It's not malpractice, it's the Blue Screen of Death
Mull over the current national climate—particularly how money is spent and the value placed on human life, plus the blind faith in "innovation" and "tech" as our latter-day Messiahs—and then ask yourself if you want, for example, to be cared for by a robot in your dotage:

"The more pressing and serious problem is the extent to which society is prepared to trust autonomous robots and entrust others into the care of autonomous robots."

Caring for an ageing population also raised questions, he said.

Robots were already being used in countries like Japan to take simple measurements, such as heart rate, from elderly patients.

Professor Sharkey, who worked in geriatric nursing in his youth, said he could envisage a future when it was "much cheaper to dump a lot of old people" in a large hospital, where they could be cared for by machines.

Not to mention:who would be liable for autonomous machines screwing people up?

The article's other bits, hinting but not discussing mechanized killing and remote-control worker oppression, aren't tasty pieces of cake to think about, either. But imagine how the Wall Street Journal, say (and most of its readers), would find all of these things Just Incredibly Peachy. They're such obvious boons to bottom lines. Eek, I say.

 
Attention Catholics: Limbo not really there after all!
Hmm... if the Church has been perhaps wrong about their own afterlife for all these years, then gosh, what else might they be wrong about? This is only their field of expertise, no? Oh wait: they're infallible, because they say they are—and they must be right, regardless, all the time, because they are infallible, so they tell us. Right?

It's just as good as taking as fact as book that claims there's an all-powerful, all-knowing and perfect sky fairy, and it's a fact because the book says it was written by this selfsame perfect sky fairy, so thenceforth the book must be perfectly correct—and if it ever seems incorrect, well, then you read it wrong, because it is correct, as it already established.

"We emphasize that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge," quoth the Vatican's International Theological Commission.

Indeed!

Pathological lying
"Liberal bias!" What really gets me about this pervasive media myth is that it practically disproves itself.

The constant repetition of "liberal bias" in that selfsame media that's so allegedly liberal? It doesn't add up, on its face.

Wouldn't a truly liberally biased media be trying to hide its biases? Wouldn't a truly liberal media be claiming via its proxies/pundits that it's conservatively biased, so as to spur consumers to think that reality, therefore, must be more liberal than it appears in the press? I mean, come on now.

Sometimes it seems like the only clue left these days is on the shelf at Toys 'R' Us.

"Take 30 minutes out of your day every day, just for yourself." That new chestnut.

It's a common "stress-busting" tip. It's the sort of advice you get in those unbearably chipper "lifestyle" magazines and "health and wellness" newsletters. You know, the rags with articles that assume you can't figure out which vegetables are the brightly colored ones.

When it's not the Great New Diet of the day or the Tip That Will Save/Change Your Life, it's always "5 ways" to do this, the "top ten" something-or-others, or "50 Wild New Sex Positions to Drive Him Bonkers" (well, if it's Cosmopolitan). The copy never rises above the sixth-grade reading level. I've written some of this stuff myself, professionally. (Not for Cosmo.) Reading this stuff, you'd think you could breeze through diabetes or follow a bullet list to nirvana.

Americans love this stuff. It's the Cliffs Notes of self-help. Short, easily digestible, yet insubstantial, we're left coming back for more. When January's diet fails—even though Sheila Lost 44 Pounds!—we move on to February's. Because look—Anne Lost 37 Pounds and Feels Great! Our franks'n'beans nation is exhorted to zealously incorporate the latest Miracle Food into meals like we're in Kitchen Stadium—"The secret ingredient is: KIWIFRUIT!!!"

We often don't follow the given advice, and then buy more, very similar advice with different titles—which we will also ignore. It's infotainment, padded with liberal amounts of bullshit, whose primary value lies in the glow of anticipating an accomplishment—"I will lose those 30 pounds, dammit!" When the accomplishment is not forthcoming, we turn the page. Oh! I can apply Feng Shui to my cubicle at work! I'm on the Path to Wellness!™

It's the same stuff over and over, except where it's different—and not by much. In their publishers' defense, the flood of near-dreck is a reflection of something fundamental about us as animals. To bone up on human nature, just reconnoiter the average supermarket checkout aisle. Food, sleep, sex, and wasting time reading junk about food, sleep, and sex. Rinse and repeat.

