On November 30, 2013, End Stand Your Ground blogged on the case of Ronald Westbrook. We re-blogged it here.
Ronald Westbrook
72-year-old Ronald Westbrook suffered with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He wandered away from his home and was shot four times and killed after ringing the doorbell and turning a doorknob at a home in Georgia.
Think Progress now reports that Joe Hendrix, who killed Westbrook, will not be charged. Walker County, GA District Attorney Herbert “Buzz” Franklin explained his decision saying, “In interviews immediately after the shooting, Hendrix claimed he acted in self-defense. In Georgia, the prosecution bears the burden of disproving a self-defense claim beyond a reasonable doubt. After looking at the facts from Hendrix’ perspective, it would be impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hendrix did not reasonably act in self-defense.”
Words that will help you look within and find your own answers. A quiet meditation, a quiet journey …. go within. Get in touch with Spirit and find the essence of what we are, why we are here and how to find our purpose.
Plus updated guidance for international supporters…
By Cathy Kristofferson, March 3, 2014
This week there are two Global Days of Action set for standing in solidarity with African LGBT communities suffering severe anti-gay persecution. For Uganda the day is Wednesday (5th) and for Nigeria it’s on Friday (7th). OBLOGDEE knows of actions in the U.S. by Stop The Hate and Homophobia Coalition in Springfield, MA and by ACT UP in New York City for the Global Day of Action Against Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law. Coalition partners of Nigeria’s Solidarity Alliance have organized protests at the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, DC and at the Consulate in New York City for the Global Day of Action In Support of Nigeria’s LGBT Community.
The Eurasian wolf (Canis lupus lupus), also known as the European, common or forest wolf, is a subspecies of gray wolf which has the largest range among wolf subspecies and is the most common in Europe and Asia, ranging through Mongolia, China, Russia, Scandinavia, Western Europe,Caucasus, the Himalayan Mountains and Balkans. Compared to their North American cousins, Eurasian wolves tend to have longer, more highly placed ears, narrower heads, more slender loins and coarser, tawnier coloured fur Compared to Indian wolves, Eurasian wolves are larger, and have longer, broader skulls. In Europe, wolves rarely form large packs like in North America, as their lives are more strongly influenced by human activities.Because of this, Eurasian wolves tend to be more adaptable than North American wolves in the face of human expansion.
There used to be a time when the European wolf roamed freely through my country. It…
Gravity is a 2013 British-produced British and American 3Dscience-fictionthriller and space drama film. It was directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited by Alfonso Cuarón, and stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts involved in the mid-orbit destruction of a space shuttle and their attempt to return to Earth.
Cuarón wrote the screenplay with his son Jonás and attempted to develop the project at Universal Studios. The rights to the project were sold to Warner Bros. and the project later found traction there. David Heyman, who previously worked with Cuarón on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, produced the film with him. Gravity was made in the UK; British special effects company Framestore, spent more than three years creating most of the film’s visual effects which comprise over 80 minutes of its running time.
The film is set during fictitious space shuttle mission STS-157. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a medical engineer on her first space shuttle mission aboard the space shuttle Explorer. She is accompanied by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), who is commanding his final expedition. During a spacewalk to service the Hubble Space Telescope, Mission Control in Houston warns the team about a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite, which has caused a chain reaction forming a cloud of debris in space. Mission Control orders that the mission be aborted and the shuttle begin re-entry immediately. Communication with Mission Control is lost shortly after.
High-speed debris strikes the Explorer and Hubble, and detaches Stone from the shuttle, leaving her tumbling through space. Kowalski soon recovers Stone and they make their way back to the Space Shuttle. They discover that it has suffered catastrophic damage and the crew is dead. They use the thruster pack to make their way to the International Space Station (ISS), which is in orbit only about 900 mi (1,450 km) away. Kowalski estimates they have 90 minutes before the debris field completes an orbit and threatens them again.
En route to the ISS, the two discuss Stone’s home life and the death of her young daughter. As they approach the substantially damaged but still operational ISS, they see its crew has evacuated in one of its two Soyuz modules. The remaining Soyuz has suffered damage, causing its parachute to deploy and rendering it useless for returning to Earth.
Kowalski suggests it be used to travel to the nearby Chinese space stationTiangong, 100 mi (160 km) away and board one of its modules to return safely to Earth. Out of air and maneuvering power, the two try to grab onto the ISS as they fly by. Stone’s leg gets entangled in Soyuz’s parachute cords and she grabs a strap on Kowalski’s suit. Despite Stone’s protests, Kowalski detaches himself from the tether to save her from drifting away with him, and she is pulled back towards the ISS while Kowalski floats away.
