Matching Funds

When I give, I like to give smart.

I give to the right organizations that I’ve researched and know well, and I prefer giving when my donation is being matched.

A few weeks ago, I found one of those opportunities when a distant acquaintance/relative named David Alhadeff was raising money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. David was kind enough to offer a personal match AND a corporate match from his firm, Goldman Sachs. 3X leverage on a philanthropic donation is a situation I like, so I donated and then sent out an email to some family members who were also kind enough to donate. With one email, we increased his fundraising amount by 21% (but more importantly, The Lance Armstrong Foundation got 3X that much!)

Today, a similar opportunity has presented itself. A wealthy donor has offered to match gifts to Planned Parenthood up to $1M:

From now until June 30, a generous donor will match every online gift to Planned Parenthood dollar-for-dollar up to $1 million. This means that, for example, if you give $50, Planned Parenthood will actually get $100. With more and more people turning to Planned Parenthood affiliate health centers for care during this economic recession, now is the best time to give. Whether you can spare $5, $50, or $500, your contribution will be doubled: https://secure.ga0.org/02/match09pporg?source=match09fbc3

Planned Parenthood is a leader in women’s health, and often provides services free-of-charge to underserved and poor women (including cervical cancer screenings, breast exams, contraception, testing for STIs, et cetera), and Planned Parenthood can’t continue to provide those services without your support.

2X leverage on your donation for a good cause…what are you waiting for!?

Doctors Now Unnecessary

When you can tap the knowledge of everyone you know, on a single platform, with responses coming at you near instantaneously, who needs a specialist anymore?:

Swine Flu Up-To-The-Minute Map

Swine flu is within 140 miles (225km) of Seattle (my location), which means in all likelihood, somebody has it in Seattle but just hasn’t been diagnosed yet. F***. Check the constantly-updated Google Maps application to see when it gets close to you:

H1N1 Swine Flu on Google Maps:

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

It’s been identified in Israel, Australia, Colombia, and all over Spain! Holy s***!

Via The Big Picture.

Not Safe Enough

Levi [Johnston] kept insisting he and Bristol Palin practiced safe sex “every time.” What he meant was safe in that they weren’t tied to railroad tracks. After many back and forths, Levi admitted that what he’d meant to say was that he practiced safe sex “most of the time.”

Levi is a selfish fool. Bristol is a dirty slut with no values.

Luckily, they’re young, and there’s hope they’ll stop making these grave mistakes. A baby will surely sober them to reality.

Palin Winked While Levi Dallied With Bristol: Margaret Carlson – Bloomberg

Thanks, Nevin.

Outbreak

NEW YORK—A new study published in The Journal Of Pediatric Medicine found that a shocking 98 percent of all infants suffer from bipolar disorder. “The majority of our subjects, regardless of size, sex, or race, exhibited extreme mood swings, often crying one minute and then giggling playfully the next.” Gregory added that nearly 100 percent of infants appear to suffer from the poor motor skills and impaired speech associated with Parkinson’s disease

98% Of Babies Manic-Depressive – The Onion

Marketing Tactics

I’m often amused by that sales tactics that companies employ. Pharmaceutical companies are known to take doctors to lavish dinners where they’re indoctrinated taught about new cures and new approaches. Promotional pens with drug brand-names are not uncommon, either. I’ve just received this gem of a gift, thanks to pharma giant Schering-Plough:

Luckily, it doesn’t contain the drug in the cocoa.

Pizza Cone

Healthy.

Via thisiswhyyourefat.com/.

Step 1: Sell Tainted peanut butter. Step 3: Profit

My mother just alerted me to a phonecall she received from Costco, telling her to throw out the Luna Bars she’d bought months back due to the possibility of salmonella contamination — which got me thinking.

Was this phonecall to help customers avoid sickness, or a sales tactic?

Think about it.

More Luna Bars thrown away means more Luna Bars bought now as replacements.

Is Costco pulling a fast one on their customers?

Miley “Two-Chins” Cyrus

Miley Cyrus has been packing on the pounds. She’s not clinically overweight, but I’m really surprised that her agent is letting her look like this in public, being that she’s a star who is held to different standards than the rest of us. Perhaps she’s promoting positive body-image to young, chubby girls?

Food Coma – AKA Postprandial Thanksgiving Sedation

(click to enlarge)

Now you know:

Turkey meat and drowsiness

One widely-held belief is that heavy consumption of turkey meat (as for example in a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast) results in drowsiness, which has been attributed to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey. While turkey does contain high levels of tryptophan, the amount is comparable to that contained in most other meats. Furthermore, postprandial Thanksgiving sedation may have more to do with what is consumed along with the turkey, in particular carbohydrates and alcohol, rather than the turkey itself. This is demonstrated in a popular episode of the sitcom “Seinfeld” when characters of the show drug a woman using turkey and alcohol in order to play with her toy collection.

