill their sworn oath to fund the
government or raise the debt limit; two Constitutional obligations
Senators swear to faithfully discharge as duties of the office.
It is really unclear where, or why, these dysfunctional teabaggers
come up with their idea that liberty is equated with opposing the United
States Constitution or a sworn oath to discharge the duties of the
office they either seek or already hold. The Constitution, like the “public debt, shall not be questioned,”
but for extremist conservatives the Constitution, like the oath to
support and defend it, is an arbitrary concept repugicans and
teabaggers will shred as they “fight for liberty” to dismantle the government because Americans twice elected an African American man as President.
In response to the DOJ's challenge of Texas's redistricting
plan and voter ID laws, Attorney-General, Gregg Abbott admitted what we
already know.…
Wingnuts never did embrace voting rights for women and minorities. Paul Weyrichsaid it back in the 1980′s. The more people vote, the worse Republicans do in elections.
When the tea party’s Judson Phillips said that restricting the vote to property owners is a “wise idea” he was simply restating the general thrust of Paul Weyrich’s sentiments.
First they combined gerrymandering with rigged and faulty voting machines.
Vote suppression reached a level of intensity unseen since Jim Crow after the 2008 presidential election.
As we
observed, wingnuts never could lose graciously. The very notion
of Americans rejecting Sarah Palin aka god’s gift to Birchers was just
too much for them to take. So rather than long for the good old days
when voting was a privilege bestowed on propertied white men, state repugicans decided enough is enough. They are going to get your votes
my pretties, and your ability to register too.
Of course, they underestimated our intelligence,when they claimed
that vote suppression was the solution to the statistically non-existent
problem of voter fraud.
Their best efforts backfired big time. In 2012, voters braved all
that the tea party repugicans dished out and re-elected Barack Obama.
Since then, the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the
pre-clearance formula in the Voting Rights Act and the wingnuts went
to town passing laws that courts had previously ruled unconstitutional.
The excuse du jour for vote suppression is it’s just another form of gerrymandering.
Some admit, with pride, that suppressing votes gives repugicans an electoral advantage In the tea repuglican logic, if it’s about electoral advantage, then it can’t be about racism.
In response to the DOJ’s challenge of Texas’s redistricting plan and voter ID laws, Attorney-General, Gregg Abbott admitted
what we already know. Republicans want to suppress votes by racial
minorities because that’s the only chance they’ve got at winning
elections . Evidently, even that’s not enough suppression because Abbot
wants to target women too. But hey, no racism was intended and no sexism intended. This is just good old fashioned gerrymandering.
In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were
controlled by large repugican majorities, and their redistricting
decisions were designed to increase the repugican cabal’s electoral
prospects at the expense of the Democrats. It is perfectly
constitutional for a repugican-controlled legislature to make partisan
districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on
minority voters who support Democratic candidates. …. The redistricting
decisions of which DOJ complains were motivated by partisan rather than
racial considerations,
Last year, Abbott claimed the
purpose of ID laws was to stop voter fraud. But the absence of
evidence to support that excuse meant he had to come up with another
reason to tell the courts.
This year, it’s just about cabal politics as usual. The fact that
voter ID laws disproportionately affect racial minorities is merely
coincidence. It’s about the fact that “those people” keep voting
Democrat so that they can get free stuff. If they voted repugican
instead of the “food stamp” President, repugicans wouldn’t need to
suppress their votes.
In reality, repugicans are trying to hold our votes for ransom just
as they tried to hold the government and the economy for ransom because
things didn’t go their way.
It’s been clear for a while that the voter-identification laws the repugican cabal
has been pushing are aimed at suppressing Democratic constituencies. And repugicans are fessing up, says Jamelle Bouie.
When liberals decry voter-identification laws as tools for voter suppression, they aren’t arguing ex nihilo. The evidence is clear:
identification requirements for voting reduce turnout among low-income
and minority voters. And the particular restrictions imposed by repugican lawmakers—limiting the acceptable forms of identification,
ending opportunities for student voting, reducing hours for early
voting—certainly do appear aimed at Democratic voters.
A voter holds a voting permit and ID card at Washington Mill
Elementary School near Mount Vernon, Virginia, in November 2012.