Those perennial issues, folded together with 2 cups of other problems, a teaspoon of vice and a dash of poor coping skills, and stewed in your overheated brain for 16 hours a day, make a nice heaping batch of stress. Serves 4. And so the mags give us an endless supply of snappy paragraphs and time-tested tips on stress, dealing with stress, coping with stress, reducing stress, and not causing stress. It would be nice if they were having some effect, instead of stressing us out over stress reduction while we get fat on faux diet plans.

Just look at the statement up top. Think about it for a moment. If they're giving out advice that says one should take 30 minutes out of one's day for one's own benefit, that implies that umpteen millions of Americans aren't currently doing that. It implies that vast numbers of people don't have half an hour—one forty-eighth—of the day to spare.

How overbooked does one have to be? Must one always be at the beck and call of others (who themselves are at the beck and call of still others...)? Are relaxation, downtime, recharging and introspection really values for nothing in our society? Is that why it seems that everyone's so harried and surly and only out for themselves—because they're desperate to get everything out of the way and perhaps have a tranquil two or three minutes brushing our teeth just before bed? (You're not going to help your fellow man when you're in a kick-the-dog mood. Or be nice to your kids. Or...)

It comes down to this: What's the point of being out of the office if you're still going to feel like you're there, watching the clock, racing to appointments, kowtowing to every demand?

Healthy people are now turning to drugs to keep them awake for as long as 48 hours at a stretch. Some say we're heading for a 24-hour lifestyle. Are we just going to fill that up with more commitments, responsibilities, and structure, structure, structure? What's the point of having more time to spend if you never spend it on anything you actually like to do?

Sound like a recipe for more living, yet less life, to you? It sure does to me. But you can bet it will make some powerful person very, very rich, and that seems to be enough justification for anything these days. If it's just like work to be home, might as well keep working, right? Because that's what it will be.

I recall being in school in the 80s, using lots of nice 1950s textbooks (the schools have always been underfunded). The science and social studies books often had a page or chapter of futurism, where they speculate on the wondrous things that postwar technological breakthroughs would bring. It was some gee-whiz pablum for the little ones. I loved it myself.

Robots and computers were favorite topics, written in that breezy style of the insubstantial magazines of the day (which were really just wordier and less-coarse versions of our modern supermarket rags). They'd speak of how these marvels would do our work for us, and leave us all with lots of leisure time. The need for supporting oneself was never mentioned, leaving one to assume that we would be paid for the robots who are doing our work for us--sort of as if we would be owning the robots. It was an irresistible and utopian sales pitch. Like our lifestyle publications, it didn't feel like a sales pitch, because it wasn't about a discrete, single product. It was about a vision of great possibility. I bought it, and so did society.

But what did we get? Not fucking nirvana, that's for sure.

Like with those cheesy magazines, we got bullshit. Opposite world. Bait and switch. Like stress-busting that causes stress, diets that cause weight gain, and peace that means war, we got free time that means more work.

The futurists of the past were right about robots and computers doing lots of our toil for us. But the forgot to mention that with the work being done by machine, the people—the workers—are often no longer necessary. And when they are, they're doing staggering amounts of work, coordinating the activities of the machines that replace hundreds of people. Those replaced persons are the ones with all that leisure time, except they need to spend it trying to find money, because they're unemployed. (I'm not saying no one should work. I'm in favor of work-life balance that's balanced. We all spend more time with the boss than the family...)

No surprise that they didn't sell the future to us that way. So are we going to buy it when they tell us that staying awake for long periods unnaturally is finally going to provide us with that time to live, enjoy our relationships, travel, relax, recharge, etc.? Because it won't. Can you imagine the 20-hour workday? And note that such profound alterations of sleep patterns are bound to have as-yet-undiscovered long-term effects on cognition and learning--and likely much more than that.

