Elisabeth’s basement days were chronicled

By using very small pieces of paper that she hid in different places in her underground prison, Elisabeth Fritzl managed to keep a diary with dates and times of almost every attack by her father Josef Fritzl, on her or the kids.

In one emotional entry she describes how she rocked her dying son in her arms until he turned blue and died from respiratory distress. He was Elizabeth’s 7th child sired by her sick father.

Josef Fritzl later burned the infants body in a furnace and spread the ashes in his garden. It is this little boy’s death that forms the basis for the murder plea against Mr. Fritzl.

In other diary entries, Elisabeth describes how she’d catch rats with her bare hands, and how fascinated her children were by every day items like a mirror or bathroom scales.

The diary explains how Elisabeth at first struggled against her father’s attacks, but once her first child had been born, she stopped struggling for the sake of her children.

This diary, which describes Elisabeth’s 8,642 days underground reveals how fickle Josef Fritzl’s decisions on who would live with him and his wife above ground were. One of the children accompanied him above ground as he had managed to wind a length of thread around his toe and would not stop crying. Josef Fritzl, worried that his neighbors would hear the crying and become suspicious, brought the child up into the house, but by the time he had discovered the thread, his wife had already come home. He therefore made up a story that Elisabeth had left the child outside their door and gone back to the cult with which he claimed she was living.

The diary also bears witness to how Josef Fritzl would torture the children stuck underground with pictures of their siblings playing in the garden or in a swimming pool.

I’m not an advocate of the death penalty, but I think this case could change my mind. This man does not deserve to breathe the same air we do. However, I think locking him in solitary confinement underground without access to daylight, for the rest of his miserable life, would be the best punishment for him.

The inappropriate and smallminded outrage of the catholic church

Imagine being 15 weeks pregnant with twins, you weigh 80 pounds yourself, and you’re 9 years old. This is not the product of a loving relationship, but rather the result of having been raped by a stepfather that should have protected you. This sounds bad enough, right? Wrong.

The catholic church then goes and gets its nose all bent out of shape, excommunicating everyone around you because they agreed that this pregnancy would kill you, as a tiny 9 year old, and they allowed you to have an abortion. When, according to the catholic church you should have been forced to carry this pregnancy to term, and then have a c-section. Just so the twins, the product of rape and betrayal, can live. Even if it means you, the 9 year old, would more than likely die carrying these fetuses to term. She is tiny! Her uterus cannot accommodate one, let alone TWO fetuses at this age. They would ALL die. Where is the common sense?????

http://news.aol.com/article/9-year-old-girl-abortion/369661

I’m disgusted. This is a CHILD, who has been violated in the worst way, young and innocent and probably incredibly conflicted about the whole thing, and the catholic church goes and villifies her and her family. NOT the stepfather who raped her. Priorities, right?

THIS is why I’m not religious.

Sex inequalities in the treatment of acute myocardial infarction

Survival chances both in hospital and after discharge in women with acute myocardial infarction are reduced because they do not have the same opportunity for therapeutic intervention as men.

That’s a pretty horrible sentence right there, don’t you think? But it’s true. The study I took that conclusion from was done in 1994. The same was still true as found by a study done in 2000. It is still the same today. Have we not learned anything in the 15 years since that 1994 study was done??

The American Heart Association in December 2009 reported:

“Men and women have about the same adjusted in-hospital death rate for heart attack — but women are more likely to die if hospitalized for a more severe type of heart attack, according to a report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.”

So, no real difference in the care women receive,  from 1994 and here we are more than a decade later. Not only that, but heart disease is now the #1 killer of women in a big part of the developed world. And still, we get sub-standard care.

