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I staggered over to Technorati today in order to avoid doing anything productive when I was confronted with me own insane face. I figured it must be a glich and refreshed a few times.
(Me): HA! My picture is on the front page of Technorati!
(Critic): As in “
There are a number of things that make me question my sanity, but one of the most annoying is the whole abortion debate. Here are a bunch of people spending large amounts of time, effort and money protesting things like “the Morning After Pill,” and the ability of women to get safe and legal abortions, while at the same time seeming to oppose the health and health care of women, and their children.
One argument that has been raised against RU-486 (also known as Mifepristone and Plan B) is that it is unsafe. One study in the journal Contraception[1] gives the odds of death due to the drug at 1.1 in 100,000. Now compare this with the numbers for pregnancy-related deaths between 1991 and 1997: between 10.3 and 12.9 in 100,000[2]. The chances of death from pregnancy are about 10 times higher, yet pregnancy is considered an acceptable risk.
What’s worse is what happens to children after birth. According to the report “Child Health USA 2003”[3], the USA ranks 26th in the list of industrialized nations with respect to infant mortality rate. This gives the USA a rate that is 1.7 times higher than France and over 2 times higher than Sweden. According to the same source, roughly 3 million children aged 1 to 18, were the victims of neglect or abuse during 2001, or 12.4 per 1,000. If you look at poverty rates, the same report mentioned above indicates 11 million children were living in poverty – roughly 15.8% of all children.
How many infants and mothers could have been saved if all the time, effort and money that went into opposing something like Plan B? How many children who were the subject of abuse and neglect could have been helped if all the people who picket Planned Parenthood clinics were to actually help them? Why don’t the political parties that oppose abortion and contraception support raising the minimum wage from the ridiculous level of $5.15/hour to something that would allow a single mother to support her children by working one full time job? How come the USA doesn’t have universal prenatal care?
Like I said, there are a number of things that make me wonder if I’ve gone off the deep end, but something like this takes the cake.
[1] Safety of mifepristone abortions in clinical use. Henderson JT, Hwang AC, Harper CC, Stewart FH. Contraception. 2005 Sep;72(3):175-8
Link: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010782405001058
[2] Pregnancy-Related Mortality in the United States, 1991–1997 Cynthia J. Berg, MD, MPH, Jeani Chang, MPH, William M. Callaghan, MD, MPH and Sara J. Whitehead, MD, MPH Obstetrics & Gynecology 2003;101:289-296
Link: http://acogjnl.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/2/289
[3] Child Health USA 2003. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Rockville, Maryland: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2003.
Link: http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa03/index.htm
Very disappointed! Very dis-a-pointeeeeed!
I remember a skit on “Saturday Night Live” called “What Were You Thinking?!” One of the guests was Walter Mondale – he was a presidential candidate who ran against Ronald Reagan.
At any rate the host and Walter were talking about this:
(Host): Walter Mondale – in the (whatever year) election you said that, if elected, you would raise taxes. (Walter): I know. (H): You made it the cornerstone of your bid for president. (W): I know. (H): No one has ever tried that. (W): I know. (H): Not even on the incorporated hamlet level. (W): I know. (H): What were you thinking? (W): (pause) I don’t know.
I did a search for “sucker of farts from dead dogs” on Google today and my site came up! Yay! I exist! My dreams of stardom and the like can’t be far away!
(Me): HA! My blog now appears on Google! (Her): Not very often. (Me): Yeah it does, search for “insane mumblings.” (Her): There are almost 2,000 results for that, and I don’t see your site. (Me): Alright, try “mumblings insane blather” (Sound of typing) (Her): OK, now I see it. (Me, preening): And you knew me before I was famous! (Her): Yeah, having my site come up when someone types: mumblings and insane blather is a real achievement! (Me): Bite me.
I hate my life.
These experiments always seemed to have three phases. During the first part you and your lab partners would be doing things like they were English Gentlemen:
(Me): 1.2, 1.7, 2.5, 6.3 (Lab partner, jotting notes): Jolly good.
