Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 5, 2011

HAYES - (continued from page 13)

making $30-50 thousand a year with 
a 14% effective tax rate, could do the 
same.)

 Companies taking advantage include 
the likes of Boeing, AIG, American 
Express, J.P. Morgan Chase, Hewlett-
Packard and Pfizer. Some might be 
legit - and then there’s the Cayman 
Islands where, according to a GAO 
report, 18,000 companies are housed 
in a single five-story building. (President 
Obama remarked, “That’s either 
the biggest building or the biggest tax 
scam on record.”)

The cost to our nation of these offshore 
shelters is estimated at $100 billion a 
year, or $500 for every taxpayer. Some 
in Congress, though, see a threat not 
in lost revenue for the country but for 
their own campaign accounts should 
they not vote as they’re told. Even 
modest proposals like the Hiring Incentives 
to Restore Employment Act, 
which didn’t seek to close loopholes 
but rather to tighten disclosure rules 
for those trying to hide income overseas, 
was opposed by our Rep. David 
Dreier, presumably as it might present 
an inconvenience to his benefactors. 
(The bill passed without Dreier’s support, 
and was signed into law last year 
by President Obama.)

 In statehouses and in Washington, 
our representatives slash funds 
for housing, heating and health, programs 
to rebuild our infrastructure 
and put Americans back to work, 
while trillion-dollar debts are incurred 
to protect offshore tax shelters 
for billionaires. Corporations are relieved 
of the burden of paying taxes, 
while salaries, benefits and employee 
rights are cut for nurses, teachers, cops 
and firefighters asked to make up the 
difference.

 

 A strange world, indeed - but perhaps 
not so strange to have budget 
priorities that seek to prevent citizens 
from becoming too educated. 

WELBORN (continued from page 13) 
As our population has aged and baby 
boomer aged public employees have 
started to retire, the full magnitude of 
what’s been promised has become apparent. 
If we look at the full amount of the 
unfunded liability from all these promised 
benefits, it’s obvious that there aren’t 
enough tax payers or tax revenues to pay 
the piper. The system must change or the 
system will crash.

 Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin is 
simply being honest in telling the voters 
the truth and taking steps to solve 
the problem. It can’t be kicked down the 
road for some future legislature or governor 
to fix. It must be done now. The 
governor has simply proposed to public 
employees pay for some of their benefits 
just as is done in private industry and 
that their unions be stripped of the unfair 
advantages that current laws in the 
states give them. This problem isn’t going 
to disappear on its own. Wisconsin 
and the rest of the nation have to deal 
with it now.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a 
freelance writer and has spoken to several civic 
and religious organizations on cultural and 
moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles area 
with his wife and 3 children and is active in 
the community. He can be reached at gregwelborn@
earthlink.net.

14

THE WORLD AROUND US

 Mountain Views News Saturday, March 5, 2011


PLANET FORMATION IN ACTION

Using the European Southern Observatory’s 
Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, an 
international team of astronomers has been 
able to study the short-lived disc of material 
around a young star that is in the early stages of 
making a planetary system. For the first time, a 
smaller companion could be detected that may 
be the cause of the large gap found in the disc. 
Future observations will determine whether 
this companion is a planet or a brown dwarf. 
(Brown dwarfs are relatively cool, star-like objects 
between planets and stars in size. They are not 
massive enough to fuse hydrogen in their cores, 
but are larger than giant planets such as Jupiter.)

Planets form from the discs of material around 
young stars, but the transition from dust disc 
to planetary system is rapid and few objects are 
caught during this phase. One such object is 
T Chamaeleontis (T Cha), a faint star in the 
small southern constellation of Chamaeleon 
that is comparable to the Sun, but very near the 
beginning of its life. T Cha lies about 350 light-
years from the Earth and is only about seven 
million years old. Up to now 
no forming planets have been 
found in these transitional 
discs, although planets in more 
mature discs have been seen 
before.

“Earlier studies had shown 
that T Cha was an excellent 
target for studying how 
planetary systems form,” notes 
Johan Olofsson (Max Planck 
Institute for Astronomy, 
Heidelberg, Germany), one of 
the lead authors of two papers 
in the journal Astronomy & 
Astrophysics that describe the new work. “But 
this star is quite distant and the full power of the 
Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) was 
needed to resolve very fine details and see what is 
going on in the dust disc.”

The astronomers first observed T Cha using the 
observatory’s AMBER (Astronomical Multi-Beam 
combineR) instrument and the VLTI to combine 
the light from all four of the 8.2-meter VLT Unit 
Telescopes and create a “virtual telescope” 130 
meters across. They found that some of the disc 
material formed a narrow dusty ring only about 
20 million kilometers from the star. Beyond this 
inner disc, they found a region devoid of dust 
with the outer part of the disc stretching out into 
regions beyond about 1.1 billion kilometers from 
the star.

