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| Is it just me or does it seem like no one gets put on xangas home page any more. there use to be new and good stories every time i came on. now its like a few here and there. And i must say the blogs are starting to get a lame. however, i understand that with so many people going to other things like face book or myspace that we loss some of our best bloggers but really we can do better then this. Well i can't but you all can. lol i truly dont even know what i am talking about so ill stop. Hi to everyone out there that I know. | | |
| forget what you might think my point is by posting this on my page. i wanted to point out something to the reader. you will see it as you read. I give thinks to the writer who is not me.
AP – Afghanistan veteran and founder of American Women Veterans, Genevieve Chase, 32, of Alexandria, Va., …
Play VideoVideo:Holiday Help For Troops ABC News
Play VideoVideo:Operation Cobra's Anger Reuters
Play VideoVideo:Obama: Afghan draw-down will start in 2011 AP
By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer – Mon Dec 14, 6:03 pm ET
WASHINGTON – Nobody wants to buy them a beer.
Even near military bases, female veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't often offered a drink on the house as a welcome home.
More than 230,000 American women have fought in those recent wars and at least 120 have died doing so, yet the public still doesn't completely understand their contributions on the modern battlefield.
For some, it's a lonely transition as they struggle to find their place.
Aimee Sherrod, an Air Force veteran who did three war tours, said years went by when she didn't tell people she was a veteran. After facing sexual harassment during two tours and mortar attacks in Iraq, the 29-year-old mother of two from Bells, Tenn., was medically discharged in 2005 with post-traumatic stress disorder.
She's haunted by nightmares and wakes up some nights thinking she's under attack. She's moody as a result of PTSD and can't function enough to work or attend college. Like some other veterans, she felt she improperly received a low disability rating by the Department of Veterans Affairs that left her with a token monthly payment. She was frustrated that her paperwork mentioned she was pregnant, a factor she thought was irrelevant.
"I just gave up on it and I didn't tell anyone about ever being in the military because I was so ashamed over everything," Sherrod said.
Then Jo Eason, a Nashville, Tenn., lawyer working pro bono through the Lawyers Serving Warriors program, stepped in a few years later and Sherrod began taking home a heftier monthly disability payment.
"I've never regretted my military service, I'm glad I did it," Sherrod said. "I'm not ashamed of my service. I'm ashamed to try and tell people about it because it's like, well, why'd you get out? All the questions that come with it."
The Defense Department bars women from serving in assignments where the primary mission is to engage in direct ground combat. But the nature of the recent conflicts, with no clear front lines, puts women in the middle of the action, in roles such as military police officers, pilots, drivers and gunners on convoys. In addition to the 120-plus deaths, more than 650 women have been wounded.
Back home, women face many of the same issues as the men, but the personal stakes may be greater.
Female service members have much higher rates of divorce and are more likely to be a single parent. When they do seek help at VA medical centers, they are screening positive at a higher rate for military sexual trauma, meaning they indicated experiencing sexual harassment, assault or rape. Some studies have shown that female veterans are at greater risk for homelessness.
Former Army Sgt. Kayla Williams, an Iraq veteran wrote about her experience in a book titled, "Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army." She said she was surprised by the response she and other women from the 101st Airborne Division received from people in Clarksville, Tenn., near Fort Campbell, Ky.
She said residents just assumed they were girlfriends or wives of military men.
"People didn't come up to us and thank us for our service in the same way. They didn't give us free beers in bars in the same way when we first got back," said Williams, 34, of Ashburn, Va. "Even if you're vaguely aware of it, it still colors how you see yourself in some ways."
Genevieve Chase, 32, of Alexandria, Va., a staff sergeant in the Army Reserves, said the same guys who were her buddies in Afghanistan didn't invite her for drinks later on because their wives or girlfriends wouldn't approve.
"One of the hardest things that I had to deal with was, being a woman, was losing my best friends or my comrades to their families," Chase said.
It was that sense of loss, she said, that led her to get together with some other female veterans for brunch in New York last year. The group has evolved into the American Women Veterans, which now has about 2,000 online supporters, some of whom go on camping trips and advocate for veterans' issues. About a dozen marched in this year's Veteran's Day parade in New York.
"We just want to know that when we come home, America has our back," Chase said. "That's the biggest thing. Women are over there. You want to feel like you're coming home to open arms, rather than to a public that doesn't acknowledge you for what you've just done and what you just sacrificed."
