i'm, like, so toadally green

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I gots me some kelp and some chlorophyll while I was in town. I should have been taking both these items for a long time now, anyway, and they both work against the ill effects of radiation, too.

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Later that same night, she finds support for these purchases.

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love, 99
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hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah

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They can patch our genes.

In a bold new approach ultimately aimed at trying to cure AIDS, scientists used genetic engineering in six patients to develop blood cells that are resistant to HIV, the virus that causes the disease.

It's far too early to know if this scientific first will prove to be a cure, or even a new treatment. The research was only meant to show that, so far, it seems feasible and safe.

The concept was based on the astonishing case of an AIDS patient who seems to be cured after getting blood cells from a donor with natural immunity to HIV nearly four years ago in Berlin. Researchers are seeking a more practical way to achieve similar immunity using patients' own blood cells.

The results announced Monday at a conference in Boston left experts cautiously excited.

"For the first time, people are beginning to think about a cure" as a real possibility, said Dr. John Zaia, head of the government panel that oversees gene therapy experiments. Even if the new approach doesn't get rid of HIV completely, it may repair patients' immune systems enough that they can control the virus and not need AIDS medicines — "what is called a functional cure," he said.

But will they?

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love, 99
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i can't imagine how many people will be comforted to hear this

[click image]

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I don't know anyone who isn't worrying their heads off about needing surgery and not wanting to die of it.

A new study from Rhode Island Hospital has found a reduced risk of hospital-acquired infections (HAI) when using two percent chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) cloths for daily bathing instead of soap and water. The study found a 64 percent decrease in the risk of acquiring an infection from either methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) or Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE). The study is published online in advance of print in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

I was not too worried about it when I went to get my head bolted back on. It didn't seem to matter to me in view of the prospect of not ending up in a wheelchair... but I tend to have those kinds of priorities really straight... more than most people I know. I mean, stuff like that they usually need to try to think around for X amount of time. Not me. Heartbeat. Bam.

My mother holds wreaths of garlic in front of anyone mentioning hip replacement. She doesn't want new hips at the price of MRSA or VRE... or any other crud that's not so vulnerable to antibiotics as we'd grown to rely upon.

So this is seriously, seriously good news.
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love, 99
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temperance pills

[click image]

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This will fix the economy for sure....

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The WORLD economy:

A drunk motorist was arrested near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape after allegedly being found to be 32 times over the alcohol limit, the department of transport said on Thursday.

The motorist was driving a Mercedes-Benz Vito at about 23:00 on Wednesday when he was stopped by police.

Blood tests were conducted on him and he was found to have an alcohol content of 1.6g/100ml.

This is 32 times over the limit of 0.05g/100ml.

Five boys and a woman, who were also in the vehicle with 15 sheep allegedly stolen from nearby farms, were also arrested.

At least for a while....

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In case of insomnia, an old movie involving radically too much booze....

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love, 99
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disregarding for the moment that our problem is the reverse

[click image]

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And impervious to caffeine or even crystal meth, 5-HTP, melatonin and plenty of B vitamins can help you sleep... unless yer me... with an honestly and epically fucked up sleeping pattern. Some people—I'm supposing they are that psychotic thing known as "normal"—benefit from cutting back on or eliminating caffeine, and taking the supplements. There are herbal aids galore and some of them even work.

That's the crappiest bit about this mass somnolence. It's fucking STRESSFUL. Eats up every B molecule and serotonin molecule in yer body before lunch. People whose nerves are shot, while functionally sound asleep, can't get enough or the right kind of sleep. It's illegal for supplement people to tell you this.

Hell, for all I know it's illegal for ME to tell you this. However, I can assure you that any petitions or demonstrations or calls and letters you care to make about the linked lethal legal problem will be as effective as dreaming you're doing them.

Though, I was sure by now it would have caused mass insurrection.

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love, 99
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well, i'll be a monkey's uncle

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Katie makes a bold, if ineffectual, move....

Too bad one needs an IQ to figure out what she has put in front of us.

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love, 99
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we already know this by heart

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Don't we?

I'm the test case. No vitamin D, no health, no brains, no life. Lots of vitamin D, health, brains, life, teeth, bones, muscles, strength, energy and strong immune response. You have to supplement if you're not living on the equator and outside most of the day. Don't listen to your doctor. Doctors are working off OLD "science" and legal imperatives. ALL the science on it now says we need those D levels MUCH higher. Do it.