Having been on the receiving end of this sub-standard care myself (I have an arrhythmia and a dilated ascending aorta), this incenses me enormously. I’m sure I’m not the only woman who’s been made to feel like a hypochondriac when arriving in the ER with chest pain. My chest pain has so far been impossible to explain, although the medical treatment I received to treat my 40,000+ PVCs a day has made a TREMENDOUS difference, and when I get pain with symptoms of a myocardial infarction (chest pain, pain in the left arm, tingling in the fingers, pain between the shoulder blades, pain up into the jaw) I more often than not try to ignore it and stay home. Everyone advises you to go to hospital with these symptoms, and far too many times I have done – only to be treated like I’m an idiot at worst, and indifferently at best – and I’ve come to a point where I will avoid heading to the ER for as long as possible. Now, I also know I have a very healthy heart (except for the dilation on the aorta) with vessels clean as whistles so I feel quite safe in staying home now that I have been checked out more times than I could ever have cared to. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right action to take. In fact, though I don’t always heed this advice myself, my advice to anyone dealing with symptoms of a heart attack is HAVE SOMEONE TAKE YOU TO THE ER or, better still,  call 911.

However, if you, as a woman arrive in the ER and you really ARE having a heart attack, can you be sure you’ll be taken seriously? And let’s say that you ARE taken seriously and admitted for care, can you be sure that you’ll get the same treatment a man would get, and hence improve your chances of survival? That is the question.

Conservatives – where did your common sense go?

So, I get an email today from a republican friend, with an incensed question of  “WHAT is the world coming to” and the reason for her incredulous question is an email she’s had from another conservative friend claiming that Obama has given China the right to exercise eminent domain over the USA if we default on our loans.

I’m flabbergasted. I know this person. She’s SMART. Yet, she has fallen for this CRAP, hook, line and sinker. She actually believes that Obama has, effectively, sold us to the Chinese. I mean.. REALLY. WHERE is the frickin common sense?????

First of all, were this to be true, wouldn’t their very own Propaganda Tank, Fox News, be ALL OVER it? Wouldn’t they be gleefully and righteously reporting about the scumbag action purportedly committed by our President?

Second.. there simply HAS to be a limit to the dastardly deeds these people believe our President capable of. I know, I know.. we’ve had 8 years of dictatorship rule, secrecy and flagrant violation of international laws, but that was then.. under REPUBLICAN rule. (My republican friend never ONCE made a huge song and dance of anything our former President did, though. Funnily enough.) But even though we have been shown how low that office has been capable of stooping, this would be so low that the whole world would draw a communal gasp of horror. It is so unthinkable, I didn’t even imagine for a minute even a Conservative fanatic could come up with it. But come up with it they did, and the masses have done their normal lemming train and believed every word of the diatribe.

Republicans, conservatives. Shame on you. Don’t be dragging otherwise intelligent people into the deep crevasse of your ludicrous nonsense. It is unpatriotic.

Why is it that hypocritical people don’t realize that they are?

Rush Limbaugh… when you look up the word hypocritical in a dictionary, there should be a picture of Mr. Limbaugh, right there. He is so incredibly unaware of how stupid, hypocritical (yes, I said it again), and pathetic he is, that it has actually seized to be funny. And what is even less comical is how people fall for it.

“Limbaugh used his self-described “first national address,” which ran more than an hour longer than his allotted 20 minutes, to accuse President Obama of inspiring fear in Americans in order to push a liberal agenda of “big government.”

“He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day, because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated. Doesn’t matter. They’ll have control of it when it’s all over. And that’s what they want,” Limbaugh said.”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/28/limbaugh.speech.cpac/

Does this man not realize that he has just described the presidency of no. 43, which we had to put up with for 8 years? Is he so incredibly dense that he doesn’t see the irony in what he is saying? What’s worse.. the people there listening to his diabolical diatribe cheer for him. Which of course means, they don’t see the hypocrisy either. And to think a large part of this country’s conservatives like this man. I shudder at the thought., and the prospects.

My very first children’s book!

I am so proud, I’ve finally taken the step to self-publish my first (finished) children’s book.  It has been such a boost to my self-esteem to see my book on Amazon.com, and I just wanted to get the message out there. You, too, can do it! Write your life’s memoir, write that children’s book you always wanted to write, and then publish it yourself! It can actually be done for VERY little money (I have spent less than $30 to get my book on Amazon.com!!) and you feel like a new person once it’s all said and done.

I used a service called Createspace, and I also have my book for sale there. Take a look, check the service and then dust off that book that you started writing years ago. Finish it and publish it! You will not regret it.

https://www.createspace.com/Customer/EStore.do?id=3361168

Aiming for a size zero?

