MAIL BAG and RANDOM THOUGHTS

I ran across the following article at WRH and wanted to share it here...similar thoughts have been on my mind lately. How does ideology serve our purpose? Does it just offer hope? What is hope - aggrandized wishing? How can this ideology be shaped into a conviction which effects necessary change? If knowledge is power, does sharing information just incubate new ideologies which never hatch into effective action? Sometimes it feels like preaching to the "already converted", as someone I know would say. And some days it feels futile...

Things fall apart…….
"You can’t eat political ideology. Nor can you win a war with it. You fight powers and principalities that have no use for you or your ideology. What are you going to do when you can’t feed your family? When you’ve been downsized with what remains of our economy?

When you’ve offended Leviathan and his jackbooted thugs appear in your bedroom at three am? Are you going to hurl Ron Paul quotes at them? Are you going to debate the 4th amendment with Leviathan while it has a gun pointed at your head? I think not……

At the end of his essay, the author quotes Yeats's poem "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". Joni Mitchell did an admirable job adapting Yeats words to music, in 1991 on her Night Ride Home album. Visionary even for such recent times. Give it a listen....

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Interesting article sent in - thanks to John from Manitoba.
He writes "The sad story of suppressed research of the detrimental effect of GMO food on consumers, animal or human."

Supermarket "Health Food" Kills Baby Rats in Three Weeks
"Biologist Arpad Pusztai had more than 300 articles and 12 books to his credit and was the world’s top expert in his field. But when he accidentally discovered that genetically modified (GM) foods are dangerous, he became the biotech industry’s bad-boy poster child, setting an example for other scientists thinking about blowing the whistle.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Pusztai was awarded a $3 million grant by the UK government to design the system for safety testing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The results of Pusztai’s work were supposed to become the required testing protocols for all of Europe.

But when he fed supposedly harmless GM potatoes to rats, things didn’t go as planned. Within just 10 days, the animals developed potentially pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller brains, livers, and testicles, partially atrophied livers, and damaged immune systems. Moreover, the cause was almost certainly side effects from the process of genetic engineering itself. In other words, the GM foods on the market, which are created from the same process, might have similar affects on humans.

With permission from his director, Pusztai was interviewed on TV and expressed his concerns about GM foods. He became a hero at his institute -- for two days.

Then came the phone calls from the pro-GMO prime minister’s office to the institute’s director. The next morning, Pusztai was fired. He was silenced with threats of a lawsuit, his team was dismantled, and the protocols never implemented. His Institute, the biotech industry, and the UK government, together launched a smear campaign to destroy Pusztai’s reputation."

Also from John...
Percy Schmeiser still fights to expose the villainous agenda behind Monsanto
Percy Schmeiser vs Monsanto:
The Story of a Canadian Farmer’s Fight to Defend the Rights of Farmers and the Future of Seeds
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Oh boy, they are going to try and keep marketing this any old way possible - using obtuse headlines so there is less chance or interest to continue reading down to the disclaimer! Many people just headline surf these days and take that info to the office for discussion as if it were a topic set in stone.

thanks to Corinne for the following...
Flu shot may prevent heart attack
"Although the study points to a link between the flu shot reducing heart attacks, Siriwardena cautioned the findings do not prove cause and effect.

"Our study and others suggest that there might be benefit in people who haven't already got heart disease, but who are just at high risk of heart disease," he said. "So there's still a debate about whether this is a true link or not," said Siriwardena, noting that the only way to confirm the results would be with randomized controlled trials, which would compare patients who get a flu shot against those given a dummy shot."

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Corinne further shares...
Celiac disease used to be a child's disease, but now old folks are increasingly developing it as well.

Maybe that's because it's always children and seniors who get first dibs on every new vaccine that comes out? Which makes the next headline rather puzzling:

Canada bans pro-euthanasia ad
Here's the organization that produced the ad and here's Canada's law on suicide. Suicide is legal - and painless, of course (no doubt because there's nobody alive to charge), but assisted suicide is not. Note that there was a Bill before Parliament on this very topic that presumably got deep-sixed along with other Bills because of Harper's prorogue.

