Another antic by the EPA concerns lead. In an unbelievable bit of hysteria about lead pollution, the EPA has just blocked pretty much all installations/repairs of fire hydrants? Why? Because they have a small amount of lead in their composition.
Now this would be almost, almost, just barely, defensible if there was real concern of significant amounts of lead going into the primary water mains but that’s not the issue.
They’re worried that… someone might turn on the hydrant and drink from it. Ok, in a worst case scenario there might be, might be, an annoying amount (to the EPA) of lead in the water that’s been sitting in the hydrant, namely the first couple of gallons. But if anyone’s drinking from a hydrant it’s been running for hours and thousands of gallons have washed through it.
So the fire departments have to sit back and seal up any broken units, and have to waste precious minutes and resources tapping into the next one down the block. People’s lives and properties at stake, for no good reason whatsoever.
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Firenze Sage, Esq. Â Used to be that dogs contributed the only pollution near hydrants.
The real Free Syrian Army is a mirage. The Middle East as it exists neatly laid out in the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post has little relationship to the messy realities of a region with few clean borders, only messy collections of tribes, families, ethnic groups and quarreling variations of Islam clinging to a few miles of dusty land, a handful of olive groves, some oil wells and their children and machine guns.
Out in Syria, the mirage of the Free Syrian Army, its camps full of soldiers defecting from the military to form a secular liberation force, has dissipated, vanishing into the sand. And all it took to knock down the Potemkin villages of the FSA that never existed was an attack on the only part of the Free Syrian Army that did exist—its warehouses full of American and European military aid.
The Free Syrian Army never existed. What did exist was neither free, nor Syrian, nor an army. The FSA was sold as an army of Syrian soldiers who had banded together under defecting officers to fight against the Assad government. The real FSA mostly consisted of Islamic brigades…”
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Firenze Sage, Esq. Â Poor Senator McCain lost in the desert looking for rebel democrats.
Aptos CA Safeway expansion too big, too expansive.
Aptos, CA & neighboring rural  areas  [Seacliff, Soquel, La Selva Beach] aghast at Safeway’s enormous expansion plans for  the Rancho del Mar shopping Center located near Highway #1 and the Seacliff exit.
The “one size fits all” Safeway  plans  will  destroy the rural  community 5+ miles north and south of the Highway #1 and Seacliff exit area.
As there is  no legal town” of Aptos, Soquel, Seacliff and La Selva Beach this area is governed by the County of Santa Cruz.
The most extreme positions I’ve  heard:  There’s the legal  attitude of .  “It  belongs to  Safeway Corporation and property owners  can  do what they want”  attitude.  And on the other end  there’s the  people  opposed to profit who  want private property to go away. “Ah, we just need Big Government regulations & laws  to to take the profit out of Big Business Safeway…”
Most of us are in the in the muddle of the middle:  We choose to live where we do as we like the rural, small  community.
What  can the muddle of the middle types do?   Let’s tell Safeway to pull in their Footprints to our liking — or we will take our Footprints elsewhere to shop.
And that’s a real possibility for many of us: Â Deluxe Market just south of Safeway at the Rio del Mar exit is an excellent, small, family run full market. Â Yes most of us shop also at Safeway as prices are lower for many items (paper rolls!).
There are a lot of Yahoo groups people can contact and let them know about the Safeway plans and how to connect with those who want to contain Safeway’s plans.
The “one size fits all” plans of Safeway and Big Government  must be opposed by all of us in the muddle of the middle. Let’s not allow to happen here what happened in Sabasterpol, CA and elsewhere.
Rein in Safeway akin to what is in the Carmel, CA area.
Either Safeway pulls in their Footprints to our liking  or we take our Footprints to shop elsewhere!
How Obama-Care affects a  family of 4 adult children
 How Obama-Care fails a family of 4 adult children says all that has to be said.
Here’s a real life example why ObamaCare does not, and cannot, Â work. Â
By the way, what I conclude from all this is this:   If you are young and fairly healthy and  never had a medical plan  and think you want one  — you may  get something for not much.
 However, if you are young and fairly healthy, you probably won’t  sign up for Obama-Care  because  you can always do what you did before and go to the emergency room. When you need it you can get it.
