The Swine Flu Unleashed
Another year, another global mutant flu scare. Except this one carries avian, pig, and human viruses. How the hell does that occur naturally? I suspect an advanced biological terror weapon. Or worse, the pharmaceutical companies releasing a new thought-to-be controllable virus into the wild to help push sales.
More cases of swine flu reported; WHO warns of ‘health emergency’
“A potentially deadly new strain of the swine flu virus cropped up in more places in the United States and Mexico on Saturday, in what the World Health Organization called “a public health emergency of international concern.”
Maybe it’s to urge people to receive the flu shot as soon as possible. To scare them into buying into the hyped up pandemic. Sure, the flu shot will help, just like growth hormone therapy has been proven to help a child develop fully after puberty while spending thousands of dollars over many years. Note to readers: It doesn’t.
US declares public health emergency for swine flu
“As part of that, Napolitano said roughly 12 million doses of the drug Tamiflu will be moved from a federal stockpile to places where states can quickly get their share if they decide they need it. Priority will be given to the five states with known cases so far: California, Texas, New York, Ohio and Kansas.”
The Swine Flu outbreak does not seem natural. Perhaps it was either released on purpose by a certain terrorist group for biological warfare or accidentally released from a laboratory after many years of attempting to create a new type of deadly strain of flu. Maybe, as stated before, it was released by government agencies to increase the sales of flu shots annually.
We may never know the truth, but everyone should at least be prepared if there is an outbreak near home. Just remember: those cheap 3M breathing masks do very little in regards to protection. Chances are no one will breathe it in, but from the contact of the hands on surfaces. It is then transferred to the host as they scratch their eye, put their finger in their ear, or for many different reasons, put a finger in their mouth.
There are many ways people receive the virus, but it’s nothing to really worry about right now. This virus alone will not wipe out humanity. It’s best to just try to stay as clean if possible, but don’t overdo the hand washing and sanitizing, and be aware of birds, pigs, and other human beings that might look infected. Pray at the sight of bird holding a tissue riding on top of a sneezing pig.
Boosting the immune system is the best defense when possible. Working out, changing up the diet, and consuming vitamins are good lifestyle changes if anyone is truly worried. Speaking of the immune system and vitamins, why do people still buy Airborne? It’s absolutely worthless. Many people do not know about the class action settlement, but here’s a wonderful link to the enormous settlement.
“The makers of Airborne—a multivitamin and herbal supplement whose labels and ads falsely claimed that the product cures and prevents colds—will refund money to consumers who bought the product, as part of a $23.3 million class action settlement agreement.”
Though, Swine Flu has made an appearance before. Fort Dix in the year 1976.
It’s good reading material and we should always know our history.
President Gerald Ford was urged by panicky public health officials to vaccinate everyone in the country. A quarter of the country was vaccinated by the time the program was put down. We lived through that outbreak as well as many others. The Spanish Flu was over 90 years ago, we’ve come a long way in regards to treatment, medicine, detection, and quarantine.
Though, this swine virus wasn’t quite as worrisome as other outbreaks in the past. Why was there such a mad rush to have everyone in the country vaccinated? Could it be that flu shots are a falsely advertised product that do not help people, especially the elderly, 65 or older, protect themselves from influenza.
It’s true, the flu shot does little for the elderly. Research released several years ago showed that even though immunization has increased by a huge percentage, the amount of annual deaths has not dropped enough to give credibility to the supposed life saving inoculation.
The CDC does tout statistics involving flu related deaths, but are they real? Out of those thousands of people, many of them had complications due to other related illnesses and pre-existing conditions such as pneumonia, heart problems, pregnancy, and alcoholism, cancer, and dozens of other factors combined to decrease the chances of surviving.
It is a very small percentage of people that actually die from the flu alone annually. This does not justify a shot prone to heavy side effects to everyone in the country at the start of flu season.
When was the last time anyone remembers a relative coming down with a case of SARS or West Nile? It’s mass hysteria and the media fuels it by confirming locations where the disease has been detected. I do not care that they are actually informing the public of such information, but it’s not right when it’s only one man in a hospital bed waiting for the results.
One day, there might be a plague that will cause the near extinction of man. It’s inevitable. It may come from the doing of a lab or from a unnatural mutation after great exchanges between species that allows the virus to adapt to become a cross-species infection.
Also, here is a map using Google Maps that shows suspected and confirmed areas of the man-bird-pig virus.
Also, for a last mention, apparently the GOP fought to strip $900 million for pandemic preparation from the emergency stimulus bill. Way to go Republican party. A disease that sweeps the nation couldn’t possible cripple an already crippled economy any further. Way to play politics instead of responding to what might be in the best interest of the country.
GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness
“When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.”
Here’s to another wonderful summer plagued by, well, yet another plague.
Stroking the Samsung Omnia i910
Wow. Really. Wow. This is truly my first smart phone, but I know this isn’t because of that little detail. This phone has blown me away. This is running Windows Mobile 6.1. Look at these incredible features.
The phone comes with 8GB internal storage. This can be further increased by microSD cards. I will snatch a 8GB card soon for 16GB total soon. Wi-Fi ready. Oh, and a removable battery! No sending this little guy into the shop.
A 5 MP camera with face detection, 15 different shooting modes, image stabilization, smile detection, image resolutions up to 2560×1920, 4x digital zoom, panoramic photography up to 8 frames, flash, video resolutions up to 640×480, and a lot of other little options.
The phone is DivX certified. As for video, there is a Video Editor. This allows for trimming video, audio dubbing, and subtitles. With multi-codec support, it can also play just about any format available with a slew of media players including FM radio, multiple media programs such as Windows Media Player, Touch Player, MPlayer, Real Player, etc. It also has a TV-Out option to play videos and images recorded on an LCD television set and can double as a digital frame.
The Omnia also sports an integrated optical mouse that is really handy while browsing non-mobile websites. There are multiple options for on-screen QWERTY keyboards and awesome hand writing recognition software to be used with any application. Voice commands, with password protection, are also pretty well done.
The phone has a flash light, full PDF support, Office Mobile with Word and Excel, Skype, Opera Browser Mobile with tabbed browsing and directory favorites, chat program for almost all protocols (AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, etc) all in one program/buddy list. You can also password protect this phone; one would need to type it in after the phone goes idle or turns on from a cold/warm boot.
Other browsers include Iris, SkyFire, Internet Explorer (ugh), Bolt, and soon to be Firefox Mobile and Google Chrome. I say Chrome because just about every Google service has a mobile side to it, why not their new browser in due time?
The phone has software for Podcasts, RSS feeds, and tons of games. Soon to be more, lots more.
It has a motion sensor that automatically rotates the screen in several different ways either to landscape or portrait, depending on how you’re holding it. Also, there is an optional feature that allows all sounds to mute when place screen face down.
The Youtube Player freeware (not from YouTube themselves) allows you to search YouTube for videos, save the video on your phone, and will also extract the audio stream from the video into MP3 to save on your phone as well.
Did I mention the native encryption for storage cards and built-in GPS receiver? It also has features to do factory restoration on the phone and to format external flash cards from the phone itself.
I also forgot to mention that you can throw your own ringers on here. Just fire up your favorite program, either MP3myMP3 or Audacity, record or cut a little bit of a song, upload it to your phone with the very easy USB connection into the Ringers folder. That’s it. No further input is necessary, until you want to assign those ringers as your default or to any of your contacts.
Samsung TouchWiz is also rather pretty to look at while adding or removing widgets from the desktop area. Nothing incredibly unique or special, but everything can be replaced with another like SPB Mobile Shell.
Oh, drat. I almost forgot to mention the Remote Desktop support for Windows based computers. It does a wonderful job remoting into the chosen desktop on the network and shows a full screen (on the phone) version of the Windows desktop PC. This feature really impressed me.
If a program is hanging, that’s no problem. We are all familiar with the Windows Task Manager. If you’re not, you probably just pull the plug on the computer when Microsoft Word freezes for more than two minutes. If you don’t use Windows, but are familiar with the Task Manager, it’s probably why you’re off using OS X or any of the hundreds of Linux distros.
I don’t know what else to add. It’s a very solid phone. I can’t imagine what I’m missing, but I’m sure there is plenty. Well, there is the bit about the stylus not actually having an embedded place to call home in the phone, but with a responsive touch screen and optical mouse, the stylus isn’t that necessary. Undoubtedly a last minute after thought.
If you have Verizon, give it a try while you wait for your name to be called. And then while you wait for someone to help you. And then while you wait for the associate to figure out what’s going on with your account. Then while you wait for the associate to fix his mistake that you told him would happen before he went and made the changes to the account.
To the Verizon guy Chuck: I told you that would happen. You should have listened. You made me angry, told me my phone’s promo ended a week ago when another associate told me the promo would last well into April, and then did nothing to try to calm me down besides act like a huge d-bag. I was an inch away from canceling my out of contract subscription. How would that have looked on your commission and to the manager hovering over your shoulder?
It’s a great phone, though. Aside from this phone, the Pre is the only other one I think I would get this year… so far. While I was stroking my Omnia earlier, Talal had to go and mention the Palm Pre. Oh, what a sexy beast that will be if it ever hits retail…
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