At some point you would reach the “epiphany” where we took at our preliminary results and realized that things weren’t working quite as planned:
(Lab partner): And here we have the preliminary results. (pause, sound of scribbling) (Me): Yes? (Partner): Umm... 6.5m/s/s (Me): What?!!
Then the experiment would enter the panic stage:
And mind you, this is a relatively easy experiment.
No pressure.
I imagine that’s why there are so many PhD students – if something goes wrong, you can blame them.
Today I was looking forlornly at my blog and noticing the lack of interest from the world at large so I sought some feedback from a friend. Here is what she said:
(Her): Your blog sucks. And basically, so do you. (Me): Perhaps if you took another look at the site.
She did and then came up with this:
(Her): Your mom dresses you funny. (Me): Does not. (Her): Does too. (Me): Na-ah. (Her): Yah-haw. (Me): Poop-breath. (Her): Doody-brain. (Me): Jerk. (Her): Twit. (Me): Sucker-of-farts-from-dead-dogs!
As anyone who is on the receiving end of the dreaded SoFfDD, she was silenced. It also helped that I had hung up the phone.
(Him): You don’t suck.
(Me): Thanks, that means a lot to me.
(Him): You stink. Your blog sucks.
The other day I was messing around when I found an article titled “Live girl-on-girl action!” on the Salon web site (don’t ask). I found the over-all tone of the article to be disturbing because it gave me the impression that:
(BTW, every time I try to use a numbered list or a "dotted" list, I get flower icons. Anyone know of a way to get the numbers or dots instead of the flowers?)
There were a number of other themes, like how this is caused by online pornography and that it trivializes authentic female homo and bisexuality, but I want to focus on the above issues for this blather/rant.
Fairly early in the article, the author asks this question:
But is this staged bisexuality really a testament to a type of hypersexualized girl power -- or a statement on how far gals will go to please a generation of guys weaned on online porn?
Girls aren't kissing other girls because they want to. They're doing it because they want to appeal to boys their age.
Females who perform for males say they're not at all turned on by the hookup…
If straight girls who make out with each other really aren't doing it for their own pleasure, but to please guys...
But for girls who get it on with other girls as a performance for guys...
But if these young women are not actually into kissing their girlfriends, why do they feel they need to do it …
But it’s not at all clear that girls do this exclusively to attract guys. One of the women interviewed has this to say:
It was like, look, I'm the center of attention! Everyone's looking at me and cheering me on. It felt good being in the spotlight…
I was like, Hey, why don't you make out? And then they started to! I was like, oh, damn, they're awesome. I don't know why I thought it would be OK to ask them. We were just testing them -- but then they did it. I told them that made them 10 times cooler.
This aspect is much more of an inference than something stated outright in the article. Thankfully, rants and blatherings do not have to be based on reality, and at any rate, nobody reads this blog anyways :-)
"I've heard from some straight girls that they do it because it's fun," says Rachel Popkin, a 19-year-old lesbian in
I see this as vastly different from exploitation.
I noticed a problem with my blog so far: it needs more rants. If I’m going create a blog titled “bather-n-rants” then, god dammit, I should have some rant postings!
So I set out to create a good ole rant about a controversial topic that I had a strong opinion about. Being the detail-oriented freak that I am, I wanted to verify the sources on the primary topic, but I was equipped with a story from “comedy central” (www.npr.org), so I thought it would be easy.
It’s times like these that I wonder if there is something seriously wrong with me. I mean, I know that there are things seriously wrong with me, but when I have such trouble finding things on the net, I wonder if, among my problems is a difficulty with searching the web.
So I go to the NPR site and look for the story, using the tag lines that I’m interested in. 5 jillion responses, sorted by date. “Ha!” sez I, “since this was a recent story, it should be right hear!” I find a story that looks promising and bring it up. Zip. OK, I’ll just try variations on the search terms. More hits, still zip.