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love, 99
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the more i snoop around in the alternative zone

[click image]

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The angrier I become. If even a tenth of the things I'm seeing and hearing about are true, it still constitutes utter condemnation of our world.

It is NOT all anger, though, now, of course it isn't. It's a splendid means to open minds... which is the cure for the thing causing all the anger.

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yeah, let's spend trillions on wars, shall we?

[click image]

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Nothing better to do with our money.

New superbugs spreading from South Asia: study
Wed Aug 11, 4:06 am ET

PARIS (AFP) — Plastic surgery patients have carried a new class of superbugs resistant to almost all antibiotics from South Asia to Britain and they could spread worldwide, researchers reported Wednesday.

Many hospital infections that were already difficult to treat have become even more impervious to drugs thanks to a recently discovered gene that can jump across different species of bacteria.

This so-called NDM-1 gene was first identified last year by Cardiff University's Timothy Walsh in two types of bacteria — Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli — in a Swedish patient admitted to hospital in India.

Worryingly, the new NDM-1 bacteria are resistant even to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics often reserved as a last resort for emergency treatment for multi-drug resistant bugs.

In the new study, led by Walsh and Madras University's Karthikeyan Kumarasamy, researchers set out to determine how common the NDM-1 producing bacteria were in South Asia and Britain, where several cases had turned up.

Checking hospital patients with suspect symptoms, they found 44 cases — 1.5 percent of those screened — in Chennai, and 26 (eight percent) in Haryana, both in India.

They likewise found the superbug in Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well 37 cases in Britain, where several patients had recently travelled to India or Pakistan for cosmetic surgery.

"India also provides cosmetic surgery for other Europeans and Americans, and it is likely that NDM-1 will spread worldwide," said the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

NDM-1 was mostly found in E. coli, a common source of community-acquired urinary tract infections, and K. pneumoniae, and was impervious to all antibiotics except two, tigecycline and colistin.

In some cases, even these drugs did not beat back the infection.

Crucially, the NDM-1 gene was found on DNA structures, called plasmids, that can be easily copied and transferred between bacteria, giving the bug "an alarming potential to spread and diversify," the authors said.

"Unprecedented air travel and migration allow bacterial plasmids and clones to be transported rapidly between countries and continents," mostly undetected, they said.

The emergence of these new drug-resistant strains could become a serious global public health problem as the major threat shifts toward a broad class of bacteria — including those armed with the NDM-1 gene -- known as "Gram-negative", the researchers warn.

"There are few new anti-Gram-negative antibiotics in development, and none that are effective against NDM-1," the study said.
NDM-1 stands for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1.

Johann Pitout from the University of Calgary in Canada said patients who have medical procedures in India should be screened for multi-resistant bacteria before they receive care in their home country.

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fight cancer and fat

[click image, video, twenty minutes]

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Eat the right things. Understand angiogenesis. Concept. Concept. Concept.
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the revolution could simply be fought in our heads

[click image, Part Two — Part Three, video, three hours total, and if you bother to watch these, you should ask yourself if you want Rockefellers and Rothschilds in charge of this stuff... if you want Dick Cheney to have endless replacement parts while your kid can't even get treatment for asthma... You should ask yourself just how ready ARE we for ANY revolution, for the revolutions tumbling down on us right now? WHAT SHOULD BE THE CHARACTER OF ANY SOCIETY WITH THIS KIND OF TECHNOLOGY?]

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... I ...

You aren't going to find me suddenly one day not hounding you to get off your ass and rise up, but don't mistake this for a bloodthirsty impulse, or for lethal naiveté about the ghosts of our forefathers mystically inhabiting any leadership that arises with us. My point is that there is no alternative means of stopping the harm, the outrageous criminality, the abjection to sociopathic impulses. None.

I'm not inciting you to violence. I am telling you that you must not shrink from the violence that surely inheres an effort to quell an uprising that would be effective. You have to get out in the streets both physically and metaphorically and that does mean being noticed by the sociopaths who must be stopped. So we do it in our millions. The vanguard is making itself a target so you will run out your front door to reinforce it. It's out there to get you to join it. You're dunning it for its misspellings and pitching hissies about its political misapprehensions, even as it very plainly is trying to stand up for YOUR life.

