Posts

Posted on

Vaping Victim

Two weeks ago today we loaded up a rented suburban with all the makings of a dorm room and set off for Colorado to take our oldest, Piper to college.
As we began our drive, Piper was coughing and mentioned that it hurt to take a deep breath. I didn’t think too much of it, but decided to keep an eye on it and figured we could pop into a CVS Minute Clinic on the road if I felt it warranted a check. On Saturday morning we decided we’d get her checked out when we actually got to Greeley that afternoon, since we didn’t have that much further to drive. It turned out to be the best decision we made, since there are no Minute Clinics in CO and we were forced to go to an urgent care that is linked in with the UC Hospital. We seriously thought this would be a quick visit, that she possibly had bronchitis and she’d be fixed up quick and moving into her dorm the next day… that isn’t at all what happened.
An urgent care visit showed what the doctor believed to be an “early pneumonia” (though the radiologist initially read her chest X-ray as clear and unremarkable.) However, things declined very very quickly and when she was sent to the ER the following morning a CT scan showed what the ER doctor called a diffuse pneumonia – not just contained to one lobe of the lungs- hers was all over. And in the meantime, they struggled to get a pulse ox reading in the 90s. It became clear we weren’t moving her in. In fact, we weren’t leaving the hospital at all that day. Or any day soon. She was admitted that afternoon and the decline continued. They put her on oxygen which we watched climb from 1 to 2 to 3 to 8 to 9 to 11 liters. At the worst point, she was getting 35 liters of oxygen and couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom without all her alarms screaming because her oxygen saturation would dip to 83 or 84. The nurses and I had to wear masks to protect us from whatever virus or bacteria had begun to literally wreak havoc on her body. She cried to her nurse that it hurt too bad to take a breath. She was getting IV fluids, antibiotics, pain meds, anti-nausea meds and a diuretic to help clear fluid from her badly inflamed lungs. She continued to need more and more oxygen. The pain meds barely took the edge off. Tests were run, more meds were ordered, she was eventually transferred to a room on the ICU floor in case her oxygen needs became even more severe.

How does a healthy 18 year old become a VERY sick patient whose oxygen needs just keep increasing?

VAPING. That’s how.

She became Colorado’s first confirmed case of what was called a “sudden and severe lung illness due to vaping.”

Here’s where the choice became tough. I could feel like a failure. I could choose to wear the poor choices my teenager has made like a lead weight and keep silent. Because this must reflect on me- somehow this means I’m not a good mom.
That’s BS.
I’m going to call that narrative out for what it is- a LIE from the devil.

I am a damn good mom. I am “all up in my teenagers’ business.” I ask the questions, I stay current on the dangers out there. But PARENTS- your kids will make bad choices. It will happen. Mine had been caught before, I confiscated, I grounded, I forced bedroom doors to stay open. I snooped. I sniffed. And still, this happened.
And I’m not going to keep silent. Because God didn’t give me a big mouth for nothing and you always have the opportunity to turn your MESS into your MESSAGE. Because we are failing our kids here. They are being wooed by an industry that has zero regard for their safety and health and the departments that are designed to protect them ARE. NOT. DOING. IT.
Nobody is going to protect them if we don’t.

These devices are marketed to our children. They are designed to look like USB flash drives or regular pens. Some even look like Apple Watches. Tiny little pods you can pop on, carts that contain THC, cute little refill bottles of gummy bear or blue raspberry liquid.
The first e-cigarette hit the American market in 2007 and until 2016 ANY E-cig or ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery system) could freely enter the market without any pre-market approval. Let’s lure them in with sweet flavors and get them hooked on nicotine. And throw some weed in there too. But be super careful because the sophomore girl who gave you that in the hallway doesn’t actually know what it is or where it came from.

Piper was released from the hospital a week ago after a one week stay. She has just weaned off a steroid that we believe saved her life. Which was ordered by a doctor who I truly believe to be an angel. He asked the right questions, paid attention to the answers and spent hours doing research – calling other doctors and hospitals to compare cases. She’s no longer on oxygen. She’s expected to make a full recovery. She’s also 100% owning her choices and has asked me to share her story so that other teenagers can hopefully make other choices. Her lung doctor told us, he fears that had we waited one more day she’d have been unresponsive on a ventilator. And while i truly believe that God held us on this journey and I’m sending up prayers of gratitude for this outcome- thoughts and prayers alone just aren’t going to cut it in this case.