Alright, I’ll just google the search terms and see what comes up. Everything and nothing, depending on how you do the search. On the “everything” side (a mere 300,000 hits) I don’t see a whole lot that is promising, so I finally narrow it down to something manageable and still come up empty-handed.
OK, whatever.
So I listen to the story several times to find the pundit/expert that blathers about said controversial issue. In addition to other stuff, said expert mentions a “recent story” from “around here” that contains the annoying issue. No name for the story, no date, no publication.
Alright, well NPR does mention this person’s name and where they work. I try that and succeed in finding the site. It contains studies, news articles, etc. so I try the site search. Zip. OK, vary the terms, etc. still zip. So I try googling the person’s name. Some hits, but not what I’m looking for.
In short after a couple of very annoying, tedious, frustrating hours, I cannot confirm this person’s story.
This “expert” had reported on a trend or whatever and I wanted some basic facts about it: who originally reported it? When was it reported? How many people is it based on? Is this a growing trend, and if so, how quickly is it growing, etc.
One of things I find annoying about news from TV, newspapers, etc. is what Scott Adams of Dilbert fame calls “context free information.” I’ll hear a story like “235 people died from coronary-bypass mad cow disease” or some such gibberish, and then I wonder: is that a lot? Is that in one year, or over a longer period of time? Is that all in one area, or the entire world? People consider the risks of driving to be acceptable, for comparison’s sake, how many people die on the highway each year?”
I guess the moral of the story is that, rather than checking your facts, it is better to just rant. If I had made outrageous claims and then spewed forth several paragraphs based on this shaky premise, I could have had a nice rant on my site.
Instead, all I have is some blather about not being able to rant.
For whatever reason, I have always wondered about the notion of an omnipotent lima bean that created the universe. Now mind, when I say “God” with the capital “G” I mean God. Not some clown pulling rabbits out of a hat or some putz who is locked in an “eternal battle” with the Devil or whatever.
God is a being that would of necessity be able to encompass contradictions. Consider the following paradox:
(1) Everything I say is a lie.
(2) I am lying.
If statement 1 is true, then statement 2 must also be true. But that means statement 2 is false, and therefore the statement is true; and on and on. This is what is sometimes referred to by people with glasses, or at least hard contact lenses, as a logical fallacy or paradox. It demonstrates that a single true/false logical system is incomplete (or whatever).
Yet an all-powerful, omnipotent green bean would have to encompass such things. It would have to be able to create a rock so heavy, that it could not move it, and still move it.
Gawd. Capital “G” and all that.
At any rate there are two things that I think about frequently when I come back to the whole G-O-D thing:
What the hell were you thinking?
This sort of question would actually have several exclamation points after it. The thing is, God would have to answer for that. God would have to answer for everything. Nothing could exist except by God’s will, and thus everything that exists does so by said pinto bean’s will.
This being the case, there are a whole bunch of things I would want an answer to.
Now mind you, if we are talking about some lesser fruitcake, sitting on a throne and dispensing “justice” or whatever a la one of Jack Chick’s little comic books, I’d lie through my teeth or say whatever I had to in order to avoid whatever horrible fate was staring me in the face.
But I would always be thinking: “what about PeeWee Herman?!!” in the back of my mind.
Forgiveness
The other thing I would ask for is forgiveness. I can only say "I'm sorry" in so many ways and yet, I bear with me the stain of every perceived misdeed. It seems rare to me that other people feel guilt about what they do, and because they do not even perceive that they have wronged me, I bear resentment.
This being the case, I walk around feeling guilt and resentment. I would prefer that this ended, that I was truly forgiven and that I would forgive everyone and everything else. That I would stop carrying around the burdens of guilt and resentment.
This is, of course, impossible. But hey, we are talking about God with a capital "G", right?
What came before comes after?
I myself do not believe in God, but I leave myself open to the possibility that such a being exists. One consolation that I feel I have in that part of the mind where faith would dwell in someone else is this: taxes.
