Great speech by Sarah Palin
Yes the press was nasty to Sarah Palin. Yes her legal defense costs were skyrocketing. But you gotta finish things you agree to do. She took an oath to do a job for a certain period of time.
Seems to me that being out of political office means that she is no longer honing the skills she has. I wish she had not left office and stuck it out.
The skills you have — and she has innate skills to speak clearly and articulate values she believes — those skills get better with work, work and more work.
All the great painters spent years and years of work, work and more work. And for women to achieve in any area not traditionally ok it takes work, work and more work.
Let liberty ring!Let the freedom bell ring today, July 4th. Let people keep more money in their pocket book. Let them make their own decisions how to spend iit.
Tell your representative NO to taxing carbon dioxide. NO to spending trillions on a new health plan. NO to amnesty for millions just because they got in here somehow. Let in those who have skills and who follow the rules.
Your personal credit rating matters. So does credit rating of each state. California ties with Louisiana for the LOWEST credit rating of any state. Individual bad credit means you are not living within your means. State bad credit is no dfferent. California has got to live within its means. How? Privatiize the prisons. Encourage more charter schools and more diversity in education.
California has 1/2 of all cities in the U.S. that have unemployment in excess of 15%. The corporate tax rate is eighth in the nation. The state and local tax is 6th highest in the nation.
That’s why you hear about a “bad business climate” in California.
Weight Determines The Future Cognitive Development Of Children Born Very Premature
Article Date: 03 Jul 2009
What the following suggests is that EARLY and CONTINUAL stimulation of the central nervous system THROUGH THE FULL DEVELOPMENTAL PERIOD UP TO AGE 16 will maximize cognitive IQ development. So, hold that preme! Sing to that preme! Rock that preme! Weight not length of time in the tummy makes the dfference between babies. Wow! See below:
Researchers of the Department of Neuroscience and Health Sciences of the University of AlmerÃa and Hospital Torrecárdenas are carrying out an assessment of the physical neuropsychological characteristics of children born before 32 weeks’ gestation or whose weight is lower than 1500 grams -very premature-. The main aim of this project, coordinated by M Dolores Roldán Tapia, from the UAL, is to accurately define the origin of brain damage, so as to stimulate the affected area early thus causing the adequate cognitive and motric development of the individual.
The commonest differences between premature babies and those born after a nine-month pregnancy are mainly related to visoperceptive skills, memory and movement which eventually translate into learning and spatial orientation difficulties. That is why these difficulties that these children have in their cognitive performance and the development of perceptual and executive functions are being studied.
A population sample of 35 very premature children is being taken for this project, together with the same number of healthy children, all of them born between 2000 and 2001, with their parents’ authorisation. Special attention has been paid to the fact that both the children and their parents have similar educational and social levels, as the stimulation they get in the early stages of their lives has a decisive influence in their later development.
The results obtained so far reveal that the decisive variable for the existence of a reversible or irreversible brain damage is the baby’s weight at birth, rather than the time of gestation. According to experts, an early stimulation of the individual’s central nerve system, from birth until his complete cognitive development at 16 years of age, in foetuses whose weight at birth is over 1,500 gr. or who are very premature, will eventually get ideal cognitive levels. However, this stimulation must be continued throughout the whole development of babies whose weight is lower than 1,500 gr. so that they can get a proper brain maturity.
As a complement to this project, Alemeria-based researchers are developing an epidemiological study so as to set the percentage of very premature children who have brain damage against the total number of children born under the same characteristics between 2000 and 2001. This study is funded by Fundación para la Investigación Biosanitaria de AndalucÃa Oriental-Alejandro Otero (FIBAO, Alejandro Otero foundation for bio-health research in eastern Andalusia). Moreover, in collaboration with the University of Granada, experts are developing another line of research whose aim is to determine the existing relationship between visoperceptive skill deficit and the level of reasoning in very premature children.