What I can do, and I’d love for you to join me in is DEMANDING CHANGE.

All e-cig makers must submit apps to the FDA in the next 10 months but given the fact that e-cig or vaping use has risen 78% in high schoolers and 48% in middle schoolers we can’t afford to wait. If our agencies aren’t going to protect our kids RIGHT. NOW. then we need to educate our kids and ourselves on the dangers of vaping. And it’s not ONLY “illegal THC carts off the streets” as you may read in various places. Companies are not required to disclose their ingredients and chemicals that are deemed as “generally safe to eat” are being inhaled. Along with heavy metals and other known irritants. It’s easy for them to have endless options to vape. Whether they know what’s in them or not.

Share Piper’s story. Do your research.
Talk to your kids. Talk to their friends. Talk until you’re out of breath, or they just might be.

Posted on

Confessions of a sugar addict

(From Ian at Alkaway from where I source the water filters I sell)
From one passionfruit my habit increased to a bowl of pawpaw, banana, passionfruit and orange… Every night.
So what? Well… last week I had my periodic appointment with my local skin clinic. Being an old surfer with Scottish skin I punished my epidermis mercilessly in search of that last great wave and of course, my skin is taking its revenge at age 72. Every visit, Dr Tim removes benign keratosis from all those parts of my body I ruthlessly cooked so long ago.
This visit, however, was different. He looked at a hard scab on the back of my neck and asked a strange question:
“Ian, are you stressed lately?”
He related that he has seen men in particular display a relationship between stress and what he was looking at. A squamous cell carcinoma.
I answered that no, I am far from stressed. I meditate daily, live a clean life and eat well.
Hmmm. he answered. Don’t you just love those doctor-hmmms?
Well, he cut it out on the spot and inserted 5 stitches.
Coming home to my true health guru, Cassie, I reported what he had found and done.
“You’ve never had one before, have you?”
“No, never. Plenty of keratosis, but none these nasties.”
“So… what’s changed in your diet?” she asked. “Ah! Fruit. You’re gorging on fruit! Fructose. The nasty sugar.”
Now… I’m not saying this is scientific in any form. But… think about it. Fruit, and sugar, is, like any dietary aberration, addictive. I had lapsed into an addictive sideline to my main alkaline keto diet! Sugar had sneaked back into my no sugar, low carb, alkaline diet.
As Dr Tim said, stress causes things like this. Stress, he said, can cause all sorts of nasty health conditions. So… is mental stress different to physical stress? I don’t think so. I think it is entirely possible that the stress that the excess fructose put on my metabolism caused the squamous cell carcinoma.So… Fruit? Yes. But in moderation!
Our ancestors only ever accessed fruit in season. And I’m sure they never drank fruit juice every day, or fruit smoothies, or any of the endless permutations our culture now tempts us with! Just keep in mind your intention. Balance through alkalizing.

Posted on

Cutting Hedge Music

Cutting Hedge Music

Some of the comments gated a special pension. Here are two.

Aw leaf them alone! They are just branching out into new areas of their music – cultivated growth, if you will. Some would try to box them in but they are going places, building on their roots to find new and interesting melodies.

Even though I have a deeply rooted affection for puns, they really need to trim some of these down. Although I must admit, this tree-o of musicians do seem to be very avant-garden. Maybe we should set them up with a hedge fund so they can really grow their capital. I foreseed great things in their futures.

Posted on

Australia flexes its ‘democratic values’ against Iran in next Anglo-American war crime

Scott Morrison’s obsequious falling in behind the United States and United Kingdom in targeting Iran again confirms the late former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s assertion that Australia does not have an independent foreign policy.

At least elements of the media, unlike the Labor Party, are sceptical about this decision, as they should be, given that it is so clearly a crisis orchestrated by the Trump administration and British government, and yet another deadly Middle East regime-change fiasco in the making.

So why is Labor supporting it? Once again, ALP stands for Another Liberal Party—like with banking abuses, police-state laws now used to raid journalists, and mistreatment of refugees, Labor is desperate to be bipartisan on foreign policy, not just because it is scared of its own shadow, but because it is also subservient to the Anglo-American war machine. The only differences between Labor and the Liberals are in degree and tone, not in substance.

More lies

The government claims it is deploying the ADF to the Strait of Hormuz to “de-escalate” the situation, and to protect “freedom of navigation” from Iran, which has been seizing ships. As usual, their claims are premised on lies.

