I am so disgusted with anti-war crowd. The crowd I read about from the past, and the crowds I hear about now both sicken me fully. Why doesn’t everyone worship vets, lionizing them to a point it encourages children from a young age to long for the war situation themselves? We can always have the hope to encourage youngsters to do the same. Ask any vet: years in war are character building. Where else can youngsters engage in enormously complex violent campaigns fighting other people whom they do not know personally, and know relatively little about? As Americans we should work hard to ensure that more generations are not denied the opportunity to fully pledge and sacrifice life, mind, limbs, spouse, and family life for this opportunity to build values considered important to society. Keep that in mind this veterans day.

Lets continue to teach our kids in public school how efficient, effective, and RIGHT we were in World War II. A big hoot to our boys who fought valiantly killing scores of nameless individuals in Europe by air. Air-to-ground fighting has to be the most manly gutsy way to confront an enemy. Well out of range of ground weapons, the brave warrior can lob a million dollars of bombs in a few seconds, teaching whoever happens to be in their path a lesson.

Also, thanks to our pals in Israel who always act with the interest of the entire world in mind. Why give those homeless jerks in Palestine that bathe in their own poverty any rest at all. All men, women, and children in those conditions should expect no different.

Posted by admin as Effyou at 6:07 AM MST

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Young girls clad suggestively in nothing but pink ribbons, pink office supplies, pink foodstuffs packaging, pink ribbon magnets, pink ribbon buttons, pink themed shirts with bizzare phrases including the term “ta tas”. The search for “the cure” is demanded…as if you personally are holding it back by your deficiency of pink merchandise purchases!

Breast cancer is endemic in all human population groups. Yet poverty rate is the most accurate way to predict which geographic regions will have greatest occurrence of breast cancer, breast cancer complications, and deaths from breast cancer. The poor get hosed while the middle-class are fooled into wasting money during a historical economic downturn. Wasted on what? The gimmicky hot-pink garbage that mostly ends up promoting corporate sponsors.

I cannot pretend that I am expert on the details of breast cancer treatment, or the details of the condition itself. To focus on specifics such as the role of diet, skin pigment type, family history, genetics, and/or pregnancy history seems like a frivolous evasion that does not confront the true problem. Personally I know that the mitigation, treatment, and prevention for this condition and its complications seem very standard nowadays. Women that typically have less access to normal, typical, regular, boring, standard health services will be punished by suffering the most from the breast cancer condition.

The goodwill and money being used to fuel all the breast-cancer awareness would be more effectively spent on research regarding the causes and cures for poverty. If we could only prevent the needless deaths due to breast cancer and prevent unnecessary complications in poorer population groups it would be a great start to solving the real breast-cancer problem.

Hodge-podge ad-hoc methods for dealing with poverty do not work. The American experience in dealing with poverty has proven this. Compared to our counterparts in other developed countries we seem absurdly incompetent. Poverty relief services are handled by an incomprehensible mix of religious affiliated institutions, secular non-profits, local and state agencies, and federal government agencies.

Secular non-governmental do-gooder organizations (NGOs) tug at your heart-strings with guilt-ridden messages constantly extorting our money. The successful ones succeed because they focus on some narrow segment of society, or a narrow segment of the poverty problem. The religious institutions involved bring with them the conditions (real or implied) associated with that particular religion’s dogma, and the possibility, however remote and carefully mitigated, of an implied expectation of allegiance to that religion; along with the same problems NGOs posses. Is it wise national policy to have the expectation (however carefully mitigated) of modifying one’s religious beliefs because of their poverty?

As it’s beyond the scope of this post I will not even begin to address the strangeness and futility of the current American approach to government involvement in the poverty problem. Over the past 80 years the federal government’s anti-poverty resources have been spent primarily on prodding everyone towards home ownership (encouraging individuals to be heavily leveraged, immobile, and indebted as national policy) and steady jobs (no matter how menial and low paying). Can you see what steps are being skipped here? Oh yeah, the fed also expends money to make sure youngsters in public schools can experience a daily cafeteria lunch for cheap!*
*Excluding holidays, weekends, and summer break.

The three most basic aspects of poverty relief are what the current American system fails at, completely: food security, guaranteed safe and stable housing, and guaranteed access to health services. The importance of these aspects do not apply to one social group more than another. This importance is the same for everyone, not just the elderly, mothers, and children. Everyone, including ugly homeless men, irresponsible young adults, criminals, balding middle-aged men, prostitutes, drug addicts, and so on!

Are we more fearful at the thought of a famous blonde caucasian actress having her breasts lopped off than the thought of thousands of poor women not realizing that they have cancer in the first place, passing this suffering down the generations? I suppose that beautiful people’s breasts are more fun to think about.

In America, homeless pets have more universal guarantees of shelter, food, and health care than human beings. This should disgust you every waking moment of your life. I do not want animals to go homeless. Animals deserve the attention they are getting. But just why have Americans have been duped into giving homeless animals, and breast cancer broader attention than poverty?

