The Disappearing Male

This is a documentary that has aired in Canada. Everyone who has had children or wants them or knows them should watch this documentary. I wish there were more documentaries like this available to the general public.

I know I haven’t been posting much lately. Life has definitely been keeping me busy. More explanation later…

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The Cat’s Out of the Bag…

This morning Camden and I were enjoying our breakfast of grits when she came out of left field with the following inquisition at nearly 4 years of age:

Cami: “Santa isn’t real is he? He’s just pretend, right?”

Me: “What do you think?”

Cami: “I think he is pretend.”

Me: Knowing good and well that my husband would not be happy with my honesty I answered her truthfully anyway. “You’re right. Santa is just pretend. Lots of people like to pretend that Santa exists because it makes them feel good and they have fun pretending he is real.” And just because I was curious I asked, “What makes you think Santa is pretend?”

Cami: “Because Santa is just pretend. He is not real. Santa is pretend like Jesus is pretend.”

Yikes. I quickly followed up that conversation explaining that Jesus was definitely a real person who lived long ago and that some people believe he was just a regular man that taught people about God and that others believe that he was the son of God and that he came to Earth to help us get to Heaven and show us how to live our lives by his example. I shared with her my own testimony of my faith in Jesus Christ. I am very thankful that I chose to tell her the truth about Santa because how will she ever learn to trust me if I’m not willing to answer her in truthfulness? Besides, it gave me an opportunity to share my own testimony and beliefs with her about Jesus that I may not have had the chance to do otherwise.

So all of you family members with young children be prepared for her to spill the beans. I’m not exactly sure how to keep her mum about the whole “pretend Santa” thing except for reiterating to her that lots of people like to pretend that Santa is real because it makes them happy. I only hope her nearly 9 year old step-sister realizes that Santa is not real. LOL.

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The Economy and The Bailout

The American Economy is in trouble and has been for a long time. It seems no one in power wants to actually solve the sources of the problem and instead want to keep heading off the inevitable disaster that needs to occur in order for balance and sanity to prevail. The whole stimulus package thing was just silly in my eyes and all though I enjoyed receiving the money I thought it was an awful idea. Obviously it didn’t do a whole lot of good which anyone with half a brain could have told you. I mean, think of the cost of the stamps alone that were spent on that stimulus package. We got multiple statements before we ever got our money and so did the millions of other Americans. This whole bailout thing is an equally disturbing patch on an ever growing hole.

Those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile know that I supported Ron Paul for President (and still do). I got the following statement from him today in my email. Sometimes I think he is the only one with any common sense anymore. For the record I think this Bailout thing is a BAD idea.

This is my favorite quote from Ron Paul’s statement:

“The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.”

Ron Paul’s Answer to the President:

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

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Secret Vaccines in the Military?

It sounds completely and utterly hoaky right? Watch this video that aired on the news and see what you think. I tried to find more information on David Faye online so that I could do a bit of background research into the situation but was unable to find anything other than links to this video. If anyone has any information please let me know.

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12 Babies Die During a Vaccine Trial

Twelve babies have died during a vaccine trial over the last year. So why haven’t you heard about it? Well, for one it is because the trial has been conducted in Argentina on impoverished individuals who have no resources to raise their voices. What’s more telling? The first one to break the story in the United States was a stock market investment website. The story wasn’t being told to raise red flags or warn the public, to investigate the morality or integrity of the company’s practices, or to spark further research. The article was newsworthy only from a financial perspective. To protect those who have an interest in whether or not to purchase stock from GlaxoSmithKline. Anyone who doesn’t believe that the driving force and bottom line of vaccination programs is about money is sorely mistaken.

Argentina was one of the countries chosen by GlaxoSmithKline to test the effectiveness of a vaccine against pneumonia. They use children from poor families who are “pressured and forced into signing consent forms.” Juan Carlos Palomares, who works for the Argentine Federation of Health Professionals, also known as Fesprosa, said that “in most cases these are underprivileged individuals, many of them unable to read or write, who are pressured into including their children” in these trials. Does anyone else catch the irony in that? How are those who are unable to read and write able to give appropriate consent when they cannot even read the consent forms they are signing? Why is this acceptable in another country but not in our own. This is after all an American business so why would we tolerate this type of behavior? Why do we turn our heads and shrug? Perhaps as long as the unethical business practices are not in our own back yard they are acceptable. Since GlaxoSmithKline can’t perform these types of studies in the United States or Europe, “they come to do it in third-world countries.” I find this completely wrong and I’m not afraid to say so. If we, as Americans, want and feel that a vaccine program is so life saving and so necessary to appropriate health care (which is the general consensus) then we need to be willing to conduct the studies on our own children and reform the laws to do so. But who will push forward their children and raise their hands for a vaccine trial. Would those working for GlaxoSmithKline? Would you? What does your answer tell you?