Stone enters the ISS via an airlock. She cannot re-establish communication with Kowalski and concludes that she is the sole survivor. A fire breaks out, forcing her to hastily make her way to the Soyuz. As she maneuvers the capsule away from the ISS, the tangled parachute tethers prevent the Soyuz from separating from the station. She spacewalks to release the cables, succeeding just as the debris field completes its orbit and destroys the station. Stone aligns the Soyuz with Tiangong but discovers that its engine has no fuel.
After a brief radio communication with a Greenlandic Inuit fisherman, Stone resigns herself to being stranded and shuts down the cabin’s oxygen supply to commit suicide. As she begins to lose consciousness, Kowalski enters the capsule. Scolding her for giving up, he tells her to rig the Soyuz’s landing rockets to propel the capsule toward Tiangong. Stone then realizes that Kowalski’s reappearance is not real, but has nonetheless given her the strength of will to carry on. She restores the flow of oxygen and uses the landing rockets to navigate toward Tiangong, which is rapidly deorbiting.
Unable to dock the Soyuz with the station, Stone ejects herself via explosive decompression and uses a fire extinguisher as a makeshift thruster to travel to Tiangong. Stone enters the Shenzhou capsule just as Tiangong starts to break up on the upper edge of the atmosphere. Stone declares that she is ready to head back to Earth, dead or alive. After re-entering the atmosphere, Stone hears Mission Control, which is tracking the capsule, over the radio.
The capsule lands in a lake, but dense smoke from an electrical fire inside the capsule forces Stone to evacuate immediately. She opens the capsule hatch, allowing water to enter and sink it, forcing Stone to swim ashore. She watches the remains of the Tiangong re-enter the atmosphere and takes her first shaky steps on land.
~~Cast~~
Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical engineer and mission specialist who is on her first space mission.
George Clooney as Lieutenant Matt Kowalski; the commander of the team. Kowalski is a veteran astronaut planning to retire after the Explorer expedition. He enjoys telling stories about himself and joking with his team, and is determined to protect the lives of his fellow astronauts.
Ed Harris (voice) as Mission Control in Houston, Texas.
Orto Ignatiussen (voice) as Aningaaq, a Greenlandic Inuit fisherman who intercepts one of Stone’s transmissions. Aningaaq also appears in a self-titled short written and directed by Gravity co-writer Jonás Cuarón, which depicts the conversation between him and Stone from his perspective.
Phaldut Sharma (voice) as Shariff Dasari, the flight engineer on board the Explorer. Shariff has a wife and child and keeps a family photograph on his suit.
Amy Warren (voice) as the captain of Explorer.
Basher Savage (voice) as the captain of the International Space Station.
~~Gravity Trailer 2013~~
Published on Aug 5, 2013
~~Don’t Let Go~~
Gravity (2013), also known as Gravedad, is an upcoming Drama, Science Fiction (Sci-Fi) Film, about two astronauts that must cooperate to survive after a devastating accident leaves them stranded in space with their lives limited by time.
Medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone is on her first Space Shuttle mission accompanied by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky, who is commanding his final expedition. During a spacewalk, debris from a satellite crashes into the space shuttle Explorer, leaving it mostly destroyed, and stranding them in space with limited air. Without means of communication with Earth, they must cooperate to survive.
Dallas Buyers Club is a 2013 American biographicaldrama film, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and scripted by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack. Matthew McConaughey stars as the real-life AIDS patient Ron Woodroof, who smuggled unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas when he found them effective at improving his symptoms, distributing them to fellow sufferers by establishing the “Dallas Buyers Club” while facing opposition from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
In 1985 Dallas, Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) — an electrician and rodeo cowboy — is diagnosed with AIDS and given 30 days to live. He initially refuses to accept the diagnosis, but remembers having unprotected sex with an intravenous drug-using prostitute. Ron quickly finds himself ostracized by family and friends, gets fired from his job, and is eventually evicted from his home.
At the hospital, he is tended to by Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner), who tells him that they are testing a drug called zidovudine (AZT), an antiretroviral drug which is thought to prolong the life of AIDS patients — and which is the only drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for testing on humans.
Saks informs him that in the clinical trials, half the patients receive the drug and the other half are given a placebo, as this is the only way they can determine if the drug is working.
Ron bribes a hospital worker to get him the AZT. As soon as he begins taking it, he finds his health deteriorating (exacerbated by his cocaine use).
When Ron returns to the hospital he meets Rayon (Jared Leto), an HIV-positive transgender woman, towards whom he is hostile. As his health worsens, Ron drives to a Mexican hospital to get more AZT.
Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne), who has had his American medical license revoked, tells Ron that the AZT is “poisonous” and “kills every cell it comes into contact with”. He instead prescribes him ddC and the protein peptide T, which are not approved in the US. Three months later, Ron finds his health much improved. It occurs to him that he could make money by importing the drugs and selling them to other HIV-positive patients.
Since the drugs are not illegal, he is able to get them over the border by masquerading as a priest and swearing that they are for personal use. Meanwhile, Dr. Saks also begins to notice the negative effects of AZT, but is told by her supervisor Dr. Sevard (Denis O’Hare) that it cannot be discontinued.
