August 25, 2009

One more day of official medical leave left. Right now I am hanging with Zoe watching Little Laureate. I am tired as I was up with her on the hour all night. Hopefully will get a nap soon.

Birthday

My birthday in a couple of hours...33.

Today

Going to look at some flooring for the living room and taking the little peanut with me.

Parks and Recreation

The listener

I Passed!!!

Jog

Holding

Here I am in ED holding. They are filling us up now with patients.

Zoe at Easter

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Originally uploaded by jstonernusa

AIG-maybe they should have been allowed to collapse.

This is why I think the bailout will not work as expected. These guys just don't get it. The average American gets to enjoy a lower living wage than 10 years ago, higher health insurance premiums with shittier coverage while these greedy assholes spend over 400K on spa treatments. This is with the tax payers money mind you. You can't afford to put gas in the car and these jerk-offs are pampering themselves. This is sick.


From CNN.com October 10, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Days after it got a federal bailout, American International Group Inc. spent $440,000 on a posh California retreat for its executives, complete with spa treatments, banquets and golf outings, according to lawmakers investigating the company's meltdown.


Robert Willumstad, former CEO of AIG, testifies before the U.S. House in Washington on Tuesday.

AIG sent its executives to the coastal St. Regis resort south of Los Angeles, California, even as the company tapped into an $85 billion loan from the government it needed to stave off bankruptcy.

The resort tab included $23,380 worth of spa treatments for AIG employees, according to invoices the resort turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The retreat didn't include anyone from the financial products division that nearly drove AIG under, but lawmakers still were enraged over thousands of dollars spent on outing for executives of AIG's main U.S. life insurance subsidiary.

"Average Americans are suffering economically. They're losing their jobs, their homes and their health insurance," the committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, scolded the company during a lengthy opening statement at a hearing Tuesday.

"Yet less than one week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation."

Former AIG CEO Robert Willumstad, who lost his job a day after the Federal Reserve put up the $85 billion on Sept. 16, said he was not familiar with the conference and would not have gone along with it.

"It seems very inappropriate," Willumstad said in response to questioning from Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland.

"Those executives should be fired," Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said at a debate with Sen. John McCain on Tuesday, referring to the retreat participants. Obama also said AIG should give the Treasury $440,000 to cover the costs of the retreat.

But Eric Dinallo, superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department, said he could see the value of such a retreat under the circumstances.

"Having been at large global companies and knowing what condition AIG was in ... the absolute worst thing that could have happened" would have been for employees and underwriters in its life insurance subsidiary to flee the company.

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"I do agree there is some profligate spending there, but the concept of bringing all the major employees together ... to ensure that the $85 billion could be as greatly as possible paid back would have been not a crazy corporate decision," Dinallo told the House committee.

The hearing disclosed that AIG executives hid the full range of its risky financial products from auditors as losses mounted, according to documents released by the committee, which is examining the chain of events that forced the government to bail out the conglomerate.

The panel sharply criticized AIG's former top executives, who cast blame on each other for the company's financial woes.

"You have cost my constituents and the taxpayers of this country $85 billion and run into the ground one of the most respected insurance companies in the history of our country," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York. "You were just gambling billions, possibly trillions of dollars."

AIG, crippled by huge losses linked to mortgage defaults, was forced last month to accept the $85 billion government loan that gives the U.S. the right to an 80 percent stake in the company.

Oakland...I avoid it like the plague. If I want to get shot I would just go to Iraq.

(09-29) 19:08 PDT -- The Casillas family did everything they could, took every precaution they could think of to keep their boy - their only boy - safe from the violence in their Oakland neighborhood.

IMAGES


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CHIP JOHNSON

Readers add their Dellums gripes 09.26.08
It's time for Oakland to give Dellums the boot 09.22.08
Oakland police measure needs good leadership 09.19.08
More Chip Johnson »
But it wasn't enough.

The violence that Leopoldo and Linda Casillas recognized, and feared, came without rhyme or reason or warning and snatched the very life of Marco Casillas, a 19-year old man without gang affiliations, a drug problem or a criminal record.

In Oakland's gang-infested neighborhoods, simply being identified as a male teenager or young adult can get you killed.

By all accounts, including the findings of Oakland detectives investigating his death, Casillas had done nothing to evoke such violence. He didn't run with a gang or affiliate himself with any group, and took great pride in just being himself, family members said.

That provides little comfort in the Casillas home in the Fruitvale neighborhood, where the young man's parents sat on the couch in their home Monday and sorted through memories and emotions and prepared to bury their youngest child.

According to police, Marco Casillas was walking a dog with his 19-year-old girlfriend Sept. 20 in the 4000 block of Santa Rita Street when someone opened fire on them about 10:45 p.m.

The girl's mother knew something was terribly wrong when the dog came back to the house alone with blood on its fur. Casillas and his girlfriend were found lying on the sidewalk.

He died at Highland Hospital within half an hour of the assault, becoming the city's 103rd homicide victim this year. His girlfriend, whose name was withheld, was seriously wounded but survived.

In the part of Oakland where they live, the Casillas family has watched with great concern as violence has ratcheted up over the years. They were aware of the dangers and took special precautions with their son because of it.

For years, right up until his death, Marco's parents had gone the extra mile to ensure their son's future.

His father walked with him to the Fruitvale BART station every day to see him off to Heald Technical College in Hayward and picked him up when he came home.

Leopoldo Casillas waited for his son at recreational activities - they even went to the barber shop together. He drove Marco to work at a pizza shop in Alameda and picked him up when his shift was over.

On the night he was shot, Linda Casillas said her son was planning to have dinner at his girlfriend's house and watch a movie. He assured her he was not going out.

His father speaks broken English, but it's difficult for him to speak of his son's death in any language.

"Mal," the Spanish word for bad, was about all he could get out Monday.

He's heartbroken, but remaining strong for his wife and daughters. Whenever Leopoldo Casillas began to talk about his son, his voice trailed off to silence, his head fell and he stared straight ahead - his wife and daughters, sensing his grief, quietly cried for him.

"They were friends," said Rebecca Navarro said of her father and step-brother.

Navarro contacted the offices of Mayor Ron Dellums and Ignacio De La Fuente, the Oakland City Council member who represents the Fruitvale district, to tell them how the horrific violence in the city they are supposed to lead had just claimed one of the good guys - her younger brother.

She never heard back from anyone.

Last year, her mother called 911 when she saw a man on a bike holding a gun to the head of another man right outside her home. A dispatcher asked if she was mistaken. "Are they friends?" "Are they just playing?"

Suffice it to say the family doesn't have a lot of confidence in the ability of the Oakland Police Department to maintain neighborhood safety and the shooting death of their son less than 10 blocks from home only served to confirm it.

Their son had big plans and big dreams but Oakland's most lawless neighborhoods are places where dreams and dreamers are all too often left to die.

Marco planned to graduate from the technical college in December, find a full-time job and help his mom and dad finally move out of the crime-ridden neighborhood.

He and his mother, a janitor for the UC system, planned to pool their finances and move the family out of Oakland in January. They were looking in Livermore. Leopoldo Casillas has two surgically repaired shoulders and no longer works.

Mother and son planned to buy a car that would get them both to a BART station - and into the central cities because as a new driver he wasn't comfortable traveling on Interstates 580 or 880.

The family is still looking to leave Oakland behind them, but the tragedy has jolted them from such daily tasks.

"We went looking for houses in Castro Valley on Sunday, but I can't find my balance right now," said Marco's mother.

funny SNL Video Sarah Palin

Jesus in the Ultrasound? Is that what the amniotic sac is called these days?

Woman claims face of Jesus can be seen leaning next to the baby in 3D ultrasound picture. The couple claims they are not religious fanatics. I see a baby with its hand curled. Just because something looks like one thing doesn't mean it is. Funny Jesus would pick the white pop culture version of himself (even though he supposedly lived in the middle east).

NICO

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Originally uploaded by jstonernusa

Running the Sahara

Check out the trailer for this new Documentary coming out about three runners (a Canadian, an American, and a Taiwanese) that ran across the Sahara desert. The doctor that is shown on the trailer is Jeff Peterson from Stanford who I work with quite often. Pretty cool accomplishment for these guys to say the least. By the way Ray, the Canadian is married to a Newfoundlander. You are never more than 6 degrees of separation from a Newfoundlander. Check it out.

The Strangers

Some believe the new movie The Strangers is inspired by these true events. Either way this is bone chilling. Maybe bringing a gun (something 380 caliber and up) with you when you go to a cabin in a remote area is not a bad idea. The following happened 140 miles north of Sacramento 20 years ago and the case is cold with no suspects. Also a very similar incident occurred 20 years later in Idaho. In both cases the toddlers were spared for some unknown reason.

(06-10) 04:00 PDT Keddie, Plumas County -- It had been more than a year since she ran screaming from the inexplicable, dark things she saw there, yet Ashley Conte still shivered as she stood in front of the battered little house.
"Anyone with any brains will never set foot in there again," she said, mustering all the conviction her 16 years would allow. "You can never change what happened inside. The house should just be ripped down."
She wrenched her gaze from the twilight shadows creeping onto the boarded up windows. "It's haunted," she whispered. "Everybody knows it. Rip it down."
Whether the terrors Ashley and others say they saw inside Cabin #28 of the Keddie Resort -- chairs and bodies floating mid-air, carvings disappearing from walls -- were figments or genuine spooks is up for grabs. But what took place 20 years ago this spring is not.
Back then, a mother, her two children and a teenage friend were butchered here in a one-night frenzy so off-the-charts savage that to this day cops don't like to step inside the house.
The murders ruined this northern Sierra mountain resort, a 3,205-foot- elevation enclave so popular people used to drive hundreds of miles just to eat at its log-walled lodge. In short order, appalled tourists began staying away in droves. And even now -- spirits or not -- the specter of the killings continues to keep this pretty resort empty.
"It's spooky, a real ghost town," said Scott Lawson, director of the Plumas County Museum in nearby Quincy. "Nobody goes there, really. And I doubt anyone will until they find out who killed all those people.
"But that," he said, eyes going wide, "is the whodunnit of the century around here."
Twenty years ago, Keddie Resort was in the latest of many heydays dating from its founding in 1910, a placid getaway where you could rent one of 33 rustic cabins or a room in the hand-crafted, two-story lodge. The streams had great trout fishing, and pine-studded trails beckoned all around.
The Keddie Lodge restaurant was packed most every night with customers who came from as far as San Francisco to dine on barbecued bear ribs, sherry- basted racoon steaks -- all shot locally -- and fine wines.
"It was always a special, pretty place to go, a real draw," said Lawson.
Then came April 11, 1981.
Sometime between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. that day, 15-year-old John Sharp and his buddy, 17-year-old Dana Wingate, were seen hitchhiking from Quincy to Keddie Cabin #28. John had been living there for months with his 36-year-old mother, Glenna Sharp -- and once the two boys walked through the door, police say, the horror began.
A pair of killers either went in with the boys or were waiting with Glenna Sharp, and they tied up all three with duct tape and electrical wire. Soon after, John's 13-year-old sister, Tina, showed up and was bound, too.
What followed was a night of torture.
By the time the killers left 10 hours later, they had used steak knives and a claw hammer to such effect that the victims were barely recognizable.
"Whoever did this stabbed the victims so violently they bent one knife totally double from the force," said Sheriff's Patrol Commander Rod DeCrona. "They stabbed and pounded on everything in sight -- the walls, the people, the furniture. Everything."
He shuddered at the memory of first walking into the murder scene. "There was blood sprayed absolutely everywhere," DeCrona said. "You knew right away we were involved with a psychopath."
The carnage was only discovered the next morning by John's 14-year-old sister, Sheila, who had been at a sleepover next door. To the enduring surprise of police, nobody outside the charnel house had heard a thing.
And the mystery only deepened: Not only was the body of Tina, most likely killed at the scene, missing -- but three near-toddlers sleeping in one bedroom had been amazingly left untouched.
Tina's severed head was found three years later by a bottle-digger, 50 miles downhill at a waterfall. One of the children in the bedroom -- two were Sharp brothers, the other a play-pal -- remembered enough so police could make a sketch of two killers, but the boy was so young the picture's accuracy is considered questionable.
Thousands of leads and suspects have been picked over since then by deputies, the FBI and state investigators -- but nothing panned out, DeCrona said. A timeline of the case dominates three walls of the sheriff's office, tips still come in, and DNA samples were sent to the state crime lab just two months ago, but nobody's holding his breath.
"Usually in a crime like this, the killers get sloppy and leave more behind, " said DeCrona, sighing. "I wish it were that simple. We have no motive, no suspects."
Dana's father, Gary Wingate, thinks there were so many police agencies involved that they "stumbled over each other and fouled up the case." But he tries not to stew about it. He never even calls the Sharp family -- who declined requests through intermediaries to be interviewed.
"Nobody has the faintest idea who killed my son, so I long ago had to let this thing go or it would eat me alive," said Wingate, who lives near Quincy. "I don't think about it, I don't go to that ghost town and I have no idea if ghosts exist there.
"But I do know this. There is evil in this world, and evil was in that house that night."
Ashley Conte and her neighbors think the evil is still there.
People began to shun the resort after the killings, and within a year it was empty. The owners put Keddie up for sale in 1984 for $1.8 million -- and nobody bit.
Over the next decade or so, it rotted into a refuge for squatters and hobos,
and the county condemned most of the buildings. But in the past few years longtime owner Gary Mollath has gone on a furious restoration campaign that has the old resort looking pretty much as it did in 1981 -- sans people.
He's rented out a couple of the best cabins, and says he hopes to rehab the rest enough to reopen in a year.
But first there is Cabin #28 -- dubbed "The Murder House" by locals -- to contend with.
The condemned building's yellow-and-white paint is flaking, doors are nailed shut and most windows are covered with plywood. Bums and kids -- including Ashley, Mollath's stepdaughter -- have often broken in for kicks, but by several accounts they all flee in a hurry.
Ashley said that aside from seeing murky forms and rocking chairs in the house, she once saw a pitchfork and the word "no" carved in the kitchen door. "When we went back a half-hour later, the words and the pitchfork were gone," she said.
Other locals, including 22-year-old Forest Jones, said they heard moans, doors slamming and footsteps when the house was obviously deserted.
Others don't buy all the spooky stuff.
"I hate it when people call this a ghost town," said Lynn Seavy, 46, who lives next to The Murder House. "Keddie is a nice, peaceful place where you can hear the wind in the trees. I wish people would get over what happened."
Mollath's solution is just as his step-daughter suggests.
"That house has been such a negative point for so long that I intend to tear it down and put a park there," Mollath said. "Then I'm going to open this place back up and cater to groups -- with people traveling closer to home now, I think the timing will be just right.
"I want people to come and say, 'Wow!' when we start up again. Not be scared."
Before he flings open the gates, though, he'd better do more than just raze The Murder House, maintains Annette Martin, a psychic in Campbell who advises police throughout the nation on murder cases.
The trouble in Keddie, she said, is that because the mayhem was so abhorrent, the victims's ghosts are probably in shock and don't know they are dead. So even if their house is demolished, "they'll still be there, hanging out."
"We often find this type of poltergeist activity in cases like this, especially if people were chopped up," said Martin. "My guess is that the 'no' the girl saw was the victims still trying to say 'no' to their killers. There is unresolved business there."
The only way to cleanse the area of spirits, she said, is to have someone spiritual perform a healing ceremony after the house is gone.
"Otherwise, whatever is in its place will be haunted," Martin said. "And it will stay haunted."

Laying down floor

Baby & Pregnancy Countdown Ticker

I am a Apple freak

Yeah!!! Now if I wanted to I could move back to Canada and not pine away for my iPhone. Seriously I could not live without this thing. It is the coolest easiest to use phone on the market.

As a side note, once you buy a macbook, iMac, etc (I have both) and you figure out MAC OS X, you will be amazed at the genius behind it all and what it can do. Computers running on windows will never satisfy you again. If you are as obsessed as me you will even buy AAPL stock!

Wolf Hunt

Alaska allows this brutal practice of killing wolves and in a recent move of Bushness, the Federal government took wolves off the endangered species list just recently. This will put the species in great risk in all states as some governors have publicly said they will not stop until the wolf is eradicated. It is hard to argue with that kind of unreason.

One must pause and give these people the benefit of the doubt I guess since a good portion of people wouldn't be able to tell you what DNA is I guess it would be a leap to expect them to understand the concept of an ecosystem. Wolves strengthen the herd, by killing the sick and weak.

Hunters tend to complain when hunting actually involves hunting and the animals don't just walk up to them with a "shoot me" sign posted around their necks. The fact is global warming in many parts of the US especially around Yellowstone has led to poor grass conditions and thus a poor food source for Elk. Rather than acknowledge this however many hunters who don't want to feel guilty about driving a hummer blame Hollywoods biggest villian the wolf instead.