Indeed, in a column
for wingnut clearinghouse WingNutDaily, longtime wingnut
activist Phyllis Schlafly acknowledged as much with a defense of North Carolina’s new voting law, which has been criticized for its restrictions on access, among other things. Here’s Schlafly:
“The
reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is
particularly important because early voting plays a major role in
Obama’s ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many
days of early voting, and Obama’s national field director admitted,
shortly before last year’s election, that ‘early voting is giving us a
solid lead in the battleground states that will decide this election.’
“The
Obama technocrats have developed an efficient system of identifying
prospective Obama voters and then nagging them (some might say harassing
them) until they actually vote. It may take several days to accomplish
this, so early voting is an essential component of the Democrats’
get-out-the-vote campaign.”
She
later adds that early voting “violates the spirit of the Constitution”
and facilitates “illegal votes” that “cancel out the votes of honest
Americans.” I’m not sure what she means by “illegal votes,” but it
sounds an awful lot like voting by Democratic constituencies: students,
low-income people, and minorities.
Schlafly,
it should be noted, isn’t the first repugican to confess the true
reason for voter-identification laws. Among friendly audiences, they
can’t seem to help it.
Last spring,
for example, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a
gathering of repugicans that their voter identification law would
“allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That summer, at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, former Wall Street Journal
columnist John Fund conceded that Democrats had a point about the repugican cabal’s
focus on voter ID, as opposed to those measures—such as absentee
balloting—that are vulnerable to tampering. “I think it is a fair
argument of some liberals that there are some people who emphasize the
voter ID part more than the absentee ballot part because supposedly repugicans like absentee ballots more and they don’t want to restrict
that,” he said.
One could spend hours going through the abundant evidence that these laws are meant to discourage Democratic voting.
After the election, former Florida repugican cabal chairman Jim GreertoldThe Palm Beach Post
that the explicit goal of the state’s voter-ID law was Democratic
suppression. “The repugican cabal, the strategists, the consultants,
they firmly believe that early voting is bad for repugican cabal
candidates,” Greer told the Post. “It’s done for one reason and
one reason only ... ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early
voting is not good for us,’” he said. Indeed, the Florida repugican cabal imposed a host of policies, from longer ballots to fewer precincts
in minority areas, meant to discourage voting. And it worked. According to one study, as many as 49,000 people were discouraged from voting in November 2012 as a result of long lines and other obstacles.
One
could spend hours going through the abundant evidence that these laws
are meant to discourage Democratic voting with burdens that harm blacks,
Latinos, and other disproportionately low-income groups. In 2011 an Associated Press analysis
found that South Carolina’s proposed voter-identification law would hit
black precincts the hardest, keeping thousands from casting
nonprovisional ballots. Likewise, if Alabama’s voter-ID law goes into
effect, it will place its largest burden on black voters who lack
acceptable forms of identification and don’t have immediate access to
alternatives. And while most of these laws—which, it’s worth noting,
have been passed in most of the states of the former Confederacy—provide
for free identification, it’s not an easy reach. To get one in Mississippi, for instance, residents need a birth certificate, which costs $15
and requires the photo identification they don’t have. They’ll also
need time to travel to the state office to pay or a computer to do the
transaction online.
For the one in five
Mississippians who live below the poverty line, there’s no guarantee of
the time to go to an office, a computer to access the website, or a
credit card to make the transaction. After all, more than 10 million
American households don’t have
bank accounts, and the large majority of them are low income. Most
voters will know the steps they need to get an ID. They just aren’t easy
to complete, and that’s the point.
So we should be thankful for Schlafly’s candor. The more repugicans acknowledge that these laws are designed to suppress the votes of blacks, Latinos, and others, the easier building a movement to stop them will be.
House repugicans discover another nefarious partisan plot by the Obama
administration to use Obamacare as a weapon to freeze the repugican cabal out of the
political process: House repugicans say they're being left
out of an Obamacare briefing from a White House officials who are
coming to the Hill to brief Democratic allies on Wednesday. Mike Hash,
who leads the HHS Office of Health Reform, is scheduled to brief
Democrats on implementation of the law at the Democrats' weekly caucus
meeting.
This is really awful news, because wow! The repugicans
being denied access to a policy briefing for House Democrats should be
the lead story in every newspaper from here to there. Because health
care shouldn't be used like a pawn in the battle royal between Democrats
and repugicans, am I right? So why is that the briefing is being held at all? What dirty truth is at the bottom of this?
House Democrats requested the meeting with Hash. Oh. House Democrats requested a
briefing. A briefing that repugicans could have requested. But didn't.
