I am posting this video because there has been recent discussion about the prevalence of GMO crops grown in Michigan. Michigan’s big GMO crop is sugar beets, followed by soybeans. The crops are modified genetically to allow farmers to spray their entire fields with the herbicide Round-Up. Round-Up sprays are designed to kill the weeds but allow the food crops to grow and be ingested by people. Great, so now we are eating food crops that survive herbicide sprays. In any case, the first 5 minutes of the video are compelling, the next 5 for the dedicated.

Yes, it does strike fear into a man’s heart to read about erectile dysfunction caused by an environmental contaminant, but Men, it’s true.  Sad way to find out about it:  men who worked in a factory with BPA contaminants.  It didn’t take long for the BPA exposure to cause erectile dysfunction either, just a few months.  And while these men had higher levels of BPA exposure in China than men in the U.S., it happened fast and it was serious, so lower levels might just take a year to cause wilting while higher levels affect performance within a month or two:

The men handling BPA were four times as likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction and seven times as likely to have difficulty with ejaculation, said De-Kun Li, a scientist at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute

The workers studied did not have to spend years in the factory to develop problems – sexual dysfunction began in new workers after just months on the job, Li said.

Problems with ejaculation coupled with erectile dysfunction?  What man wants to take that kind of risk? Heck, what woman would want her man to take that risk?

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In Belgium, a man has been diagnosed as having been paralyzed rather than in a coma for over 23 years:

Current brain-scanning techniques failed to detect Houben’s conscious state. Photograph: Getty Images

But then doctors used a state-of-the-art scanning system on the brain of the martial arts enthusiast, which showed it was functioning almost normally.

For 23 years Rom Houben was trapped in his own body, unable to communicate with his doctors or family. They presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983.

Is this a rare case of “whoops” that doctors have only done every so often?  Well, no, actually.  This freakishly horrible story happens to more people than we might imagine.  It’s not some science fiction movie:

Belgian doctors used an internationally accepted scale to monitor Houben’s state over the years. Known as the Glasgow Coma Scale, it requires assessment of the eyes, verbal and motor responses. But they failed to assess him correctly and missed signs that his brain was still functioning.

Laureys, who is head of the coma science group and neurology department at Liège University hospital, concluded coma patients are diagnosed falsely “on a disturbingly regular basis”. In around 40% of cases diagnosed as vegetative, more careful examination shows there is still some level of consciousness. He examined 44 patients believed to be in a vegetative state, and found that 18 of them responded to communication.

So, almost half of those people who had been declared to be unable to communicate actually could and just remained trapped?  Great, this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

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This story starts, for me, when I read around about  the “local” Kellogg’s company to find out if they used GMO foods in their cereals.  It turns out, in fact, that the Kellogg’s Cereal company has used GMO products for years, and for my queries specifically, had used GMO sugar grown right here in Michigan.

I had thought for some time that the local sugar sold here, Big Chief, had to be too good to be true, and it is.  It was inexpensive, locally grown, almost obscenely abundant, and Wal-Mart carried it. I don’t know why I bought it after that litany to begin with.  But I did, and I soon felt guilty.  Our local Wal-Mart has fallen prey to big corporate execs who have stopped carrying any smaller local brands, stopped carrying the organic brands and have moved away from anything with a “natural” label, so I was suspicious of any of the products that were left.  Turns out:  I was right to be suspicious.

Check out the local “growing” facility for Big Chief Sugar.  Does it look like it has any farm-base to its facility?  Well, not really, right?  Yeah, I got fooled too.  But, I have since stopped buying the Big Chief Sugar.  See, I garden too, and I do it organically.  I am allergic to the herbicides and pesticides, having come in contact with some in the past and sustained severe burns, even at small levels.  When I had poured out a bird bath onto some ground that had been sprayed with Round-up two weeks previous to that, anywhere the water touched the ground and then my feet caused a skin burn, one that peeled.  It was horrific.  So, no more Round-up.  I even went so far as to fight with my family and our local city to halt Round-up spraying because I had been burned so badly.  So, no more sprays, but I don’t want to support growers who may be spreading Round-up all over, especially if I would ingest it or have it impact my own garden.   No more Big Chief Sugar for me and my family.

What are Michigan farmers going to do if there is no more seed for conventional sugar beet plantings? I would hope that they could find seed at a seed saver’s exchange, much the way other Michigan gardeners do.  I do worry though, what risks have Michigan farmers taken with their own health by planting extensive crops that will be sprayed with toxic chemicals?

