Prometheus 6 - Haters

What are you waiting for? Do it!

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:04:03 -0500

Quote of note:

One of the studies, by researchers at Duke and Stanford universities and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California, estimated that routine one-time testing of everyone would cut new infections each year by slightly more than 20 percent, and that every infected patient identified would gain an average of 18 months of life.

The other study, by Yale and Harvard researchers, found that testing people every three to five years would be cost effective for all but the lowest-risk people, like those who are celibate or are in monogamous heterosexual relationships. And even for those people, one-time testing was found to be cost effective.

Experts Want H.I.V. Testing for All Adults

SpongeBob has always creeped me out, but ALL Nickeloeon cartoons do

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 07:24:41 -0500

Quote of note:

And we look at such people and we shake our heads and sigh, trying to understand how excruciating it must be to go through life feeling as though you're stuck like a pinned bug to a perverted universe that can't be trusted, one that they desperately hope will be over real soon now, just like the "Left Behind" books promise, so they can forget how miserable and lost and distressed they feel and so they may finally leave their not-so-secret homosexual fantasies behind and drive their big manly SUVs to the Promised Land.

SpongeBob, Evil Gay Heathen
How sad to be a right-wing Christian in a world full of homo cartoons and scary nipples
- [email protected]">By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 26, 2005

I don't know the word for this but ridiculous crosses my mind

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 01:13:10 -0500

Sugar, Vending Groups Take Action Against Obesity Claims
By Caroline E. Mayer and Dina ElBoghdady
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 13, 2005; Page E01

Two more food industry groups are taking the offensive against claims that their products play a role in the nation's growing obesity problem.

Concerned about efforts to curb the sale of junk food in schools, the vending machine trade association is teaming up with pro football Hall of Famer Lynn Swann to announce today its own $1 million campaign against childhood obesity. One feature will be rating the nutritional value of the food in the machines. A red sticker on a candy bar, for example, would mean it should be chosen rarely, while a green sticker on a granola bar would mean it's more nutritious and can be selected more frequently.[P6: OH, yeah. That'll be real effective. Bet the sticker will be on the bottom, so you'd have to buy the candy to see it...]

Meanwhile, the Sugar Association, worried about the declining sales, is going to spend at least $3 million a year for the next three years to give consumers "permission to use sugar," according to Melanie Miller, a spokeswoman for the association. "In moderation, it's not evil," she said, noting a teaspoon is only 15 calories.

The industry-sponsored drives come as the food industry is being blamed for the growing number of obese Americans, particularly children. The number of obese children has more than doubled in the past 30 years.

Scary shit, man

Sun, 9 Jan 2005 04:39:26 -0500

Toxic Breast Milk?
By FLORENCE WILLIAMS

If human breast milk came stamped with an ingredients label, it might read something like this: 4 percent fat, vitamins A, C, E and K, lactose, essential minerals, growth hormones, proteins, enzymes and antibodies. In a healthy woman, it contains 100 percent of virtually everything a baby needs to survive, plus a solid hedge of extras to help ward off a lifetime of diseases like diabetes and cancer. Breast milk helps disarm salmonella and E. coli. Its unique recipe of fatty acids boosts brain growth and results in babies with higher I.Q.'s than their formula-slurping counterparts. Nursing babies suffer from fewer infections, hospitalizations and cases of sudden infant death syndrome. For the mother, too, breast-feeding and its delicate plumbing of hormones afford protection against breast and ovarian cancers and stress. Despite exhaustion, the in-laws and dirty laundry, every time we nurse our babies, the love hormone oxytocin courses out of our pituitaries like a warm bath. Human milk is like ice cream, Valium and Ecstasy all wrapped up in two pretty packages.

But read down the label, and the fine print, at least for some women, sounds considerably less appetizing: DDT (the banned but stubbornly persistent pesticide famous for nearly wiping out the bald eagle), PCB's, dioxin, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic. When we nurse our babies, we feed them not only the fats, sugars and proteins that fire their immune systems, metabolisms and cerebral synapses. We also feed them, albeit in minuscule amounts, paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deodorizers, cosmetic additives, gasoline byproducts, rocket fuel, termite poisons, fungicides and flame retardants.

If, as Cicero said, your face tells the story of your mind, your breast milk tells the decades-old story of your diet, your neighborhood and, increasingly, your household decor. Your old shag-carpet padding? It's there. That cool blue paint in your pantry? There. The chemical cloud your landlord used to kill cockroaches? There. Ditto, the mercury in last week's sushi, the benzene from your gas station, the preservative parabens from your face cream, the chromium from your neighborhood smokestack. One property of breast milk is that its high-fat and -protein content attracts heavy metals and other contaminants. Most of these chemicals are found in microscopic amounts, but if human milk were sold at the local Piggly Wiggly, some stock would exceed federal food-safety levels for DDT residues and PCB's.