What would be wrong with having a little humility and teaching yourself to stick up for your misapprehending brothers and sisters who will never win a spelling bee? What would happen if you suddenly started piping up against the strident fuckers with sham spines, that evil tide of fascists-in-denial who want you to think of them as "progressives", in defense of the courage and altruism of the politically incorrect? How UGLY AMERICAN is it to keep deflecting the awful truth you KNOW, but terrifies you too much to admit? You scream and whine about them hating America for listening to the fascist shills on Fox, but can't hear the fascist shilling going on full blast at MSNBC and HuffPo and TPM because... because... because whut? They know how to spell? Their shilling is more subtle and nuanced?

Is that right?

That's right.

The sociopaths recognized that our side needs more nuance and élan to be brought along peacefully. So they let us have Obama, and they are now ripping the guts out of America much more subtly, and MUCH more viciously than ever before.

So what if—since yer so good with yer mouth—you just started DEFENDING the people who, agree with them or not, have the courage to defend you? What if Naomi Wolf and David Swanson and Chris Floyd started getting up to address the Tea Parties? Are you SURE Sarah Palin would stay a bigger draw? Yes, you are. Is that right? No, you stupid fucks, it is wrong. Getting up in solidarity with their American impulse to protest and to fight fascism will be met with GRATITUDE... if leaving some a bit mystified.

For the ENTIRE history of America we all, from every walk, have agreed to protect each other's rights and to stand for liberty and justice for all, no matter WHAT else we think, but only some of us are honoring that social contract... and these are mostly NOT from the purported "left".

I don't know if you labored through Kenney's dud style of interviewing my anti-Zionist homeboy last night, but in that interview he mentions about how the "left" skipped its big chance to put down Israeli aggression once and for all because Pappy Bush was the one who'd get the credit for it.

YOUR PARTISANSHIP AND PUSILLANIMITY IS GENOCIDAL.

So I'm asking you to get brave enough to STOP blasting away against the only Americans standing up for America, and, further, to save yer sorry souls by DEFENDING them instead. Maybe you won't run out onto the streets to wrest our lifeblood and treasure from sociopaths out to slaughter and enslave vast swaths of humanity—INCLUDING YOU—but you CAN sit down and pick out what you find admirable about your illiterate and gauche brothers and sisters, and emphasize THAT instead of your own immoral—IMMORTAL—complicity.

The tide of public opinion itself, if large enough, could turn this around—because these new world order fucks are in a supremely weak position, globally, just hanging on by a thread, and needing badly to have you in a lock or lose it all—but it has to be huge, and it won't be huge enough to save any of us if a whole lot of us don't cut this shit out.

Don't like me assailing your precious virtue? Tough shit. DEAL with it. WTF would be wrong with GETTING SOME instead of keeping up your sickeningly self-serving and life-harming excuses?

WHO were the Nazis? They were the dominant incarnation of a global business élite, which also showed itself in the Fascisti in Italy, but consisted behind these fronts of plutocrats from all over, INCLUDING the United States and England. We, the Allies, did not beat fascism, did not beat the Nazis, in World War Two. The oligarchs just realized they'd wrung every dollar from it they could without obliterating technological prizes, divvied up the scientists, moved them out of Germany, and called the whole thing off. They have continued in their schemes—lo, these sixty-five years intervening—and now find themselves in position to attempt what they didn't manage back then. We have all been referring to it as "globalization" for something like twenty years now, give or take, without, in the main, ever realizing what we are saying.

It's a Nazi term.

It's a fascist term.

It's what's happening to America right now. It is trite by now to remind you that THIS is the answer to our constant questioning about how ever in the world could the German people have countenanced the rise of Hitler, of Nazism.

YOUR EXCUSES ARE PRECISELY HOW THAT HAPPENED.
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... II ...

BTW, if yer reaction to my beating you over the head with your own stupidity is to become even more adamant about your excuses, your judgments about the jackasses out there stubbornly voting against their own interests, with attitude, who WON'T listen to reason, no matter what, THIS answers THAT question too. LOOK IN THE MIRROR.
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... III ...

