One anniversary too many?

The Affordable Care Act celebrates its one year anniversary today. Nevertheless, not all of its beneficiaries are rooting in its support. There are definite early signs of success for this bill, including increased insurance access for thousands of children with pre-existing health conditions, drug prescription support for seniors on Medicare, tax credits for small businesses, and extended coverage for young individuals on their parents' plans (THANK GOD:)!!). However, many conservatives and libertarians are still looking for ways to repeal the hell out of this bill. And a few U.S. states, such as Virginia, are still fighting hard to retain their state rights--arguing that the Obamacare is unconstitutional. (Obama did acknowledge this problem a couple of weeks ago, when he endorsed a proposal that allowed states to opt out of federal health care reform requirements in 2014 so long as the state provides a viable and comparable plan). Other problems are also quickly arising, such as increased rates of employee reductions in many small businesses across the nation. In light of the economy, business owners are doing as much as possible to pinch each penny, even if this means downsizing their company to avoid entering into the employee mandate. At the most recent U.S. Chamer of Commerce press call, two small business owners were featured to discuss how the health care reform coverage mandates will inevitably raise costs for employers and make them less likely to hire more workers. While it is still too early to tell, especially considering the outrageous amount of pro-reform demonstrations Washington D.C. will experience later on today, Obamacare did survive to see its first birthday. Yet, the following year will be crucial in determining its longterm success and if the ACA will ever see another birthday again.

raw stuffed peppers

Just dropping a raw food/vegetarian recipe to those interested! One of my favorites and tastes amazing:)

1 lb. small bell peppers, halved and seeded
1 c. raw cashews
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp. salt
3 carrots
2 stalks celery
3 Tbs. olive oil
1 Tbs. fresh lemon juice
1/2 c. raisins

Cover the cashews with water in a small bowl and soak for several hours. Coarsely chop the garlic, carrots and celery and add these to a food processor with everything else except the peppers. Buzz in the food processor until everything is finely copped then spoon into the pepper halves and serve. Simple!

Back and Fourth Activism

“PAICINES, Calif. — When Mike Peterson jumped into a colleague's single turboprop Pilatus and flew over the remote central California valley that he now hopes to turn into a solar plant, he saw sunshine, flat land that would require little grading and two big transmission lines to tap into. "Wow," he remembers thinking at the time. "God made this to be a solar farm."

But when Kim Williams looks out at that same land from her low-slung ranch house, she sees an area rich with wildlife that is helping support her grass-fed chicken farm, her neighbor's cattle operations and her peaceful way of life. She supports solar energy on a small scale -- the electric fence around her chicken coop is powered by solar -- but says when she learned about the solar plant she felt shock and disbelief. Now, she's suing to block it.” MSNbc

Shocker. The long-time supporters of green energy only support solar energy until it becomes a reality. This made me think of Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, who left the organization after 18-years with critiques of his group feeding our nation with “pop-environmentalism.” He cited numerous fellow directors who angrily labeled nuclear energy as evil, while throwing in misinformation about chemicals, biology, and genetics without any formal science background. He claimed there was massive uses of wrong information, fear, and sensationalism to deal with people on the emotional level rather than intellectual level. It was clear to him that Greenpeace had turned political. These people played politics as dirty as it gets—completely giving up on science and facts. Of course, that is what happens when you have activists that relay information received purely by word-of-mouth. Collectively these people grow as a unit, making friends with each other, gaining a voice, and similarly sharing a factually unfounded passion. In fact, it has long been agreed that Greenpeace has actually lent to more environmental harm than environmental good. An interesting quote by Moore himself, during an interview following his resignation from Greenpeace.
”I wouldn’t say vindicated as much as unfortunate that all of us — including me in the ’70s — who were leading the environmental movement made this mistake of being against nuclear energy. We were caught up in the anti-nuclear war movement and we made the mistake of thinking everything nuclear was bad. We didn’t make the distinction. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said if it was not for the environmental movement, there would be a lot fewer coal-fired plants in the world today and a lot more nuclear plants. We actually did something very negative back then. 
It is one of the reasons I work so hard to change the perception because I think it was a serious error.”

