green

Learning to live without eating is a tough one for us banded ones. :help: There will be some ups and some downs. Don't beat yourself up over the downs. :angry Just come here for support instead, eh.

@Eleebana2: I heard that the fact that Gordon Brown is Scottish may also act against him. Is that true? He certainly sounds like a worthy man.

I feel for your sister and her husband. I think that we are all victims of the greediness of the airlines when it comes to their unrealistic seat configurations. Whenever I have flown in third world countries on old, second-hand aircraft I am always amazed at the amount of seat and leg room that these planes have. It is wonderful! I also remember flying back to Toronto from Amsterdam with an airline that is rumoured to have made every fouth row especially short vis-a-vis leg room. By the end of that flight I was pretty near psychotic!:xena_banana: I think that the damn airline folks oughta hand out tranquilizers as they shoe horn us into our seats. Thanks for letting me vent. As you can see, I feel kinda strongly on the subject.:heh:

The above listed site is another pro-life site. It says so at the bottom of the page.

Bandiva is right, Argon. Get a bed, the best you can afford. A wonderful bed is a fabulous thing! And you do spend a lot of time there, you know.:xena_banana:

Yep, now that I see the picture it's thumbs up on the outfit.

Green is my family name and also a very nice colour. I usually think of myself as Green or by my initials, rarely by my first name which happens to be Alice.:xena_banana:

If you choose the full red velvet skirt you should wear this with a narrow very plain black top. A narrow top will enhance the fullness and the tiers of the skirt. The black velvet gauchos and boots also sound nice and the red shirt paired with the plaid vest would work with these.

My bad, chocolate, and thanx for pointing this out. :embarassed: This was clumsy writing on my part and not at all what I meant to say.

This issue of weight discrimination is a real issue of course. People are much, much nicer to young, slim, good-looking, tall, white people. And being fat is has something in common with those other categories; there ain't much that you can do for yourself without surgery. Fat people do metabolize food differently from thin people. Our systems are more efficient; we get more miles to the gallon. This worked for us in prehistoric times. It's a bummer now. I think that obesity should be recognised as a medical condition and that airlines should provide the obese with an extra seat free of charge. Let's face it: Those seats that the airlines now provide are, due to their greedy desire to pack us in like sardines, tiny and there is no leg room, either. Note that they have chosen these seat configurations although the average customer is growing bigger. Even for a normo a long distance flight is a nightmare. This is the how the airlines seem to like it, not the customers. Outsized customers should be accomodated at no extra charge to themselves.

Ah, the virtuous anti-smoking Nazis strike again! While I think that it is fair to ban smoking from indoor work spaces, taking the battle onto the open street is a bit too much. What about breathing in the exhaust fumes from all those SUVs, etc? Are these not much more deleterious to one's health? And on the environment? These attacks on the smoker have turned into a witch hunt. There are much bigger problems that are being ignored.

:clap2: :clap2: :clap2: I'm gonna tell that to mistah green! So there! Love that mistah Cloe, eh.:clap2: :clap2: :clap2: Hugs and kisses (but nothing involving Green being on her knees) to the both of yer, eh. Smoochies :kiss2: to mister and missus Cloe from green. Hahahahahaha! :o

Because I have never been a maternal person - it is for this reason that I have never had children of my own - what I look at in those who do choose to have children is whether they can take care of them both physically and emotionally. It is clear from the review that I have made of the material available of the Duggar family that these kids are doing well. They are healthy and they are as happy as anyone has the right to be. The remaining issue is the desire that these children not be raised as bigots. This is a big concern. What is not a big concern as far as I am concerned is something that a number of you have mentioned and this is this issue of play time. Play time is a very recent concept. Until the mid-20th century and even then this was only prevalent in the most affluent countries children were expected to take part in family life, to learn, and to be as productive as was possible. This current concept of the sanctity of childhood and of playtime is very much a recent and arguably artificial construct. I would further argue that the reason that so many teenagers now run into sexual trouble is that they were, historically speaking, already wed and breeding at this time. We may wish to carefully examine our middle class style values and style of living and then contrast this with the biological imperitives of our species. It strikes me that the issue that we are so often fighting is that of our own biological time table. The trick is not to give in to this but to acknowledge its existence and to figure out some way to work around it.

Oh, that Green! She is doing a lot of posting, eh? Well, re the Duggars, I have reviewed the website and I really can't see anything wrong with this family so far. It is true that they are a little square but so what? They seem to be happy, healthy and loving. As long as they are also brought up to accept and respect those who are different from them - Jews, Muslims, atheists, people of colour, and other foreigners - I really do not have any problem with this family.

