Beware "Silver Formula" Vitamins! I don't know what has happened to the manufacturers of multivitamins and dietary supplements, but their common sense seems to have abandoned them.
+
I have for many years taken a multivitamin-mineral pill with fair regularity. In recent months I had been feeling less myself — less energetic, less willing to deal with the many obligations I face. One nite I was looking at the label of the multivitamin I was about to take and noticed the wording "50 & over" (or some such). I think my late mother bought that bottle for me, and I had only recently gotten to it. I began to wonder if the formulation of those pills differed from the regular pills, or the 'mature' designation was just marketing tripe.
+
The next time I was in a store that sold vitamins, I whipped out my reading glasses and went line by line down the label of differing multivitamin/mineral pills. Lo and behold! There was NO IRON in the "50 & over" or "Silver"-formula tablets. None at all. Do older adults no longer need iron? That seemed absurd to me, so I bought a bottle of a formulation that included an iron supplement and started taking that. Within days, I felt more energetic, more positive, more enthusiastic about my life. (And, I am reticent to mention, more sexual.) I credit the iron.
+
What role does iron play in the human body? Well, consider that if one does not have enuf iron (anemia), the body cannot produce hemoglobin, the essence of red blood cells. Without red blood cells, the body cannot carry enuf oxygen to its cells nor carry away enuf carbon dioxide for proper bodily functioning. I suspect, tho I have not fully investigated this, that one reason red blood cells are red is that they contain iron. Iron is, after all, what makes many red soils red (rust-colored, actually). Indeed, the blood uses more iron than all other body systems put together.
+
I do not think I'm imagining the improvement in my energy and wellbeing level. For one thing, I am so busy with so much in so many areas of my life that I could not focus on differences in diet or dietary supplements if I wanted to.
+
If you are taking a dietary supplement marketed for older people and feel sluggish, check the label. If it does not contain iron, switch to a pill that does include iron and see if, after several days, you feel better.
+
Subnormal Cold. ABC News reported tonite that parts of the Nation are experiencing record low temperatures. Parts of Florida dropped into the teens (F) last nite! Remember that we are still in autumn. Winter does not arrive for another 12 days. We are significantly, subnormally cold. But you are not to notice that. You are not to see the two feet of snow in the Midwest. You are not to acknowledge the frozen pipes in the Northeast. Any recognition that we are subnormally cold might incline you to doubt the "Global Warming" hypothesis, and you must never do that.
+
Not in Vain? ABC World News Saturday also addressed the split in opinion among parents who have lost kids to the Iraq war — no: the hell with the Radical Feminist bullshit that requires us to pretend that women are dying at the same rate as men in the military: these parents have lost sons. Some parents want the U.S. to stay in Iraq until everything turns out great!, feeling that otherwise their son will have died in vain. Other parents have sadly accepted that the war has been not the salvation but the destruction of Iraq, and want us to withdraw, immediately.
+
I'm sorry to say that the bereaved parents need to suffer a second horrible pain: recognition that this war was never intended to help Iraqis but always to hurt them, ravage them, KILL them — for Israel. The Iraq war is thus not a tragic failure but a wonderful success, because it has practically destroyed Iraq and threatens completely to destroy Iraq, whether the United States remains or withdraws. And that will make Israel very, very happy. The more dead Arabs, the happier Israel is. The more powerful Moslem countries around it are destroyed, the happier Israel is. Iraq? One down. Two to go: Iran and Syria are next on Israel's "hit list" of countries to be destroyed by the evil, stupid bastards of the United States Government. And Israel will achieve that destruction unless the people of this country, who have no such horrifying agenda, speak out and force a change in U.S. behavior in the Middle East.
+
LifeSharers. Tonite's ABC News — yes, I am partial to ABC; I worked, my first job in New York, for ABC News, as a clerk-messenger in a documentary unit — also reported on the modestly controversial work of LifeSharers, an organization that promotes organ donation. It does so by enlisting people in an organ-exchange program. If they receive an organ, when they later die, they donate their own organs, first to other members of the organization and, then, only if no LifeSharers member needs them, to the national organ transplant waiting list (on which, today, 92,000 people reside, many of whom will not receive the organ(s) they need but die!).

If you or a loved one ever need an organ for a transplant operation, chances are you will die before you get it. You can improve your odds by joining LifeSharers. Membership is free. Join LifeSharers now.