Questions:
1. Are the Xians behind the ban on the TV ad? They always said that if free choice was allowed on abortion, the next thing would be euthanasia.

2. Is the ban actually a covert bid to increase public demand for euthanasia so that doctors who perform it sneakily now - without asking the patients or the family's permission, but by quietly reducing the oxygen flow or upping the night time morphine dose - can stop feeling guilty? After all, it's in a good cause - it frees up hospital beds, cuts health care costs and serves, in the words of Scrooge, to "decrease the surface population".

3. How can the ad be accused of promoting something illegal when it's only lobbying for legality and we have laws that supposedly guarantee freedom of speech? Wasn't the abortion debate in the same category? And what about the old debate on contraception, about which the Church protested and de-pop advocate Margaret Sanger extolled the population control advantages?

4. We finally got government to recognize abortion as a moral issue rather than a legal one; shouldn't we do the same for end of life decisions as well? Of course, this means that both abortion and suicide will be enforceable one of these days (talk about the good, the bad and the purely ugly).

So guard your medicine cabinet because I'm going to ransack it and save up a cache of downers against the day when representatives of the Ministry of Grim Reaping arrive to help me off the planet. Over my dead body, thank you very much.

Hold your horses there girl, eventually you will have access to every prescription going! There appears to be some evidence an argument to support euthanasia is looming...the media has started its subtle campaign vilifying the elderly, who are really victims of the medical community aided and abetted by BIG Pharma!
Drugged-out seniors a prescription for disaster (photo pinched from Toronto Star)

"They are the drugged-out generation, and they're not who you think they are. They're 80. And 85 and 90 and 95 – over medicated seniors clogging emergency departments, blocking hospital beds and sicker than they have any reason to be.
The Number 1 drug users in North America, outside of patients in long-term care facilities, are women over the age of 65.
Twelve per cent are on 10 or more meds, sometimes up to 20 or more drugs; 23 per cent take at least five drugs.

In long-term care, seniors are on six to eight medications, on average. Fifteen per cent of seniors admitted to hospital are suffering drug side effects. It's not uncommon to find seniors dizzy and dotty from being prescribed so many drugs."

And since you can't take it with you, the government will get you drugged up enough to justify taking your nest egg...the media seems intent on planting this idea also. This isn't the first financial article I have seen which eludes to the concept that if you are over 55 then you have no ability to manage your finances.
Does financial decision making decline with age?
Agarwal’s proposed solution, nonetheless? Set up a government licensing system to ensure older adults have a sound level of financial understanding before they’re permitted to invest.

Pension gap gets less air than long guns

John from Manitoba sent this thought in, originally from Rumor Mail...
This Pretty Much Sums It Up…Jail vs. Nursing Home
Let's put the seniors in jail, and the criminals in a nursing home.

This way the seniors would have access to showers, hobbies, and walks, they'd receive unlimited free prescriptions, dental and medical treatment , wheel chairs etc. and they'd receive money instead of paying it out.

They would have constant video monitoring, so they could be helped instantly, if they fell, or needed assistance. Bedding would be washed twice a week, and all clothing would be ironed and returned to them.

A guard would check on them every 20 minutes, and bring their meals and snacks to their cell. They would have family visits in a suite built for that purpose.

They would have access to a library, weight room, spiritual counseling, pool, and education. Simple clothing, shoes, slippers, P.J.'s and legal aid would be free, on request. Private, secure rooms for all, with an exercise outdoor yard, with gardens.

Each senior could have a P.C., a TV, radio, and daily phone calls. There would be a board of directors, to hear complaints, and the guards would have a code of conduct, that would be strictly adhered to.

The "criminals" would get cold food, be left all alone, and unsupervised. Lights off at 8 pm, and showers once a week. Live in a tiny room, and pay $5000.00 per month and have no hope of ever getting out.

Perhaps with the prisoner exchange program there will be some additional room for 143 BIG Pharma execs...those are the individuals that should be incarcerated in a nursing home.

143 prisoners in Ontario mistakenly allowed to walk free
At least 143 prisoners were mistakenly allowed to walk out of Ontario correctional facilities over the last eight years — and the provincial government will not say who these prisoners were, how many of them were dangerous, and whether any of them are still at large.