Because they don't give a shit about making Obamacare work. Unless they
can make it work to help them win the next election. Because for them,
your health is a pawn in a political struggle.
A
67-year old former murder suspect and American fugitive living in
Central America whose drug use is legendary and who bragged about
sleeping with ten 17-year old girls [aka McAfee Virus founder John
McAfee] was contacted by the House repugican cabal last week to advise them on their
investigation of the rollout of the Obamacare website, healthcare.gov. Even CNBC, which reported the news, could barely suppress their shock and awe:
The House committee responsible for
Obamacare oversight asked for expert guidance last week about the
troubled launch of the federal Healthcare.gov site from John McAfee, the
tech legend once suspected in the murder of his neighbor in Central
America, CNBC has learned.
That repugican-controlled committee
wanted the McAfee Associates founder to "guide our oversight and review
of" the implementation of the federal marketplace selling Obamacare
insurance, according to an email obtained by CNBC.com.
After arranging for McAfee to fly to
D.C. to share his wisdom, CNBC reports that repugicans pulled the plug
on McAfee visit last Wednesday and aren't commenting on the record
about it now. Still, how on Earth did this even enter the realm of
possibility? It's completely nuts, but the craziest thing of all is that
this is nowhere near the craziest thing the repugican cabal has done on Obamacare
this month.
Type 1 diabetes while pregnant? Sarah Palin thinks you’re a big liar and
also, she laughed when you fainted, ‘cuz pregnant ladies fainting is SO
FUNNY in that pro-lifey kinda way.
Palin wrote on her Facebook page,
Whether accurate or not, for some reason I found this
hilarious! Am I out of bounds for cracking up when I saw this take on a
nauseated Obama fan, her absentminded pal, and our President’s heroics
this week? If so, penance paying I’ll accept. With the Obama White
House’s total lack of transparency, it’s no wonder that some will ask
whether they staged even a fainting lady in the Rose Garden. What was
once a major leap in logic has become a single step because President
Obama has lied so often and so blatantly (“If you like your health care
plan, you can keep your plan” comes to mind!).’
“Some will ask” whether Sarah Palin is really as bitter as she
appears and some others will ask if Sarah Palin ever sorted out that
Paul Revere ride bit that confused her. “Some will ask”, indeed. SOME.
WILL. ASK.
Palin linked to an article from Drudge by a conspiracy theorist who
claimed that female audience who fainted was a fake. No, she wasn’t a
fake. The fainting “nauseated Obama fan” is Karmel Allison, who suffers
from Type 1 diabetes and is pregnant. This is so funny, y’all! The
things Obama does to this country.
Ms. Allison’s blog on how scary her diabetes is during pregnancy:
I had been trending insulin resistant for a few days —
requiring on average about 22 units of insulin per day rather than the
standard 14 or 15. This was not too surprising, as — well, I suppose I
meant to write a piece announcing this, but it hasn’t happened yet, so
here goes nothing- I’m pregnant, and the hormonal ups and downs lead to
periodic changes in insulin requirements. Still, heading into Friday
night, my insulin behaved like water, and I was just pumping it in with
relatively little return on investment. By the evening, I had used some
25 units for the day.
Now, being pregnant, hyperglycemia is my bogeyman. Hyperglycemia is bad
bad bad. And not just standard, over 200 hyperglycemia. I now begin to
panic when I hit 130 mg/dL. So before bed, when I began to climb to 120,
130, I bolused excessively and walked in circles, trying to bring
myself back down. I stayed up for an extra hour, waiting, walking,
bolusing. Finally I was closer to 100 mg/dL, and went to bed, annoyed to
have had to stay awake longer than desired
You may think it’s not very “pro-life” to mock the fact that a
pregnant diabetic fainted and then accuse her of lying, but hello: Said
diabetic went to Berkley and lives in California, which means she must
be an Obama worshiper who is allowed to stand next to President Obama,
unlike Obama-stalker Sarah Palin, who is not allowed anywhere near
POTUS.
This is unfair. So, the fainter asked for it. “Am I out of bounds for
cracking up when I saw this take on a nauseated Obama fan…” Oh, gosh
no, Ms. Palin, especially not in light of pallin’ around with terrorists
and supporting the right to “ask questions” about the President’s birth
certificate, because you know, SOME WILL ASK.
