The Get Well Card

Image via Wikipedia

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:

Inside the card the verse Numbers 6:24 The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: …, and it was through the following verse Numbers 6:25 The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:

The Lord showed his graciousness through these Christian men and women, not with a flash of light or thunder – a simple act of kindness and grace. It’s a shame that non-Christians will never see the love, the concern or the grace expressed here, but will only see it as an act of kindness by a fellow human being. It isn’t, it went beyond kindness, it was an act of grace at the time needed, to the one needing and by those that truly meant it.

Related articles

• Charles Gore: “You will have to choose to be Christians.” (lifeondoverbeach.wordpress.com)

EPA says Parker County homes at risk of explosion after natural gas ‘fracking’ contaminates aquifer

EPA says Parker County homes at risk of explosion after natural gas ‘fracking’ contaminates aquifer | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News

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 Business Marketing for 2011 …

Small Business Marketing Outlook for 2011 Is Looking Up

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.

Potentially, Israel Faces a Second Holocaust

Phyllis Chesler wrote this for the rally-demonstration “For the truth, for Israel” held in Rome October 7. It is already available on several web sites and blogs, but we wanted to post it to the PRIMER-Connecticut blog as well because Professor Chesler will be speaking in New Haven, at Yale, on November 18. Chesler will be speaking at the Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective Seminar Series organized by The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). The title of her talk will be “How Scapegoating Israel Diminishes the Rights of Women in the Middle East.” It is scheduled for 4:15-5:45 p.m. at ISPS (Institution for Social and Policy Studies), 77 Prospect Street, New Haven.

YIISA holds seminars most Thursday afternoons during the academic year. The seminars are open to the public and well worth attending for those who are nearby. The schedule may be found on the YIISA Seminar Series web page.

Many of the articles by Chesler may be found on her web site www.phyllis-chesler.com.

---

Potentially, Israel faces a Second Holocaust.

 

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

Feds Deciding When Healthcare Science Costs Too Much To Save Lives

Feds Deciding When Healthcare Science Costs Too Much To Save Lives — Emerging Corruption

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?

Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life

Anthony Watts describes it thus:

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

The Sad State of the Small Biz Web

The Sad State of the Small Biz Web – Website Magazine – Website Magazine

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

Related Articles

• Big biz moves to help small biz (money.cnn.com)
• Small Biz Marketing: More Bad News for Yellow Pages (smallbusinesssem.com)

Obama’s War on America’s Seniors

The American Spectator : Obama’s War on America’s Seniors

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.

Related Articles

• Peter Ferrara and Larry Hunter: How ObamaCare Guts Medicare (online.wsj.com)
• Obama cites a healthier Medicare (voices.washingtonpost.com)

Lukewarm reaction to NY imam on Middle East tour

Lukewarm reaction to NY imam on Middle East tour | Reuters

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.

Italy: Islam denied income tax revenue –

Italy: Islam denied income tax revenue – Adnkronos Religion – Mozilla Firefox http://ht.ly/2xOpg