It has been demonstrated in both animal models and in humans] that ingestion of a meal rich in carbohydrates triggers release of insulin. Insulin in turn stimulates the uptake of large neutral branched-chain amino acids (LNAA) but not tryptophan (trp) into muscle, increasing the ratio of trp to LNAA in the blood stream. The resulting increased ratio of tryptophan to large neutral amino acids in the blood reduces competition at the large neutral amino acid transporter resulting in the uptake of tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system (CNS). Once inside the CNS, tryptophan is converted into serotonin in the raphe nuclei by the normal enzymatic pathway. The resultant serotonin is further metabolised into melatonin by the pineal gland. Hence, these data suggest that “feast-induced drowsiness,” and in particular, the common post-Christmas and American post-Thanksgiving dinner drowsiness, may be the result of a heavy meal rich in carbohydrates which, via an indirect mechanism, increases the production of sleep-promoting melatonin in the brain.

Typtophan – Wikipedia

Pragmatism.

I’d labeled Barack Obama a pragmatist long ago, and I’m clearly not alone in this characterization. Want an example of his pragmatism? He chooses to stay in shape rather than waste his time studying 2,000 year old fairytales:

Obama skips church, heads to gym – Politico

Diseases That Will Kill

If you weren’t already alarmed by our impending economic doom, here’s some chipper news on the health front!:

-Tuberculosis infections in Washington State are at a 30-year high.

-Public Health has no funding past 2009 (Good thinking, guys!), jeopardizing local prevention efforts by cutting outbreak response staff, killing off the satellite TB clinic that serves the homeless (TB-infested pirates, they are), and weakening the State’s ability to ensure that active TB patients complete treatment.

-Outbreaks will become more likely, and more difficult to respond to/control.

-Multi-drug resistant TB costs $250,000/person to cure.

-Run for the hills!

-81% of active TB patients are low-income, 80% are ethnic minorities, and 76% were foreign-born. Blacks (46 per 100,000), Asians (30 per 100,000) and Hispanics (17 per 100,000) continue to have disproportionately higher TB rates than whites (2.3 per 100,000).

-Super! If you’re white like me, you don’t have anything to worry about!*

*Save for the possibility our underfunded Public Health system misses a multi-drug resistant TB outbreak and we all consequently die.

30-year tuberculosis high in King County reflects ongoing health threat

That’s an old cornea.

An 80-year-old man in Oslo, Norway can still see with a 123-year-old transplanted cornea, although his vision is no longer great. Bernt Aune received the transplant in 1958. The donor was a man born in 1885!

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the oldest living organ in the world,” eye doctor Hasan Hasanain at Namsos hospital told the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang.

In the 1950s, doctors expected it to work for just five years, Hasanain said. Such cornea operations date back to the early 20th century and were among the first successful transplants.

“It wasn’t unusual to use corneas from elderly people who had died,” Aune said.

Link

Via Neatorama via Microsiervos.

Links for Monday

I really hate beggars. Something needs to be done about them. Perhaps more laws against their presence in public coupled with more rehabilitation and job training dollars. Atlanta just installed little banks on the street in which to give money to support the needy instead of giving directly to the homeless. Seattle and Portland NEED to do this.

Atlanta Cracks Down On Panhandlers – NPR

Nutjob Critic Roger Ebert Answers Your Questions About Creationism (Hilarious)

Baskin Robbins Heath Bar Shake has 2,300 calories (92% of the RDI for men, 115% of the RDI for women), HALF A POUND of sugar (SERIOUSLY), 3 times the recommended daily intake of saturated fat. Call it the Death Shake?

Baskin Robbins Death Shake Has 2,300 Calories – Consumerist

Point-Counterpoint

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis – Bloomberg (Great Read)

Loan titans paid McCain [campaign manager] nearly $2 million – IHT

Lesson: Both major political parties are responsible for the banking mess, as are the investment banks who sold the securitized mortgages, as are the real estate investment promoters on late-night tv who sold the public on the home price boom, as are the banks for buying the sludge, as are the people who bought the homes they really couldn’t afford.

Edit: John McCain denies that his campaign manager received money from Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, noting that Mr. Davis left his former firm in 2006 and has not received a penny in distributions from the firm in that time, nor does he hold an equity stake.

Every Minute, Every Hour, Every Day

4.2 children are born every second, 253 per minute, more than 15,000 per hour. Each year sees 133,398,951 new births. That’s 133 million children that will need education, shelter, food, water, energy, clothing, computers, and transportation for at least 66 years (the WHO’s estimate of global life expectancy). These requirements are too taxing on our planet’s natural resources. Even when accounting for human innovation which aims to maximize everything from crop yields to water reclamation, our birthrate and resource usage is unsustainable.

Only 55 million humans die each year, which, measured against the amount of humans added, is extraordinarily out of proportion.

US Census Bureau