Oh, no, 99, I can't fight against the Death Star's Lord Vader with those people because they worship an invisible friend. I can't fight for all mankind alongside anyone who would keep homosexuals from marrying. I can't be counted in a crowd against our vampire overlords if they can't even spell their wrongheaded signs. You can never convince me anyone who's been duped by a bunch of overpaid shills is brave enough to thwart the Emperor. No! 99! Yer just full of happy claptrap about courage and heart. They're cannon fodder, stupid hicks who want to slaughter sand niggers and molest children at Bible Camp. They are not trying to stop the Death Star! They just want Sarah Palin to front for it! Yeah, that's the ticket! They just want Sarah Palin to get back at Obama for being a glib community organizer where only narcissistic sociopath bumpkin governors belong! This isn't a fight between The Force and The Empire! This is a fight between the decent proponents of an enlightened society and farting and belching cavemen for whose turn it will next be to lead us.

Never mind that "lead us" is a euphemism for "follow Lord Vader's orders" and never mind that the fight that must be fought is the one common to cavemen and ivory tower dwellers alike. No, no. Don't pay attention to that. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Just look at the big looming head and keep fighting someone more your own size.

You know, NONE of that matters. If we don't blow up the Death Star we won't ever be able to duke it out to decide any of that stuff. The whole world will continue to be done to us and we will continue to be spit out at whim, continue with our health and our food and every penny we ever worked for completely subject to their whim. You'll get treated better if you work your brains out, for as long as you can work your brains out the way they say is okay, where they say it's okay, and for whatever pay they feel like letting you use to keep body and soul together. The moment something impedes your steady production will be the moment something impedes your steady breathing. And all this will only be so long as they see a profit in it. The instant they see that robbing you of more of your ability to pay for life necessities, while shortening your productive life, actually enhances their bottom line, you won't even be allowed to work your brains out to stay alive.

It's already happening.

Those farting cavemen who can't spell "moron" are protesting ever more loudly about it.
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... IV ...

Are they right to manipulate your preference for serfdom over pain? Is it okay to stay thinking like the herd when the herd is fed what to think by bastards who know how to funnel the herd from its pasture straight to the abattoir? You know that if you leave it up to them, YOU will lose, but you keep getting distracted by all these hypnotic ideas and lies and the constant goosing with horror stories... tasers... underwear bombs... scary mullahs... people going postal in the cockpits of their planes... on campuses... in the woods practicing with paint guns... toe tapping in the men's room... drone attacks... active denial technology... angry colored people... jackknifed chemical tankers... missing children... the streets of Mexico littered with corpses... earthquakes... hurricanes... tsunamis... suicide bombs.

Sure we should legalize pot.

Is that the way life on earth should be? Is that the way it has to be?

Are Oprah and Rupert and Warren really worth more than the billions living outside the castle walls?

Is that right?

Is all this happening to everyone really less important than staying too busy with your Hatfield and McCoy trip to ever have to face Vader's light saber?

I think so. I really think that's it.
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... V ...

You know, I've been listening to a couple of those wackos with an imaginary friend talking about pretty much exactly what I always talk about, and actually seem to have the same idea about removing the power of the Death Star by ceasing to fear them, ceasing to heed them, them just ending up being taken out by a population that finds itself suddenly sick to death of their shit... sort of like the end of Ceauşescu, only, optimally, without the slaughter part... but they are also counseling that we should all be praying for the Death Star people. Not that they get what's coming to them, but that they awaken to the harm and stop it. They don't seem to think that their imaginary friend will do this, but rather that there is this power when vast numbers of people set their hearts on something together, from wherever, all over, just a big enough number of humans willing certain of us to wake up....

I think that's pretty cool. I don't see what's so all-fired unforgivable about their religious beliefs that you couldn't go out there with them and pump your fist at the cameras with them... or stay in and join their prayer... or go out and pump your fist and join this prayer.

Are you really telling me you can't hang with this?

I mean, we all knew what he meant and would it be better if he'd picketed for us to get a heart?

Naw. Too sappy.
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... VI ...

I mean, did you ever stop to think that if we didn't have to be filling these few plutocrats' coffers with piles of lucre the size of Jupiter, we would not need a giant government to create our ideal world? All those "assholes" we revile for wanting to drown it in a bathtub might not actually be nearly as assholish as we suppose. Or maybe some of them are but would be mollified completely into being blandly content Joe Nobodies if they weren't having to pay and pay and pay for shit that NEVER does anything but rip us off and get us blown up and dead or maimed in some third world country... in some other third world country, that is. [See below for details.]

I bet you never stopped to think of that.
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... VII ...