So it bugs me to see this happening again: liberals fighting for something to happen, but not wanting to pay the price to make it happen. The legal brawl comes as the U.S. is racing to adopt renewables. In the United States, renewable energy, including solar, makes up just 8 percent or so of electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That figure was expected to jump to 13 percent by 2035 -- but that was before the Green vs. Green feud.” So now, when funds for this project should be spent on creating renewable energy resources, it will instead be spent on fighting to make this happen. Thousands of environmentalists are in support of Kim Williams, now fighting for another unified by word-of-mouth cause. The whole point, I thought, was to be less selfish about ourselves and our immediate future, and think more broadly about the environment and those who will spend time on our earth later? I should make it clear that I don't fully support solar energy anyway. At least not with the science we have now. Until solar energy can become more efficient, other forms of energy are still preferable in my evaluation. My main point is how poorly developed such opinions, on behalf of environmentalists, can be. From ideals to reality, there needs to be a greater basis of evaluation and factual understanding when advocating for anything from A-Z.

On the gender-equality battle

There are definitely sexist practices worth fighting for. However, the most ubiquitous example is the “he or she” phenomenon: I don’t know who first asserted that this usage was necessary, but I would like to find out where he or she lives and poke him or her in his or her eye. The above sentence well exemplifies what vexes me most about this “politically correct” behavior. The idea behind it, best I can tell, is to show that men and women, even hypothetical ones, are equal in status. But by forcing awkward construction into the sentence, the speaker equally suggests that females are so very delicate that they can be injured by not getting equal pronoun space.

Many of the similarly overzealous PC phrases that were forced on society decades ago have since been deemed, thankfully, unnecessary. No one can, for example, have a truly sincere conversation about someone being “vertically challenged.” Even the term “African-American” is dying out and being replaced by the less ethnically fretful “black.”

The main problem with “he or she” is akin to the latter issue, and it was raised by the Angry Black Woman and many of the other people who responded to her post: More than it achieves anything else, a PC construction draws attention to itself.

The cumbersome “he or she” model often draws so much attention that the substance of the sentence is actually eclipsed by the pronoun panic. (I again direct you to the last sentence in the second paragraph.) And just using "she" as a replacement for the long-established standalone "he" is similarly jarring and salient; that kind affirmative etmyological action might even be more distracting.

Don Raley, a professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism, dedicated a page of a publication editing textbook to this pronoun problem, and he cites multiple alternatives that can help a writer circumvent the clunkiness of “he or she.” Take the following sentence: “A nurse should do her job.” To fix this, you can, for example, make the subject of the sentence plural, as in “Nurses should do their jobs.” Or you can recast the whole sentence in the second person: “If you are a nurse, you should do your job.”

This does cleverly solve the “politically correct” problem for the moment, but the required reworking compounds another dilemma: By being overly sensitive toward potentially offending women, we’re sacrificing efficiency for little, if any, reward. I don’t mean just efficiency in terms of space either. I happen to believe that renowned grammarians have better things to do with their time than make answers to sexism hand-wringing (whether or not those grammarians would agree).

There is the oft-cited caveat that sexist language isn’t only about protecting the dignity of women, and the sentence reworked above is a good example of the type a person might quote to make this argument. Male nurses, they would say, have pronoun-sensitive feelings, too. But the equal-problem defense is a red herring. With all due reverence to the male nursing community, I don’t believe they are a strong enough lobby to cause this kind of massive linguistic shake-up: feminism is most certainly the culprit here.

So to the person who feels that this satisfies some feminist streak, I say that it doesn’t. If you want to break real glass ceilings, go to Saudi Arabia and rally women drivers. And to the woman who continues to disagree, I make the special plea for her to recognize how much stronger the gender would seem if we didn’t balk at gender-neutral hypotheticals. It’s only an insult if women are precious enough to take it as one. By Katy Steinmetz.

Service-Learning

When it comes to short-term volunteering abroad, do such providers actually deliver efficient results? Are we fooling ourselves, justifying our guilt, or fulfilling our own desires as volunteers? The most recent President's summit pledged a huge focus on volunteerism and the need for more and more young individuals to become involved. Case-in-point, this "service-learning movement" has indeed burgeoned amongst high schools, higher education institutions, and U.S. non-profit organizations.