And, If you are older, successful, and for years you have paid for a medical  plan  — you will pay dearly for much poorer medical care.  From those who have made a success of their life, more will be taken so as to level everyone to the same level.  That’s Obama’s plan.
Here’s a real life example:  Maria, my y friend of many years,  is over 65. Her husband, an attorney, divorced Maria  when the youngest child was about age six.  Her ex-  choose  to re-marry and then remarry again.  Her ex- now he lives in Latin America.
As my memory recollects, my friend Maria raised the youngest two children. The two oldest finished college; Â the youngest two did not attend college. Â Such is life when fathers boogie the home. Â The kids pay.
My friend, Maria who is over 65  uses Medicare.  Her  four children:  the oldest , a male over 45, works as a successful New York based photographer. He pays for his own medical plan.  He will be one who will pay much more money for far worse medical care.  From those who have — even more will be taken.
The  next oldest child, a female in her early 40’s , was employed in high end clothing until  a few years ago. She  has a pre-existing  medical condition and has not taken care of her health issues for various reasons. She typically votes Republican.  Currently unemployed,  she will be able to access health care for someone with a pre-existing condition.  But she may find out that the care she can get now is about the same as was available to her before:  not that great. She already knows this and — my guess — she probably will not access what could be available to her.  She has already been burnt by medical care that she thinks harmed her. Why get more of the same.  So she will opt out of Obama-Care by in-action.
The third child used drugs and eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now around age 40,  she receives various forms of assistance including government paid for medical care. Her mother was particularly concerned when the government took her daughter off of medications that were working and put  her on less expensive, different medications.  That daughter went down hill and had to be hospitalized for several months. She is now stabilized and lives off welfare.  She used to be an excellent artist.  Now she rides her bike and buys bike parts. She has no need for Obama-Care.  She probably does not even know what it is.
And the fourth adult child, the youngest:  he  dropped out of high school, has a hit and miss job history;  he had a tax payer paid for emergency operation  with severe complications.  That probably cost  taxpayers  about $30,000 dollars.  He did not pay a dime and has never paid a dime for that medical care.  He is back doing what he did before needing immediate emergency  medical attention.  My guess is that he knows he will get medical care if he needs it and at that time he will sign up. He will not sign up for Obama-Care until he needs it. If ever.
I asked my friend Maria  if the topic of Obama-Care came up around the diner table over Thanksgiving. She said there was no discussion.  Why should there be?  It’s a no brainer:  get it when you need it.  Avoid it when it has hurt you. Â
Oh, the oldest adult child did not come to diner.  He was off  working. Â
written by DrCameronJackson@gmail.com
Even as President Obama reluctantly granted Americans thrown off their health plans quasi-permission to possibly keep them, he called them “the folks who, over time, I think, are going to find that the marketplaces are better.” He means the ObamaCare exchanges that are replacing the private insurance market, adding that “it’s important that we don’t pretend that somehow that’s a place worth going back to.”
U.S. President Barack Obama meets with health insurance chief executives at the White House in Washington November. Reuters
Easy for him to say. The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare’s insurance costs more in return for worse coverage.
Mr. Obama and his liberal allies call the old plans “substandard,” but he doesn’t mean from the perspective of the consumers who bought them. He means people were free to choose insurance that wasn’t designed to serve his social equity and income redistribution goals. In his view, many people must pay first-class fares for coach seats so others can pay less and receive extra benefits.
Liberals justify these coercive cross-subsidies as necessary to finance coverage for the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions. But government usually helps the less fortunate honestly by raising taxes to fund programs. In summer 2009, Senate Democrats put out such a bill, and the $1.6 trillion sticker shock led them to hide the transfers by forcing people to buy overpriced products.
This political mugging is especially unfair to the people whose plans on the current individual market are being taken away. The majority of these consumers are self-employed or small-business owners. They’re middle class, rarely affluent. They took responsibility for their care without government aid, and unlike people in the job-based system, they paid with after-tax dollars.