Nuria Huelamo (Centro de Astrobiologia, 
ESAC, Spain), the lead author of the second paper, 
takes up the story: “For us, the gap in the dust disc 
around T Cha was a smoking gun, and we asked 
ourselves: Could we be witnessing a companion 
digging a gap inside its protoplanetary disc?”

However, finding a faint companion so close 
to a bright star is a huge challenge and the team 
had to use an adaptive-optics instrument called 
NACO in a novel and powerful way, called “sparse 
aperture masking,” to reach their goal. After 
careful analysis they found the clear signature 
of an object located within the gap in the dust 
disc, about one billion kilometers from the star—
slightly farther out than Jupiter is in our Solar 
System. This is the first detection of an object 
much smaller than a star within a gap in the 
planet-forming dust disc around a young star.

You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.


Ask jai……


Ask jai is a weekly column that will strive to honestly answer your job search questions relating 
to job searching techniques, networking skills, resume writing and interviewing. The employment 
situation is getting better, however, it is still a challenge finding were the jobs are located and how to 
get pass the “gate-keepers”. As an Executive Recruiter I was privy to working directly with Corporate 
Recruiters and understanding their process in selecting which candidates to interview and hire. I will 
candidly answer your questions, possibly bluntly answering you questions, but I will be totally honest. 
My objective is to help you achieve your employment goal.

Web Focus:

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse

Web Focus is a new feature being rolled 
out in this edition of On Line and its 
purpose is to highlight websites of 
interest. Regular readers of On Line are 
encouraged to send in their requests for 
websites that they would like featured 
in this section by sending an email 
to p.carpenter@MtnViewsNews.com 
. Although no formal schedule for the 
frequency of this feature has been set as 
yet the tentative plan is to feature one 
website each month

We begin this series by featuring the 
website Privacy Rights Clearinghouse 
(http://www.privacyrights.org). PRC bills 
itself as a non-profit with the dual mission 
of consumer education and consumer 
advocacy. Among PRC’s stated goals is 
to raise consumers awareness of how 
technology affects personal privacy and 
to empower consumers to take action to 
control their own personal information 
by providing practical tips on privacy 
protection. In addition to responding 
to specific privacy-related complaints 
from consumers and interceding on 
their behalf, PRC routinely advocates for 
consumers’ privacy rights in local, state 
and federal public policy proceedings. 
Services provided by PRC include a 
hotline for consumers to report privacy 
abuses and request information on how 
to better protect their privacy, fact sheets 
on privacy issues in English and Spanish 
and a host of other privacy-related 
material including transcripts of PRC 
legislative and regulatory testimony. The 
Home Page for the PRC website features a 
sidebar for browsing such privacy topics 
as Privacy Basics, Background Checks & 
Workplace, Banking and Finance, Credit 
and Credit Reports, Debt Collection, 
Education, Harassment and Stalking, 
Identity Theft & Data, Insurance, Junk 
Mail/Faxes/Email, Medical Privacy, 
Online Privacy and Technology, Privacy 
When You Shop, Public Records & 
Info Brokers, Social Security Numbers, 
Telephone Privacy and more. These 
topics are presented in a clear and concise 
manner and provide a wealth of relevant 
knowledge about privacy issues that 
every consumer should know. 

Established in 1992 by Beth Givens, the 
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse bases its 
philosophy of consumer privacy on a bit 
of testimony embedded on its “About Us” 
page:

“The real danger is the gradual 
erosion of individual liberties through 
the automation, integration and 
interconnection of many small, separate 
record-keeping systems, each of which 
alone may seem innocuous, even 
benevolent, and wholly justifiable.”

---U.S Privacy Protection Study 
Commission, 1977.

This brief summary hardly does the 
depth and breadth of knowledge and 
information found on the Privacy 
Right Clearinghouse (http://www.
privacyrights.org) justice. The 
information found on this site is sure to 
make a more well-informed consumer 
out of the majority of visitors who take 
the time to read and apply the practical 
tips found there. 