Rachel McNeill, a gunner during hostile convoys in Iraq, said she was so affected by the way people treated her when they learned she fought overseas that she even started to question whether she was a veteran.
She described the attitudes as "Oh, you didn't do anything or you were just on base," said McNeill, who suffers from postconcussive headaches, ringing in her ears, and other health problems related to roadside bomb blasts. The 25-year-old from Hollandale, Wis., was a sergeant in the Army Reserves.
She said she seemingly even got that response when she told the VA staff in Madison, Wis., of her work. She said she was frustrated to see in her VA paperwork how what she told them had been interpreted.
"It would say like, 'the patient rode along on convoys,' like I was just a passenger in the back seat," McNeill said.
Other women have had similar complaints. The VA leadership has said it recognizes it needs to do more to improve care for these veterans, and as part of changes in the works, female coordinators are in place at each medical center to give women an advocate. The agency is also reviewing comments on a proposal to make it easier for those who served in noninfantry roles — including women — to qualify for disability benefits for PTSD.
Sen. Patty Murray, a member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs committee, recently asked VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ensure that service members' combat experience is included on their military discharge papers, so later they can get benefits they are entitled to.
Research has shown that a lack of validation of a soldier's service can make their homecoming more difficult.
"What worries me is that women themselves still don't see themselves as veterans, so they don't get the care they need for post-traumatic stress syndrome or traumatic brain injury or even sexual assault, which obviously is more unique to women, so we still have a long ways to go," said Murray, D-Wash.
Chase said one challenge is getting female veterans to ask for changes.
"Most of us, because we were women service members, are so used to not complaining and not voicing our issues, because in the military that's considered weak. Nobody wants to hear the girl whine," Chase said.
McNeill said that when she's been out at restaurants and bars with the guys in her unit, they make sure she gets some recognition when the free beers go around.
"They'll make a point ... usually to say, 'She was over there with us, she was right next to us,'" McNeill said.
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| End-of-Year Sky Show: Geminid Meteor Shower
By Jon Brooks, contributing writer, and Vera H-C Chan, Y! senior editor
Saturday, December 12, 2009 07:06:03 am PST
The popular Perseid meteor shower may get the fair-weather attention, but the real show comes in winter.
Most amateur stargazers huddle by the fireplace in December, when the Geminids rain debris above the Earth's atmosphere. A winter wallop has dropped temperatures to freezing in some parts of the nation, but don't let a difference of a few degrees Fahrenheit keep you from seeing the night show that NASA considers the "best meteor shower of 2009."
The shower (nearly) ends a stellar year for skywatching on a high note—which is appropriate, given that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Meteor showers and plenty of other space-related phenomena captured cyberspace imagination this year. Just a few:
Annular solar eclipse—just a partial (January 26)
Poor little Mars rover Spirit gets stuck (April 23...and still spinning its wheels)
Hubble Space Telescope, repaired (May 18)
Six crew members emerge from isolation on a fake spacecraft (July 14)
Remembering the first step: Apollo mission's 40th anniversary (July 20)
Solar eclipse spurs parties and prayers (July 22)
Perseids keeps stargazers' necks happily craned (August 12-13)
A deliberate crash landing on the moon (October 9)
Pool party! There's water on the moon (November 13)
Leonids light up the sky (November 17)
Catching the Last Shooting Stars
As for the Geminids, patient stargazers might've already caught its beginnings on December 6, but the meteor shower reaches its peak on the nights of December 13 and 14. For those disappointed by November’s Leonid show, the outlook for the current Geminid shower, which lasts until December 18, is good.
Astronomers believe the Geminids are increasing in intensity every year, yielding 120-160 meteors per hour during the shower. Astronomy magazine expects great conditions for viewing "100 'shooting stars' per hour—an average of nearly two per minute." People in China and Indonesia have the orchestra seats for the Geminid show, and might be able to see more than "300 meteors per hour."
You don’t need a telescope to see the streaks shooting across the heavens. For optimal viewing, NASA pinpoints 12:10 a.m. EST/9:10 p.m. PST, and suggests going somewhere away from the “light pollution” of cities and towns, to an area dark enough to see the stars clearly. Keep your eyes roaming all areas of the sky to spot a meteor. (And dress warmly, bring a blanket, and fill up on hot drinks.)
No Comet Here
At their best, meteor showers provide an intense display of the violence of the cosmos, at a safe distance for earthlings to watch. Meteors are streaks of light created by particles of debris from comets and other celestial bodies hitting the Earth's atmosphere. These particles, called meteoroids, can measure as small as a grain of sand to as large as a boulder.