Some of the chemicals I'm mainlining to my 1-year-old daughter will stay in her body long enough for her to pass them on to her own offspring. PCB's, for example, can remain in human tissue for decades. On a body-weight basis, the dietary doses my baby gets are much higher than the doses I get. This is not only because she is smaller, but also because her food -- my milk -- contains more concentrated contaminants than my food. It's the law of the food chain, and it's called biomagnification.

God, the very presence of the word "race" just confuses the shit out of people

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 12:10:34 -0500

Quote of note:

Race-based therapy is a "bad idea," said Patricia Davidson, a cardiologist at Washington Hospital Center. For a doctor to employ this type of treatment, the practitioner would have to ask a patient, "How much African American blood do you have" in you? she said. "We have to be very careful with that."

Idiot.

You have to find the physical conditions that this combination of drugs treats (obviously that condition is NOT identified merely by symptoms) and look for that. Because some whte guy somewhere will have the some condition, and wouldn't it be a shame if he died because his doctor was only looking at melanin content to judge the appropriate treatment?

How many illnesses have fever, body aches and upper respiratory problems as symptoms? Why is everyone all surprised that the symptoms of two different problems are the same? If this is seen as some dramatic proof of physical differentiation of races, why doesn't the fact that cancer runs in certain families proof those families constitute a separate race?

Anyway…

A Cure for A Race?
Heart Drug Findings Set Off Ethics Debate

I hate posting shit like this

Mon, 8 Sep 2003 18:19:57 -0400

Black Residents Outraged Against Police Brutality

SAN FRANCISCO (NCM) - On Aug. 25, two White San Francisco police officers drove up Middlepoint and West Point Road in the neighborhood of Hunters Point between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Lee Collins, a 23-year-old resident of the area, who many may know as Baby Finsta, and was featured in Kevin Epps' award-winning independent film "Straight Outta Hunter's Point," was called out by the officers.

As they approached him, he put his hands up, and the officers commenced hitting him with their billy clubs, punching and kicking him until he was unconscious.

At the same time, they were uttering derogatory remarks to his relatives. The officers who made the initial stop called in for their backup to detain everybody in white t-shirts in the area.

When backup arrived, approximately 30 officers showed up, pointing guns at children, who were as young as 8 years old, as well as other residents who had witnessed the act of police brutality.

Fourteen-year-old Marcus Law, an honor roll student who has never been in trouble with the law, was approached and immediately hit with a police billy club, causing him to go to the hospital.

At least two other adults were brutalized in the incident, and a number of children and other spectators were traumatized by what they saw.

The police said that Collins started the trouble by fleeing and resisting arrest, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is what I'm like when I'm tired

Thu, 4 Sep 2003 18:50:32 -0400

Bitter.

Someone came to my archives after searching via Yahoo! for "usa today" blacks laziness 2003 and left deeply disappointed, I'm sure. I was going to rant, but you know what? I wouldn't even enjoy it.

I was foolish enough to read some of the pages that were returned.

I'm done for tonight, I need rest so I can deal with some personal planet-side requirements. But I'm also going to write two, maybe three posts. Of the definitely to be written posts, one (which will express my feelings about the Bush regime's reneging on the promise to fund the AIDS fight in Africa after they gave him all those lovely photo ops and everything) you may not see until next Friday on Open Source Politics when the first of my monthly essays on Africa will be published. Or maybe you will…it was really my intent to take a Pan-African approach to my writing there.

Tomorrow you can definitely see two posts by yours truly on OSP—one in the LegalWrites section on the NAACP's lawsuit against Florida's Board of Education (at least that's what it starts out and ends up being about, the middle wiggles around a bit) and in the Knowledge section on that presents a high-level overview of Microsoft's Information Rights Management stuff. And you can definitely see the second essay I'll write tomorrow, to be titled 'Why I Am Not a Republican," right here.

If I wrote the third it'll be about why I don't hate white people. If this little old retired Jewish accountant who lived 3000 miles away from me hadn't interceded, a little young Jewish hypocritical bigoted lawyer who lived an hour or so away from me could have inspired me to do some real ugly shit.

Idiot

Mon, 25 Aug 2003 17:11:50 -0400

I got my very own Neocon Fedayeen. I just wish he were brighter.

In honor of this occasion, I have created a new category called Haters. Hate mail, hate comments, whatever will be copied into this category. And in honor of the Fedayeen, I'll point out the absurdity in his post just because he's the first at this address. Everyone else will get straight copied to the post, with email address and I.P. the well-wisher posted from.

Later this week I'll make a template that will display all haters. I think I'll add a line on the sidebar that gives a count of them as well. And I'll look into an add-in that lets me filter out categories as opposed to adding them in. That way I can keep it off the index page.

This is just a policy being established. Haters get copied to the Haters category. This way I can respond without getting involved.

Now, on to the hater.