Many of the parents in the Argentina program have tried to pull out of the program only to find that those conducting the trial “force them to continue under the threat that if they leave they won’t receive any other vaccine,” said Julieta Ovejero, great aunt of one of the six babies who died in Santiago del Estero. Not only are the consent forms often illegitimate but the families are then threatened if they change their minds about participating. Yet, there is no outrage. There is no one sitting on the Dave Letterman show telling this story. There are no capitol marches. These are silent victims because they have no way to tell their stories and would anyone care anyway even if they did? This is the untold story of our vaccine program and this is just one vaccine trial in only one country. There are many, many more.

In the end, it is only twelve babies, right? Isn’t that within the realm of acceptable deaths? What is the number of acceptable deaths that we will tolerate? Despite the deaths that have all ready occurred the program continues on and GlaxoSmithKline accepts the number of deaths as a necessary part of the numbers game. They count on you accepting that as well. In fact, they spend quite a bit of research trying to determine exactly what the number of deaths the American public will accept in order to reach a 90% acceptance rate. Keep in mind that we only have the reported number of deaths. How many side effects have occurred or are yet to occur? Will these trials be an accurate reflection of the outcome we’ll see when this vaccine makes it to the general public? Or will there be yet another vaccine fallout like the one being experienced with the Gardasil vaccine which is quickly becoming a ticking time bomb?

Take a look at the most recent Gardasil statistics, a HPV vaccine recommended for young girls and women. The statistics were gained from HERE.

The Judicial Watch Special Report, Examining the FDA’s HPV Vaccine Records, dated June 30, 2008, reviews records obtained from the FDA under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Those records paint an even grimmer version of this dangerous vaccine, whose side effects now include:

· A total of 8,864 reported adverse events

· A minimum of 18, but possibly 20 reported deaths. 11 occurred less than one week after vaccination, and 7 within two days

· 45 cases of miscarriages and spontaneous abortions

· 78 outbreaks of genital warts, plus additional cases of facial warts and warts on hands and feet, even in patients who had tested negative for HPV and genital warts prior to vaccination

Additionally, Merck correspondence included in these records state that Gardasil has NOT been evaluated for its potential to cause carcinogenity or genotoxicity, AND, they were permitted to use an aluminum-containing placebo instead of a standard saline placebo.

Since Gardasil contains 225 mcg of aluminum, using an aluminum-containing placebo may paint an entirely inaccurate picture of its level of safety.

For reference, here is the original article on the pneumonia vaccine trial being conducted in Argentina that first appeared on TradingMarkets.com

Buenos Aires, Jul 10, 2008 (EFE via COMTEX) — HPFS | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — At least 12 babies who were part of a clinical study to test the effectiveness of a vaccine against pneumonia have died over the past year in Argentina, the local press reported Thursday.

The study was sponsored by global drug giant GlaxoSmithKline and uses children from poor families, who are “pressured and forced into signing consent forms,” the Argentine Federation of Health Professionals, or Fesprosa, said.

“This occurs without any type of state control” and “does not comply with minimum ethical requirements,” Fesprosa said.

The vaccine trial is still ongoing despite the denunciations, and those in charge of the study were cited by the Critica newspaper as saying that the procedures are being carried out in a lawful manner.

Colombian and Panama were also chosen by GSK as staging grounds for trials of the vaccine against the pneumococcal bacteria.

Since 2007, 15,000 children under the age of one from the Argentine provinces of Mendoza, San Juan and Santiago del Estero have been included in the research protocol, a statement of what the study is trying to achieve.

“Only 12 have died throughout the country, which is a very low figure if we compare it with the deaths produced by respiratory illnesses caused by the pneumococcal bacteria,” pediatrician Enrique Smith, one of the lead investigators, said.

In Santiago del Estero, one of the country’s poorest provinces, the trials were authorized when Enrique’s brother, Juan Carlos Smith, was provincial health minister.

According to pediatrician Ana Maria Marchese, who works at the children’s hospital in the provincial capital where the studies are being conducted, “because they can’t experiment in Europe or the United States, they come to do it in third-world countries.”

“A lot of people want to leave the protocol but aren’t allowed; they force them to continue under the threat that if they leave they won’t receive any other vaccine,” said Julieta Ovejero, great aunt of one of the six babies who died in Santiago del Estero.

Fesprosa’s Juan Carlos Palomares said that “in most cases these are underprivileged individuals, many of them unable to read or write, who are pressured into including their children” in the trials.

According to Fesprosa, “the laboratory pays $8,000 for each child included in the study, but none (of that money) remains in the province that lends the public facilities and the health personnel for the private research.” EFE

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