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A Look at Volunteers and Their Employers

The volunteers’ spirit of companionship can tie their community together more closely, and of course it will fulfill the volunteers’ goal of giving charity to their local poor. But organizing this kind of event can be time consumung in its own right, and before you know it you don’t have as long left to actually do some good. Of course volunteering can be more fun with your friends from work pitching in right along with you. This is a call for companies to look to the example of firms like Connecticut’s Adaptive Marketing LLC. In addition to shopping programs including Privacy Matters 1-2-3 intended to benefit consumers, Adaptive Marketing handles the organizational duties to give its employees the time to reach out to the local community.

Such initiatives used to be annual activities — but this has come to be seen as the minimum of effort. Tennis shoe recycling programs and more active work like tree planting weekends — these and other activities have been arranged for its staff by Adaptive Marketing. By centralizing the organization individual initiatives became larger events, with specific dates, locations and times publicized in advance to help volunteers with their time management. Naturally, it’s essential to let volunteers find programs in line with their own interests. Staff members from Adaptive Marketing can choose from many local initiatives. Prior projects have ranged between areas as diverse as education for children and young adults, green programs, and events supporting arts and culture. The result is that Adaptive Marketing volunteers have the chance to use their time in meaningful, important ways and have fun joining in the process.

Generally, when businesses urge staff to get involved at homeless shelters, it tends to be to help with a specific event or a regularly scheduled, ongoing job. Members of staff may well say they have no time to give, but usually even they can often set aside the hours to lend a hand with some smaller one-day event. Providing a helping hand is a practice with a long history at many businesses. Goodwill builds from the actions of Adaptive Marketing’s members of staff, and the members of staff of companies like it, over the course of company-supported programs like those touched on in this article. Assisting others makes you feel better about yourself — which is just the sort of feeling to make stafrf motivated both in their volunteer work and back behind their desks.

Introduction to Cancer of the Mesothelium

Malignant mesothelioma is a uncommon cancer of the tissue that lines the body’s inside organs. Around 2,000 new cases are detected each year in the whole United States. From this group, around75 percent of cases affect the sac that protects the lungs, named the pleura. Also known as pleural mesothelioma. In about ten to twenty percent of occurrences, mesothelioma cancer could affect the tissue that envelopes abdominal organs, referred to as the peritoneal membrane, causing what is then referred to as peritoneal mesothelioma.

Exposure to asbestos is absolutely the main risk factor for this uncommon disease. Following exposure to asbestos, the time to progression of the mesothelioma disease might be 20 to 40 years. Because of job related exposure, cancer of the mesothelium is almost 3 times more likely in men, than in women. Due to the number of instances rises with your age, there are almost ten times more cases in the men over age 64 than in the males in their 30s.

Having Malignant mesothelioma is a severe ailment, which, at the current time, has a very poor degree of overall endurance. Nonetheless, if it is diagnosed quickly, regimens are then at hand that will seriously lengthen the patient’s life. Advanced approaches continue to be and are being tested by the way of clinical trials.

What Did We Know and When Did We Know It?

As America revisits the rationales for war in the aftermath of Plamegate, the
topic of revisionist history has been repeatedly highlighted in the mainstream
media . A barrage of charges has been hurled into the public forum these past
several months, emanating from Left and Right alike, that Bush Administration
and Democratic leaders are engaging in “Cover Your Ass” revisionist historical
accounting.

It got me thinking. Just what is it that we were actually thinking
and saying back then? And what is it that we have simply come to
believe
we were thinking and saying? That curiosity, along with a
personal desire to be intellectually honest in myself as I continue to oppose the
Bush Administration’s militaristic impulses, provoked me to poke my head
back in to old email bins and review correspondences from those days just
before “Shock and Awe” streamed American might across a billion television
screens worldwide.

After reviewing that correspondence, what most strikes me with respect to
current day rhetoric, even more so than the continuing lack of transparency
and seemingly deliberate obfuscation of the Bush “cabal,” is the constant
Democratic refrain these days that “we didn’t know then the things we know
now.” By and large I see more clearly than ever, after reviewing my own
thinking, and knowing that I was not alone, that we did know
then much of what we now know, or at least we knew enough then to know
that we weren’t sure. The truth was out there, or at least plausible alternative
views were, for anyone willing to look for it beyond the Bush Administration
spoon-fed front pages of the New York Times.

