Whatever comes, there's something to be gained from it. Whether it is what you wanted and what you planned for, or whether it is not, there's something you can use.

Flag Counter started April 3, 2008

[I found this very interesting article on the Vaccine Awakening web blog here (scroll down about 2/3s of the way). Read the link in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics linked below. Interesting how our rights to make medical decisions seems to go away when vaccinations are brought up! Imagine taking kids away from homeschooling families because they don't want to inject their children with something that's possibly the cause of many long-term health problems as well as immediate ones such as death.]

Arthur Caplan got his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science at Columbia University and serves as a professor of bioethics for University of Pennsylvania. He is also a consultant for GlaxoSmithKline and commentator for MSNBC.

In 1992 Caplan wrote about forced medical experimentation by doctors on captive people in concentration camps during World War II, including typhus vaccine experiments. At the time, Caplan defended the Nuremberg Code, which was created by the judges of the Nuremberg Tribunal who presided over The Doctor’s Trial at which doctors were charged with crimes against humanity. The doctors on trial used a “greater good� utilitarian defense to justify the biomedical experiments they performed without the informed consent of their captives, saying they did it to further scientific knowledge and “benefit humanity.�

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[If you listen to country music you might have heard this song by Emerson Drive. However, if you were like me, you might not have carefully listened to the lyrics and so missed the entire point of the song. Or, you might be way ahead of me and figured it out, but still would like to read the lyrics. Here they are.]

I was coming to the end of a long long walk
When a man crawled out of a cardboard box
Under the E. Street Bridge
Followed me on to it
I went out halfway across
With that homeless shadow tagging along
So I dug for some change
Wouldn’t need it anyway
He took it lookin’ just a bit ashamed
He said, You know, I haven’t always been this way

(more…)

On the way to visit Mom and Dad, we drove through some back roads south and west of our house for the first time since the ice storm and saw a lot of damage. That reminded me of this photo I took at the MDC exhibit at the fair but didn’t get posted to my weblog. Our house is located about where it says 1″ in the darker blue (heavier ice) area of the map.

I got up early, put on my long johns, dressed quietly, made my lunch, grabbed the dog, slipped quietly into the garage to hook the boat up to the truck, and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour.

There was snow mixed with the rain, and the wind was blowing 50 mph.

I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad throughout the day.

I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed. There I cuddled up to my wife’s back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, “The weather out there is  terrible.”

My loving wife of twenty years replied, “Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that shit?”

I still don’t know if she was joking…

[I stole this great joke from Justin and Calie's weblog here.]

I found a web page here with great information about the teams in the West Central Missouri Conference, and it had the Harrisonville game information for 2004-2006 also. You can see their last loss was September 1, 2005 against Belton. Belton is a Class 5 school while Harrisonville is a Class 3 school (the bigger the class number, the bigger the school). The last 4 games of each year were playoff games. In 2004, they lost the MO Championship game, but they won in 2005 and 2006.

I found a web page here with great information about the teams in the West Central Missouri Conference, and it had the Harrisonville game information for 2004-2006 also. You can see their last loss was September 1, 2005 against Belton. Belton is a Class 5 school while Harrisonville is a Class 3 school (the bigger the class number, the bigger the school). The last 4 games of each year were playoff games. In 2004, they lost the MO Championship game, but they won in 2005 and 2006.

Richard and I spent the weekend visiting Mom and Dad in Bowie, TX and had a great visit. We asked Mom to take some photos of us to try and get something of quality we can use for our Hand n Hand Livestock Solutions materials. I’m not sure we got that photo today (since I’m very unphotogenic!), but we did take some fun ones!

Dad brought out one of his hats for me to wear to match with Richard’s.

Richard, Dad and I in our cowboy hats! Then Richard took one of Dad, Mom, Dolly and I!

Julie took photos of her nephew and Delilah on September 11 and shared them with us. Here’s Delilah in her class with her teacher reading a story.

This was scanned from the Bolivar Herald-Free Press September 19, 2007 issue.

Click here for more photos from that day.