From 2017, read Transcripts documenting the coup interviews with Malcolm Nance
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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Fixing Fox News Lies, one plumber at a time

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Yesterday a plumber in my kitchen actually said to me, "Obama has just given Iran the freedom to build a nuclear bomb." The Freaking Plumber! I got him to stop long enough to say, "Well since this deal comes after a Year of secret negotiations, I don't think anyone knows the details yet." That shut him up, 
But it really P's me off that the Misinformation Machine reaches Everyone so easily, thus UNDERMINING American security. Once again, I believe Fox Limbaugh et al are paid and run by anti-American groups and the FoxFriends are so Dumb they don't even know it, just repeat what the bosses tell them to say and cause Millions of Americans to believe the opposite of the truth. Meanwhile Obama is solving one international problem after another and the Boehner Bimbos still can't figure out the Obamacare website.
Jerks

From Facebook today 
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Kay Ebeling
4 minutes ago

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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Being a crime victim actually gave me tools for life.

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I'm a sex crime victim, and I survived the incidents by enduring. I tightened my lips and even though the enduring lasted a long time, I lived through it. 
Now decades later when I get in a situation that's intolerable, I seem to get through it better than my friends. Because I endure. I know it's going to end eventually so I stick it out and go through it and in the end, I survive, as always.  So being a crime victim actually gave me tools for life.

Posted on Facebook this AM - 

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=Kay Eb

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Telling a Republican they're no longer a Republican because they are now poor.


I have a new friend who needs to learn that because she is now poor, it does not make sense for her to be a Republican anymore.  I'm finding ways to break it to her gently. 

My new friend here at the senior complex said she was having trouble sleeping, so I offered to give her one of my Valerian.  A laugh slipped out of her chest and she said, oh those aren't strong enough for me.  Then she gave a 15 second litany of pharmaceuticals she takes, and that's just at night, to help her sleep.  Soon she let out another laugh, “Valerian aren't strong enough,” she said, “they do nothing for me.” 

Me, I take one Benedryl and get knocked out as soon as it hits.  I thought these were massively potent pills I was getting through Amazon, but my neighbor explains, because she is on so many prescription drugs, she can take Valerian and Benedryl and not even feel their effects. 

She said one of the drugs she takes “is for restless leg syndrome.”

I started to continue the conversation with, “I don't trust pharmaceutical companies,” but I'm pretty sure my new friend is a Republican.  For that reason I also didn't say “or any drug introduced since Ronald Reagan was President.” Instead I say:

“I don't trust any drugs that were introduced since the 1980s.”  

My friend starts to agree then stops herself.  

I continue, “Since deregulation, they've been getting away with too much.” 

My friend hesitates more, not sure how what I said conflates with what she's believed all these years. 

My new seventy-something friend doesn't realize the only reason she's Republican is because her husband was successful.  He's now dead and his long illness depleted their funds.  So she's not really Republican anymore, she's just voting that way out of habit.  I don't want to force this new truth in her face by starting political arguments, but I feel a need to help her as over the coming years the fact of her new income status makes itself more obvious in her life.  

I remember in about 2002 when it first happened to Lizzie and me. When we were living in our car on the streets of Hollywood those months, I realized, People aren't poor because they want to be poor.  And once you're poor, you're there and there’s not a whole lot of ways out.

I said to my new friend, “If I take too much Benedryl, I get restless leg syndrome,” and hoped that later she makes the connection that one of her prescription drugs is probably causing the symptom they're treating with another prescription drug, when she thinks about it. And that big pharma has put profits above her health in the "free market" she and her husband cheered all those years.  And a lot of things in her life today would get better if more people would just vote Democrat. 

My friend was married for 27 years to a man who was “in real estate” and they traveled between their two houses on different US coasts.  Now she lives in this lower rent senior complex and even though she drives and dresses better than anyone else here, she tells me she feels like she’s poor too, and I understand because from her frame of reference she is. 

Oh, and anti-depressants for pain

My friend is also taking an anti-depressant and every time she says the name of the drug to me, she adds, “For pain, I take it for pain.”  I've been down that road before, where corporate doctors prescribe anti-depressants pills as pain medication. 

