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Sheri went into work over the weekend (Saturday specifically) after having been with me all week at the hospital. I had been admitted on Monday after not being able to eat for over a week and losing a lot of weight unaccounted for. When she arrived at her desk she found this card addressed to her, waiting patiently for her. I can only say it was a tremendous uplift for her after worry, uncertainty and being the decision maker in many cases for my problems all week. She had waited through a test procedure to see what my problem might be, and second procedure to take pictures and do a biopsy on a tumor, a feeding tube implanted and then colonoscopy to determine if the tumor had spread; no spread, great so lets go open esophagus some and call it a week. After all that and more — she found this gift of love on her desk.

She was extremely touched that so many had thought of her and her well-being. But not to be just an encouragement these friends had not only collected and given her money where at a time it was sorely needed, they all took the time to write a personal note to her. People often ask me how could I possible see God’s work in the world – I point to events like these. People with no thought and certainly without any expectation of gain did what was loving, what was kind and what did no harm!

Rom 13:8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
[and]
Rom 13:10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love [is] the fulfilling of the law.

The inside of the card:

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The EPA ordered Fort-Worth based Range Production Co. to take steps to protect the families and water supplies after the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates natural-gas drilling, failed to act, EPA Regional Administrator Al Amendariz said.

Railroad Commission officials “acknowledge that there is natural gas in the drinking water wells,” Armendariz said. “They want more data and believe that action now is premature. I believe I’ve got two people whose houses could explode. So we’ve got to move.”

The Railroad Commission and Range Production had not responded to Armendariz’s statements or the EPA’s order.

The EPA issued an imminent and substantial endangerment order under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act after inspections confirmed natural gas in the private drinking water wells that serve two homes in southern Parker County.

Range Production drilled horizontal gas wells into Parker County, near the two homes, from a drilling pad located nearby in Hood County, Railroad Commission records show.

The gas wells were drilled using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals is injected deep underground under high pressure. The pressure fractures the tight shale formation and releases trapped natural gas.

In the last five years, fracking has turned North Texas’ Barnett Shale field into the nation’s biggest natural gas area, with tens of thousands of wells drilled.

Critics say the practice endangers water supplies, citing examples of tapwater that can be set on fire by igniting the gas in the water. In response to such complaints, Congress ordered the EPA to conduct a nationwide study of fracking and water quality.

Industry officials and Texas regulators say fracking is safe because the chemically treated water is injected far below any usable drinking water. They say the gas in widely distributed flaming-water videos was not a result of fracking.

Armendariz said the EPA is not alleging that fracking caused the Parker County contamination, only that Range’s gas wound up in the drinking water.

Required casing and cement that line the gas well might have failed, letting gas escape into the aquifer, he said. It’s also possible that drilling struck a geological fault or an old gas well, he said.

The extent of contamination isn’t known. Range must identify the affected area under the EPA order.

“We know they’ve polluted the aquifer,” Armendariz said. “We know they’re getting natural gas in there. We don’t know yet how far it’s spread.”

The EPA instructed Range, among the nation’s largest gas-producing companies, to indicate within 24 hours whether it intends to comply with the order and to provide potable water to the two families within 48 hours.

It also must install meters in the homes to check for explosion risks.

Range also must survey the local aquifer and identify any other private wells that might be contaminated. Within 14 days, the company must submit a plan for checking the homes’ interior air and surrounding soil for natural gas.

Range has 60 days to tell the EPA how it will trace gas pathways through the ground, close those pathways, and clean up the aquifer.

One of the two affected homeowners declined to comment. The other could not be reached.

Small businesses are feeling optimistic about the economy— so much so that they’re increasing their 2011 marketing budgets. That’s the result of a new survey my company, GrowBiz Media, conducted with the help of Zoomerang, a leading provider of online survey and polling tools.

The Small Business Marketing Practices Survey polled small business owners to find out about their marketing plans for next year. Entrepreneurs plan to increase their online and offline marketing budgets, with the biggest increases going towards e-mail, websites and social media marketing.

