Don’t Fear the Truth

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Earlier this week, after reading the article stating Canada was going to stop the import of these bottles, I started looking online for glass versions of the bottles we have, called Dr Browns Bottles. These are unique bottles, and reduce baby gas immensely. I found out that you could now get glass versions of Dr Brown’s bottles, so I started checking online stores. Amazon had one seller - sold out. eBay had no one selling any of these bottles.

I spent an hour and a half looking at probably fifty online stores - none of them had these bottles. They were all sold out. It appeared that Dr Brown just released these bottles about a month ago, and with this article hitting yahoo.com, people had bought out every store on the net. Amazing.

I kept checking, started looking for other bottles that might be similar to ours. No local stores even carried glass bottles at all. Very frustrating. If you have kids, trying feeding them with a bottle and wondering if your baby is drinking something harmful to them.

This morning I went online to check again - and found some! Sellers on eBay had them! Hey wait a minute… what the hell is up with these prices?

eBay sellers, and one person on Amazon, are price gouging these bottles. Not just a little either. These bottles sell for $12.99 for a set of two. We use about 10 bottles total, including what we send to our daycare. So I expected to pay about $60 plus shipping for 10 bottles.

Here is the list of eBay sellers that have these bottles.

Six bottles = $109. Four bottles = $59. Two bottles = $34!

I am so, so tired of capitalism. Anything for a buck. Now, if someone gouges a Playstation when they are new, and someone wants to pay $1000 for one, fine. In my opinion, this is different. People are scared, and worried that their *babies* are in danger and these freaks decide not to just make a few dollars on the short supply… they triple the price? A few dollars more I could see, but this is no different, in my opinion, than the company that charged $8 for bottled water at the second Woodstock concert. Disgusting.

We got lucky. The Babies-R-Us store an HOUR away had 11 packages, so we now have the glass bottles. I had thought I would buy the remaining bottles and put them on eBay for the price I paid, just to piss off those scum bags making money off of fear, but then realized I was just taking bottles away from someone locally that might need them.

Is this the end of the world? No. But can we have a little humanity please? Nothing is more precious than a baby. At the right, take a look at my 9 month old daughter. Yes, there is nothing any better about my daughter than anyone else’s daughter, but sometimes I think people need to relate to things visually. There are a lot of people out there just like me, who have bundles of joy just like this little rascal here. We deserve to be safe, and that safety comes before profit. I don’t give a shit if your portfolio drops a little because some plastics company’s stock lost value now that they can’t produce cancer causing plastic. We all deserve to be safe, from the newborn baby up to the retired great-grandmother. Is it too much to ask that safety comes before profit?

And the question of the day is: do you think the corporations knew about dangers of BPA when they started using it? Because in case you didn’t know, the chemical companies do not have to prove something is safe to be put on the market - someone else has to prove that they cause problems in humans. Since you can’t test on humans, that is pretty hard to do until the chemical has been around for quite a few years, and you can start to look for trends, etc. Is it coincidental that after 30 years of use, there is growing evidence that Aspartame is dangerous… and lookie here, Splenda is on the market, ready to take over.

This is not the way it should be. Fuck profit, fuck corporatism, and fuck anyone involved in this shit. We can’t even make cigarettes illegal though when we know that they cause cancer, what are our chances of changing how chemicals are allowed into the market so that we can know our kids are safe with the stuff they come into contact every day?

About Zero. The European Union, Canada, and California are all making these chemicals illegal because they will put a ban on something without conclusive evidence. Is it not better to remove something that seems questionable, until it can be proven safe, than it is to say “well until you can prove that it causes cancer in humans, we will continue to make money.”

I’m moving to Canada. Screw this shit.

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What is interesting is that when I first read about this, most anyone I talked to thought it was just ’stuff I read in the Internets’. Then I saw recently the Today show had a doctor on that said this hormone was dangerous to humans. Then, people would agree. I can, no joke, tell people that I read about this on the Net, and people will be skeptical. Say I saw it on TV, everyone gasps. ‘Really?! Wow I had no idea it was dangerous.

People assume that new information was found, that the original tests were good, everyone tried their best, but a bad product slipped through.

Keep thinking that. How does the Kool Aid taste, anyway?

And if you admit that there are people and/or companies, like Monsanto, that are knowingly putting dangerous products on the shelves, what do you do when you read other things? Like how Polycarbonate plastic bottles are cancerous, or Talcum powder is cancerous, or that Flouride is cancerous, or lipstick, etc etc ad nauseum.

It’s like flipping a switch. Once you have to admit that the government and the corporations are knowingly putting dangerous products into our hands, just for profit, the world gets a lot scarier. I’ll bet no one knew about the lead paint in the toys, right? Of course our government would find out and prosecute, they have in the past right? I mean, it’s not like Bush has relaxed laws and cut funding for government agencies that are supposed to check up on things to keep us safe, right?

Ooops, he did. So the end result is that we are LESS protected, and LESS likely to have the government find and punish a company doing these kinds of things, than we were 10 years ago.

The scariest part is: how many things are we eating or using that have not been investigated, like Milk was in the movie above? And how many have been investigated, but were censored, like the movie above? Ten products? A hundred?

A thousand? What if…

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“But the Sun is bad bad bad!” you say. Ahh, no, it is not. If I wanted to veer off into conspiracy land, I would say that the entire thing is dreamed up by people who *want* us to die early. A lot of companies, actually every company, does not want us to really live too long. But that is just speculation… I just feel it is interesting to note where people’s motives are. The government does not want to pay out Social Security, big companies do not want to pay out on retirements to employees for 30 years after they retire…

Luckily, no one’s morals are that bad right? I mean, we wouldn’t have government or rich jerk offs that would actually want people to die early right? They have consciences. Everything is fine, the *really really* bad people only exist in other countries. Here in the US, we have some greedy people like Martha Stewart or Kenneth Lay the former CEO of Enron, but nobody really evil in politics or high up on the corporate ladder in the health care or pharmaceutical world, right?

Right?

So. Vitamin D.

Your skin makes it. The study shows it helps prevent cancer. By 60%! And the kicker? You have to take 3 times the dose the FDA recommends.

A personal anecdote to make my point: Growing up I worked on a farm. The farmers all go outside, all day, most days of the week. They do not wear sunscreen. At the farm I worked at, the owner was super tanned (at least on his arms) all summer, every summer, for 80 odd years. He died of natural causes.

No skin cancer. He worked on a farm all his life. His sons, in their 60s now. No skin cancer.

Why? From what I have read, skin cancer is likely when the skin *burns*, not just from exposure to the sun. Thousands of years of evolution and we think our bodies would not have evolved a way to get nutrients and health from the sunlight we are in every day?

The problem is that people are inside all spring, then on a hot sunday afternoon in July, they have a picnic, and get burned. If they had been outside all spring, they would have a safe healthy tan, and not get burned. Your skin tans to protect you. If you think about people thousands of years ago, they would never be white skinned in July - they would have had exposure all summer, and as the sun increased in intensity, they would have gotten darker and darker tans - to match the sun’s intensity and protect them.

Civilization. Its a bitch. We work all day so we can sit around and… write blog articles at 1:41 in the morning, then we spend more money to put chemicals on our skin to protect us since we are screwing up our bodies’ normal defense mechanism… which causes us to have a vitamin deficiency, and we are more likely to die from cancer… caused mostly by crap chemicals that ‘make our life easier.’

These conveniences make previously time consuming jobs (like say… making a loaf of bread) easy, or we just spend some of our time (wages) to buy a loaf of bread.

And what do we do with this extra time? We work! To make OTHER PEOPLE rich. Odd that 30 years ago the average American could support a family with only one parent working, now both must work to survive. Fire up the leaf blower though, to make the job faster so you can get a few extra minutes with your family, since you both work all day, often overtime now that paying overtime is cheaper than hiring more employees. Inflation catches us all. Do some research on Ron Paul and ‘the inflation tax’ - the more you learn, the angrier you get. Really, really angry.

“Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.”

PS: get some vitamin D supplements.

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