In the near future, the team of researchers of the University of Almeria will be expanding their research and including new variables that may make a determining brain difference in very premature babies, like for example, the brain difference between babies born in natural multiple births and those with artificial techniques, or the interaction between pre-maturity and bad nutrition.
Sometimes when I drive down highway #1 from Aptos to Monterey I see a driver who seems to be completely asleep at the wheel. The way the head is faced or the body bobbing up and down to music I wonder how the car gets down the freeway. Obviously the car is on automatic control.
Seems like that is how our U.S. Congress acts. What ever the Democratic Party tells them to do they do. Something else — not them — is in control. They regularly sign things they have not read.
And these are the people are supposed to be control of the purse. Read the following:
Check the following article from Overlawyered:
On the House floor
By: David Freddoso
Commentary Staff Writer
06/26/09
By all appearances, the House is about to vote on a very long bill of which it has no completed official copy.
Texas Republican Reps. Joe Barton and Louie Gohmert have just asked the chair whether there exists a complete, updated copy of the Waxman-Markey carbon-cap bill.
“If a bill for which there is no copy were to actually pass this body,” Barton asked, “could the bill without a copy be sent to the Senate for its consideration?”
Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers’ amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk’s desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.
But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: “Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)…” How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?
Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can’t even wait until members of Congress know what they’re voting on.
buy health insurance like cereal
Let’s see how sensible this line of thinking is: Add 15 to 40 million to health care rolls. Yet Obama promises we are going to cut health care costs. Does that add up?
And the newly minted public program will abide by the same rules as the private programs.
Do you think a publicly run health organization will be any better run than 1) the post office. That’s why we all love Fed EX and don’t care about all the junk mail we get through our mail box.
Health care should be just like buying cereal: you can choose the no sugar or additives, shredded wheat, or buy the expensive little containers with 12 varieties of sugar. You choose and you pay with your dollars.
Likewise, if you are healthy and age 25 you should be able to shop for a policy that gives you no frills and only helps if you end up in a terrible accident. Choice is a good thing for people.
This is from a blog called Heritage:
“According to the May 5th New York Times, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has proposed a health care reform “compromise†on the creation of a new public plan to compete with private health insurance. No doubt Schumer is trying to convince moderates that they should ignore Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) frank admissions that a public plan is just the first step of an unprincipled strategy to achieve government run health care.
Schumer’s compromise would require that the public plan and private plans would abide by the same rules and regulations. But even the NYT identifies some huge holes in his claim. Would the public plan be subject to state premium taxes, like private health plans, or state insurance laws, or solvency requirements with the private plans in states with which it is competing? Could the public plan be allowed to become insolvent? Or will it become another candidate for an eternal Congressional bail out? We have even more questions than the NYT does:
Will public plan officials be subject to the same state and federal tort laws?
How about the same accounting standards as private companies?
Could they be sued for breach of contracts?
Will they have to negotiate rates and benefits like private plans, set up provider networks, and set prices in the market, just like private plans do today? Market prices? (No special advantages, remember)
Will the officers of the public plan be able to reject doctors or medical professionals who do not meet quality standards like private plans can do today, or will they be forced to take any willing provider?
Will the benefit setting of the public plan be transparent and benefits packages be completely transparent, defining clearly what is and is not covered? No confusion on these points, like that which afflicts Medicare beneficiaries today.
Would the public plan officers have budgets to market their products, just like private plans? Would those marketing costs be subsidized by the taxpayer or paid out of public plan premiums? ( Otherwise, looks like those awful administrative costs would be incurred by the taxpayers).
Of course, Senator Schumer and his colleagues invite us to ponder a problem in elemental logic. If the public plan and the private plans are really going to abide by the exact same rules, what is the point of a public plan in the first place?
Of course, the public health plan would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Congress Inc. That means that it would be a political institution, just like every other government sponsored enterprise, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It will be ground zero for special interest lobbying – by doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and insurers, as well as every special interest to the left of Pearl Jam, on a scale unprecedented in health care history.