Now they’re being punished for the crime of not subsidizing ObamaCare, even though the individual market was never as dysfunctional or high cost as liberals claim. In 2012, average U.S. individual premiums were $190, ranging from a low of $123 in North Dakota to a high of $385 in Massachusetts. Average premiums for family plans fell that year by 0.5% to $412.
Those numbers come from the 13,000 different policies from 180 insurers sold on eHealthInsurance.com, the online shopping brokerage that works. (Technological wonders never cease.) Individuals can make the trade-offs between costs and benefits for themselves. This wide variety is proof that humans don’t all want or need the same thing. If they did, there would be no need for a market and government could satisfy everybody.
That is precisely what the Obama health planners believe they can do. Regulators mandated a very rich level of “essential” health benefits that all plans in the individual market must cover, regardless of cost. This year eHealth EHTH +0.29% reported that its data show individual premiums must be 47% higher than the old average to fund the new categories in the individual market.
Meanwhile, ObamaCare’s plans are limited to essentially four. Yes, four. The law converts insurance products on the ObamaCare exchanges into interchangeable commodities that finance the same standard benefit at the same average expense over four tiers known as bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
So, for example, a bronze plan covers 60% of health-care expenses and the beneficiary pays a lower premium to pick up the remaining 40% out of pocket. Platinum carries a higher premium for a 90%-10% split. But there can be little deviation from the formulas—that is, there is little room for innovation or policy choice—to suit customer preferences.
In any case all four tiers are scrap-metal grade, because the rules ObamaCare imposes to create a supposedly superior insurance product are resulting in an objectively inferiormedical product. The new mandates and rules raise costs, so insurers must compensate by offering narrow and less costly networks of doctors, hospitals and other providers in their ObamaCare products. Insurers thus restrict care and patient choice of physicians in exchange for discounted reimbursement rates, much as Medicaid does.
Nearly half of the ObamaCare plans are tightly managed HMOs, according to a McKinsey & Co. analysis. In states like California, Missouri and New Hampshire, many networks are 40% or 45% the size of those offered for normal commercial coverage. Patients face the prospect of waiting months and driving miles to clinics and county hospitals.
Narrow networks can be a useful cost-control tool, to the extent people choose to give up medical options in return for lower premiums. But that’s rarely what people want when they’re choosing with their own money. Some 82.5% of eHealth customers in 2012 purchased preferred provider organization plans (PPOs) that are structured so patients can visit virtually any physician.
The awful irony of this new ObamaCare health system is that all adults now enjoy mandated pediatric vision benefits, even if they don’t have kids, but parents can’t take their daughter to an expensive children’s hospital if she gets really sick. Everybody gets “free” preventive checkups with no copays, but not treatment for a complex illness from specialists at an academic medical center.
If the old individual market was as bad as Mr. Obama said it was, then he shouldn’t pretend it’s a place worth going back to, even for a year’s delay. His “fix” is necessary politically because ObamaCare’s willful destruction of this alternative is the worst act of government mayhem since FDR’s National Recovery Act. The Affordable Care Act’s main achievement is turning out to be diminishing affordable care.
Use healthcare.gov  so that  your elderly, dead  relatives (over age120) get the government assistance they “need”, don’t want and cannot use.
 What might happen if too many visitors go to healthcare.gov??  It just might crash. Â
Rule #1:  cover your tracks.  Create a new email account  just for Healthcare.gov  Make sure the User Name is long and complicated, e.g. Cowgirl1909fromTexas  is a good one as it’s long.
Just creating an account may put a  strain  on the system. Â
Go to AOL Â or G-MAIL etc. and get a new account that you will use only for healthcare.gov
Go ahead and use this one:   Cowgirl1909fromTexas   Password:  Sunshine12  Change the numbers. Â
Once you have that new email account for your relative age 120+ then go to:
Here’s an example:  At age 120,  my Aunt Bessie is a bit  on the creaky  side. She  needs all that Obama-Care can provide.
No, Aunt Bessie  does not want a Death Squad notice that she has lived too long. Â
And actually Aunt Bessie passed on about 20 years ago.  I do know her social security number and I do remember her every  year on her birthday … And she did live in Texas …  And she is a real person who truly lived… And I do want to remember her …
When they ask which state? choose a large state such as Texas as there will be more choices.