As poverty-rate is the best predictor of who gets various cancer conditions/complications, I predict that as more individuals slip into poverty, more individuals will be involved with cancer complications including death, all other things remaining equal. The only way this will change, so that all things do not remain equal? It begins with universal health care.

Further Webby Reading:
Poverty, Genetics Linked to Cancer Risks in Blacks
April 04, 2006
Author: Charlene Laino
Published By: Fox/WebMD webmd.foxnews.com
URL: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190574,00.html

Breast Cancer Screening and Socioeconomic Status
October 7, 2005
Author: SS Coughlin et. al.
Published By: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. Gov’t) www.cdc.gov/mmWR/
URL: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5439a2.htm

Peer Reviewed Reading:
Evaluating Local Differences in Breast Cancer Incidence Rates: A Census-Based Methodology (United States)
Angela Witt Prehn, Dee W. West
Cancer Causes & Control, Vol. 9, No. 5 (Oct., 1998), pp. 511-517
Published by: Springer
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3553264

Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Breast Cancer Treatment and Survival
Cathy J. Bradley, Charles W. Given, and Caralee Roberts
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 94, No. 7, (Apr., 2002),pp. 482-490
URL: http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol94/issue7/

Altered Breast Development in Young Girls from an Agricultural Environment
Elizabeth A. Guillette, Craig Conard, Fernando Lares, Maria Guadalupe Aguilar, John McLachlan, Louis J. Guillette, Jr.
Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 114, No. 3 (Mar., 2006), pp. 471-475
Published by: The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3436694

Posted by admin as Effyou at 2:39 AM MDT

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I recall with satisfaction to a time when I was about 18. A family trip found me at a US Civil War battlefield and a curator was pointing at an old building she claimed to have been commandeered as a field hospital at some point after a particularly nasty battle. To shock the crowd she recounted written descriptions of how doctors would perform surgery as quickly as they could on the many wounded, hacking limbs off and simply tossing the discarding masses of flesh outside via the nearest window.

With news of the Iraq war and the record number of dismemberments because of the nature of fighting: why are people acting like it’s some new thing? The Civil War had a far higher rate of occurrence of amputees, and live body mutilation as a result of the nature of warfare. Are people really such big idiots? Like this MSNBC article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4478134/ is probably just an attempt to gloss a cute “positive” story in the Iraq war. Really that’s the only positive news from the Iraq war that poor young folks (and yes, literally poor because of the bad pay) have some chance of retaining partial use their heavily damaged limbs. And those who’s limbs are completely disintegrated can use one of the thousands of new bizzare replacement body parts. The Civil War saw the development of Plastic Surgery as a discrete medical art. Many improvements to what we take for granted like crutches, wheelchairs, and the like.

The first time I learned about mastectomies I was probably about 12 or 13. This is a simple procedure where the female breast is hacked off usually because of some nominal malady like a cancerous infection. Thanks to Sports Illustrated and Monte Python’s: The Meaning of Life I had developed certain tastes. It was only at this point when I was 18 I could put the two together finally: having bad luck with procuring live visual events and the unappealing nature of expensive pay-form venues I reckoned there was a feasible alternative. My hometown was a regional center for health care in the Midwest, but was a relatively small city with a very laid back police and lax security at most commercial establishments. Needless to say how things went down, it certainly made me a happy boy.

Posted by admin as Effyou at 3:44 AM MDT

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-begin update- (~1yr after original post) Looks like George Bush took the advice from the infancy of the Obama campaign and invaded Pakistan himself. Horray.
(keep reading if you want, this is now a deprecated article)
-end update-

Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and rival to Hillary Clinton brilliantly retorted to criticism that he was a naive idiot concerning foreign policy by announcing a naive and idiotic foreign policy. Successfully distancing himself from Hillary, Obama promised he was willing to be even less careful and more aggressive with military incursions into foreign countries without their permission. He promised to insult and alienate an important American and NATO ally in the occupation of Afghanistan. He also promised he would insult, alienate, and incite the inhabitants of a proud Muslim nation in political crisis by invading it under a similar premise that George Bush uses to continue his occupation in Iraq. In “Obama threatens military force against Al Qaeda in Pakistan” (Chicago Tribune) he is quoted using similar fear-baiting rhetoric Bush-Cheney administration has become so famous for. “…There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again…. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharaf will not act, we will.”. Just lovely, he promises to use a strange Axe Wielding Ogre mentality that not even Bush has the nerve to enact or even threaten to enact. This would make for strange and confusing U.S. Diplomacy when just weeks ago, Obama promised he would talk to each and every criminal dictator the world has to offer in his first year as president. If Obama does win election it will be worse than Carter, the last time a religious ignorant Democrat with little experience was elected president. Personally, I am not that worried so long as Obama makes all his slip-ups during his campaigns, which seems to be the way its going. I never would have thought he would describe a foreign policy even more brazen and dangerous than Bush-Cheney would come up with!