Usually that space-dust dance comes from lively comets. The Geminid meteors are an exception: They emanate from a dead comet called 3200 Phaethon. As for their name, it's derived from the constellation Gemini, the area of the sky from which the meteors appear to originate.
Astronomical Anniversary
Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei invented the telescope and Johannes Kepler came out with his 650-page documentation of Martian motion. That, according to the United Nations, is reason enough to call for a year-long celebration. The International Year of Astronomy hosted events all over the world, and the heavens apparently joined in and threw their own 2009 shows, like the solar eclipse that darkened the skies over Asia.
In the United States, NASA underwent a lot of scrutiny. But even as the bosses were evaluating its core mission, the agency got a few projects literally off the ground—and lots of Web attention: The buzziest may have been the highly risky (and rousingly successful) mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The oddest may have been a March contest for naming a wing of the International Space Station: NASA opted for Tranquility over the more popular "Stephen Colbert," but the satirical TV host got a space-station treadmill named after him.
The Americans weren't the only busy ones: Selected Russian and European volunteers willingly isolated themselves for 105 days here on Earth, to prove their Mars mettle (and next year, the lucky crew gets to spend 520 days in isolation). And tourists who can afford the airfare to the International Space Station always get lots of envious queries—the first clown in space proved no exception this year.
Once in a Blue Moon
The sky shows aren't over yet. The Ursid meteor shower gets its turn December 22, the Pleiades will brighten up the night on December 29, and a blue moon will entertain New Year's Eve revelers. (And no, the moon doesn't turn a shade of turquoise: The phrase just means a second full moon appears in the same month. But don't let that stop you from singing its praises.) | | |
| Hey everyone
Look !
http://www.amazon.com/Esmaer-Journeys-Poetry-Christopher-Whedon/dp/1605639478
Just feeling the need to pass this info along | | |
| Healthy Detox after Overindulging
By Dr. Maoshing Ni - Posted on Tue, Nov 24, 2009, 11:22 am PST
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by Dr. Maoshing Ni a Yahoo! Health Expert for Alternative Medicine
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Stuffed with stuffing, filled with turkey, crammed with cookies, and saturated with alcohol. Now what? Holidays call for celebration, and many of us know the consequences that come from overindulging in alcohol and food. Sometimes, despite out best intentions, we overdo it. This holiday season, detoxify and recover naturally with the tips that follow.
FOOD OVERLOAD
Chinese medicine views proper digestion as the most essential component in living a long and healthy life. Your digestive function is made up of numerous organs all working together to break down, absorb, and process all of the nutrients in the food you eat. Without healthy digestion, you can become malnourished and toxins will build up in your body, leading to degenerative diseases and rapid aging down the road.
Indigestion is caused and made worse by overeating--especially rich, fatty, spicy foods, alcohol, coffee, and acidic foods. These remedies will get your digestion on the right track.
ONE HOUR AFTERWARD:
Walk it off
After a large meal, take a 10- to 20-minute stroll. Aside from the proven benefits to your heart, walking is the perfect gentle exercise for promoting digestion and encouraging cleansing of the lymphatic system. Walking helps food move along the digestive tract, improving digestion and absorption. For added benefits, walk while massaging your abdomen with your palms, in a circle around your belly button.
Herbal tea brings relief
Relieve that feeling of fullness with herbal teas that target your digestion: Steep 1 teaspoon each of mint, rosemary, oregano, cilantro, sage, and basil and in a cup of hot water. Drink after each meal to soothe and prevent bloating. Peppermint, chamomile, and ginger tea are other good choices for settling the stomach. Also, look for Chinese herbal formulas like Indigestion for digestive support and cleansing.
THE MORNING AFTER:
Start with apple cider
Apple cider vinegar is traditionally used to remedy digestive distress, support liver detoxification, normalize digestive juices, and reduce intestinal bloating. Mix 1 tablespoon of organic apple cider vinegar with 12 ounces of warm water, and drink in the morning on empty stomach. Feel free to add a little honey or maple syrup. Lemon water will also help.
Eat right to lighten up
These meals will help your body recover from overindulgence.
Breakfast: Eat oat bran cereal, brown rice, or any other whole grain cereal (as long as it is unbleached and does not contain any added sugar or chemicals.) Pair with unflavored soy milk.
Lunch/Dinner: Eat any combination of beans, brown rice, oat bran, vegetables, and organic chicken, turkey, or soy-products.
For a powerful Super Cleanse Broth, simmer any combination of the following ingredients for an hour: collards, Swiss chard, kale, mustard greens, cabbage, dandelion, Brussels sprouts, daikon radish, watercress, seaweed, shitake mushrooms, cilantro, garlic, leeks, fennel, anise, fresh ginger, and turmeric. Drink 8 ounces twice a day.
A popular herbal formula among my patients is Internal Cleanse, a special combination of natural herbs to detoxify, clear the mind, promote emotional balance, and ease digestion. For more information, click here.
Try a detoxifying exercise
This movement is from Liver Cleansing Qi Gong, a body-mind exercise that was designed by ancient Chinese physicians to help stimulate the liver and drain the excess toxins from the body:
Stand with feet shoulder-width apart in front of a tree. Inhale while raising your right leg and exhale while placing your right foot on the ground in front of you between your body and the tree.
Inhale while raising both arms from the sides until they come together over your head. Exhale while lowering your hands in front of your face. Visualize green light running down your face as your hands move down to your chest.
Inhale as you move your hands to the right rib cage over your liver. Exhale as you move your arms down your right abdomen and right leg, as if pushing down and out with your hands. Visualize the green light moving the toxins out of the liver, down the liver meridian on the inside right leg, and out the big toe.
ALCOHOL OVERINDULGENCE
The liver is one of the hardest working organs in your body and performs a wide variety of functions. Its most important ones include the processing of nutrients, the production of bile to help in digestion of food and eliminating wastes, and cleansing the blood of toxins such as drugs, alcohol, and other dangerous substances.
The liver has the ability to regenerate itself, but the effects of alcohol eventually wear down the liver. I strongly suggest that you keep your drinking to a minimum for the longevity of your liver and your health, but on that rare occasion when you overindulge, consider these remedies.
ONE HOUR AFTERWARD:
Ginger tea to the rescue
Ginger is an ancient Chinese remedy to minimize the symptoms of hangovers. Ginger has been found to soothe the digestive lining and balance gastric juices, making it a great remedy for overeating, too. This remedy is even more effective if you drink it in between alcoholic beverages.
Cut a 2-inch piece from fresh ginger root, and thinly slice. Bring three cups of water to boil in a pot. Add the sliced ginger and reduce heat to a simmer. Brew for about five minutes. Then strain out the ginger and sip the tea slowly. You may also add honey to taste.
Drink up!
Water, that is. Though this is hardly a secret remedy for combating a hangover, it bears repeating. Alcohol dehydrates your system, so drinking plenty of water will help combat some of your unpleasant hangover symptoms, rehydrate your body, and flush out toxins. Drink a few glasses of room temperature, filtered water after a night of holiday extravagance.
THE MORNING AFTER:
Start with lemon water
First thing in the morning, drink one lemon squeezed in 12 ounces of warm filtered water. Lemon activates your liver to release toxins and helps to cleanse and move the roughage that stays behind in your intestines. Throughout the day, drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water to flush your system.
Detoxify with herbal tea
Chinese traditional medicine uses natural substances to help support the healthy functions of your liver, lymphatic system, bowels, urinary tract, and skin. Try these herbs in teas to cleanse and prevent a buildup of toxins and wastes in your body:
Chrysanthemum flower is traditionally used to cleanse the liver and neutralize toxins.
Hawthorn berry is used to cleanse the blood of plaque and other toxins.
Turmeric supports the detoxification process in the whole body by increasing bile production and releasing and eliminating toxins. Simply put a tablespoon of the spice in a pot and stir over medium heat for five minutes.
Milk thistle protects and restores the liver, due to its content of silymarin.
Dandelion root has been found by studies to enhance the flow of bile, relieving liver congestion, which in turn aids the body in detoxifying.
Popular among my patients is Hangover, a Chinese herbal remedy that is helpful for relieving symptoms of hangover.
Heal your aching head
If you wake up with a "morning-after" headache, try this herbal tea to reduce head pressure: Boil 2 tbsp each of chrysanthemum flowers and mint leaves in 4 cups of water for 15 minutes. Drink throughout the day until your headache subsides.
I hope this article helps you recover from the effects of overindulgence! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.
May you live long, live strong, and live happy!
--Dr. Mao
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Find out amazing ways you can naturally increase your energy and heal common ailments in Secrets of Self-Healing, Dr. Mao's landmark book on natural healing. | | |
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