Archive for Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Stand out from crowd by quitting your job

By John Beal

February 11, 2009

I saw this morning that a fellow on the CNN Web site has a new suggestion for dealing with today’s economic uncertainties: quit your job.

David Seaton, who contributes to the CNN iReport, suggests that quitting a job you don’t like will differentiate you from the hordes of other applicants that human relations managers have parading through their offices these days.

“If you have quitting in your past, as opposed to being laid off, it just makes you different,” he says. “It shows that you’re better than everyone else, you’re not in a fear mentality. Instead you’re just looking for the best use of your talents. So don’t be afraid to quit a job that you don’t like anymore, or to quit a job that’s no longer paying you what you deserve.”

Dynamite. It’ll make you stand out, all right. Of course, it will also disqualify you for unemployment benefits, thereby reducing recessionary strains on the public pocketbook.

Sounds like a plan.

* * *

Apparently the Kansas Senate may again take up a measure that would enact a statewide smoking ban in public places.

The measure passed a committee last week, but some opponents – majority leader Derek Schmidt among them – say it goes too far. According to an interview on Kansas Public Radio, Schmidt bases his objection on the bill’s attempt to define a private club as a public space. He seems to infer that the state cannot regulate behavior in private clubs.

Hogwash. The state has the same ability to regulate activities in private clubs as it does anywhere else. Does anyone really think otherwise?

Many communities already have acted to ban smoking in public spaces, and the state should take the same action. Banning smoking protects everyone – customers and employees alike – from the proven harmful effects of second-hand smoke.

Supporters of the bill say the Kansas Medicaid program spends $200 million a year in treating smoking-related illnesses. That doesn’t count the expenditures of private insurance programs.

* * *

Shades of Gerald Ford. Video on the Web today shows President Obama bumping his head as he enters Marine One, his official helicopter. Next we’ll have alert Secret Service agents wrestling the helicopter to the ground.

* * *

In England, where bizarre behavior seems almost the norm, they’re apparently going ape over the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

Observances include a Darwin coin, courtesy of the Royal Mint, and a Darwin stamp set from the Royal Mail. A group of knitters also are paying tribute, and some quilters are doing a Bayeux tapestry of the voyage of HMS Beagle.

Obviously, Darwin is not the controversial figure in England that he is over here. According to a report on National Public Radio, that’s because even those who see the hand of a creator in the natural world have no problem with Darwin.

The Right Rev. Lord Harries of Pentregarth, member of the House of Lords and former bishop of Oxford for the Church of England, says this is because science and religion answer different questions. Simply put, science seeks to answer how things happen, while religion seeks answers to why things happen.

Put that way, it seems so simple.

Comments

  1. CarolT (anonymous) says…

    Every smoking ban, everywhere, has been rammed down the public's throat by falsely framing the issue as "freedom versus public health," and concealing anti-smoker scientific fraud.

    More than 50 studies have implicated human papillomaviruses as the cause of over 22% of non-small cell lung cancers. This would equal over 30,000 cases, which is more than they are claiming for radon. It's also ten times more lung cancers than the anti-smokers pretend are caused by secondhand smoke. Passive smokers are more likely to have been exposed to this virus, so the anti-smokers' studies, because they are all based on nothing but lifestyle questionnaires, have been cynically designed to falsely blame passive smoking for all those extra lung cancers that are really caused by HPV. And, it's obvious that a significant proportion of lung cancers blamed on active smoking are actually caused by HPV. Obviously, there is a corrupt, politically-motivated coverup of a far larger cause of lung cancer than radon or secondhand smoke!

    http://www.smokershistory.com/hpvlung...

    The anti-smokers lie that smoking bans supposedly cause "immediate, dramatic" declines in the number of heart attack admissions. In the Pueblo study, what they didn't tell you is that the death rates from acute myocardial infarction actually increased in the year after the ban, the same time they were boasting that the number of admissions declined! That suggests that people were dying because they weren’t admitted to hospitals when they should have been! And in the Indiana study, they exploited an anomalous spike in acute MIs during the "before" section of the study, to make the "after" part look better! And in the Helena study, the actual death rates from acute myocardial infarction (as opposed to hospital admissions which were the endpoint of the study) were nearly identical in 2001 (before the ban) and 2002 (the year of the ban), and reached their lowest point in 2003, the year after the smoking ban was repealed.

    http://www.smokershistory.com/etshear...

    If smoking or passive smoking were the real cause of asthma, the rates of asthma would have gone DOWN. But the EPA's own report says, "Between 1980 and 1995, the percentage of children with asthma doubled, from 3.6 percent in 1980 to 7.5 percent in 1995." The graph on pdf page 65 boasts of declines in cotinine levels during this same period.

    http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eermfi...

    And the CDC says, "Despite the plateau in asthma prevalence, ambulatory care use has continued to grow since 2000... Increased ambulatory care use for asthma has continued during an era when overall rate of ambulatory care use for children did not increase."

    http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad381...

    This is a classic example of how the slimy and unscrupulous manipulators of public opinion have railroaded Americans into tyranny!