Q: I have heard some employers will not consider you for employment if you have been unemployed for more 
than one year or more. Should I take any old job that is offered me or wait for the right one? Shemeka

Dear Shemeka: You should always apply for positions you want. Why waste your time pursing jobs you really 
do not want? Why waste an employer’s time screening, interviewing and hiring someone who is only taking a job 
because they feel destitute? This usually results in a disgruntled employee and a very dissatisfied employer. The 
employment term is usually very short and it becomes a lose-lose situation. Employers are looking for a win- win 
hiring situation and that can only happen when the employer is looking for candidates that match their requirements, 
truly interested in the position and working for their company. You should do the same and only look for employers 
and positions you would be willing to accept an offer. Spend your time searching only for positions that match your 
interest, experience and skill sets. Than you will only receive offers for the right job and not just any old job. 

I know all the stories and quotes out there are very discouraging: “there are no jobs out there”, “no one is hiring”, 
“I can’t find the right position”, “there are so many people looking for jobs that I don’t have a chance”. NETWORK! 
Yes, I have said it before …and so do all the recruiters and career advisors. Over 80% of jobs are filled by employee 
referrals, friends, neighbors and strangers who know about jobs through their employer or someone who knows 
someone. You must get out there and start hand shaking and introducing yourself at events, job and hiring fairs, 
parties, everywhere and let people know you are job searching. Use the social internet (i.e., facebook, twitter, 
LinkedIn, etc.). Use the telephone. Do whatever it takes to find the appropriate and satisfying position for you. Do 
not just take any old job. Because that is how you will always feel about it and will most likely show up in your job 
performance. This is the lose-lose situation I mentioned before.

I can tell you to not take just any old job. However, only you can make the decision based on your financial need and 
circumstances. The positive note here is employers are very aware that a large percentage of job seekers have been 
out of work for more than one year. Keep in mind they are looking for the ideal candidate and they are taking their 
time to hire. Continue to be diligent in your job search and believe your time will come. Who knows…you could 
be creating a timely kismet for yourself and an employer.

Everything you ever wanted to know about how to get a job ….but did not know who to ask. ASK jai. Send 
your questions to: jai@resumeandcareerservices.com or visit website www.resumeandcareerservicesc, or call 
310-858-85821.


THE PERFECTLY PAMPERED PET

As an avid animal lover, I strive to do my absolute best in 
caring for the health and welfare of my dog and it pleases 
me to know that there are so many new innovative and 
creative ways to pamper your pet these days. With such 
a wide variety of services made available by so many 
different pet care providers, I decided to come up with a 
short list of what I like to call “pet pampering providers” 
in our local area that promise to bring a happy wiggle 
to your pet’s walk and a whimsical wag to his tail! I also 
included a few basic guidelines for selecting store-bought 
pet food, and a list of ingredients that can be included in 
home-prepared daog food.

DR. DOMOTOR’S ANIMAL HOUSE VETERINARY 
HOSPITAL is a full service companion animal hospital 
committed to providing quality veterinary care. I 
recommend them based on my own personal experience. 
My bloodhound “Tater” has special needs that Animal 
House has succeeded in meeting to their fullest and, when 
my cat named “Shatt” became deathly ill with a urinary 
tract disease, Dr. Domotor literally saved his life. She also 
managed to save my neighbor’s dog “Molly” from dying 
of the typically fatal disease, distemper. Owner: Dr. Sylvia 
Domotor, Location: 135 W. Foothill Blvd., Monrovia 
Phone: 626-307-7881

EASING PAW provides specialized pet message therapy 
as well as energy work healing touch and acupressure 
techniques that are known to improve the health of your 
pet and help prevent disease. Owner: Annette Ramseyer, 
C.M.T. Location: 135 W. Foothill Blvd. Ste.1, Monrovia 
Phone: 626-391-6356

ON THE SPOT Mobile Dog & Cat Grooming offers 
“curb-service” expert breed grooming for those who 
prefer the convenience of having their pet pampered at 
home. Their vans are equipped with warm water tubs and 
full service trimming and grooming equipment. Your pet 
will enjoy the unique luxury of personalized, one-on-one 
grooming attention without leaving the comfort of their 
own home. Owners: Tim & Katherine Nibley, Phone: 
626-794-5863 

Like humans, dogs are individuals with individual needs, 
so it is always best to consult with your veterinarian 
before choosing a diet that works best for your pet. I 
have heard rumors about the sub-standard quality of 
dog food products found on the shelves of most grocery 
stores in the US. The main concern seems to be that pet 
food products are often not of the quality and standard 
that we think they are due to poor and inaccurate package 
labeling. There are a couple of basic bits of information to 
look for on the product label that might help take some of 
the mystery out of the process. 

