The lake’s November chill arches my back, pries my mouth open, forces my eyes wide until, overhead, I see the pewter sky through a cloud of bubbles. A second ago, I was up there, on the dock. Now I’m below the surface, flailing in liquid that feels as thick as gelatin, surprised by the water filling my mouth. A small voice, distant and oddly detached, muses: Am I going to drown?
The answer comes a second later, when my PFD delivers me, spluttering and gasping, back to the surface. Thank God, I think, still troubled by the underwater voice. Now I’ve got to last another 10 minutes, in a lake that’s nearly ice-water cold...
What is cold water shock?
A sledgehammer blow that can cause drowning, trigger heart failure, or chill victims so rapidly they’re unable to swim, hang on to a rope, or pull themselves to safety.
Cold water has been claiming lives as long as we’ve ventured near it, but it’s only during the past few decades that scientists have solved an ancient mystery: Why does cold water kill so quickly? How do strong swimmers succumb in seconds or minutes—long before hypothermia can set in?
The answer is the “huge, huge shock to the system” that comes with sudden, unexpected immersion in cold water, says Stephen Cheung, holder of the Canada Research Chair for Environmental Ergonomics. Known around St. Catharines’ Brock University as Dr. Freeze, Cheung is his own lab rat, dunking himself in chilled water while wearing nothing more than swim trunks. “People worry about falling in cold water and dying from hypothermia, but with cold shock, you’re not in the water long enough for that,” he says. “You die from drowning.”
So that’s why I’m a sodden and chilled guinea pig in Lake Muskoka. To help Cottage Life’s readers understand the threat that lurks off their docks and beneath their boats, my editor (in his warm, dry office) says, “We want show, not tell.” ...
The danger's not over once you're out
In one of the Second World War’s cruel medical mysteries, severely chilled sailors and airmen would routinely collapse and die after being plucked from the sea. Only after the war did researchers discover the victims were being killed with kindness. As rescuers tried to warm their charges, urging them to get up, sitting them next to the stove, plying them with soup or tea, they shifted cold blood from the extremities to the body’s core, chilling the heart, triggering a dramatic fall in blood pressure, and bringing on heart failure.
Anyone exposed to prolonged cold, or suffering from hypothermia, needs to be warmed slowly, under medical supervision. If paramedics aren’t yet on the scene, lay the victim in a plastic sheet and a blanket or sleeping bag, bundled up, and let shivering do the warming.
I spent almost as long lying on the dock in a sleeping bag as I did in the lake, but after eight minutes or so I was able to shuffle to the dive team’s heated truck and change into dry clothes. In another hour, with a couple of cups of coffee, I was over the immediate chill. By the next morning, after a good night’s sleep, I felt close to my pre-immersion self. [emphasis added]...
Introduced in the State Senates of both Colorado and South Dakota last week is a bill known as the “Firearms Freedom Act.” If passed, the bill would make state law that “any firearm, firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in the state and that remains within the borders of the state is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.”
This now makes Firearms Freedom Acts already passed in Montana and Tennessee, and currently introduced in these 21 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming.
According to Gary Marbut of the Montana Shooting Sports Association and author of the original bill that was introduced in Montana, “It’s likely that FFAs will be introduced soon in West Virginia, New Mexico, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina and maybe elsewhere” ...
We are only two weeks away from the Super Bowl. After watching the Minnesota Vikings make mistake after mistake in Sunday’s Championship game, and give away the game to the New Orleans Saints*, I think back to my high school football experiences.
After an embarrassing loss like the Vikings had, our coach would have told us, “Boys, we’re going back to the basics and re-learn the fundamentals of football.”
The fundamentals of football are:
• blocking and tackling
• holding the football tightly and not fumbling the ball
• keep doing your job until the whistle blows
• score more points than the other team
• work as a team, not as individuals
• winning gets you more girls than losing
What could this lesson possibly have to do with state secession, you may ask?
The Secession War of 1776 pitted the English colonies against motherland England and King George. The Declaration of Independence declared the colonies as sovereign nations…as sovereign as England herself.