Craving that flat-chested, skin-and-bone look of some of the actresses out there today? Well, make sure you stock up on not only laxatives, but also tums for your bones. Following a starvation diet, your “fat” won’t be the only thing leaving your frame, but you’ll also lose bone mass, creating a problem that will haunt you for the rest of your life. Brittle bones can make a 50 year old look and feel like a 95 year old.

Is it really worth it? Just to fit into children’s clothes as a woman?

I don’t get that mentality. At all.

Translation of a Swedish blogger’s post about Facebook’s sudden morality

A picture of a mother nursing her baby, gazing into her baby’s eyes, is one of the most beautiful pictures you can find, this Swedish blogger writes. More beautiful than a picture of a sunrise of the Serengeti, even. People (read men) are so friggin boob-fixated that they are constantly confusing the concepts.

Just like a stubborn child wanting candy all hours of the day, men want boobs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But OH MY GOD not with a baby suckling on it!!

In her blogg she sometimes writes about  how she practices “provocation-nursing” (nursing in public). This makes some of her readers very irritated and some write to say surely there is no-one out there giving a damn about whether she’s nursing her baby while she is out. But yes, this blogger says, many people (read men) think breasts filled with milk are disgusting.

That Facebook is now actually removing pictures of mothers nursing their babies while pictures of child pornography and other things are left alone, says it all, she continues. She does not think much of the United States. Everyone enhances their boobs and have to go to church, she says (I agree with her sentiments!!). Why is it okay that a mother of three fills her boobs with silicon to look alluring but she cannot nurse her baby during a meeting? People (read men) have become completely photoshop-damaged. If they see something natural they pee their pants.

Nursing can not take place in public and someone else has to change those poop-filled diapers. But sex in all available holes and squeezing the boobs until they are bruised, that’s okay.  (How I wish I had this lady’s eloquence!)

She ends her blog by saying she’s heading to Facebook to put up a juicy, aereola-filled picture of herself leaking through a thin blouse. I say, you go girl!

What is so wrong with breastfeeding pictures???

Facebook, you’ve lost my respect.

Apparently Facebook is telling mothers who have pictures of themselves breastfeeding their babies in their profile, to take their pictures down or be banned from the forum. Yet, at the same time there are members with pornographic pictures in their profiles, and nobody says anything to them. What is wrong with this picture???

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. Obviously the people at Facebook are quite happy to look at pictures of porn, but something as natural as feeding one’s baby on the other hand, that is just too disgusting for words. PATHETIC, FACEBOOK!!

Now, many mothers on Facebook are protesting this ludicrous crap by posting their pictures of breastfeeding. I’d join them, but I don’t have a single picture of me breastfeeding. I breastfed allright, but never thought to take a picture of me doing so. But I applaud all the women who are taking part in this protest. You go girls!!

Is monogamy right for humans?

In our past, we were not exactly the faithful types, and if we’re to look at the rest of nature, monogamy does not seem to be a very popular way of life. Only 3 percent of all mammals spend their entire lives with one partner. And we’re part of that 3 percent. However, since the Internet came into play, our so called faithful nature has taken a severe beating.

These days, you can be unfaithful in many ways.. physically, on the phone, via text messages, or in online chats. Quite whether non-physical flirting can be called infidelity is another matter, but if you are flirting, stealing away to chat with someone, and hiding evidence, then chances are that you are not being entirely honest about what’s going on.

When man first established him and herself on this earth, monogamy was not part of the equation. For a man, it was important to sow his seeds in as many places as possible to ensure offsprings. And for a woman, it just wasn’t practical to put all her eggs into one man’s basket. Literally.

These days, however, the religious right have kittens every time someone strays outside of marriage, although most of them are probably doing it on the quiet too, and the truth is, it’s not as much fun as it used to be (although I have to admit I have not got much experience since getting married) and with STDs running rampant, it’s just not as safe either.

In a recent survey, 44 percent of the people who replied to the survey admitted to using texting as a means of flirting. 45 % of women who responded said they regularly check their partner’s phone to see if he’s got something going, and 31% of men admitted to doing the same. So.. chances are you’re going to get busted.

You can read more about this in the book ”Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People” by David P. Barash, Ph.D., and Judith Eve Lipton, M.D.