Hell! They're SPACE LIZARDS, literally or metaphorically, and there's no telling. They are strict adherents to perfidies so perfidious people have died horribly of them for millennia, perfidies only ancient brutes could have concocted and modern ones still observe. Aren't we always going on about LEARNING from history? What really is the problem here?

There are people walking around on this planet who believe we are being farmed as food for space aliens. This is neither here nor there to me, because we are being farmed as food by space lizards we can see and touch and vote for... and so it's probably only their subconsciousnesses trying to shield these hysterical people from utterly unacceptable reality with all these ideas about spacecraft and ghastly flesh-eaters off-world. They're RIGHT HERE.

You can't make reality acceptable if you can't put yourself through it to see it and fix it.
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and, while we're on the subject

[click image, audio, one hour]

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I found this interview fascinating and encouraging... and know already that much of it is just plain true. It was spectacular to hear someone mentioning how our mental conditioning cages us for life, and doing it from the perspective completely divorced from anything you would call "Zen". I love how she discusses that there actually is NOT nothing you can do about certain predicaments, healthwise or otherwise, and adored the discussion about how what we frequently mistake for the advance of senility is really much more about feeling we should be able to remember information that did not interest us to begin with. She does a great job of articulating this.

Plus, she gets on the subject of how the too frequently dodgy information on the internet can actually improve our chances of discerning reality from the clues flying up out of this mosh pit world. This was particularly interesting to me, of course, because it was a problem I immediately encountered upon my connection to the internet... which was very late by the standards of many denizens of the tubes. I started to have regular access sometime in early 2005, but did not have my own 'round the clock connection until late 2005. I began being exposed to many alternative news sites and investigative journalism sites that were telling me stuff quite at variance with what I'd been led to believe about just about everything for my entire life, and I had always been comparatively well-informed, already knew the mainstream stuff was bunk... but had not the first part of a clue just how far into complete nonsense it actually was.

I immediately became intensely suspicious. I remember contacting some poor guy who ran a popular leftist site to ask him just who he was, and how on earth could I have faith in the outrageous stuff he was posting. He splutteringly replied as best he could, and as I was reading his response it occurred to me that even though I had not trusted the mainstream media for many years already, I still had some idea that mainstream sources were superior, could be used to rest one's case upon, EVEN after having thoroughly demolished the idea of the citing of authorities as purely delusional in a book I'd written. I sat there reeling over the realization of the depth of this business the Buddhists call "delusion" and wondered if I should bother trying to track down what was going on it the world, or what.

Obviously, I decided to start shooting the tubes and stay mindful of the mental conditioning that both goes into the reportage and opinion and that same problem with the one absorbing this information. I learned not to just take everything I read at face value, or to let my knee jerk up and bash me in the chin when someone came up with something that fought with what I already thought. I learned to check up on people. I learned to gauge the reliability of certain sources and not automatically accept the veracity of even the most trusted sites. I learned that people bragging of their own investigatorial prowess were very weak on investigatorial prowess, and saw with my own two eyes how the constant suggestion of it hypnotized readers into believing the boasts over assessing the content. If it agrees with their world view, they are the most apt to swallow it whole and cease looking further to get at the truth... at reality.

I don't know if I share Dr. Langer's optimism about this wreckage. I think she suffers from a default assumption that most are as intelligent and open-minded and driven to the discernment of the actual as she is. But her insights are very worth your attention.
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heart patients take heart

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All kinds of goodies coming down the pike....
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even though i'm too young to need this

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... I still think I need it....
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yes, well, but, er, how do you get rid of 'em?

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They really need to cut to the chase, man....
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F A B U L O U S !!!!!

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deaths from H1N1 vaccine

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Al Jazeera is reporting on the air that there are now eight deaths in Sweden shortly after being vaccinated for H1N1. Doctors insist these people were all sick from other things and the vaccine hasn't got anything to do with it, but al Jazeera is also reporting that medical professionals are showing a surprising reluctance to get vaccinated....

I can't find anything from googling about it except this, which is a few days old, and the number of deaths was just four, but maybe I'm just too tired and can find it in the Global Research Flu Bonanza page when I get up.

In Europe, civilians are increasingly rejecting the H1N1 vaccine. Recent polls in Germany and Austria show only 13 and 18 percent respectively willing to take the shot. In Sweden, four vaccine related deaths have been announced and almost 200 healthcare workers have reported becoming more seriously ill from the vaccination than they might have from a flu infection. In the US, anywhere from 90-99 percent of adverse events go unreported.