Apparently a few decades back, when psychiatrists gave depressed people anti-depressants, the patients reported that they not only got happier, but in some cases their physical pain went away. 

Pharma execs saw dollar signs.  Now they could sell anti-depressants to emotionally stable people who were in physical pain.

Vastly expanding their customer base. 

Again, this was after Ronald Reagan.

So after a minimal amount of unmonitored testing, big pharma got doctors all over America to prescribe antidepressants to people when they are in physical pain over the last thirty years.   

I saw through this ruse after a few months of taking psychotropic pills for body pain, because I could tell, the pain was not getting any better, but the psychiatric drugs were making me more crazy than I had ever been before, and I've had my periods.  Not having any doctors paying attention to me for last decade or so, there hasn’t been anyone to convince me those drugs work when they don't.  

So I don't take pharmaceuticals and if I feel the need, I can take a Valerian root bought over the counter in tablet form and then lay down for a snooze. 

But maybe for now I'll cut back on the Benedryl.
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Meanwhile: Stay Happy . ke

Monday, November 11, 2013

LadyWomen born 1945-60, Gray Tweens, now face poverty in old age

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Ladywomen:  Not housewives, not career women, females who came of age too early for Ms Magazine but too late for Ladies Home Journal are today's "Ladywomen" though we could also be called “gray tweens.” Ladywomen grew up thinking we’d be supported by a husband and wound up supporting ourselves, usually in low paying jobs, often raising kids singlehandedly as well, as we Ladywomen were also the first of the “single mom” phenomenon.  

Now as I become an old lady, my suspicions are confirmed, women from my generation, born 1945 to 62 or so, are facing poverty in unprecedented numbers, just because of the quirky period of time in which we happened to be born.

When I grew up, women went to college mostly to get what we called an M-R-S degree, as in you went to college to land a good husband and become a Mrs. Girls were not even steered into higher math class until the late 1960s.  


Now Ladywomen as a generation are reaching retirement with a monthly Social Security check that provides no security at all.  

As I look around my senior complex, the women who stayed with their husbands, mostly in their seventies and older, live well now, even though they never really held a job of any note.  Now my generation is beginning to enter the senior housing population.  And in the lower rent senior complexes, we are all broke women.  In no way am I saying women today would have been better off as housewives, but we Ladywomen got caught in the middle. 

It's only females born 1945 to 1961 who fall into this Ladywoman category.  If you were born earlier, you probably ended up in a traditional marriage, and today in retirement you are living on your husband’s pension  If you were born later, you probably were encouraged to plan for college and a career from the start. 

It's just us, members of this lucky demographic born at the tail end of the Baby Boom who are now the Ladywomen.  We get to be the topic demographic in current poverty studies. 

Ladywomen may have been the first to get politicized by Gloria Steinem et al, but unfortunately we did not end up with the same earning capacity that women who are benefiting from the women’s revolution of the 1970s have today. 

I did not even go to college until I was 26 years old in 1975, soon after Ms. Magazine’s first issue came out, as it happens.  In fact I saved that first issue of Ms., and in the early eighties when I was living in Houston, I went to see Steinem speak and had her autograph my copy.  I have carried that magazine with me all these years, wrapped in plastic wrap, in fact it is near me now in a box I brought from Chicago: Volume 1 number 1 of Ms. Magazine autographed by Gloria Steinem herself. 

I’d sell it if it would help me pay next month’s rent. 

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Posted by Kay Ebeling, 
producer of City of Angels Blog 
since January 2007

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Related article in AlterNet today:  


POST SCRIPT: 
The way The USA is set up, if you work as a professional from age 22 to 65 or so, you will have a good amount of cash in your Social Security and a comfortable retirement.

But most women in my age range, Ladywomen like me, kind of backed into feminism and career opportunities. 

Also our husbands were free to leave marriages for the first time in western civilization history, and they did.  So a lot of us Ladywomen are now arriving at the age where we have nothing to rely on but Social Security and there is literally almost nothing there. 

We are the Ladywomen and we need to be heard.  

ke