If Fannie and Freddie, and AIG and the Automakers, and the Big Banks and whatever else is in line for a big bailout at taxpayer expense is “too big to failâ€, guess what would be the congressional response to a shortfall in the income of a newly minted, congressionally created public health plan with millions of enrollees? There’s no guess work here. Unless you believe in Unicorns.”
salmon fishingTaking too much water from the delta caused the crash in numbers of salmon. So says reports posted on Water 4 Fish. Go there to put your two cents in — write a letter and more as you choose. Working together we CAN bring back the salmon to our streams and rivers.
Autism Vox has thoughts concerning the most helpful statements that have stuck with her regarding her autistic son now almost an adult. One was, it is not the hand you are dealt but what you do with it. So true.
I would add, keep looking for new ways to communicate. Get a dog the child can train and interact with. Find a trainer who knows how to work with autistic children. Try water. Surfing or simply listening to the waves can sooth and open communication. Music and singing are other avenues.
In my view, Applied Behavioral Analysis has serious limitations. Don’t trust the verbage you hear about ABA being the only scientifically based therapy. Any good therapist uses art and science. And serendipity. written by Cameron Jackson cameronjacks@gmail.com
First we attract the sea lions to the dam. They eat the salmon. Then they trap the sea lions to move them elsewhere. But then some think that too slow so they shoot the seals. Ah,the inhumanity of man.
The Lede – New York Times Blog
May 5, 2008,
Trapped Sea Lions Shot Dead in Oregon
By Anahad O’Connor
UPDATE: After close examination of the dead sea lions later in the week, officials changed their assessment of how they died, saying that something besides bullets had caused what were initially thought to be gunshot wounds. More in this post.
For years, the Bonneville Dam on the Oregon-Washington border has made life all too easy for the sea lions that congregate in the Columbia River just outside of Portland. Fish ladders in the dam create a bottleneck for salmon swimming upriver to spawning grounds, which allows sea lions to easily swoop in and dine on endangered salmon.
But now it’s the sea lions that have become the easy prey.
In an attempt to keep the sea lions from gorging on the salmon, state and federal authorities set up traps to humanely catch and remove them from the dam, to be shipped to zoos and wildlife parks. But over the weekend someone shot and killed six of the sea lions as they lay in the traps. According to the Associated Press, the animals were apparently shot in the middle of the night; their bodies were found around noon on Sunday.
Pinpointing the perpetrator will not be an easy task, because the Columbia River sea lions have been at the center of a long battle, and have a number of enemies. American Indian tribes in the area and others who fish the river for salmon have been pushing for months to get the federal government to set up regulations protecting the salmon and allowing lethal force to be used against the sea lions (themselves a protected species).
Even without the pesky sea lions, fishermen on the west coast have been having a tough year, so to protect the fish passing the dam, the National Marine Fisheries Service approved plans to kill or capture as many as 85 sea lions a year for five years. But the program was put on hold after the Humane Society of the United States challenged it in court. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled a hearing on the matter this week.
The Humane Society doesn’t like the killing part, but has gone along with capture. The sea lions trapped so far have been sent to Sea World parks in San Diego and San Antonio, a policy that some other animal-rights advocates are none too happy with, especially after one of the seven captured last month died in custody during a medical inspection. So the motive for the shooting might have been to sabotage the trapping program, rather than to take revenge for salmon-snatching: It’s not clear whether the trapping will continue now that the cages have become bulls’-eyes.
In any case, some commentators are noting that the Columbia River sea lions have a serious public relations problem and could stand to benefit from an image change.
Right now it looks like the sea lions can use all the help they can get.
For more info on this story, google sea lion blog and goto Lede, the blog for the New York Times.
Here is the web site: The Lede
Weight Determines The Future Cognitive Development Of Children Born Very Premature