This might look all mean girl, oxymoronic “repugican feminism” but
don’t hate on Ms. Palin, she can’t help it. It hurts to lose an election god promised just to you. Especially to one of those dark, “exotic”
types.
But anyhoo. Sarah Palin, who crept over the border once to use the
great Canadian healthcare system, now thinks the idea of 40 million
Americans having access to healthcare a super bad idea because if you
can’t keep your same insurance (aka, NONE, for many), well, that sucks
so bad that we might as well let you die. Don’t say Palin isn’t an ideas
gal.
At least Palin didn’t instruct her dwindling followers to stop and
harass any pregnant diabetics who may have signed up for Obama Care like
she told her cult to harass anyone with an Obama bumper sticker.
Pregnant diabetics fainting – HAHAHAHAH! SO FUNNY. Clearly no one except Sarah Palin needs health insurance.
This message was brought to you by the pro-life faction of the repugican cabal.
You
might expect California or New York to top a list of most dangerous
states. But in fact, neither was even in the top five for the nation’s
highest violent crime rate last year.
The FBI’s latest statewide statistics offer a snapshot
of the underside of the 50 states: where violent crime -- murder, rape,
robbery and aggravated assault -- is most common. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed
the states with the highest rates of violent crime in the country.
Last year violent crime rose slightly, just under 1%, after 20 years
of steady decline. Crime peaked in the late 1980s, fueled by the crack
cocaine epidemic. Although the exact cause of the decline remains
unclear, experts have pointed to factors such as better policing,
demographic changes, higher incarceration rates, a drop in cocaine use,
and the introduction of a variety of social programs.
In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., Urban Institute senior fellow
John Roman pointed out that the crime decline has not been uniform.
Crime has fallen markedly in some large cities, like New York, Dallas
and Washington, D.C. However, the decline has been less impressive in
cities like Baltimore and Detroit, where economic and racial segregation
limit the ability of the poor to move into the middle class.
The more integrated the population is, the less common serious crime
is, Roman explained. Most crime is committed by people at the bottom of
the economic totem pole, he said.
The apparent relationship between low income, low education and
higher crime rates has been well documented, although identifying the
cause and effect is still a matter of debate. It is clear, though, that
these states for the most part match the national trend. Of the 10
states with the highest rates of violent crime, eight have lower rates
of adults with bachelor’s degrees, and most of them had median income
levels below the national figure in 2012.
Yahoo Homes is publishing the top five states here. To see the full report with the rest of the top 10, visit the 24/7 Wall St. website:
On its website, the FBI instructs readers to avoid comparing state
violence because rankings tend to be simplistic and ignore factors that
influence crime, as well as the different ways crimes are measured and
reported. For this reason, Roman cautioned against directly comparing
states based on their individual crime rates. However, because the
states with the highest and lowest violent crime rates have remained
consistent for many years, “this exercise is worth doing," he said. "I
don’t know how you make policy without doing this kind of thing.”
24/7 Wall St. identified the states with the highest rates of violent
crime per 100,000 residents. Using estimated populations and crime
incidents from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which measures incidents
of eight types of violent and nonviolent crime for 2012, 24/7 Wall St.
calculated the incidence of the four types of violent crime per 100,000
persons for that year: murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated
assault. In addition to crime data, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed income,
poverty and education statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American
Community Survey for 2012, the most recent available year.