Actually I do believe in taxes, but I also feel that oblivion would serve the same purpose that forgiveness would. If I did not exist, then I could not be holding a grudge. If I did not exist, I could be blamed for something, but I certainly would not be aware of it.
I think that oblivion would be a state that is the same as I was in before I was born. When I think about yesterday, there is the concept of the day before that. Eventually I come to my earliest memories where there is no "before." Then I consider what came before that, and there is nothing.
It is still possible that there was something, some experiences that came before birth, etc. but it seems less likely than the simpler explanation that there was nothing. On the other hand, there is a Buddist saying: "Want nothing and have everything. Want everything and have nothing."
Since what I want is nothing, it seems like getting exactly that would be everything I want.
fnord
It kind of reminds me of air, water and food – when I have these things, they don’t seem that important. When I don’t have them, nothing else exists.
Similarly, with sex, we have a very strong drive. Animals that don’t reproduce do not pass on their traits to offspring (OK, there is next of kin selection), and for most of the time that human beans have been on the planet sex = reproduction.
The sex drive is weird in that, with food, water and air, the drive to get these things is coupled with a physical need. If you don’t get water, you die. End of story. No air? Well, you are going to have a short and painful existence. No sex? You can expect to live about as long as someone who is getting sex. A drive without a need.
The part where the whole train got derailed and smashed into the natural gas refining plant was when sex got tangled into the social aspects of human existence. For example, human beings do not obsess about water as much as we do about how we look to potential mates, even if we’re “getting some” and we don’t need another mate at the moment.
The actual, physical sex act doesn’t really need to take that long, so why can’t it be like water, food or air: oh, I need to have sex, fine. Lumber over to female or whatever, grunt, grunt, done. Wander off mindlessly and do something else.
But noooo! Is this mate acceptable to my friends? Does the attractiveness of my mate change my status with the group? What about when the two of us are just staggering around? What about her group, do I want to fit in with them? Is this mate of an acceptable age? And on, and on.
And then there’s the whole physical aspect of it. The size of her breasts and butt really don’t have a lot to do with the sex act itself. After you’ve been together for a couple of months or so, it stops mattering even to you. And yet people (alright guys) obsess about these things: are her boobs large or small? Do they sag or are they perky? Are the nipples sorta small or large? Blah, blah, blah.
So it’s really annoying when sex grows to consume my world. There’s a whole universe of things going on: music, philosophy, science, trying to bring world peas, etc. And here I’m stuck thinking about how long a girl’s legs are, or whether she likes “doggie style.”
To add insult to injury, this is all related to reproduction. Having kids. I really don’t think I should have kids. Many geneticists agree.
The mindless beast we carry within can be annoying in many ways, but for me, the worst is when it takes over my thoughts. Of all the aspects of ourselves that we have some measure of control over, like weight, strength, etc. it seems like one of the more responsive things are our minds. We choose to think about something and we think about it. It seems like we should be able to at least control that.
There is nothing more annoying to me then when the ole peskie grey critter gets clobbered by my sex drive so that, no, the regularly scheduled program has been pre-empted by “I dream of booty.” I mean, we can’t control the fact that we age, we can’t control the needs for air, water, food, you’d think that at least we could control what we think.
I guess that’s why I sometimes take the whole sex-drive thing as such a person affront.
I was sitting around, not being very productive, when I found myself listening to “comedy central” (www.npr.org). As usual, they were reporting on some outward sign that humanity was burning its little way towards the end or whatever and I found myself ranting at the computer speakers…again.
Muttering to myself, I stumbled around the web and read some things on blogger.com that provoked a few smirks, some outraged gesticulations, and my mouth frothing over. It was then that I realized a cunning plan…
Why not post my inane blather? I could make jillions of bucks! Scantily clad women would throw themselves at my feet! I would have millions of admirers!
I realized right away that these goals were unrealistic. I mean women do not throw themselves at your feet…they usually just walk up to you and then lie down. Much less wear and tear.
At any rate, so here it is! Perhaps when the applause dies down I will post some other crap. We’ll see how it goes.