First of all, it is important that the product was inspected 
and approved by the AAFCO (Association of American 
Feed Control Officials). This should appear somewhere 
on the packaging and it ensures that the quality and 
balance of ingredients that went into that product meet 
regulation standards. One of the most and more obvious 
factors in selecting the best food for your dog, is knowing 
exactly what went into it. Be sure to read the small 
printed list of ingredients on the package, and if the first 
item on the list is not some kind of meat, you might want 
to pass on that product. Perhaps the most misleading 
thing you will find on a dog food product is “human 
grade ingredients”, leading the buyer to believe that they 
are feeding their dog the same quality of food that they 
themselves are eating. In reality what it means is that it 
contains “crude protein” or pieces and parts of animal 
product, which may be very different from what human 
food contains. There is a lot more involved and a lot more 
to know about pet food selection, but these label reading 
tips can be very helpful in making that decision. 

If you prefer preparing home-made food for your dog, 
here are a few basic tips: Dogs require a high protein, low 
carbohydrate diet, therefore meat should be among the 
most prevalent ingredients in any recipe combination. 
Chicken, beef, turkey and lamb are excellent selections 
(raw if possible). Vegetables such as spinach, lettuce, 
carrots, celery and squash are great choices. I have heard 
that onions are not great for dogs, so you might want to 
avoid them in your recipe. Oats are excellent nutrition 
for both dogs and cats but rice, wheat and soy should be 
avoided. Grapes and raisins have been known to be toxic 
for dogs. Apples, bananas and avocados are among the 
best fruit selections for the canine digestive system. Nuts 
and coconut oil are healthy additions to a homemade dog 
food mix, as well as additives such as Royal Jelly crushed 
vitamins and minerals to enhance the nutritional value 
of the meal. Always consider the specific health and diet 
needs of your pet, taking into consideration body weight, 
age and other particular factors, and again be sure to 
consult your vet first!

Best of luck to you all in pampering your pet. May he (or 
she) live a long and healthy life!

CANYON CANINE Dog Walking & Pet Sitting Services 
offers personalized, one on one attention through 
neighborhood walks and local trail hikes. The health 
benefits of exercise for your dog cannot be over estimated. 
Canyon Canine provides exercise and attention needed 
when you are either working or away. Owner: Chris Leclerc 
Location: Sierra Madre Phone: 626-355-8333.

Happy Tails

by Chris Leclerc


THE COLD WAR

After weeks of fighting, the 
army of my immune system 
has finally beaten the invading 
virus that had besieged me. 
My enemy’s plan of attack 
began with soreness localized 
in my throat. Then insidious 
phlegm mobilized the battle 
up my nasal passageways. 
My defense strategy involved flooding the enemy 
with a constant barrage of tea. Chemical warfare 
(if you can call it that) included ibuprofen and 
Ricola cough drops.

Although the war is over, a few stubborn 
insurgents remain. Every now and then the 
rogue mucus globule stakes out a claim on the 
precipice of my soft palate, taunting me from that 
inaccessible spot at the end of my nasal cavity and 
the beginning of my throat. Blowing my nose rarely helps. When alone, I sometimes 
try to knock this irritant off by violently snorting. How can I tactfully describe this? 
No doubt you’ve heard others do this, and have probably done it yourself. But what do 
you call it? --Reverse gargling for the nose? The sound is like a cross between a clogged 
vacuum cleaner and something a cat would do to expel a fur ball, which is quite the way 
it feels. Half the time it doesn’t work anyway. I try not to get frustrated --I think snot 
can sense anger.

I don’t think I pampered myself by enlisting the aide of over-the-counter drugs to 
combat my symptoms. My husband, on the other hand, holds the stoic belief that 
medicine is reserved for the dying. He is nearly over his cold, and it’s a good thing! It 
was pitiful to watch him sneeze, cough, and generally be miserable. I offered him some 
innocuous drugs, but he would have none of it. “I’m just going to sleep for a while,” he 
said. But it’s hard to sleep when you have to hold your head at a funny angle to keep the 
phlegm from shifting.

While being sick isn’t fun for anyone, we all know elementary school teachers have it 
worst of all! With friends and relatives in education, I always hear about the kids who 
seem oblivious to yellow ropes of snot dangling from their nostrils. I’d estimate that 
kids are havens for germs and infectious diseases until they’re about 10. A friend of 
ours has two children, seven and four, and I swear someone in that family is always sick! 

People also concoct weird ideas of what causes colds. Changes in the weather and 
sleeping, or going outside, with wet hair can supposedly put you under. If two people 
in a family are sick, they methodically study the onsets and symptoms to determine 
whether the other person is responsible; because who wants to be sick and not have 
someone to blame? My husband kept apologizing to me for getting me sick, although 
my watertight analysis of our illnesses suggested that I must’ve picked it up at work. 
Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, I’m just glad I can breath through my nose again!