Soon after the colonial victory, the states ratified the Constitution, which instituted a very strict few duties for the new Federal Government that the states created, and retained all other power to the states and to the People.
Those are the fundamentals of the game.
Over time, the Federal team began doing things for which it had no power or authority. The People’s team began fumbling the ball…and the Federal team always recovered the fumble. The People’s team gave up yardage (sovereignty) on every series of downs. And the referees…the courts…kept throwing flags against the People’s team and hitting them with the penalties.
The game has ceased to be fun to play. The refs have left the field to the Fed team, and now the Feds play however they want. The Fed team makes up its own rules, and the game doesn’t even resemble the fundamentals. And insult above all insults, the Fed team tells the People that they have to keep playing and cannot leave the field.
The whole concept of state secession is to return to the fundamentals. No state would ever consider seceding unless the Federal Government that it helped to create was doing things it ought not do. The fundamentals require that the Federal Government operate within its Constitutional restrictions.
Nullification will not be able to be effective, since there is no American state with a Militia in place to enforce any nullification challenged by the Feds.
Then, you must factor in the reality that the US Constitution has no authority to bind any two persons in any way, and that no legal status exists between the People and the Federal Government. Read Lysander Spooner’s “No Treason.”
So, it is time for the People’s team to walk off the field and stop playing this no-win game. But to do so, seceding states had better revitalize their Militias first.
By the way…free men get more chicks than slaves. Lighten up, Francis!
Secession is the Hope For Mankind. Who will be first?
*Even though I was rooting for the old guy, Brett Favre (a Mississippi boy), the Saints are a Southern team, and the South is where my heart is. Geaux Saints!
DumpDC. Six Letters That Can Change History.
© Copyright 2010, Russell D. Longcore. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”
But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”
Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That’s more than any previous president — and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn’t get its exclusive Obama interview — I believe the top-rated Grain & Livestock Prices Report — 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction’s Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.
But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:
“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview.
Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.
So who’s panting for that 412th speech? Not the American Left. As Paul Krugman, the New York Times’s “Conscience of a Liberal,” put it: “He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For.”
Not the once-delirious Europeans, either. As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: “The World Bids Farewell to Obama.”
And not any beleaguered Democratic candidates trying to turn things around in volatile swing states like, er, Massachusetts. ...
The next time you dine out you might want to take your dental floss with you.
For it seems the toothpick has become the latest victim of the health and safety police - leaving disgruntled diners with food stuck between their molars.
Staff at a luxury hotel chain are refusing to provide customers with the post-meal dental sticks - because they are 'potentially dangerous'.
However, sharp metal cutlery on the table is - for now - still acceptable.
But when Mr Freeman asked the waiter for assistance, he was astonished by the response.
'He apologised but said he was not allowed to give me a toothpick for health and safety reasons,' said the 63-year-old. 'I asked him if he was joking, but he said it wasn't April 1 and there weren't any in the hotel.
'I told him it was nonsense and asked to speak to the manager for an explanation, indicating there were 14 very dangerous metal knives and forks on my table that had been unsupervised for at least two hours.
'The manager agreed it was ludicrous, but assured me there had been a directive from head office not to provide toothpicks because they are potentially dangerous.' ...
In the end, the case of a Willows teenager expelled for having hunting guns in his pickup truck parked next to campus didn't focus on gun rights.
It became a question of whether the authority of school officials to enforce the state's Education Code extended to the school fence – or a sidewalk's width beyond it.
On Friday, members of the Glenn County Board of Education drew the line at the gates of Willows High School.
They ruled that officials in the Willows Unified School District had exceeded their authority when they expelled Gary Tudesko – a 17-year-old with a history of disciplinary problems – for leaving two shotguns and ammunition in his truck parked a few feet from the school's tennis courts on a public street.
"The district governing board acted in excess of its jurisdiction to expel the Pupil," the board wrote in its decision. ...