These are the most dangerous states in America. 5. South Carolina
• Violent crimes per 100,000: 558.8
• Poverty rate: 18.3%
• Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 25.1%
• Property crimes per 100,000: 3,822.2 (the highest)
South Carolina’s 18.3% poverty rate is the ninth worst in the
country, and well above the U.S. average of 15.9%. Though it has been
transforming itself into a hotbed of manufacturing, with companies such
as Boeing and BMW opening manufacturing facilities, South Carolina has
the nation’s fifth highest violent crime rate. Its murder rate of 6.9
per 100,000 is the fifth worst in the country. Its aggravated assault
rate is the third worst. Roughly 25% have bachelor’s degrees, among the
nation’s lowest figures. 4. New Mexico
• Violent crimes per 100,000: 559.1
• Poverty rate: 20.8%
• Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 26.1%
• Property crimes per 100,000: 3,600.7 (4th highest)
For many Americans, New Mexico is Taos, Santa Fe and the big nuclear
laboratory at Los Alamos. It is also a poor state. Its violent crime
rate is the fourth worst in the country; its forcible rape rate is also
fourth worst. It has among the highest rates of drug use in the country,
which is known to encourage criminal activity. Its burglary rate is
second worst. “We dare not pretend this does not have an effect on our
economy or our overall quality of life,” former New Mexico legislator
Dennis Kintigh wrote in the Albuquerque Journal earlier this year about
the levels of violence in the state. 3. Alaska
• Violent crimes per 100,000: 603.2
• Poverty rate: 10.1%
• Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 28.0%
• Property crimes per 100,000: 2,739.4 (24th lowest)
It may seem incongruous that Alaska, which has a low poverty rate and
high levels of high school and college graduates, would be among the
states with the worst crime rates. It has among the worst violent crime
rates in part because of its forcible rape rate: 79.7 per 100,000
residents, the nation’s highest rate. (Next is South Dakota, with a rate
of 70.2 per 100,000.) Also disturbing, a 2010 study suggests that 37%
of women who live in Alaska say they’ve “suffered some form of sexual
assault in their lives,” the Anchorage Daily News reported. Alaska is
also second in aggravated assaults. While rape and assault rates are
high, other crime levels are average. 2. Nevada
• Violent crimes per 100,000: 607.6
• Poverty rate: 16.4%
• Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 22.4%
• Property crimes per 100,000: 2,809.4 (23rd highest)
Nevada ranks among the worst in the country for its robbery rate,
motor-vehicle theft rate and aggravated assault rate. It also ranks high
in categories like burglaries and forcible rape. Much of the crime,
state officials maintain, comes from the swarms of tourists who visit
Las Vegas, Reno and other cities with casinos and related entertainment.
Factor out the casino traffic in Reno, and local crime rates are
similar to the rest of the nation, Emmanuel Barthe, a criminal justice
professor at the University of Nevada Reno, told the Reno
Gazette-Journal. Nevada also has among the lowest high school and
college graduation rates. 1. Tennessee
• Violent crimes per 100,000: 643.6
• Poverty rate: 17.9%
• Pct. of population with bachelor’s degree or higher: 24.3%
• Property crimes per 100,000: 3,371.4 (10th highest)
Tennessee has the dubious distinction of having the worst violent crime
rate in the country. The state was among the top 10 in the country for
murders and robberies and was first for aggravated assaults, with an
estimated 479.6 for every 100,000 residents. Tennessee’s 41,550 violent
crimes in 2012 were up 6.8% from 2011 but down 10% from 2007, when there
were 46,380 violent crimes. There were 388 murders in the state in
2012, up for a second straight year. To be fair, Tennessee’s violent
streak is concentrated in some of the major metropolitan areas.
Memphis’s violent crime rate was the nation’s fifth worst, while
Nashville’s was the 18th worst. Like many states with high violent
crime, poverty in Tennessee is acute, and high school and college
graduation rates are lower than most of the country.
The
Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Ashlee Owens’s license.
It said that it did not have proof of her car insurance. Ms. Owens
insisted that the DMV was wrong and that she had mailed it in. She made a
good faith effort to resolve the problem over the phone. But the DMV
kept her waiting on hold for very long periods, then hung up on her.
Over and over again.
Ms.
Owens was sick of it all and decided to head down to the local DMV
office to resolve the issue in person. But she was no longer legally
able to drive.
So she rode her horse:
It
was illegal for her to drive all the way from her home in Amelia, to
Richmond, so Ashlee had a friend drive her to Richmond with a horse
trailer...and that's when Ashlee, Sassy and her dog, Tuff, had their
protest parade.
Ashley left Sassy and Tuff, for a tough battle.
$645 dollars in fees, just to get her license back. While she was
inside, the DMV came outside. Drawing a crowd of people who said, now,
they've seen everything at the DMV. And after two hours…victory.
"I
went in. The lady that's the head of DMV came and found me and she
asked me if I was the lady with the horse outside and said ‘well come
over here'. Took me to the side and she took all my paperwork upstairs
and handled it immediately and sent me on my way," Ashlee said.
Fresh from solving the mystery of why coffee rings form,
physicists were eager to tackle life's next big question - one that has
been puzzling scientists for over 100 years - namely, how does the tea
kettle whistle?
In a basic sense, the reason why a tea kettle
whistle when the water inside it reaches boiling temperatures, is
obvious (it's the steam, duh!) But the physical source of the noise and
the specific reason for the whistling sound had been unknown - until now.