We knew that we believed Iraq had WMDs, not that they had them. We knew, or
felt strongly, that we would only find out “yay” or “nay” if Saddam Hussein were
to be confronted with credible use of force. We knew then, based on the
available, now discredited, intelligence, that Congress did not vote for “war,”
but had authorized war only as a last resort if weapons
inspections failed. That’s what we knew even if that sinking feeling in our guts
told us the Dems had just given away the store and turned the prospect of
violence into the inevitability of it.

After all, anyone paying attention then could also see plainly that the rationale
for war was shifting on an almost daily basis, that U.S. engagement with the
U.N. was not sincere, or was not coming across as such, and that, short of
Saddam relinquishing the reins of power, we were setting up Herculean
milestone measures for the Iraqis that a reasonable person knew they could
not possibly meet especially if they were telling the truth that
they had no WMDs.

Simply put, it was clear to me then, as it was to many others, that the Bush
Administration was rushing our nation to war. It was as clear to me then as has
only become clear to me since that, while we were busy tossing out ideas of
how best to deal with Saddam, our nation’s leadership was busy tossing out,
quite literally, State Department plans to deal with the post-war Iraq they knew
was on the way.

In early March of 2003 I sent out an appeal encouraging friends and family to
sign an online petition in support of continued U.N. diplomacy backed by force.
I received back a scathing reply from a male relative two days later, a missive in
which I was charged with offensiveness for advocating continued diplomacy, a
preconceived dislike for Bush, and, perhaps most hurtfully at the time for
someone who prided himself on going out of his way to be well-informed,
naivete.

Would that this matter were so trivial that I could tell him “I told you so” a little
more than two and a half years later. I know I can’t and wish I couldn’t. For that
matter, I imagine he thinks he was not wrong based on what he knew at the
time. He may even still believe we did the right thing. In any case, there is no
glee in being right about an issue wherein being right has meant unnecessarily
lost lives, an expansion of the very terrorism the military action was intended
to curb, and an unprecedented loss of American prestige. Or to put it another
way, I would gladly grant my relative a smug smile and an “I told you so” in
return for just one single American soldier’s lost leg or one Iraqi child’s lost
mother.

As for the charges my relative leveled my way? I stand by my views on
diplomacy over force as easily as I will grant him his point on Bush. As for
naivete, I thought him wrong then, but now recognize the truth in what he
said.

Back in 2003, the last thing in the world I was thinking was “insurgency” and a
Vietnam-like quagmire. I was not thinking outright lies, misdeception and
cover-up by high-ranking government officials. I was most certainly not
thinking Internet televised beheadings of Americans, the “outing” of our own
post 9/11 intelligence assets in the interests of partisan gain, or, absurdly,
even the glimmer of the idea of torture by Americans and attempts by our own
Vice-President to codify that torture into law.

Back in 2003 we as a nation were divided on means, bitterly so; but, by and
large, we were still unified in purpose, the knowledge that 9/11 had changed
everything, and in our beliefs in the indominitability of American force and our
determination to do good in the world, even if we get it wrong sometimes.
Doves and hawks alike back in 2003 believed we would “win” the war if fought
and, while I was not certain, and didn’t think we could assume, that we would
be greeted with cheers and bouquets and flowers as my relative had
suggested, I was still on some level surprised and saddened when we weren’t.

So, yes, he was right on that count. I was more nave then. I think we all were.
I’m less so now, but think of that lost part of me as just the most minimal of
the most minimal casualties bestowed upon us by the “Law of Unintended
Consequences.” I can’t say I mind that loss, particularly when placed against,
just to name one example, the 600 lives lost on an Iraqi bridge when
inaccurate reports of a suicide bomber created a stampede, the effects of
which were worsened dramatically by concrete barriers at an American
checkpoint. As for me, I still sit here from the same safe perch I sat on then
and toss out words to the world. I consider myself fortunate. I mind very much,
however, the reasons behind that loss, all the thousands upon thousands who
have lost so much more because we chose not to know all those things we
could have and assumed we knew all those things we didn’t.