Just take at least 2000mgs of Vitamin D extra every day and SKIP the damn vaccine.

There's some guy screaming about how dangerous all vaccines are at the bottom of that piece.

One of my favorite cats just died from vaccine-induced cancer a couple weeks ago.

We need to start smacking these guys around, don't you think?

UPDATE SOMETIME THE NEXT MORNING: Here's a video of al Jazeera's report....

explaining my formidable intellect

[click image]

... in exquisite detail... and against all odds.

codgers take note

[click image]

the next generation

[click image]

Stimulating Sight: Retinal Implant Could Help Restore Useful Level Of Vision To Certain Groups Of Blind People

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2009) — Inspired by the success of cochlear implants that can restore hearing to some deaf people, researchers at MIT are working on a retinal implant that could one day help blind people regain a useful level of vision.

The eye implant is designed for people who have lost their vision from retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, two of the leading causes of blindness. The retinal prosthesis would take over the function of lost retinal cells by electrically stimulating the nerve cells that normally carry visual input from the retina to the brain.

Such a chip would not restore normal vision but it could help blind people more easily navigate a room or walk down a sidewalk.

"Anything that could help them see a little better and let them identify objects and move around a room would be an enormous help," says Shawn Kelly, a researcher in MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics and member of the Boston Retinal Implant Project.

The research team, which includes scientists, engineers and ophthalmologists from Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, the Boston VA Medical Center and Cornell as well as MIT, has been working on the retinal implant for 20 years. The research is funded by the VA Center for Innovative Visual Rehabilitation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Catalyst Foundation and the MOSIS microchip fabrication service.

Led by John Wyatt, MIT professor of electrical engineering, the team recently reported a new prototype that they hope to start testing in blind patients within the next three years.

Electrical stimulation

Patients who received the implant would wear a pair of glasses with a camera that sends images to a microchip attached to the eyeball. The glasses also contain a coil that wirelessly transmits power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball.

When the microchip receives visual information, it activates electrodes that stimulate nerve cells in the areas of the retina corresponding to the features of the visual scene. The electrodes directly activate optical nerves that carry signals to the brain, bypassing the damaged layers of retina.

One question that remains is what kind of vision this direct electrical stimulation actually produces. About 10 years ago, the research team started to answer that by attaching electrodes to the retinas of six blind patients for several hours.

When the electrodes were activated, patients reported seeing a small number of "clouds" or "drops of blood" in their field of vision, and the number of clouds or blood drops they reported corresponded to the number of electrodes that were stimulated. When there was no stimulus, patients accurately reported seeing nothing. Those tests confirmed that retinal stimulation can produce some kind of organized vision in blind patients, though further testing is needed to determine how useful that vision can be.

After those initial tests, with grants from the Boston Veteran's Administration Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health, the researchers started to build an implantable chip, which would allow them to do more long-term tests. Their goal is to produce a chip that can be implanted for at least 10 years.

One of the biggest challenges the researchers face is designing a surgical procedure and implant that won't damage the eye. In their initial prototypes, the electrodes were attached directly atop the retina from inside the eye, which carries more risk of damaging the delicate retina. In the latest version, described in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the implant is attached to the outside of the eye, and the electrodes are implanted behind the retina.

That subretinal location, which reduces the risk of tearing the retina and requires a less invasive surgical procedure, is one of the key differences between the MIT implant and retinal prostheses being developed by other research groups.

Another feature of the new MIT prototype is that the chip is now contained in a hermetically sealed titanium case. Previous versions were encased in silicone, which would eventually allow water to seep in and damage the circuitry.

While they have not yet begun any long-term tests on humans, the researchers have tested the device in Yucatan miniature pigs, which have roughly the same size eyeballs as humans. Those tests are only meant to determine whether the implants remain functional and safe and are not designed to observe whether the pigs respond to stimuli to their optic nerves.

So far, the prototypes have been successfully implanted in pigs for up to 10 months, but further safety refinements need to be made before clinical trials in humans can begin.

Wyatt and Kelly say they hope that once human trials begin and blind patients can offer feedback on what they're seeing, they will learn much more about how to configure the algorithm implemented by the chip to produce useful vision.

Patients have told them that what they would like most is the ability to recognize faces. "If they can recognize faces of people in a room, that brings them into the social environment as opposed to sitting there waiting for someone to talk to them," says Kelly.