LifeSharers is a non-profit voluntary network of organ donors. LifeSharers members promise to donate upon their death, and they give fellow members first access to their organs. As LifeSharers members, you and your loved ones will have access to organs that otherwise may not be available to you. As the LifeSharers network grows, more and more organs may become available to you -- if you are a member.

LifeSharers is a private initiative, founded by one man, entirely apart from the Governmentally established waiting list. Naturally, the Government decries LifeSharers' efforts. Rather than challenge LifeSharers on a public-policy or morality basis, the Government asserts that it gets better results. I wonder. The father of my friend Joe died before he could receive a heart transplant. Is the system working so well that we don't need LifeSharers butting in? I don't think so.
+
Demand American Spellings! Last nite at work I encountered a document from the firm's London* office, which required British spellings. The operator before me had left a default 'English (US)' language designation in the spellchecker, which offered to change "recognised" to "recognized", and she accepted the correction. The proofreader said "NO"!
+
Unfortunately, Britain's ruling class is so stupid that it continues to insist upon idiotic spellings that do not conform to either American (great-majority) nor intellectually-defensible usage. The great English-language icon, H.W. Fowler, a Brit, pronounced that -IZE is the superior spelling, but nobody in Britain listened.
+
So stupid(, stupid, STUPID), tradition-chained Brits use -ISE where every intelligent person in the world writes -IZE.
+
I consulted with the proofreader, who is himself from somewhere in the (formerly British) West Indies (judging from his speech; and race). He said that yes, the S should be restored, because the document relates to a Cayman Islands company, so, as I offered, I should change the language of the spellchecker to 'English (Caribbean)' or 'UK' and recheck the document.
+
In some 12 pages, the spellcheck found only three differences: S instead of Z, as above; and "wilful" and "fulfil" in place of "willful" and "fulfill". That's it! 3 silly little differences between U.S. and British English in 12 pages of legal text. Why on Earth do the Brits nonetheless insist on their own stupid spelling when ours is plainly more sensible? Why do we, the greatest power in the history of the world, permit the tiny and inconsequential European island nation Britain to control the spelling of "English", a language of which the United States, one country, comprises 70% of all native speakers? It is PREPOSTEROUS.
+
Especially considering how LITTLE DIFFERENCE there is as a practical matter in most texts, the United States should DEMAND that its spellings be used in all English-language materials produced around the world, starting with (a) all materials created by the United Nations, to which we are the greatest contributor and (b) all materials created by U.S. law firms and corporations abroad, on pain of FINES and other gradated punishments designed to compel use of American spellings.
+
Why should we spend millions of dollars of American taxpayer contributions to publish UN materials in STUPID, British spellings, when WE control the now-misnamed "English" language?
+
If Britain wants the UN to use British spellings, it should bear the ENTIRE cost of "English"-language materials issued by the United Nations — every single copy of every single publication.
+
And why on Earth should AMERICAN law firms operating in Britain consent to use STUPID British spellings? We should crack the f*king whip over British courts, publications, and everything else, and give Britain the news it should have heard at latest 50 years ago: "English" ain't "British".
+
The United States controls "English", as even the New Zealand-born editor of the Oxford English Dictionary acknowledged perhaps 20 years ago. Should anyone doubt that, we can just change the name of the language WE control, to "American", "Anglic", or something else, demand that it be recognized as an official language AND working language of the United Nations, and SEE how many people around the world want to learn "English" as against how many want to learn "American".
+
If our Government will not speak to this — in perfect, American 'English' — then it is up to us who are PROUD of American 'English' to DEMAND that "our" Government use OUR tax dollars to do OUR bidding, and DEMAND that American spellings be used in all English-language materials all over this planet!
____________________

* That's London, England, "United Kingdom" (altho there is no King in that "Kingdom"). Not London, Ontario, which cost the TV show All in the Family's fictional "Archie Bunker" a Christmas bonus, as seems apt at this time of year to mention. Archie never HEARD of London, Ontario, so shipped something to London, England. The cost and delay so infuriated his employer that it cut his Christmas bonus to pretty much nothing that year. I have been to London, Ontario. It struck me as one of the coldest places, humanly, that I had ever been. I spoke at the University of Western Ontario on the Expansionist Party's proposal that Canada join the Union. That was not what made London (ON) seem cold to me. I enjoy a confrontation. It was later, standing on the empty street in the cold autumn nite that made London, Ontario seem desolate. I suppose that LondON is, however, wonderful to be in on a gloriously sunny day. At least that's the kind of variation one sees with my own city, Newark, New Jersey, depending on the weather.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,928 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:12 PM