Alex Terry, Zoomerang’s General Manager, says the survey reflects business owners’ ability to adapt and use “different technologies to make the most effective and creative use of their budgets.” Social media, in particular, is in the spotlight: “This area of marketing is poised to see an incredible uptick in the next year,” Terry notes.

More than one-third of business owners responding to the survey already make social media part of their marketing mix. Of those who use social media tools, Facebook was the most popular, used by 80 percent. Next came LinkedIn (37 percent) and Twitter (27 percent).

Overall, 13 percent of business owners plan to increase their social media spending next year. Here’s where else they will be spending more:

• Website                           + 17 percent
• Direct mail                   + 15 percent
• E-mail marketing   + 15 percent
• Print ads                        + 10 percent
• Online ads                    + 9 percent
• SEO                                    + 4 percent

The bulk of small businesses’ spending increases is slated for their online marketing avenues. However, the one method most entrepreneurs say they rely on above all others is good old word-of-mouth. Eighty-six percent of business owners said word-of-mouth is important to their companies. Asked what specific kinds of word-of-mouth marketing matter to them, 70 percent cited in-person networking, 50 percent said customer referral rewards, and 34 mentioned cited social media.  Also significant: event marketing (21 percent) and public speaking (20 percent).

One fact that saddens, but doesn’t surprise me: Just 54 percent of businesses surveyed have a company website. I’m still amazed how many small business owners fail to take advantage of this crucial marketing tool. With word-of-mouth increasingly being spread online, entrepreneurs who rely on it will fall behind if they don’t have at least a basic business website.

Of those respondents who do have a business website, 80 percent use it to provide “general information,” 45 percent use it for customer service, and 30 percent use it for e-commerce. Just  13 percent blog on their site.

How does your business stack up against these numbers? What tools are you using—or planning to add to your arsenal in the coming year? Get more details from the Small Business Marketing Practices survey and see how you compare to similar companies at the Zoomerang website.

Indeed, many Europeans continue Hitler’s war against the Jews by supporting fifty-seven Islamic apartheid nation states against the single Jewish democratic state.

The worldwide media has become totally “Palestinianized” and Stalinized. Palestinians—even the haters, terrorists, and torturers, are naught but noble, innocent victims. Israel has literally become Orwell’s 1984 “Goldstein,” whom propagandized mobs are taught to scapegoat for their every conceivable sorrow.

The ideological assault against Israel has escalated. Daily, hourly, in every language, the media repeats Big Lies. Israel is the “Nazi, apartheid” state, the “colonial” aggressor. What a neat trick. Bloody Muslim imperialism and Islamic religious and gender apartheid are thus denied and projected onto Israel.

Israel is essentially, existentially, “evil.”

In 2005, Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” In 2006, he said that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime” and that Israel would “soon be wiped out.”

President Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, but really, he feels Hitler did not go far enough. Thus, he is taking up where Hitler left off—Ahmadinejad’s intention is a clearly stated genocidal one.

No one is stopping him.

We—the world’s civilians—are now all Israelis. The same world which refused to stop the airplane hijackings and human bombs which blew up countless Israeli civilians has now inherited this whirlwind. As they say: It starts with the Jews but it never ends there.

Recently, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that: “To delegitimize Israel is an affront not only to Israelis but to those everywhere, in every part of humanity, who share the values of a free and independent spirit.” However, while his speech, delivered in Israel, was a very warm one, Blair also seemed to suggest that Israel’s best approach to combat the “delegitimization efforts” was to “always be a staunch and unremitting advocate and actor for peace.”

In other words, Israel, alone among nations, must earn the right to exist by being “good.” If we applied this standard to Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, they would have ceased to exist long ago.

Dear Mr. Blair: Israel has always been in favor of “peace.” The intransigence and solution lie elsewhere with the Palestinians, the Arab world, the Muslim world, and with the so-called “international community” which have collectively hardened their hearts against Israel. In 1975, the United Nations resolved that “Zionism is a form of racism” and has since passed 322 resolutions condemning Israel and not one condemning any Arab country.

