HeiressofBickworth
HeiressofBickworth's JournalI rolled that dice once too often
Some of you may remember but others may not. Two years ago, I was hospitalized for complications due to massive kidney stones, six times over three months. One of those times was the H1N1 flu. The complications from that alone damned near killed me. High fever, vomiting, sure. But then it went into congestive heart failure (I had no such thing before or since) and renal failure. Thanks to lots of good doctoring/nursing and drugs, I survived. I got a flu shot before I left the hospital and one a year since. I just got one a week ago. I was somewhat worried last year when they said that the predominant flu strain wasn't covered by the flu shot. I can't afford to take the chance of catching the flu again -- I might not survive another encounter.
It's always about the money
Regulations/standards = "But to big business, these are little more than tiresome barriers to increasing profits."
The question of how we protect ourselves from sub-standard goods is answered by this: we don't. As long as these trade agreements prevent the labeling of country-of-origin, we go shopping and we take our chances. According to free-traders and libertarians, if enough people sicken and die from a product, the "market" will take care of everything. They do not believe in preventive measures; they only believe in the magic of the "market". Will they sing the same tune when THEIR children get sick from eating filth-fed fish from Thailand or Mexico or some similar occurrence?
I think Smarmy got it right
We HAVE to be at war. It's an economic thing. War preparation got us out of the Great Depression, then we got into WW II. Still basing our economy on the MIC, we got Korea, and after that, many others. Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest -- oh, perhaps it's Syria but we're not altogether in that one -- yet. I've read that if we stopped military armaments and supplies, the bottom would drop out of our economy as we don't have the manufacturing base to fill in the gap. That base has already been sent to Mexico, China, Bangladesh, etc. There is so much profit in raping countries for their natural resources and paying pennies a day for workers, the big corporations and the 1% will never give up raking in the dough. As I've said many a time before: it's always about the money. We can dress it up in lots of camouflage (red-scare, stopping creeping communism, pay-back for 9/11, "helping" regimes stay in power when their citizens want to change, unwanted regime changes, etc.) but it all boils down to money interests. The money interests don't give a flying fart in space about whatever excuse they've dreamed up -- they are always and forever looking to increase their profits.
Wish it were otherwise.
Where is Bickworth?
I wondered about that also. In doing genealogy research, I found that my 14th great grandmother was "Heiress of Bickworth". No name of her own just that John Bird married the Heiress of Bickworth. I first researched "Bickworth" as a place name but found nothing. I then researched "Bickworth" as a family name, but again found nothing other than references to the Heiress. There are lots of Bickfords and Bickwiths, but nothing that suggests either as an alternate spelling of "Bickworth". There's not much on Bickworth I can use to tie in my ancestor.
So, here I am 14th great granddaughter of someone with a description but no actual name. I'm descended from her daughter. Any fortune the Heiress may have had would have been assumed by her husband (women didn't have separate property back then) and probably dissipated over the years, and in any case, wouldn't have come to her daughter anyway.
I'm retired on Social Security so, yes, I need to save up my money for a big trip like I've described. I have no husband to either help or hinder me. Wonder what Granny would have thought of this.
Jeremy Scahill wrote a book about JSOC
which was turned into a documentary film. I saw the film and Scahill was the speaker after the film. This post ties into all of the problems uncovered by Scahill about the lack of accountability of US war crimes.
Scahill's book published by Nation Books, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, released on April 23, 2013. The main premise of the book is Obama's continuation of Bush's doctrine that "the world is a battlefield" and relying on missiles and drone strikes, JSOC to carry the bulk of the covert operations and targeted killings of suspected terrorists. Scahill expands on this theme by covering topics such as the assassination of U.S. citizens, namely Anwar Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, and the lack of accountability of U.S. special forces, such as the Gardez massacre, where U.S. special forces killed two males, including the pro-U.S. local police commander, as well as three females, two of whom were pregnant. An Afghan investigation found signs of evidence tampering, such as bullets being removed from the wall where the women were shot. Several family members of the victims alleged that the special forces subsequently used their knives to dig the bullets out of the bodies and cleaned the resultant wounds to purge any evidence of the U.S. raid.
The book was later made into a 2013 American documentary directed by Richard Rowley based on a screenplay written by Scahill and David Riker. Scahill both produces and narrates the film. Dirty Wars premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2013. It was released in four theaters on June 7, 2013. The film was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, ultimately losing to 20 Feet from Stardom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Scahill
Another one of their plans to stop Medicare
I'm sure they would find a large percentage of people on Medicare who also take drugs (medicine). Some take drugs for pain and chronic pain, others take drugs for a variety of other health issues, any one of which can produce false-positives for illicit drugs. But you can see where this is going: a secret list of drugs and imperfect test results means NO MEDICARE FOR YOU! This is just a variation of the "pre-existing condition" game of the insurance companies to avoid paying benefits. It worked so well for them, the Pubs are looking at this as a way of chipping away at Medicare.
On the one hand, I'm somewhat impressed at the time, energy and inventiveness Republicans use to cheat. Voting rights, health care, election results, bribery, etc. On the other hand, it dismays me that the energy it takes to be such assholes isn't spent on actually doing something for the benefit of the country as a whole and not just their 1% supporters.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... (married, one small kid)
I used a fairly large pressure cooker to make my own spaghetti meat sauce which I put up in pint jars. I could put 10 jars (2 layers of 5) in the pressure cooker. Then there was the year that an aunt, cousin and I picked 157 ears of corn, shucked them, cut the kernels off, used the pressure cooker to process and then split the resulting jars among us. It was a VERY long day.
There was something very satisfying about looking at the open shelves in the kitchen and seeing jars and jars of spag sauce, corn, green beans, tomato sauce, applesauce, apple juice, peaches, pears, plums, and various jams. Only the meat and veggies needed the pressure cooker.
But that was in a prior life. No need to go to that trouble any longer. Daughter and son-in-law live with me, but they fix their own meals. I don't eat spag any more anyway and frozen corn is just fine. I sold the cooker in a yard sale many years ago.
BUT, if you are interested in buying in bulk, making your own and don't want to use the freezer, a pressure cooker is just the thing.
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Snohomish County, WA
Member since: Wed May 18, 2011, 02:12 AM
Number of posts: 2,682