The current flash point in the Strait of Hormuz has its origins in US President Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran.

It escalated on 5 May when Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton—one of the notorious neoconservative liars who orchestrated the 2003 invasion of Iraq—suddenly announced the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and a bomber taskforce to the Gulf in response to an unspecified “number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings”.

Very significantly, on 14 May the top UK Commander in the region, Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika, publicly contradicted Bolton in a Pentagon briefing to state that there was no increased threat level from Iran. Just two days later, the UK government overruled Ghika and agreed there was an increased Iranian threat.

From that moment, the British escalated the situation, in coordination with the Washington neocons. On 19 May the UK announced the deployment of its waterborne SAS equivalent, the Special Boat Service, to “protect shipping”. Only then did shipping incidents start to occur—indicating that either John Bolton and his British cronies are the prophets of our time, with greater insights than even local British commanders, or that they have orchestrated the incidents to provoke an escalation that can be the pretext for an invasion to achieve Bolton’s longstanding goal of regime change in Iran.

The following shipping incidents have occurred after the deployment of US and British forces to the Persian Gulf:

  • In mid-June two oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf of Oman, which US Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo instantly blamed on Iran, based on “intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise”, etc., which he claimed no other force present in the area had. Not true; the British SBS does.
  • On 4 July, away from the Persian Gulf, British Marines seized an Iranian oil tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar in the Mediterranean Sea, on its way to deliver oil to Syria. The British claimed to be enforcing EU sanctions against Syria, but aside from the fact that the USA and EU’s sanctions on Syria are a crime against humanity in pursuit of another regime-change war crime based on lies, those sanctions didn’t apply to Iran—it was purely a provocative act of piracy. (On 19 August Gibraltar let the ship go, over US objections.)
  • On 10 July, the British staged a provocation in the Gulf by having an empty oil tanker, the British Heritage, sail through the Strait of Hormuz without its transponder on and closely shadowed by British Navy Frigate the HMS Montrose. Sailing without a transponder is a danger to other shipping, and as Iran is responsible for shipping on its side of the Strait, an Iranian ship attempted to intercept the tanker before the Montrose bore down and warned it off.
  • On 19 July, another British ship, the Stena Impero, was detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard after also sailing with its transponder off and moving in the wrong traffic pattern. It must be suspected that this was the outcome the British hoped for: then-Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt loudly and shamelessly pontificated that “these seizures are completely unacceptable”, insisting that “all ships can move safely and freely in the region” (but not Gibraltar apparently).
  • There are a number of other claims of Iran attacking or capturing ships in the Gulf which are either unproven, or must be seen in the context of the Anglo-American escalation.

Now, Australia is buying into the lying Anglo-American narrative, citing the freedom of navigation chestnut to justify our presence.

A comparison must be made to China and the South China Sea, where our Anglo-American allies use the freedom of navigation excuse to sail naval forces with enough firepower to blow up the world. The two countries that most depend on freedom of navigation in both the Persian Gulf and South China Sea are not the USA and UK, but China and Iran. Notwithstanding the current crippling US sanctions, Iran depends entirely on shipping through the Gulf to sell its oil. Iran’s biggest customer is China, which depends on shipping through the Persian Gulf for half of its oil imports, which then must also be shipped through the South China Sea.

Bizarrely, Iran and China are being demonised as the risk to the shipping lanes they depend upon most, when in fact the real risk is Anglo-American provocations. This demonisation was taken to its extreme when Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie compared the rise of China to that of Nazi Germany, and called China a “challenge” to our “democratic values”. Hastie made the comments in a 26 June speech to the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society in London, one of whose founders, Cambridge University professor Brendan Simms, trumpeted his Society’s vision in a 2011 article praising the Libya intervention entitled, “Democracy can be dropped from 10,000 feet” i.e. “democratic values” can be bombed into countries. After destroying Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Hastie’s neoconservative friends are now targeting Iran for a regime-change bloodbath, and fantasise about ultimately overthrowing China.

Australians must face the fact that Iran and China are not threatening the world, we are. It is our responsibility as citizens to demand our government withdraw from the Anglo-American regime-change agenda, assert a truly independent foreign policy, and support a new international economic order based on sovereign nation-states respecting each other’s sovereignty, but cooperating on economic development that can lift the world out of poverty and ensure prosperity for future generations.