So are we going to wreck our health just for the chance to fill our days with more work, more structure and more stress? It might be worth it to gain that half hour to spare.

The resplendent Tucker Carlson, of MSNBC, strove to keep the ass-elbow differential factor obfuscated recently on "The Situation" while interviewing Dr. Rebekah Guy and her attorney Sam Perkins.

At issue was the lawsuit filed by to force Wal-Mart to comply with a Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy ruling telling their pharmacies to stock Plan B (levonorgestrel)—the emergency contraceptive often called the "morning-after pill." In other words, the lawsuit merely seeks to make Wal-Mart's pharmacies—regulated parts of the health care system—comply with the law, to quit denying women access to health care. But it's all boo hoo, poor Wal-Mart, from the Bow-Tied One.

Factual smackdown! Score one for women, freedom and sense. Then, after some more "don't trample on Wal-Mart's morals" sort of thing—would that be ironic or just Alanis-Morissette-ironic?—another factual smackdown:

GUY: And the Board of Pharmacy decided that this meets both of those requirements, and so it's now requiring Wal-Mart—not us but the Board of Pharmacy or the state of Massachusetts—to cover this medication.

… and, inner wingnut in full effect, he lunges in a furious blur of flailing fists, and he's on top of him now, Holy Fucking Toldeo, he's biting his ear!

Fascism? Fucking FASCISM? The man who was merely "bothered" by the Bush Dysministration's rampant illegal domestic spying and Quaker-monitoring has just accused the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy of fascism. "Unhinged" is a word that comes to mind, for some reason.

Oh, wait, he didn't. He said he wasn't "going to use the word". So clever, that guy. Similarly, I'm not going to say he throws rocks at Girl Scouts or wears Depends, because it may not be true. But then again it could be, I don't really know, as I have no information myself, so we really don't know if he did or did not. But like I said, I'm not going to say that he throws rocks at Girl Scouts, I'm just not going to go there, because I really don't know, and even if I did, it would only be my opinion. One might say that, if it were true, however, then I would be forced, metaphorically, to put out a fatwa for his head—to wit: "Bring me the head of Tucker Carlson, that Depends-wearing asshat!"—but I'm not going to say that.

It's absolutely frightening that America has reached a point where the bleating of extremist partisans has so deranged the public's common sense that universal concepts like "lying is wrong" now need to be pointed out and explained.

Slackage supreme reigns again. Well, I did say earlier that I wouldn’t post anything unless I had something worthy to say, and I’ve been trying to stick to that. At the same time, I don’t want to continually disappoint those of you who drop by on the off-days looking for content that ain’t there.

So, once in a while, I may want to point your eyes towards someone else’s content. Whether it’s any more worthy than staring at old blog posts you’ve already read is for you to decide.

Hey, I could just spend a whole post ranting about the great central Massachusetts city of Worcester is full of suicidal jaywalkers who refuse to fluoridate their nasty, swimming-pool tap water (it even ruins coffee!).

So get thankin’ them lucky stars of yours.

Low-hanging fruit from the wingnut tree (Wingnuttia evangicali) pre-snarked for your pleasure http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002343.html .

More good stuff (this time I mean it when I say “good”): http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/

A taste:

In the States, teenage girls are used to being equated with the inanimate objects with which throbbing dudes who buy “Zoo” {a new “lad mag” –MCH} are obsessed (the other objects: cars, gadgets, and films). Maybe that’s why these girls are turning into drunks and druggies at breakneck speeds. Girls, in fact, have outstripped boys as loser dope fiends, according to WaPo. A Cornell professor opines that girls are snapping under the pressure imposed by the rule that they be rail-thin virgin sexbots, so they’re wearily drowning what’s left of their shattered selves in liquor and drugs.