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It’s harsh, but these political videos are a lot like the break-up songs I am very fond of. I had taken a break from the usual Michigan fare to blog about some equality statistics with health care, but this video is too good to pass up. I was going to post it on Monday for Music on Mondays, but I kept cracking up. So, since I am sharing in the laughs, I thought you might enjoy this one too. Love the end morphing into George Bush. I think that’s the coup de resistance.

According to the National Trauma Data Bank and a Harvard study, more uninsured patients die in the ER than those with private insurance.  The ER patients without insurance get less care, get transferred more often and die at a higher rate than those with health insurance. The study said, helpfully, that “most survived their injuries” but the insured were almost 200% more likely to die in the ER than the those with health insurance:

In the study, the overall death rate was 4.7 percent, so most emergency room patients survived their injuries. The commercially insured patients had a death rate of 3.3 percent. The uninsured patients’ death rate was 5.7 percent. Those rates were before the adjustments for other risk factors.

Now for those of you unfazed by the 5.7% death rate, consider that it’s almost twice the death rate for those who have insurance. :

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.

The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable.

“This is another drop in a sea of evidence that the uninsured fare much worse in their health in the United States,” said senior author Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and medical journalist.

Considering even doctors were surprised, I wonder how many of them have been in an ER with no insurance themselves.  I have been that patient, and I did suffer injurious care and almost died. Do I think that I am the only one who had that issue, obviously I am not.

Since researchers couldn’t pin down an easy answer for this huge disparity in care, they tried to “account for other factors,” or look for other reasons that those without health insurance die at a rate 200% above those with insurance.  Researchers couldn’t find much, because even “taking other factors into account,” still netted an 80% increase in the death rate, which I suppose could be a victory if those without health insurace only have an 80% higher risk of death in ER?  Still, it’s a crazy proposition to make:

The researchers took into account the severity of the injuries and the patients’ race, gender and age. After those adjustments, they still found the uninsured were 80 percent more likely to die than those with insurance — even low-income patients insured by the government’s Medicaid program.

I am not sure what Medicaid program protection offered, but it’s clear that those with private health insurance, when at the mercy of the ER staff (which is always a dubious “privilege” given the 1 in 3 medical error rate and medical staffers “murderous actions” causing their errors to account for the 6th leading cause of death in America) live almost 80-200% longer than those without health insurance.

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Or, that’s what he meant to say when he declared he couldn’t determine how strip searching a 13-year old girl over ibuprofen was any different than changing in gym class:

One of Ginsburg’s liberal colleagues, fellow Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer, saw it a little differently. He said he had a hard time understanding the girl’s claim that her rights had been violated.

“I’m trying to work out why is this a major thing to, say, strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym,” Breyer said. “How bad is this?”

(Maybe he added young, nubile and hot in there too… Oh, wait, he didn’t, not what I heard….Judge Stephen Breyer likes them young and hot? What, he likes it all hot?  Maybe Justice Breyer says he wants to “pop” the 13-year old co-eds, maybe not.  See, that’s just how internet rumors get started…) What, you think maybe he doesn’t believe a 13-year old girl’s naked body should be available for school administrators to review any time they see fit?  What does he mean, exactly?  So now changing for gym class is akin to a strip search?  What planet is this man from?  And, if a strip search is akin to changing in gym class then simply because a young girl is changing at school, the adminstrators get to look in her bra and underpants?  There is no logic to this argument.  Man, even his photo looks smarmy and annooying.

I know it’s a little late, and I know I should have declared this before, but U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer gets the Asshole Award of the Week for his commentary on offering up a young girl’s naked body for the school administrators’ perusal simply because he compares it to changing into gym clothes.  I used to think only Scalia was an asshole any day of the week, redeemable only by an early death, but apparently I need to add Stephen Breyer to the list, because he sounds like a child-abuse supporter.  Gross, nothing like a Dirty Old White Man’s Club to make me truly disgusted in our “democracy.”  Now we get to add that element of sexual perversion to Stephen Breyer’s rulings regarding children, if we follow his lead of equating strip searches with gym class.

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In a rare but honest interview, Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice on the U.S. Federal Supreme Court stated that the bench needs more diversity and more justices from different walks of life stating that one female justice is not enough:

During the Saturday panel sponsored by the William and Mary Law School, O’Connor emphasized the value of diversity on the bench — in sex, professional experience, geography and religion.

She said she was glad another woman was on the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the third woman justice in history and the first Latina, succeeded David Souter in August. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the other woman on the court. “It’s not enough,” O’Connor declared.

O’Connor, a former legislator in Arizona, said it was important for a president to pick justices from a variety of backgrounds. All nine of the current justices were elevated from U.S. appeals courts.