Service is awarded something of a "sacred" status so it is neither popular nor political to raise questions about the assumptions of unintended effects of volunteerism which often characterizes service-learning. Between the excitement and dramatic tales of volunteer stories, the field for service-learning is therefore booming. Most studies assessing the efficiencies of such programs lean far within interest to maintain and/or grow such programs. And while some informal debates do rise occasionally, most of what should be considered an important opinion is overlooked in favor of the excitement and superficial ideas of "volunteerism."

So does service-learning teach a false understanding of need? Although I have consistently been in favor of volunteer programs, both abroad and local, I recently have come to question the appropriateness and efficiency of such commitments. For example, I am scheduled for my next volunteer mission in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti in four weeks. In light of the Cholera outbreak, where beds are few and health professionals are even fewer, is it justified for me to take away resources in exchange for only 10 days of volunteering? Americans, especially during volunteer expeditions, are protected with the utmost highest watch. That is to say, if it is even the possibility that an American does contract a health problem, greater attention will be (as history has shown) provided to that American in lieu of attention that could otherwise be given to at least more than one Haitian citizen.

Do little "blips" of volunteer trips satisfy the long-term goals and needs of countries? What is the worth of my spending several hundred dollars in U.S. funds while taking attention from Haitian government officials (though Haitian dollars)? When does it become efficient to volunteer? And most importantly, should anyone and everyone be allowed to volunteer abroad? If we placed stricter regulations on who could volunteer, where, when, and for how long, would we be more efficient in using funds and providing help? I wish there were more studies on this so I could quit speculating. But deep down, my gut instinct doesn't feel too right about what I'm about to do.

Big belly update

Big Belly Solar spotted on my campus! http://fragmented-shilpagogna.blogspot.com/2009/08/big-belly-solar.html "The BigBelly Solar Compactor is a patented compacting trash receptacle that is completely self-powered. Instead of requiring a grid connection, BigBelly uses solar power for 100% of its energy needs. The unit takes up as much space as the "footprint" of an ordinary receptacle—but its capacity is five times greater. Increased capacity reduces collection trips and can cut fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. BigBelly also provides cost efficiencies from labor savings, fuel cost and maintenance savings, as well as environmental benefits from reduced emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Safe, easy to use, and designed to keep out pests, the BigBelly has already proven its worth in urban streets, parks, colleges, arenas—and in all weather conditions."

No Chunkin the Pumpkin

It's halloween again!...

The seeds are not the only amazing part of pumpkin! Save your pumpkin flesh and use them in desserts, dinners, and even smoothies! It is difficult to believe how much healthy food is being thrown down the disposal so families can light these fruits shells for 2-3 days before they begin rotting. Do your part and conserve the food of our globe!!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! :)

Pumpkin Pie

• 175g/6oz plain flour
• 75g/3oz butter
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 tbsp cold water
• pinch salt
• 450 g (1 lb) prepared weight pumpkin flesh, cut into 2.5 cm (1 in) chunks
• 2 large eggs plus 1 yolk
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
• ½ tsp ground allspice
• ½ tsp ground cloves
• ½ tsp ground ginger
• 275 ml (10 fl.oz) double cream

Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF/Gas Mark 4. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. Cut the butter into small pieces and rub it into the flour until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add 2 tablespoons of cold water to mix it into a firm dough, then wrap it in cling film and chill for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, to make the filling, steam the pumpkin, then put it in a sieve and press lightly to extract any excess water. Then lightly whisk the eggs and the extra yolk together in a large bowl. Place the sugar, spices and cream in a pan, bring them to simmering point, stirring with a whisk regularly. Then pour this mixture over the eggs and whisk it again briefly. Now add the pumpkin pureé, still whisking everything until it is thoroughly combined. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface, then use it to line a 20cm flan dish. Prick the entire surface with a fork and bake blind at 190ºC/375ºF/Gas mark 5 for 15 minutes until just firm to the touch. Then pour the filling into your pastry case and bake for 35-40 minutes, by which time it will puff up round the edges but still feel slightly wobbly in the centre. Then remove it from the oven and place the tin on a wire cooling rack. Serve chilled (stored loosely covered in foil in the fridge) with some equally chilled créme fraïche, but warm or at room temperature would be fine.