Cambridge
physicists Ross Henrywood and Anurag Agarwal made a series of
simplified kettle whistles in a rig, then tested them by forcing air
through them at various speeds and recording the sound they made. Here's
what they found about how the tea kettle whistles:
Their
results showed that, above a particular flow speed, the sound itself is
produced by small vortices – regions of swirling flow – which at
certain frequencies can produce noise.
As steam comes up the
kettle’s spout, it meets a hole at the start of the whistle, which is
much narrower than the spout itself. This contracts the flow of steam as
it enters the whistle and creates a jet of steam passing through it.
The steam jet is naturally unstable, like the jet of water from a garden
hose that starts to break into droplets after it has travelled a
certain distance. As a result, by the time it reaches the end of the
whistle, the jet of steam is no longer a pure column, but slightly
disturbed.
These instabilities cannot escape perfectly from the
whistle and as they hit the second whistle wall, they form a small
pressure pulse. This pulse causes the steam to form vortices as it exits
the whistle. These vortices produce sound waves, creating the
comforting noise that heralds a forthcoming cup of tea.
Well,
that's neat, you may say, but what's the big deal about figuring that
out? Henrywood explained that the whistling effect is actually quite
common and figuring out how the sound is made is the first step toward
getting rid of it. "The effect we have identified can actually happen in
all sorts of situations - anything where the structure containing a
flow of air is similar to that of a kettle whistle."
"Pipes inside
a building are one classic example and similar effects are seen inside
damaged vehicle exhaust systems. Once we know where the whistle is
coming from, and what’s making it happen, we can potentially get rid of
it," he added.
While Congress bickers and pat themselves on the back, they aren't doing anything about a grown public health threat.
Congress isn’t taking any meaningful steps to protect Americans from the
ever-increasing threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the
food industry, according to a new report issued on Tuesday. Every recent
legislative attempt to stem the use of antibiotics in animals has been
blocked by the farm and pharmaceutical industries — and public health
researchers warn that’s putting Americans at risk, even though the issue
could easily be prevented with additional regulation. - More
A 17-year-old girl from southeast China's Fujian Province has received a
face transplant that was grown on her chest. Xu Jianmei, a resident of a
small fishing village, was severely disfigured in a fire that occurred
when she was five years old. She lost her chin, eyelids, and a large
part of her right ear.
She was not able to receive treatment during the optimal treatment time,
as her family could not afford it. But last year, the chance to get a
new face came to her after doctors boldly proposed growing a new face on
her chest using tissue grafted from her leg. "First, we took a piece of
blood vessel fascia from her thigh and implanted it in her chest.
"Then we inserted a skin expander beneath the part of skin where the
blood vessel fascia was planted, so that the part could expand and produce enough skin for her new face,"
Jiang Chenghong, Xu's surgeon, explained. After making sure that the
tissue making up a new face can be kept alive, it can be transplanted to
the patient's face.
The last stage of the surgery was completed last Monday. Xu's new face
was successfully transplanted. Doctors believe that the wounds left by
the surgery will heal over the next several weeks. "With her new face,
she will be able to express herself in a more precise way. She will even
be able to blush when her emotions change", said Jiang," but it may
take a long time."
The same algorithm used to find tunes in music retrieval systems
has been successfully used to identify the signature whistles of
dolphins, according to research done at the National Institute for
Mathematical and Biological Synthesis […]
In Australia’s Western Desert, Aboriginal hunters use a unique
method that actually increases populations of the animals they hunt,
according to a study co-authored by Stanford Woods Institute-affiliated
researchers Rebecca and Doug Bird. Rebecca Bird […]
A man from Soddy-Daisy in Tennessee is in the hospital recovering after
spending all day trapped in the woods, calling for help after a 70 foot
fall from a tree on Tuesday. 33-year-old Jason Newman told rescue
workers he was chasing after what he says was a "mountain lion," when he
climbed out on a tree and fell. Reports say he is lucky to be alive. He
has several broken bones. His neighbor Brian Henry says rescue workers
should be praised for navigating the rough terrain to get Jason off the
ridge.
Jeff Horton says he landed about eight blows in persuading
large predator to back off; board now has a crescent-shaped bite, an
inch deep
Jeff Horton’s surfboard, with visible bite marks, is now a souvenir.
A surfer on the Hawaiian island of Kauai claims to have used boxing
skills to fend off an attacking shark that bit into his board, narrowly
missing his leg.