Young girls, in fact, are of such negligible consequence in Man’s World that teenage boys can no longer distinguish them from the pictures in lad-mags. In Connecticut recently, three college boys were charged with “disorderly conduct” when they jacked off into a live sleeping girl’s face. Having obeyed the rule that says college boys must watch porn on the internet, they congratulated themselves on having lucked into discovering a sleeping chick in their dorm room, and decided it would be a really good idea to spew their hot loads all over her. I bet that felt good!

An interesting perspective on allegedly “shady” stuff:

http://www.alternet.org/story/32047/

And, still don’t think America’s turning into a farking fascist hellhole? Then read this, asshat!: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/32086/

And lastly, did you know that Coretta Scott King died in a quack doctor’s ‘cancer clinic’/ scam shop? She died of cancer complications soon after her arrival and probably not from the bogus and dangerous ‘treatments’—unlike many others who go to these ‘places. here’s the info:

http://www.ncahf.org/digest06/06-05.html and

http://www.ncahf.org/digest06/06-06.html and

some background on the Asshat-in-Chief, Kurt Donsbach:

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/donsbach.html

Ciao for now.

Providence Journal columnist M. Charles Bakst has gone out on a limb--by which I mean he wrote an eminently sensible and correct column about the latest local erosion of our democratic values, which is more or less the same thing nowadays. Perhaps the damage done is not particularly bad in this instance, but (insert apt metaphors: slippery slopes, stalactites and stalagmites, the Grand Canyon, etc.).

This time, it's the Governor's wife, with the chisel, at the Wall of Church and State.

Sue Carcieri held a pleasant prayer service for the forced-birth contingent. It's not so seemingly earth-shattering in itself, prayer services being wildly popular in that demographic, to which she also belongs, and to which she has every right to belong if she so chooses. The problem is that this was a prayer service with a political agenda attached that was held in the State House.

Bakst quotes attendee Joanne McOsker, president of Catholics for Life, as saying that the purpose of this "Rosary for Life" service was "to end abortion and to establish the teachings of Christ in our government." Jesus Christ Almighty, indeed!

To paraphrase Emeril Lagasse, there ain't no First Amendment police comin' after you when you do this. ('Tis a crying shame.) But, bless his heart, he was offended. Yes, offended! Like any real American patriot should be when our democratic and Constitutional values are threatened on scales large or small.

You've got to give a shit about something to be offended by it, and for fuck's sake, it's a damn fine thing to see someone give a shit about the separation of church and state and strongly say so in print. It's been absent for too long, while we've lost so much, while so few were noticing. Theocracy sucks; ask an Afghani.

Of course, the media should have been engaged in the Giving of the Rat's Ass on this all a-fucking-long, but have been sanitized and pansified by brickbats and browbeatings from the corporate types and the evangelical screechers. The profession that should be taking its cues from All the President's Men instead cowers before the vitrolic verbiage of knownothings and nutbags. The people's government watchdog watches not, but assumes the Lewinsky position before the greedheads whose greenbacks buy the fucking government. 

Pansified? Pansy-ified? Well, you know what I mean. Anyway: Get a spine, you lily-livered douchebags! Take some cues from Mr. M. here. He's a moderate. He's so freaking moderate, it's boring. Cutting-edge controversy doesn't seem to be his thing. The smart money in Vegas says that something M. Charles says probably ain't gonna be radical.

In addition, he doesn't look like the kind of guy I'd want at my back in a gang brawl behind a Dumpster in an alley (no offense, Chuck, and no, that doesn't happen all that often, sheesh...). Yet he's got more cojones than the whole staff of Fox News. And Fox News fucking offends me, the tools.

Take that! And that!

Offense: It's Not Just for Wingnuts Anymore. We the people can use it too.

Randomly offending Sean Hannity (the tool): http://intellectualize.org/images/hannity-book15.jpg
http://www.hereinreality.com/hannity/douchebag.jpg
http://www.image-hosting.net/images/messageboard/makincopies/hannity.jpg
http://www.peteykins.com/images/FarkDec03/Hannity.jpg

Cuz nuthin's more fun than a snark attack.