Europeans and Americans have launched countless petitions to boycott Israel-only. Fifty Israeli and 150 American artists have just launched a performance boycott against the Israeli city Ariel. Meanwhile, they or their colleagues continue to perform in Cairo, Ramallah, Riyadh and the United Arab Emirates. Free spirited theatre people have allied themselves with the most regressive and repressive of ideologies and condemned Israel, the only country that does not honor murder women, or jail and torture dissidents, artists, or homosexuals.

Obama’s United States, along with the western intelligentsia, wrongly blame Israel for the peace failure; they believe that it would be “racist” or “Islamophobic” to expect the Palestinians to first accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state as a precondition for any real peace negotiation. Instead, the American media blames Israel for “not caring about peace.” Human rights organizations and medical journals blame Israel only—although in 2009, the founder of Human Rights Watch finally criticized his own organization for doing so.

Our theatre boycotters wish to be seen as “anti-racists;” yet, and tragically, by holding Arab and Muslim countries to much lower standards, and by condemning their inhabitants to continued Islamist barbarism, they fail every ethical test of non-racism. And, their anti-Zionism is an unacknowledged form of anti-Semitism/racism which remains a politically correct pleasure.

Big Lies and monstrous hatred have gone global. Stand against this. Stand for the values of the Enlightenment, stand for truth over lies. Otherwise, we will all be bombed back into the Arabian 7th century, the women who survive will wear burqas, we will all be ruled by theocratic barbarians.

More than the lights will go out, and not just over Europe; this time, the lights will dim over the entire world.

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. is emerita professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at City University of New York. Well known author of fifteen books, including Women and Madness (Doubleday, 1972), The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and most recently, The New Anti-Semitism, she is the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women’s Health Network. Prof. Chesler is often on international media and is a frequent contributor to INN as well as FOX News, Pajamas Media, and Middle East Quarterly.

In some cases it costs as much as $88,000 annually for an Avastin breast cancer regimen, certainly not a cheap deal. But who is the government to decide that a lifesaving (or life extending or life changing) drug is too expensive for us to be allowed to use?

This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

UC, Santa Barbara physics professor: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’ – Telegraph Blogs « Snow Report Blog

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

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Despite two thirds of those surveyed having had a business website for 2 years or more, only 1 in 10 firms made updates on a daily basis.

That is a pretty sad statistics for the small business Web workers and signifies that many companies continue to struggle in maintaining their web presence. Some other alarming results from the survey:

- 1 in 4 companies admit to updating their websites on a monthly basis,

- over half (54 per cent) admitted to making technical tweaks only ‘infrequently,’

- one third of companies surveyed use only a single domain name, and three quarters own less than 6 domains

- nearly half of firms (48 per cent) are not currently advertising on search engines

- 1 in 3 (34 per cent) are unable to quantify the popularity of their website as they do not look at their visitor numbers

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The Chief Actuary for Medicare has publicly reported that the Medicare payment rates for the doctors and hospitals serving seniors will be cut by 30% over the next 3 years. By 2019, those Medicare payment rates will be lower than under Medicaid, which leaves the poor often unable to find doctors and hospitals willing to serve them. Medicare’s Chief Actuary reports that ultimately under Obamacare Medicare payment rates will be only one-third of what will be paid by private insurance and only half of what is paid by Medicaid. Good luck to Grandma in finding a doctor then.

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep him, President Obama promised in trying to sell Obamacare to the nation. But the question under Medicare now, after Obamacare, is whether your doctor will be willing to keep you.

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Kuwait-born Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim cleric leading the project to establish the center, has been in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the past two weeks but met with a more subdued reaction than the U.S. media.

“Muslims this time are not part of this, they didn’t call for it, they didn’t defend it and didn’t bother with the whole issue,” Saudi columnist, Abdulrahman al-Rashid, wrote in the pan-Arab daily Asharq Alawsat.

The U.S. row is perceived as much less of an affront to Islam than Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets and France’s moves to forbid the full face veil, observers say.

Asked whether the American people were becoming more intolerant, the Imam Abdul Rauf played down American prejudice.

“If they are informed properly about what the actual facts of the situation are, they will always make the right decision,” he said.