Raphie Frank is a New York City-based interactive producer, writer,
photographer and designer, but at heart a simple storyteller. At the moment he
is looking for stories to tell with happy hopeful endings, but such stories,
sadly, are far and few between these days.

Additional writings from a “far left centrist” can be viewed on Politinotions.

Conseco, Congress, Sports and the Steroid Scandal - Is Congress going to lay the groundwork to inclu

As of late steroid use in sports has been the topic of
conversation by the media. From Jose Conseco appearing on Donnie
Deustch’s “The Big Idea” which airs on CNBC to Congress looking
to pass legislation to regulate steroid use in professional
sports.

Is steroid use a problem in pro sports?

Well it depends on who you asked, but steroids weren’t developed
in 2005, they have been around for quite some time. Most people
associated bodybuilding with steroid use so football and
baseball players that may have used them just flew under the
radar.

As sports enthusiasts question records that were broken and bash
those pro athletes that have been singled out for steroid use,
the big problem isn’t the use of steroids by pro athletes but
the use of steroids by the youth.

Of course kids that are playing baseball in the schoolyard look
up to their role models and try to emulate them. So laws being
passed to eliminate the use of steroids in pro sports may have
an impact, but having a law isn’t enough. There has to be an
educational process developed so that the youth really
understands the dangers of steroid use.

Legislation without Education in this instance would be a big
error.

When educators and politicians thought that speaking about drugs
or sexually transmitted diseases might increase the use of drugs
or sexual activity with the youth, they found out that kids knew
more than they thought. So they have to take the same stance
with steroids early on.

They have to assume that young athletes are aware of steroids
and some perhaps use them. Then move forward accordingly and
educate the youth on what they are and the harm that they may
cause.

I am amazed that a pro athlete would come out via a book and
admit their steroid use but does not take the responsibility of
publicly denouncing steroid use with the youth and making public
statements along those lines. Perhaps tainting the careers of
other pro athletes was good enough but any pro athlete that has
thousands if not millions of kids looking up to them have a
responsibility to the public.

Maybe congress should work with MLB, the NFL, NHL and NBA and
create PSA’s warning of the dangers of steroid use and begin a
program in schools educating the youth on steroid use. Another
good idea would be to develop a program to educate the parents
as well.

We will see what develops in the coming months and hopefully
legislators will keep in mind that they have to include
education with legislation as it relates to steroids.

Louis Victor New Age Media Concepts 646-403-9972

Environmentalists Often Complain About GM Crops

Maybe some of the people complaining ought to go to Africa and tell people to stop breeding like rats? Think of all the GM Crops can do for plastics, synthetic material and even for NASA since they are working with these R and D facilities to make organic materials with GM crops. All this special R and D is paid for by these companies due to the future promise of potential profits, but it is not without risk.

The only question I would have I guess in the GM Crop issue, which was not addressed is the low sperm counts of the human race over the last 5 years, it is getting critical reduced by half in the UK and one-third in the US. Are the human species also entering an era of Terminating Genes, if so why? Overweight, bad diet? What if those building blocks of life, which are passed into future viable offspring are effected due to the intake of crops with GM - terminating seeds? Would this in fact affect the humans, which eat those seeds within a ear of Corn, bowl of rice, Sun Flower seed. This of course is an interesting thought. Will this effect fertility of livestock too, since they eat GM feed? And can we control World population growth and unnecessary children mortality rates if populations were to agree that if the sperm count was raised slightly in the UK and lowered in Africa and China, in fact less people would be born and there would be enough food and water for everyone? And then the quality of life of each goes up along with reduced death rates in children, no lack of food or water and more safety from disease, famine, virus, pathogen, etc. Although there maybe absolutely no correlation whatsoever, one has to ask. The infertility rates are most likely environmental or from frequency pollution and not from seeds used to grow the crops that we eat? However the thought is surely intriguing indeed.

EzineArticles Expert Author Lance Winslow

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/