Swamp Musings

That ad is allegedly from 1948 but I know at least one can made it into the fifties. When I was a little kid, I was used to seeing things with faces being prepared for the dinner table but when my mom opened a can of this stuff and took its innards out, something told me that this wasn't right.

That cute pup at the bottom of the previous post is Rima. She's 3/4 GSD and 1/4 Handsome Stranger (granny was a loose lady). She's as sweet as she can be but she's at that age where everything must be munched; clothes on the clothesline, potted plants and their containers, recently reduced my 100' extention cord into several smaller sections, all perfectly normal. She also does the random crap routine and will get over it eventually just like all the other critters did and take the biz down into the woods, usually around the end of the first year.

This week I've been out with Cindy (my loppers) and an axe opening up the lane down here as I need UPS to resume service as my drop shipments seem to be getting dropped off randomly and are sometimes hard to find. That's not right.

Since Fall vanished and the temps went back into the upper 80's, I've taken to the cutoffs and kerryboots again and anyone that wears kerryboots know what poor, sloppy footwear they are, no traction and no stability at all. Well, I was sectioning an overhanging water oak limb, not paying attention to my footing, just avoiding the bamboo thorns that were after my legs when zip, my foot went out from under me and I made a 2-point landing. Left knee into the thorns, right hand in a fresh, steaming Rima land mine. That wasn't right. I'd lost my footing in, you guessed it, another land mine. That wasn't right either. Since Rima is of somewhat unknown parentage, I figure she can be a new breed. Shit Sue.

I'm sure there is something wrong with this as well.

Just got my Alltel bill for the month. My DSL rate just went up 57%. Goodbye DSL. **sob!** If I resume dialup service with them (used it from 1997), THAT rate is up 59%. Hello NetZero. This is wrong.



La Grippe of the Trial Lawyers

From the October 25, 2004 issue: Guess who's to blame for the flu vaccine fiasco.
by William Tucker
10/25/2004, Volume 010, Issue 07

JOHN KERRY wasted no time jumping on President George Bush about the unexpected shortage in flu vaccines this year. Why wasn't Bush paying attention? He should have done things differently. And of course Kerry had a "plan" to solve the whole mess.

If Kerry thinks he can solve the flu vaccine problem, he need look no further than his own running mate, trial lawyer John Edwards. Vaccines are the one area of medicine where trial lawyers are almost completely responsible for the problem. No one can plausibly point a finger at insurance companies, drug companies, or doctors. Lawyers have won the vaccine game so completely that nobody wants to play.

Two weeks ago, British regulators suspended the license of Chiron Corp., the world's second-leading flu vaccine supplier, for three months. Officials cited manufacturing problems at the factory in Liverpool, England, where Chiron makes its leading product, Fluvirin. Chiron was scheduled to supply 46 million of the 100 million doses to be administered in the United States this year. The other 54 million will come from Aventis Pasteur, a French company with headquarters in Strasbourg.

So why is it that 100 percent of our flu vaccines are now made by two companies in Europe? The answer is simple.

Trial lawyers drove the American manufacturers out of the business.

In 1967 there were 26 companies making vaccines in the United States. Today there are only four that make any type of vaccine and none making flu vaccine. Wyeth was the last to fall, dropping flu shots after 2002. For recently emerging illnesses such as Lyme disease, there is no commercial vaccine, even though one has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

All this is the result of a legal concept called "liability without fault" that emerged from the hothouse atmosphere of the law schools in the 1960s and became the law of the land. Under the old "negligence" regime, you had to prove a product manufacturer had done something wrong in order to hold it liable for damages. Under liability without fault, on the other hand, the manufacturer can be held responsible for harm from its products, whether blameworthy or not. Add to that the jackpot awards that come from pain-and-suffering and punitive damages, and you have a legal climate that no manufacturer wants to risk. ...snip...


This is really not good.
THE DEMON IN THE FREEZER


This is almost as much fun as a crushed nut.
Arm-to-Arm Against Bioterrorism

..."Smallpox is the most deadly disease in our species’ history. Variola virus causes this disease and humans are the virus’ only natural host. It is transmitted person-to-person, most commonly through the air. Infected people exhale the virus from blisters in their mouth, and anyone who comes within 10 feet of a smallpox victim can inhale the aerosolized virus and catch the disease. There are no currently available anti-viral measures that doctors can use to treat smallpox. Antibiotics don’t work. "...

It ain't sustainable.
The Reimportation Blues

..."What's to be done, then? Clearly, the situation today is politically unsustainable, as events are proving. The ban should be lifted, therefore, not to encourage reimportation, which isn't likely to happen, but simply to allow market practices to surface. Today, with their high-profit American market protected, companies don't have to bargain hard abroad. The ban shields them, allowing them to claim they have to accept foreign price controls. Practically, Americans are subsidizing socialized medical systems abroad."...


I wanna try this at home!
Vaccine production relies on quaint system

* * * * * *

Sunday, June 13, 2004
Since Britney Spears released her album "In the Zone" last November, more than 15,000 Americans have killed themselves.