We all must have at least 5+ elderly relatives — who have passed on — that could use some Obama-Care ….
Let’s put a smile on some bureaucrat’s face!  Sign up lots of  relatives all over age 120.
 Just log in.  Don’t do anything more.  But do come back and visit the site many, many times …
If we all visit healthcare.gov at once maybe we can hear the crash!!
Remember — do cover your tracks!! Â Â written by annonymous.com
The free website,  Circle of Gifts offers a solution.  Shawn DeArmond  made and  uses it  with his family.
Perhaps Circle of Gifts  can help you. Try it out and see!
I did find some  basic terms such as “CLAIM”  and BOUGHT” confusing.  Nothing is actually bought. There is a link to Amazon where you can purchase items.Â
Instead of CLAIM and BOUGHT, As a psychologist  I would  prefer language  such as :  “ I’D LIKE  GIFT X“ and  “OK! WISH  HEARD!”
I do plan to try out Circle of Gifts as it is a  thoughtful way of giving gifts.  Isn’t that what real giving is all about?  Thoughtfulness?
written by licensed psychologist  DrCameronJackson@gmail.com
                            for  the Circle of Gifts web site,  go to: http://circleofgifts.com/
written by Shwn DeArmond who started Circle of Gifts: Â
“This  past week, I launched a cool new web site on Drupal. It’s called Circle of Gifts, and it’s a tool to help families and friends make their holiday shopping easier. Users build their wish list on the site, and their Friends “claim” items so others know not to buy that gift. I originally built it for my family, but have since expanded it and it’s now open to the public. There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of challenges to overcome in building a social network on Drupal. Let’s look at some of them:
Claiming Gifts
The core functionality of this site is that people need to be able to create their wish list, and other people need to “claim” the gifts. Enter the Flag module. Flag’s slick ajax system made it easy to mark a gift as claimed, but it didn’t end there. Only one person can claim a gift, and nobody else should be able to unclaim it. Neither global nor standard flag functionality would work. Fortunately, I was able to take the work Jen Lampton did on the Flag Limit module, upgrade it to Drupal 7, and add the functionality I needed. Problem solved! Flag was also used for two other pieces of functionality on the site: to mark a gift as “not wanted anymore”, to mark a gift as “Bought” once it’s on your Shopping List. To be honest, the biggest problem we had with Flag, and it’s still something we’re tossing around, is how to label the links. Here’s what the links look like now:
Claimed
Bought
Don’t Want
Flag link
Flag link description
Click to claim
Click to mark this gift as bought.
Remove this item from my gift list
Flagged message
You have claimed this gift.
You have bought this gift.
You no longer want this item
Flag unlink
Flag unlink description
Click to release your claim on this gift.
Click to mark this gift as not bought
Add this item back to my gift list.
Unflagged message
This gift can now be claimed.
This gift is not bought.
This item is now back in my gift list.
The trouble with flag link text is that it is simultaneously trying to display current state and an action. By making the links buttons, it is moving towards being an action as opposed to a state. “Claim” and “Release” icons work pretty well, as do the “Remove” and “Add Back”. But I’m still not thrilled about “Bought” and “Not Bought”, as the text is not an action word, but rather a state. The problem is that the act of actually purchasing the gift is outside the control of the site. It just links to Amazon. This is just checking it off your Shopping List. I’m still working on that one.
Birthday Views
This one SEEMS so simple: Standard Date field for users to enter their birthdate (including year). I need a view that shows all my friends, sorted by which birthday is coming up next. Just sorting by the field doesn’t work, of course, because it shouldn’t take year into consideration. Also, if today is November 17, the birthdays in December should come before the birthdays in January, so just sorting by the day of the year isn’t going to work either. Also, if the birthday field is blank, it should put them at the end of the list. I ended up implementing hook_views_query_alter(). Here’s the function:
Take a look at your query to see what it’s labeling the birthday field. The first $query->orderby looks to see if the field is empty, and puts the empty ones at the end. The second $query->orderby takes the day of the year of the birthday, subtracts the day of the year of today, adds 365 so we won’t have any negatives, and then finds the remainder when dividing by 365. Totally works. Yay math! (Some math wiz wanna tell me what’s going to happen in 2016 for leap year? Sorta wondering.) Circle of Gifts had plenty more obstacles that were overcome, but I finally launched it. I invite you to create an account, poke around, and maybe it’ll be useful to you like it is for my family.