Jeff Horton (pictured at right) was surfing earlier this week at Pila’a Beach near Kilauea. He told the Garden Island that he saw the shark, presumably a tiger shark, swimming toward him as he sat on his board.
“It came flying straight toward me,” he said.
Upon impact, Horton rolled off of his board and onto the shark, which he briefly rode before unleashing a barrage of punches.
“I started punching as hard as I could,” he said, adding that he
landed about eight blows and caused the shark to back off with a knuckle
punch to the eye.
Horton said he used to be a boxer, and that he was just reacting instinctively.
“I was pretty scared,” he said.
There were about 10 others in the water, watching the chaotic incident, and many others on the beach, 200 yards away.
Horton managed to climb back onto his board and paddle ashore. Aside
from abrasions on his hands, he was not injured. The surfboard is left
with a crescent-shaped bite mark, an inch deep.
Horton told the Garden Island that he was greeted with a group hug on
the beach, and that a tourist gave him $50 and told him to go
celebrate.
The surfer presumably complied, and said he’ll be hanging the board on his wall as a souvenir.
Will Horton continue to paddle out on another board?
“I’ll surf the rest of my life,” he said.
Diver Chris Coates takes a hit to the head and hand from
pectoral fin as whale passes within a foot; ‘scary’ moment caught on
video off Africa
In boxing parlance, it was a right hook that landed.
Fortunately, the swinging pectoral fin didn’t knock out cameraman Chris
Coates, who got a little too close for comfort while videotaping an
approaching humpback whale and its calf in waters off the eastern coast
of Africa.
You can hear a whale talking, as if admonishing Coates for his role
as an underwater paparazzi. And you can hear Coates grunting out some
sort of message, presumably telling the whale to watch out or change
course, since it was swimming right at him. JukinVideo posted the rare showdown in this video from the professional underwater cameraman:
Coates, 38, was diving off one of his favorite spearfishing spots and
he told JukinVideo’s Mike Skogmo that he always takes a camera, saying
“you will be amazed at some of the crazy stuff we see out there. This,
however, ranks with some of the craziest I have ever seen.”
Coates had been seeing whales all day, so seeing the whale in the distance was not surprising to him.
“But I must admit, I got quite a shock when it swam right up at me,”
he told Skogmo. “At one stage it was only one foot away, and even though
I know that they generally don’t hurt people, it’s so big and strong,
it is still scary.”
So where did the whale hit Coates?
“The whale hit me on the head and hand,” he said. “I could feel its
barnacles scraping over my forehead. The slap with the fin was quite
hard, but I don’t think it was trying to hurt me or it would have been
way harder. It also must have hit the camera because it hit my hand that
was holding the camera.”
On our card, we’re calling it a technical knockout.
A bull escaped from a truck and ran wild in the streets of a busy Romanian town on Wednesday.
The 300 kg bull had escaped from a farm near the town of Braila .
Surveillance cameras caught the bull headbutting a traffic policeman,
who was later transported to a hospital with non-life threatening
injuries
Finally, the bull was caught on a narrow street and tranquilized, before
being taken back to the farm where it came from. It’s still unclear how
the animal managed to escape.
She was not able to receive treatment during the optimal treatment time,
as her family could not afford it. But last year, the chance to get a
new face came to her after doctors boldly proposed growing a new face on
her chest using tissue grafted from her leg. "First, we took a piece of
blood vessel fascia from her thigh and implanted it in her chest. 
"It had to be at least half a mile, maybe even further," he said. Henry
says it was at around 8:30pm on Tuesday night when he heard Newman,
better known as 'Cuz,' yelling for help. It took him a minute to figure
out the screams were coming from the ridge behind his house. "When you
can only see 30 to 50 feet in front of you, it's hard to pick a
direction on which way to go because you're trying to follow this man's
voice, who ended up being way up there," says Henry.
It took them about two hours to get him down off the mountain. As far as Newman chasing a mountain lion, Henry says, "To me, that sound backwards. Usually,
you see a mountain lion, you'd think the mountain lion would chase you
up the tree." He is just glad Jason survived the fall. "I'm glad he's
okay. And if his story's true, I don't recommend chasing a mountain
lion," says Henry. Newman's cousin says he was in surgery on Wednesday
and is expected to recover. Newman never said why he was chasing the
animal. But he was most likely chasing a bobcat, not a mountain lion.