“I don’t think we should have nine clones up there,” O’Connor said.

Retired Justice O’Connor has stated that she feels some of her decisions are being “dismantled” by the current court, and she has been somewhat dismayed by this:

Asked how she felt about the fact that the current court had undone some of her rulings, the nation’s first woman justice responded, “What would you feel? I’d be a little bit disappointed. If you think you’ve been helpful, and then it’s dismantled, you think, ‘Oh, dear.’ But life goes on. It’s not always positive.”

Obviously upset by some of the decisions, the other female Supreme court justice, Ginsburg, has said she has keenly felt the gender disparity on the court as well. Sotomayor adds a much-deserved, but way too late gender addition.   What remains to be seen is whether or not the Good Old White Boys Club will fight to keep their majority with underhanded tricks designed to keep their place.

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The New York Times ran an article that details President Obama’s  nomination of Mr. Islam Siddiqui for the position of chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the United States trade representative.  The major problem with this appointment is Mr. Siddiqui’s association with major chemical corporations like DuPont and Monsanto.  According to a condensed report of the New York Times article brought to us by the Organic Consumer’s Association, Mr. Siddiqui’s ties to the chemical industry greatly affect his decisions toward agriculture:

The White House has nominated Mr. Siddiqui for the position of chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the United States trade representative. He is presently a vice president at CropLife America, a coalition of the major industrial players in the pesticide industry, including Syngenta, Monsanto, Dow Chemical and DuPont. That job doesn’t seem to square with the Obama administration’s professed interest in more sustainable, less chemically dependent approaches to agriculture.

The Obama administration thus far has been a mess of contradictions if nothing else, and Mr. Obama’s appointees have evidenced the same confusing traits.  Obama says he is working for better environmental standards in China and yet he is allowing a corporate Monsanto and DuPont mouthpiece to be America’s chief agricultural negotiator?

You know you have it bad when the New York Times publishes an article against you, but Obama seems unfazed by his appointee’s political burns.  It’s a sign that troubles me, a sign that the country is headed in a direct swing in the opposite direction of this past election from Democrat to Republican again.  The Republicans couldn’t seem to understand public sentiment, and it appears President Obama has missed the message about his plunging popularity ratings and lack of public approval.  The backlash against Siddiqui is considerable, as he has made a number of assinine comments about the legalities of misleading the public on organics labeling and has been heavy-handed in his international approaches:

Another Washington wheeler-dealer using the revolving door between government and big business, Siddiqui formerly worked for Clinton’s pro-biotech USDA. Siddiqui gained notoriety in 1997-98 as an insider pushing for the infamous proposed USDA regulations for national organic standards that would have allowed toxic sewage sludge, irradiated foods, and genetically modified organisms to be labeled “organic.” At the time, Siddiqui explained:

Number one, there’s no prohibition in law against these two issues, both GMOs and irradiation. Number two, we know that Organics Board had recommended against those two items in the organic agriculture. There’s a considerable debate on these issues; it’s a public debate issue. So essentially, the department has felt that we want to open it up, we want to seek comments. And it could be any one of the three choices; either it could be allowed, it could be prohibited, or it could be allowed on a case-by-case basis, especially dealing with GMOs.

Another reason he gave was ” … some of the agencies within the U.S. government felt that we will be inconsistent in going to the EU and telling them to not require GMO contents being spelt out in ingredients.” As the special trade advisor to Clinton’s USDA Secretary Dan Glickman, Siddiqui threatened Europe with economic reprisals from the WTO is the EU wouldn’t allow GE food imports.

This appointment looks like it fits under a Bush-appointee member with the international threats, the urge to push the public into accepting GMO’s with the concept of a paternal legal argument, and basically ignoring public fall-out.  Great. The mass of contradictions and lack of attention to public opinion will most certainly lead to Mr. Obama’s downfall.

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Hey WordPress Readers, Michigan has made it to another blog–now there are 2 (Mine and this other one):

Anyone know about Michigan poll taxes?

November 17, 2009 ·

We got a request today from someone “researching the history (specifically as it relates to Michigan) of poll taxes, vouchers and other means of limiting access, to either a poll, the court etc.”

In Michigan, to file a medical malpractice lawsuit, the litigant must have something called “an affidavit of merit”, and that costs money.

The researcher wants to pursue the line of argument that requiring these affidavits of merit serves as a barrier to the court, and that in turn violates an individual’s constitutional right to redress.

Actually this is listed under http://OpenRecords.wordpress.com.  How proud am I?  Well, actually, this whole bit about limiting access based on money doesn’t make me proud.  So, I guess the question becomes:  “How proud am I that another blog is covering Michigan even if there are big constitutional issues with the courts?”  Guess I am proud to see Michigan and users computing in the cloud.  But, anyone with more information might want to check out the other blog to add a comment.  Woohoo, we Michiganders sure know how to have fun, don’t we?

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Okay, reading another report about how many medical errors cause deaths among Americans here, and I am starting to wonder why  no criminal charges are filed against physicians/hospitals who cause deaths.  (According to Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, the criminal charges can be shot down by a small-town judge and not be appealed…)

Lawyers are a popular target, because our citizenry suffers from epidemic jealousy of anyone who has the potential to make a lot of money. However, without lawyers and courts, the wealthy and the oppressors cannot be combatted.

The same article by Saul Segan:  Tort Reform—Another Dangerous Scapegoat, published on the Huffington Post website does make a valid point when discussing lawyers–people love to hate them,but everyone needs one at some point.  And, when the chips are down, you want a good attorney who will help you in your fight, because let’s face it:  we all have to fight somewhere and some time.  Every person will have some sort of dispute:  custody disputes, divorces, wills and estates, property disputes, criminal issues, injuries, problems with jobs, etc.  No person can escape the fact that at some point in time, he or she will be calling for some sort of legal advice, because the law is equated with determining our rights.  Who doesn’t want to know what their rights are?

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I like the idea of putting a motherhood museum out there, but the best message I have heard about mothering in a while: love them or hate them, you wouldn’t be here without them. So go ahead and watch, because even the giggles are worth it. Really, they are…

There is nothing hotter in a man than naked need. I thought that this was another ackwards brothel-type video where the guy advertises his prowess in bed and offers to pay the woman to try it out, but it’’s got me watching it over again for nuance. I love the fact that he is willing to “perform for ya.” Okay, always like a man who advertises his skills in such a way as to be interested in what a woman wants. I have never been the kind of woman who feels it’s a special privilege to give birth to any rich man’s progeny. So sue me, but the whole pregnancy and only two ways to give birth (cut it out or push it out) doesn’t seem like any amount of payment for vaginal pain after one night of pleasure is really an even trade. But, I digress, because what I find interesting in this video is the idea that it’s all (Spoiler Alert) his fantasy. The stereotypical family is his illusion, and I like it. I had to put his mug shot up just to show how far he has come, and I guess it’s this juxtaposition that I find so interesting. Good for Monday Music.

OMG! (to steal a phrase from those much younger than I), LOL.  In fact, I can’t stop laughing.  I have been looking at one of the areas of tort reform that is hotly contested in Michigan, and I came across this marvelous quote from George Bush, acting as President back in 2004:

“Too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”–George Bush

Are you laughing too??  I am still laughing.  I think it’s particularly accurate considering some of the things I have heard about the manner in which OB/GYN’s “practice” medicine, instituting their opinions and “care” when women are in their most vulnerable and passive positions and physical states.  God, it doesn’t get really any better than that.   I had been looking at articles about how medical malpractice lawsuits would influence tort reform, and I came across that quote that had to be shared.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, talking about medical malpractice reform, but here is a good quote too:

In 2003, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies issued a devastating report detailing the scope and gravity of the safety of the U.S. health care system. Two studies showed that “at least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented.” As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt found in September 2009, “After reviewing thousands of patient records, medical researchers have estimated that only 2 to 3 percent of cases of medical negligence lead to a malpractice claim.” And as Tom Baker, director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law and author of The Malpractice Myth, noted in August, the rate of claims is going down:

“We have approximately the same number of claims today as in the late 1980s. Think about that. The cost of health care has doubled since then. The number of medical encounters between doctors and patients has gone up — and research shows a more or less constant rate of errors per hospitalizations. That means we have a declining rate of lawsuits relative to numbers of injuries.”

So, while health care costs more, causes the same injuries and people go to the doctor more, lawsuits have gone down because of tort reforms designed to protect doctors at the expense of patient rights.   That’s what I really wanted to get out when I found the quote about doctors and their loves.  I guess I will just have to put this in another post. I am laughing to hard at George Bush.

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Well, I am having a spectacular Monday, accidentally sending a text first thing this morning to someone else that I couldn’t get to the phone when my sister called ’cause I had run to the bathroom. Don’t know who got that one, but it wasn’t my sister, and she only got it after she made it to work. Lovely. So, if you have had that kind of Monday morning already. (I started mine that way before 8am.) This might make you feel better. Good for a Music Monday post, because damn it, Mondays can suck. Musical stairs–think I want some for my house.

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