RealtyTrac® (www.realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released its Year-End 2009 Foreclosure Market Report™, which shows a total of 3,957,643 foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled foreclosure auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 2,824,674 U.S. properties in 2009, a 21 percent increase in total properties from 2008 and a 120 percent increase in total properties from 2007. The report also shows that 2.21 percent of all U.S. housing units (one in 45) received at least one foreclosure filing during the year, up from 1.84 percent in 2008, 1.03 percent in 2007 and 0.58 percent in 2006.
Foreclosure filings were reported on 349,519 U.S. properties in December, a 14 percent jump from the previous month and a 15 percent increase from December 2008 — when a similar monthly jump in foreclosure activity occurred. Despite the increase in December, foreclosure activity in the fourth quarter decreased 7 percent from the third quarter, although it was still up 18 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008.
“As bad as the 2009 numbers are, they probably would have been worse if not for legislative and industry-related delays in processing delinquent loans,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “After peaking in July with over 361,000 homes receiving a foreclosure notice, we saw four straight monthly decreases driven primarily by short-term factors: trial loan modifications, state legislation extending the foreclosure process and an overwhelming volume of inventory clogging the foreclosure pipeline.
“Despite all the delays, foreclosure activity still hit a record high for our report in 2009, capped off by a substantial increase in December,” Saccacio continued. “In the long term a massive supply of delinquent loans continues to loom over the housing market, and many of those delinquencies will end up in the foreclosure process in 2010 and beyond as lenders gradually work their way through the backlog.” ...
LOS ANGELES — It wasn't the first time that Katherine Scheri ruined a real-estate agent's day with a low property appraisal.
Scheri, a real-estate appraiser, had sized up a three-bedroom, two-bath house in Santa Ana, Calif., for $30,000 less than what the buyers offered to pay. A typical deal-killer for a seller.
The agent urged the lender to force Scheri to consider several other properties that could back up the original $310,000 sale price. Then he tried good old-fashioned guilt, telling Scheri her appraisal was going to ruin the buyers' shot at the American dream.
"That's what he laid on me," Scheri recalled. "And I said, 'Don't you care they could be potentially spending $30,000 too much for a house?' "
Across the country, agents and homebuilders are complaining too many appraisals are coming in low, scuttling deals.
The National Association of Realtors says nearly one in four of its members has reported clients losing a sale due to appraisals. The National Association of Home Builders, meanwhile, said low appraisals were sinking a quarter of all new home sales and argues it's not fair to compare distressed properties to brand-new homes.
And that gets to the heart of the problem.
Roughly 40 percent of all home sales this year were foreclosures or short sales, meaning the property sold for less than the mortgage. In some markets, like Las Vegas and Phoenix, they've hit more than 50 percent. ...
Many researchers, including those here at Neithercorp, have projected that the third and final stage of the economic collapse will begin sometime in 2010. Barring some kind of financial miracle, or the complete dissolution of the Federal Reserve, a snowballing implosion should become visible by the end of this year. Data indicates that the dollar and the Dow are running on nothing but false promises and fiat bailouts, and that this game is slowly winding down. The Fed cannot sustain its current rate of liquidity injections without raising the ire of foreign nations heavily invested in U.S. debt, especially when banks have refused to loosen their lending practices as promised, thereby hoarding all bailout funds made available to them and stifling any chance of a credit market recovery.
Understandably, an important question has arisen among those people who are trying to prepare for the event; When EXACTLY will the collapse occur?
Of course, we aren’t psychic, and narrowing down the final trigger to the exact day, or even the exact month, would be extremely difficult. However, what we can do is explain what signs to look for, how to look for them, and what dangers they foretell. Economics gives the appearance of a complex and confusing science, but most economic indicators taught in business schools are really hollow background noise, designed to do nothing more than make television investment analysts seem more intelligent than they really are. All we need to know are the fundamentals, the unchangeable concrete factors that all economies operate on, and how to tell when they are beginning to falter. The following list is composed of signs anyone with a little work and a little vigilance can keep track of, giving them an even greater edge in knowing when the house of cards is really about to topple ...
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