Ron begins selling the drugs on the street. He comes back into contact with Rayon, with whom he reluctantly sets up business since she can bring many more clients. The pair establish the “Dallas Buyers Club“, charging $400 per month for membership, and it becomes extremely popular.
Ron gradually begins to respect Rayon and think of her as a friend.
When Ron has a heart attack, Sevard learns of the club and the alternative medication. He is angry that it is interrupting his trial, while Richard Barkley (Michael O’Neill) of the FDA confiscates the ddC and threatens to have Ron arrested. Saks agrees that there are benefits to Buyers Clubs (of which there are several around the country) but feels powerless to change anything. She and Ron strike up a friendship.
Barkley gets a police permit to raid the Buyers Club, but can do nothing but give Ron a fine.
The FDA changes its regulations such that any unapproved drug is also illegal. As the Club runs out of funds, Rayon — who is addicted to cocaine — begs her father for money and tells Ron that she has sold her life insurance policy to raise money.
Ron is thus able to travel to Mexico and get more of the Peptide T. When he returns, Ron finds that Rayon has died after being taken to hospital and given AZT. Saks is also upset by Rayon’s death, and she is asked to resign when the hospital discovers that she is linking her patients with the Buyers Club.
She refuses to comply and insists that she would have to be fired.
As time passes, Ron shows compassion towards homosexual members of the club and making money becomes less of a concern – his priority is provision of the drugs. Peptide T gets increasingly difficult to acquire, and in 1987 he files a lawsuit against the FDA. He seeks the legal right to take the protein, which has been confirmed as non-toxic but is still not approved.
The judge is compassionate towards Ron but lacks the legal tools to do anything.
As the film ends, on-screen text reveals that the FDA later allowed Ron to take Peptide T for personal use, and that he died of AIDS in 1992, seven years later than the doctors predicted.
~~The “real” Ron Woodroof~~
CLUB DISPENSES EXPERIMENTAL AIDS DRUGS
by: Sherry Jacobson
The closet in Ron Woodroof’s bedroom looks like a miniature pharmaceutical warehouse. Pint bottles of hydrogen peroxide, packets of dextran sulfate and small containers of a drug called Procaine PVP fill the spaces where clothes should hang.
From his tiny Oak Lawn apartment, Mr. Woodroof is operating one of the largest distribution centers for experimental AIDS treatments in the United States. This month alone, the Dallas Buyers Club will dispense thousands of dollars worth of purported AIDS treatments to people diagnosed with the deadly disease.
“I am my own physician,’ said Mr. Woodroof, 39, a former electrical contractor who founded the club in March 1988, shortly after his AIDS was diagnosed. Currently, he is taking three experimental treatments that he believes have reduced his suffering and extended his life.
The buyers club, which has more than 580 local members, is part of a national network that imports AIDS treatments from other countries, including Japan, Switzerland and Sweden. Some experimental drugs manufactured in the United States are shipped to other countries and brought back in through Mexico. None of the treatments has been approved by the federal government for use by AIDS patients.
One I didn’t know about. It was an eye opener and a confirmation of how a governmental agency tries to control the medications and treatments that are available for patients that need them.
Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel had a birthday yesterday!
Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist.
He was most widely known for his children’s books written and illustrated as Dr. Seuss. He had used the pen name Dr. Theophrastus Seuss in college and later used Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone.
His works have spawned numerous adaptations, including 49 television specials, four feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series. He won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
He was a perfectionist in his work and would sometimes spend up to a year on a book. It was not uncommon for him to throw out 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book. For a writer he was unusual in that he preferred to be paid only after he finished his work rather than in advance.
Geisel’s birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.
Grab your hat and read with the Cat in the Hat on Monday, March 3, 2014, for the 17th annual Read Across America Day.
The Seussical celebration kicks off a week of reading across the nation as NEA members gather students, parents, and community members together to share their love of reading.
NEA’s Read Across America Celebrates 17 Years with Dr. Seuss
~~Facts About Dr. Seuss~~
Published on Jan 7, 2014
The truest truth about Dr. Seuss and his life before Mulberry Street.
Ronald Westbrook 
This week there are two Global Days of Action set for standing in solidarity with African LGBT communities suffering severe anti-gay persecution. For Uganda the day is Wednesday (5th) and for Nigeria it’s on Friday (7th). OBLOGDEE knows of actions in the U.S. by Stop The Hate and Homophobia Coalition in Springfield, MA and by ACT UP in New York City for the Global Day of Action Against Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law. Coalition partners of Nigeria’s Solidarity Alliance have organized protests at the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, DC and at the Consulate in New York City for the Global Day of Action In Support of Nigeria’s LGBT Community.
![By Malene Thyssen (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Skandinavisk_dyrepark.jpg "By Malene Thyssen (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons")