   Clinton’s health plan: the federal govt spends money better than parents says Hilary.
  Clinton’s health plan:”“We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won’t get the care for their children and themselves that they need. . . .Â
“The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better,” says Hilary Clinton
Boston jihadist’s  diet meets Islamic religious requirements. Just when we think we’ve reached the limits of tolerance for Muslim terrorists, we learn that one of the jihadist punks who confessed to killing and maiming hundreds of marathoners, then terrorizing and shutting down an entire major U.S. city, all in the name of Allah, has been getting meals prepared for him in accordance with Islamic dietary requirements.
Gitmo prisoners  get art and other classes as well.  Thanks to a multimillion-dollar federal contract, Guantanamo Bay prisoners can enroll in seminars to learn all about basic landscaping and pruning, calligraphy and Microsoft PowerPoint while the U.S. figures out what to do with them.
Gitmo prisoners also can get in touch with their artistic sides.
“At a minimum, the art seminar shall include water color painting, charcoal sketching, Arabic calligraphy, acrylic painting and pastel painting,†contract records reviewed by The Washington Times state.
The documents surfaced last week in a U.S. Court of Federal Claims lawsuit stemming from a dispute over a more than $5 million contract to provide library and seminar services to detainees at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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Firenze Sage, Esq. Â Yes we have gone stark raving mad!
How to comparison shop  Obama-Care?  Compare  plans based on CAPS, DEDUCTIBLES & CO-PAYS.
CAPS:  What is the maximum the health care  plan will pay? That is what s a CAP means.
DEDUCTIBLE: How much do you have to pay out of pocket  before the insurance kicks in and starts to pay? How much can you afford to absorb in out of pocket immediate expenses?
CO-PAY:  How much  will you pay for each doctor visit?
Are you someone who already has a medical plan  and want to keep it? Watch out. If your plan does not conform to Obama’s standards, you may not be able to keep it.  So far 300,000 individuals  have lost coverage in Florida. In California one insurer (Kaiser)  has cancelled 160,000 people.Â
Are you a first time buyer of medical insurance? Obama-Care needs scrutiny by young people who are 1st time buyers of health insurance.
Learn how to compare  private policies on these  important issues.
Remember, if you have no insurance you get stuck for a fine/penalty of $95 the first year. If you do end up in the hospital you can sign up when you need care. Â
The House Speaker predicts that more people have been kicked off their medical plan than have been able to sign up on the web site.
The numbers so far show 3 times as many signing up for government run free care for the poor compared with private plans that meet the Obama-Care standards. So that just expands the number of people on a government run plan. If that trend continues, no way will Obama-Care pay for itself. It will implode.
Some say that was the Big Plan all along — that Obama-Care fail and turn into a One Payer system. Â From the Democrat perspective the more control the government has over everything — that’s the highest good for the liberal/progressives.
Instead of merely throwing them out of office, why not require  all politicians who believe that more government is good to spend two months in North Korea.
The core functionality of this site is that people need to be able to create their wish list, and other people need to “claim” the gifts. Enter the Flag module. Flag’s slick ajax system made it easy to mark a gift as claimed, but it didn’t end there. Only one person can claim a gift, and nobody else should be able to unclaim it. Neither global nor standard flag functionality would work. Fortunately, I was able to take the work Jen Lampton did on the 
This one SEEMS so simple: Standard Date field for users to enter their birthdate (including year). I need a view that shows all my friends, sorted by which birthday is coming up next. Just sorting by the field doesn’t work, of course, because it shouldn’t take year into consideration. Also, if today is November 17, the birthdays in December should come before the birthdays in January, so just sorting by the day of the year isn’t going to work either. Also, if the birthday field is blank, it should put them at the end of the list. I ended up implementing hook_views_query_alter(). Here’s the function:
