The value of life

Two squirrels recently died in Yosemite. It was the plague that felled them.
Yosemite National Park closed the popular Tuolumne Meadows Campground  through Aug. 21 in order to treat fleas in rodent burrows, officials announced Friday.

State health officials began investigating human plague in the park and surrounding areas after a child from Los Angeles contracted the infectious bacterial disease. The child had visited the Stanislaus National Forest and camped at the Crane Flat Campground in Yosemite last month.

The child was still recovering from the disease, which is typically carried by wild rodents, such as squirrels and chipmunks, as well as their fleas. Fleas can carry the disease from infected dead rodents to other animals, including humans.
Initial symptoms of a plague infection include high fever, chills, weakness and swollen lymph nodes, officials said. Plague can be fatal if not treated with antibiotics in its early stages.

Visitors were given precautionary information about plague following the child’s infection and the area was monitored, but the Crane Flat Campground remained because public health officials didn’t recommend campground closures, according to the park.

“Human cases of plague are rare, with the last reported human infection in California occurring in 2006,” California Public Health. “Although this is a rare disease, people should protect themselves from infection by avoiding any contact with wild rodents.”
Plague came to the United States via rat-infested steam ships from infected areas, according to the CDC. Los Angeles was home to the last urban plague epidemic, which took place between 1924 and 1925.

Just a thought.

Married to avoid jail??? ....

 

A young East Texas couple celebrated their wedding day earlier than planned thanks to a criminal court judge.

Last month, Smith County Judge Randall Roberts ordered Josten Bundy to marry his girlfriend Elizabeth Jaynes as part of his probation for his involvement in a few with her ex-boyfriend. Otherwise, Bundy would be sentenced to 15 days in jail.

 

“[The ex-boyfriend] had been saying disrespectful things about Elizabeth, so I challenged him to a fight,” Bundy, 21, told KLTV. 
 

Judge Roberts asked Bundy at the sentencing hearing if Jaynes was “worth it.”

“You do know one of the provisions to stay on my probation is you’re going to have to marry her?” Roberts later asked Bundy.

Afraid he would lose his job if he was in jail, Bundy and Jaynes set a date and got married at a courthouse. With the short amount of time to plan the wedding, some relatives were unable to attend.

 

Blake Bailey, an attorney who practices constitutional law, told KLTV the sentence would likely have been struck down if it was appealed.

Will See if the fights end. Just a thought

Disappear...

 

A Michigan state representative is facing calls for his resignation after audio recordings surfaced of him asking an aide to plant a story about him having sex with a gay prostitute.

In a mushrooming scandal, legislative leaders seized the computers of tea party politicians Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat, as Courser refusing to step down  acknowledged their affair and claimed the two state representatives are the victims of a blackmail plot led by the GOP establishment.

Courser, 43, is married and a father of four. Gamrat, a 42-year-old mother of three; says she married her high school sweetheat. She  also fired chief of staff.

The two legislators, who both cite their Christian faith as an inspiration behind conservative policy platforms, had worked closely together and even shared office space and aides. The pair were said to disappear from the office together for hours on Thursday afternoons. 

Tea party Member, Conservative, Cited their Christian Faith, having an affair and tried to cover it up by deceiving others with fake stories. They fired people who just happened to be working for the State but under their supervision. 

This is Embarrassing.  Just a thought.

Brief...!

Image is not related.

A White House staffer is facing assault charges after shooting at a Capitol Police officer using the cop's own gun after a lover's quarrel, police said.

The White House has placed Barvetta Singletary, a special assistant to the president and the House legislative affairs liaison, on "unpaid leave and revoked her access to the complex "

Singletary texted the Capitol Police officer around 2:30 a.m. Friday inviting him to her Upper Marlboro residence for sex.

After he arrived at her home, they “engaged in a brief sexual encounter” at which point Singletary started questioning him about another woman he was dating.

After he refused to give her his cellphone passwords, she allegedly pointed the Glock handgun at him and fired one round in his direction.  The officer, who was not hit, then gathered his belongings, fled the home and called police.

What happened to smoking a cigarette to confirm satisfaction and end of encounter?  
Just a thought.

The Fox

Don leads off the list of perpetrators with Charles Krauthammer, who he said “hates me so bad he can’t even see straight.”  “a sad case and totally overrated and a real jerk.”
 Trump goes on to express his deep disappointment in Fox News, saying that they probably have an agenda.

He adds, “Certainly I don’t have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly, she’s a lightweight,” describing how she came out with a script and a goal of looking tough. He said, “When you meet her you realize she’s not very tough and she’s not very sharp. She’s zippo.”  He is the first to challenge Fox, criticize them that much. Mutual Respect.

 Just a thought.

Rejected......

Donald Trump was disinvited from a gathering of influential conservatives and drew fire from GOP rivals, after he made an indelicate remark about Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

Erick Erickson, an influential conservative blogger who organized the annual RedState Gathering, formally rescinded Mr. Trump’s invitation to appear on Saturday night at an event sponsored by the RedState website. 

The annual RedState Gathering has grown to a much bigger event that brings conservative bloggers and activists together to question top Republicans. This year’s event was even more significant because it came right after the first GOP primary debate.

This latest Trump controversy stems from an interview the celebrity real estate mogul gave to CNN. In it, Mr. Trump lashed out at Ms. Kelly, who asked him about his history of making incendiary remarks about women. He told the rival cable-news network, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her…wherever.”

Comment:
This is not about Kelly... this is about America's Next President. Eric disinvited the star of the debate. I consider that an attempt to silence his voice.
Re-invite the Don and let him do his things. You may get unexpected talks and ideas from him or others...... rather than nothing.

Just a thought

Big-Mouth...

It was the most dramatic opening to a presidential debate in recent memory and Donald Trump stole the show before he'd even said a word.

Perched comfortably at the top of the polls and lapping his closest rivals by double digits, Trump was expected to do well at the first GOP presidential debate of the 2016 season. The onus was on his competitors to seize the spotlight, but none of them managed to change the dynamics in a race that Trump has dominated for more than a month.

Trump has defied the normal patterns of politics and Thursday night was no exception. But it was harder to tell how his answers would wear on voters over time.

Though it was Trump's first political debate, and perhaps one of his first experiences with time constraints and a buzzer, Trump navigated the debate stage with ease, even when faced with unexpectedly sharp questions like the first from Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly.

"One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don't use a politician's filter," Kelly said to Trump in the opening minutes. "However, in particular, when it comes to women. You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals."

Trump's no-holds-barred performance and comments about women could represent a missed opportunity to broaden his appeal. But the biggest risk the unpredictable real estate magnate took was when he refused to rule out a third party presidential run that could spell defeat for the Republican Party.

He shined big time with all including women. He didn't fit what Fox News wants him to fit. He talked about few issues and no body else did.

I started liking the guy.   Just a thought. 

Business Lead..

American Airlines said it would join Delta and United Airlines in banning the transport of animals known in Africa as the "big five", coined by hunters because they are the hardest to kill on foot. 
Lufthansa Cargo decided in early June to no longer accept any trophies from Africa, while Emirates SkyCargo banned such shipments in May.

There has been an international outcry against trophy hunting among animal lovers since it emerged that American dentist Walter Palmer killed a rare black-maned lion that was a familiar sight at Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park.

Delta Air Lines Inc, the only American airline to fly directly between the United States and Johannesburg, will also review policies on accepting other hunting trophies with government agencies and other organizations that support legal shipments, it said.

Nearly 400,000 people signed a Change.org petition that was started by a Delta customer calling for the airline to stop transporting exotic hunting trophies, the organization said.

The bans will make it harder for hunters to get their trophies home to put above the mantelpiece, dealing a blow to Africa's multi-million-dollar game industry.

Bow and arrow hunting of big animals should be banned.  Just a thought.

Nuclear Deal

 

An explosion killed a top official at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, Iranian officials said. He is the third man identified as a nuclear scientist to be killed in Iran in a mysterious explosion, a fourth survived.

In each case, someone placed a bomb under the scientist's car.
  

It is likely that the Israelis are doing it, possibly in cooperation with the Iranian mujahedin,".  Iranians doing the deeds, no matter who is the sponsor.  Some believe Iranians, who oppose the government, are doing that.

 

Roshan's killing comes amid growing tensions between Iran and the West.      U.S. officials say the international sanctions on Iran have taken a toll. 

Stuxnet, a 500-kilobyte computer worm, infected the software of at least 14 industrial sites in Iran, including a uranium-enrichment plant. This worm spreads on its own, often over a computer network.

This worm was an unprecedentedly masterful and malicious piece of code that attacked Microsoft Windows machines and networks, repeatedly replicating itself. Then Siemens Step7 software. Finally, it compromised the programmable logic controllers. The worm’s authors could thus spy on the industrial systems and even cause the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart, unbeknownst to the human operators at the plant.

The Nuclear deal with Iran will help so much for a period of fifteen years. No need for killing, bombing, Malware, or Sanctions. All the talks against the deal is just fake façade.

Just a thought.

Without..

The rich may well be "different from you and me,"  They think everyone else is like them. The richer you are, the more likely you are to think that others are wealthy, too, according to the study published in the journal Psychological Science.

The reason for the misconception is simple,: Since people are more likely to live, work and go to school with others in similar income brackets, when we look around, we come to the (incorrect) conclusion that most other Americans are at least somewhat like us.
  

This isn't usually a deliberate impulse, but it's one that can be hard to shake.

"It is likely that people do not have much conscious insight or control over the processes by which they are making such judgments,".

Wealthier people are more likely to say the status quo of income distribution in the United States is fair, and are less likely to support redistributive policies, 

Low-income Americans and their advocates have an uphill battle getting the country's haves to see the widening gap between them and the have-nots.

The study focused on income, but he said net worth which is skewed even more toward the very rich since many of the wealthiest Americans earn a significant amount from investments rather than income could be an even more telling predictor of these attitudes.

So whatever it is, wealthy or not, please give a hand to the poor.   Just a thought