Penn and Teller offer a response that takes less than 2 minutes. Not that any of this makes it any easier to see your baby subjected to multiple jabs of concoctions created by Big Pharma. That said, the statistics beg for us to make sure we vaccinate our children. And see here.
Hobby Lobby is suing to be exempted from certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case . . . The question at the heart of this is, should a company be forced to pay for things with which it has a moral objection? [More . . . ]
What kinds of things do people stick into their orifices? It's limited only by their imagination, it seems. This article summarizes hospital reports and it's an eye-opener---wait, I shouldn't have said that, because some of you might now try to stick something in your eye. The data comes from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. Here's a sample of things people stuck into their ears: Ear: SEED PAINTBRUSH "SOME BALLS" SLAG MAKEUP BRUSH PATIENT TOLD PARENTS THAT THE CATS STUCK SOMETHING IN HER EAR GASOLINE BUTTERFLY HERSHEY KISS "CLASSMATE PUT A ROCK IN EAR, HAS PIECE OF PAPER IN OTHER EAR" Check out the article for lots more. But now I must mention that I once attended a deposition of a doctor in Atlanta. On his bookshelf, he had a big jar of screws, nails, coins, nuts and bolts and other metal things. It all weighed more than a pound. The doctor related that a man came to the ER complaining that he didn't feel good. An x-ray revealed all of this crap in his stomach. The medical staff did surgery to take it all out. Shortly thereafter, "the man died of something else." Go figure.
I really enjoyed these mesmerizing videos demonstrating how many types of things are manufactured. Fascinating. Life would be so very different without our factories. Some would say for the better, but I don't agree at all. I don't want to spend the time to make my own food from scratch or create clothes. That would take immense amounts of time away from things I prefer to do. This topic reminds me of Jared Diamond's Germs, Guns and Steel, in which he describes a culture that spends most of every live long day harvesting, mashing and cooking their basic food substance. They can never get to libraries or any sort of technology because every day is a battle to gather enough food. Here's a description from Wikipedia:
The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: 1) access to high protein vegetation that endures storage; 2) a climate dry enough to allow storage; 3) access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surplus frees people up to specialize in activities other than sustenance and supports population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technologic innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation states and empires.
I found this video of a stop-smoking ad on Facebook and wanted to share it here too: