| Personal Finance 101 with H. Swint Friday
We are entering the last weekend before Christmas and I am sure everyone is scrambling to get all of their last-minute shopping and holiday preparations ready. A shopper interviewed by a local TV news crew last week had some obvious but good advice that this is not a time to be stressed, but to enjoy. Easy to say. As adults, many of us have a number of stressful responsibilities on our shoulders at this time of year. One of if not the largest is the financial burden created by the customary holiday celebrations. The other stresses include the time and effort required to make sure the holidays are fun for everyone we care about. The magnitude of these stresses is readily observable as we see suicide rates rise dramatically this time of the year. The best advice I can give is to do the best you can and realize that your financial and personal health and sanity depend on not trying to do, expect or demand too much from the holidays.
Spotted in Seattle -- yet another wild cat
A wild serval cat, the second one found wandering around West Seattle in the past three weeks, was on its way to Sara's Sanctuary in Redmond on Friday. Terri Miner, the owner of the sanctuary, is working long hours to build a new enclosure. She knows what she's in for; it will be the third serval for her shelter. The elegant cats with long legs and graceful necks look like miniature cheetahs or leopards. They come from Africa and, like other exotic animals, are illegal to own in Seattle. "You can't put a serval with another animal. You can't put them with a dog, a cat or monkey. Everything we have on this property is prey to a serval," said Miner. "They can jump 15 feet straight up in the air. It means quite an enclosure is needed," she said.
Where Health, High Fashion Intersect
Hartford Hospital sponsored its "High Fashion With A Heart" fashion show Saturday at Hartford Stage to benefit the Henry Low Heart Center and the theater's stage education fund. Models sported new spring fashions for a sold-out crowd of mostly women who can't wait for the better weather — and a new clothes season — to arrive.
Among them was Ellen Dornelas, center director of Behavioral Health Programs, who put work aside to sit back and relax.
"I'm just looking for ideas for clothes," said Dornelas about the outfits from West Hartford's bk & co.
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Concentration camps in America: The consequences of 40 years of fear
More realistically, an increase in street and campus protests against the Iraq War, similar to those of the '60s, could easily lead to the imposition of martial law in the Unites States as an extension of the War on Terrorism. Or, as the current recession deepens into a depression with wide spread unemployment, hunger and civil unrest, martial law could be imposed and military work camps established. Irrespective of how it plays out, every scenario involves mass preventative detentions, without trial, by the military and requires federal confinement facilities. Accepting the fact that the president has the power to detain as many American citizens as he chooses, is the government actually building facilities to concentrate them? In January 2006, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contract to former Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) to provide detention centers in the United States to deal with "an emergency influx of immigrants into the US, or to support the rapid deployment of new programs." Unexplained were these "new programs" and why they require a major expansion of detention centers.
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