My question is: why is the media reporting this as a horse race? Maybe that expression is cliche, but really, why? Why do I see headlines like “Obama: If Pakistan doesn’t hit Al Qaeda, US must” that seem strait out of the campaign PR department? Why not describe the foriegn policy he actually sets out and cut out all the rhetoric in a similar manner I did instead of horse race coverage. They dwell on the idea that he is countering criticism from the Hillary camp, but BIG DEAL. Obama is announcing what is a very radical shift and potentially very dangerous in an unstable nuclear power like Pakistan: to invade their territory whenever we feel like they aren’t “doing enough”. And the fact Obama uses shameless rhetoric needs to be pointed out. It is irresponsible they just repeat the rhetoric without pointing it out as rhetoric. The rhetoric I am referring to is very powerful and provocative “Al Queda…who murdered 3,000 Americans”. Well, it isn’t exactly accurate is it knowing what we know?

We lost our chance to do much of anything in Pakistan a long time ago. Osama and the like will have to be caught on the terms of the nation(s) in which he dwells. It is a fact of life that might be hard to accept for those that lead or wish to lead a nation that thinks itself to be all-powerful. This means long-term strategy. Terrorism was not stamped out in the U.K. overnight. It had roots that were long reaching, and the solution had to be deep rooted. The same obviously applies here, but as long as important candidates like Obama ignore this with pandering and dangerous rhetoric no problems surrounding the arab/islamic terrorism problem will ever be solved.

Posted by admin as Effyou at 2:43 AM MDT

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I will have to try very hard to keep myself from cursing furiously as construct these sets of thoughts. For a long time I have thought there are fundamental problems with the way news is dispersed on television. Let us say we are watching the news. Specifically the national news: it often discusses SERIOUS events that might have a direct impact or that viewers might be seriously attached to mentally. You hear a serious story, ends with a note, the audience is thinking something serious and all the sudden your brain gets raped with an impaling barrage of nonsense about how important it is to buy soda, food, or whatever else. This might seem like an old tired rant, but let’s describe a similar situation that can occur all the more disturbing and mentally insulting.

I was reading an article about a deadly explosion at one of Burt Rutan’s (of SpaceShipOne fame) so-called “space pads” at the Mojave airfield in California. The article titled “Blast at desert spaceport kills 3″ and it seemed the death count had gone up since I last read about it. For me this story is important because Rutan has repeatedly mocked NASA for spending so much money compared to him. He seems to fail to realize he was able to use decades of information and technology developed and paid for by NASA and other government means, including all the billions of dollars spent over the decades. Safety is one thing NASA has been criticized; yet for all it has achieved you might say the death toll is quite low. To me it seems a new stretch of freeway will cause more fatal accidents than has occurred in the history of NASA. Will Burt continue to brag about his shoestring budget now that 3 of his comrades have died while his operation has achieved very little in practical terms since 2004?

Lets examine what I will find in this CNN article. It is flanked on the right by a jumpy flash advertisement urging the reader to purchase a Nintendo Wii game immediately under the guise it will “train your brain”. So big deal I can try to ignore what is an ad to the side because it is not part of the content. You will see there is a tempting link to “watch the aftermath of the explosion” which I thought would be a way to glean what type of explosion and what the area was being used for. Instead of seeing what I expected I saw a fucking ape grinning and giggling while carrying a surfboard and a blond beach bum character looking at the chimp with raised eyebrow. I was so disgusted, enraged, insulted, and betrayed. This is CNN, a trusted name in news. Why would it be in CNNs interest to barrage me with unrelated material the very first moment I lay eyes on their YouTube knockoff video streamlined video feed? When I view the cable channel I can at least wait and come back after the commercials are over, but not the case with this. I could wait for 20 minutes, click on the video link, and the totally unrelated and insulting advertisement would play. It might be less than 20 seconds long, sure, but how long is the video stream content? I don’t know because I did not get that far. I tried clicking back on my web browser to get back to the article but when the page navigated back, the video feed floated in the article’s way. I had to go back to my home page to rid my senses of the drivel.

This is a huge commercial to content ratio that video providers are trying to push on YouTube like services. It is the same thing with AdultSwim’s website. A 2 minute ad every 5 or so minutes of content (AdultSwim of course owned by the same company as CNN: TimeWarner) That is a far higher ratio of commercial time than would be on television. Also the viewer is forced to watch it or abandon (or seriously disrupt) their computer experience completely to try and avoid it. The owners of the material might think: great the viewer is FORCED to pay attention and the advertisers will love that. Advertisements are a disgusting and immoral means of funding our news and television (or equivalent entertainment and information). Look at the BBC website. No ads. Watch TV in England, no ads. Watch TV in Quatar: no ads. Is anyone out there stupid enough to use advertisements as a trusted way to get information? Yes! The typical average user has no choice but to: the advertisements are IN THE WAY of the content (what people WANT to watch). Text ads like google have been so successful because they allow a moral way to combine content of a creator with minimal interference on the user experience. It seems like a step back doesn’t it when advertisements had to conform to strict expected standards? Advertisers have long relied on deceiving people or forcing people into watching content. It’s ugly, its immoral, and we put up with it? There should definitely be regulation on how advertisements are handled by video content providers on the internet else the providers will just continue to deceive and trick users the same way CNN did to me (and will do to you too).

Posted by admin as Effyou at 4:29 AM MDT

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