Sunta, I love this piece which you have posted. Thanks for doing so. You might be interested to know that up here in Canada there has been a belief for sometime now that the States will eventually run into a fresh water crisis and that your country will end up by looking north at our splendid fresh water resources. Indeed there are those Canadians, ones who might be considered to be a little paranoid, who foresee a time when Canada might be taken over (*read invaded*) for this reason. You might also be interested to know that although there is a sizeable chunk of underpopulated property to the north of America this land is underpopulated for a reason. Even with the already noticeable effects of global warming taking place up here in Canada the fact does not change that much of this chunk of real estate is rock and not lush and fertile farm land. Man cannot live on minerals alone. As for our coastal waters which were once a source of food, well, they have been pretty well fished out. And even though our own government has placed a moratorium on fishing - thus tossing lots of locals onto eternal welfare - these protections only extend three miles past the Canadian coastline. European and Asian fishermen who choose to fish outside these limits can do so and are continuing to do so. The issue of population is both interesting and frightening. Mammals were designed to breed fairly prolifically in order to handle times of famine, disease, and predators and this balanced out before mankind began to develop his superior intellectual resources and was thus able to tinker with the natural birth to death ratio. (We can see an echo of our own extravagant growth in population in that of our house pets. Animal shelters complain bitterly about animal owners who refuse to neuter their pets. An on-line visit to any animal shelter is always heart-breaking.) At the same time, while some creatures, notably humans, are flourishing, others are disappearing at an increasingly rapid rate as their home turf is torn down to make space for us. Biologists and Environmentalists tell us that biodiversity is important for the stability and the health of the planet. This kinda makes sense to me and as we are part of the planet it strikes me that we must wake up and pay attention to this message. Sunta has chosen to open this thread by discussing the issue of attitudes towards population. Though most of the industrialized nations have low birth rates it is true that America is an anomally. Your birthrate is 2, and that is replacement level, and many of the other affluent nations are quite envious. Mousecrazy has raised what I personally consider to be a more powerful point and that is the issue of the western lifestyle. She's saying something very interesting here, in my opinion, for the truth is that we now all leave much bigger footprints in the environment due to our current lifestyle expectations than our grandparents or great-grandparents did. We do this regardless of the number of kids we have chosen to have.

It seems to me that the above statement was carefully crafted. Creator was left unspecific, undoubtedly deliberately so. America was designed to be a pluralistic country by its founding fathers.

Benny Hinn is currently raising money for his new personal jet, to be called the Dove. He claims he needs it for his missionary duties. Hahahahaha!:heh:

LOL! Good thing that I still have excellent bladder control, grrl. That last crack would have had me peeing my ginchies otherwise.

Thanx for the good wishes and yep, Wheezy, you are right! I actually have been thinking about most of those very things that you listed. I have already been painting for some years now and I used to be serious about photography even longer ago. I even had a darkroom when I was in my 20s! I am dying to get back to the all grrls' gym that I belong to but I am still having physio for the F...ed Up shoulder. :cry Today I went to the movies with a couple of older retired friends. Afterwards we ended up in an Indigo book store. I bought 5 books for less than 17 bucks. The kid at cash said that he gets even better deals as an employee. Then I thought that I could get a part-time job in a book store. Yep, I figure that once my mother's estate - I am the executrix - is finally cleaned up and my shoulder is good then I can start taking care of Green biz.

I don't think that Sunta has been as rude or as abrasive as Bill O'Reilly or that pill poppin' guy - I forget his name - who made such fun of Michael J. Fox recently. Some of you like to listen to these clowns because you are on the same political page whereas you are not on the same page as Sunta. This will inevitably colour your responses to her posts. It is certain that she chose to introduce a controversial and challenging topic on this thread. I believe that there is much to be gained by debates such as this one. This is where we are forced to scrutinize our own beliefs and put them in good order before putting them out there for everyone, including the opposition, to examine. By doing this we learn more about ourselves and our beliefs. And by examining the opposition's arguments we also learn more than we would be by choosing to remain unchallenged and safely embedded in our same old ruts. In my opinion Rants and Raves is the most intellectually challenging neighbourhood on the site. Now, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of blood letting from time to time, is there?

Thanx. Now that I am retired I've got to figure out what to do with the rest of my life! Now that is going to be complicated! :help:

No, He is only 48 years old. He has lots of life left in him! LOL He was in favour me taking early retirement. He seems to like to have someone to come home to. Weird, eh?

Sounds like you came from a fine family. I am a little bit envious, you know.

I am not an American but I must say that I do find this version of the statue to be deeply offensive and I can understand anyone's outrage. Let us speak frankly here. This statue has been representative of the spirit of America, a country which has welcomed generations of immigrants without regard to religion or to social standing. Those hopeful immigrants who funnelled through Ellis Island saw the Statue of Liberty before they were able to place foot on American soil. I don't know how Americans interpret this symbol anymore but for many of us the Statue of Liberty still signifies that the country she symbolically guards is a place of freedom, brotherhood and equality. This was the spirit in which the French nation presented her to you. It was an entirely humanistic and secular passion that lay behind this gift and this spirit must be respected for the Statue of Liberty must be accessible to all Americans. Surely you can understand, when you think about it, that to trick out this powerful symbol of what America stands for with a symbol that belongs to a specific group is deeply offensive and should not be allowed. Why, for a non believer it is as offensive as seeing the Lady chugging down a bottle of coke! I am surprised that your country has allowed this kind of thing. It is disrespectful.

Thanks for the compliment, Carlene, and I will accept it as another atheist. What bothers many of us is that we see that many Christians, in particular the Fundamentalist and Charismatic Christians, have opted for a narrow and particular version of Christianity without troubling to examine either the framework of their beliefs, or the Bible itself. It is clear that these are Christians who have never taken the trouble to examine this document carefully and so have not noted its internal inconsistancies nor that it is an often somber, an often brutal document. The careful atheist becomes concerned because the careless Christian always cherrypicks. And it is these Christians who then propose to hijack the constitution and the working agenda of the single most powerful country in the industrialised world at this time for their own ends. Make no mistake, no other modern and sucessfully functioning country in the international arena is a theocracy. We are thinking folk who are concerned about the current state of affairs, as we should be, and it is this, I believe, that makes folks like Sunta, etc. charge into these discussions with passion. This is always a good thing. This is a reminder that democracy still exists.