Remember When Dennis Miller Was Still Funny?
Before he became a hateful, rabid right-wing tool and could only find work on Fox News shows and talk radio....
Vets Shred Uniforms to Heal Themselves
15 years ago
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
The Old Sneezeguard
Don'tcha just hate when someone tries to lay out orthodoxy?
Do you hate it when people ascribe motives when they couldn't possibly know your motivation?
"I AGREE. PEOPLE WHO COME HERE TO CREATE CONFLICT OR TO LOOK FOR A CHANCE TO "ONE UP" SOMEONE MUST BE SUCH TOTAL FAILURES IN LIFE THAT HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO.
IF IT IS NOT ABOUT THE LIFESTYLE I AM UNLIKELY TO READ IT. THAT INCLUDES THE MAJORITY OF BLOG POSTS, ESPECIALLY IF IT IS ABOUT POLITICS. SOME OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL BLOGS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE LIFESTYLE. IT SEEMS MANY COME HERE PRIMARILY TO GET A FREE BLOG THAT ALLOWS X RATED TOPICS OR TO GET LAID. VANILLA PEOPLE PREDOMINATE, NOT THOSE WHO ACTUALLY LIVE AN ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLE.
AFTER CHECKING FOR MAIL, MY GROUPS AND MY WATCHED BLOGS, I SKIM DOWN THE LIST OF RECENT POST AND SOMETIMES I FIND ONE OR TWO THAT LOOK INTERESTING, BUT MORE OFTEN I FIND NOTHING."
How amazingly boring.
Don'tcha just hate when someone tries to lay out orthodoxy?
Do you hate it when people ascribe motives when they couldn't possibly know your motivation?
"I AGREE. PEOPLE WHO COME HERE TO CREATE CONFLICT OR TO LOOK FOR A CHANCE TO "ONE UP" SOMEONE MUST BE SUCH TOTAL FAILURES IN LIFE THAT HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO.
IF IT IS NOT ABOUT THE LIFESTYLE I AM UNLIKELY TO READ IT. THAT INCLUDES THE MAJORITY OF BLOG POSTS, ESPECIALLY IF IT IS ABOUT POLITICS. SOME OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL BLOGS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE LIFESTYLE. IT SEEMS MANY COME HERE PRIMARILY TO GET A FREE BLOG THAT ALLOWS X RATED TOPICS OR TO GET LAID. VANILLA PEOPLE PREDOMINATE, NOT THOSE WHO ACTUALLY LIVE AN ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLE.
AFTER CHECKING FOR MAIL, MY GROUPS AND MY WATCHED BLOGS, I SKIM DOWN THE LIST OF RECENT POST AND SOMETIMES I FIND ONE OR TWO THAT LOOK INTERESTING, BUT MORE OFTEN I FIND NOTHING."
How amazingly boring.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Gone Baby Gone
Went to see it last night. It was very, very well done. I had a few issues with it...but they were due to my being a fan of the series of novels from which the characters were drawn, not the film itself.
The author of the book, Dennis Lehane, grew up in my neighborhood and sets most of his books here...in a neighborhood pretty much ignored by other movies filmed here. (The Departed had two scenes filmed here though) I love the books...there's the neighborhood connection...I watched them film of of this movie. A few scenes were filmed, quite literally, around the corner from my house.
So I had high expectations. Ben Affleck being a first time director taking on this material...had me a little wary. But he really pulled it all together. Very impressive work by the actors and by Affleck the Director.
A few of the performances are outstanding...most notably Ed Harris as a BPD detective on the missing child case. He's fucking intense.
Went to see it last night. It was very, very well done. I had a few issues with it...but they were due to my being a fan of the series of novels from which the characters were drawn, not the film itself.
The author of the book, Dennis Lehane, grew up in my neighborhood and sets most of his books here...in a neighborhood pretty much ignored by other movies filmed here. (The Departed had two scenes filmed here though) I love the books...there's the neighborhood connection...I watched them film of of this movie. A few scenes were filmed, quite literally, around the corner from my house.
So I had high expectations. Ben Affleck being a first time director taking on this material...had me a little wary. But he really pulled it all together. Very impressive work by the actors and by Affleck the Director.
A few of the performances are outstanding...most notably Ed Harris as a BPD detective on the missing child case. He's fucking intense.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Ennui
I'm finding that blogging at the other place is becoming less and less...interesting...or something.
I was looking at my Watched Blogs list just now. About a year ago it numbered 76 members. It's down to 21 now.
I took a tally of the front page bloggers. Excluding my own...there are 15 members there. I read just 5 of them....and not all of them regularly.
(related tangent: further looks determined that only 3 of those 15 people come to my blog...so apparently they find me as boring as I find most of them. I wonder if there's an unspoken, unacknowledged kind of competition amongst a lot of the Front Pagers? A quiet enmity that keeps them away from those who would surpass them in rankings? I know a few have open hostility in this regard. The apply Sun Tzu's teaching to blogging. Me? I just don't see the interest in a lot of them. How many times can the same blogger ask the same questions? And I already receive plenty of e-mail forwards from friends...I don't need to read them in blogs as well.)
======================
I'm not sure what it is that's causing this...fatigue?...lack of interest? Maybe familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe it's the fact that so many of the people I read and enjoyed have left after becoming fed up with alt's service, the proliferation of scumbags and whackos...or both. I do know that the really great writers who've moved on from there...are rarely replaced by writers of the same caliber.
Maybe it's the repetition. Just the other day the topic of submission being a gift was being tossed back and forth. And my only thought on the subject was "Sweet Jebus, not THIS again!" No one has anything new to say on it...it's the same tired, old retread viewpoints. You can only watch so many reruns of Gilligan's Island.
Oh well.....it's a "whatever" kind of issue. I do miss a lot of people there though.
I'm finding that blogging at the other place is becoming less and less...interesting...or something.
I was looking at my Watched Blogs list just now. About a year ago it numbered 76 members. It's down to 21 now.
I took a tally of the front page bloggers. Excluding my own...there are 15 members there. I read just 5 of them....and not all of them regularly.
(related tangent: further looks determined that only 3 of those 15 people come to my blog...so apparently they find me as boring as I find most of them. I wonder if there's an unspoken, unacknowledged kind of competition amongst a lot of the Front Pagers? A quiet enmity that keeps them away from those who would surpass them in rankings? I know a few have open hostility in this regard. The apply Sun Tzu's teaching to blogging. Me? I just don't see the interest in a lot of them. How many times can the same blogger ask the same questions? And I already receive plenty of e-mail forwards from friends...I don't need to read them in blogs as well.)
======================
I'm not sure what it is that's causing this...fatigue?...lack of interest? Maybe familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe it's the fact that so many of the people I read and enjoyed have left after becoming fed up with alt's service, the proliferation of scumbags and whackos...or both. I do know that the really great writers who've moved on from there...are rarely replaced by writers of the same caliber.
Maybe it's the repetition. Just the other day the topic of submission being a gift was being tossed back and forth. And my only thought on the subject was "Sweet Jebus, not THIS again!" No one has anything new to say on it...it's the same tired, old retread viewpoints. You can only watch so many reruns of Gilligan's Island.
Oh well.....it's a "whatever" kind of issue. I do miss a lot of people there though.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Legal or Not, Abortion Rates Compare
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
ROME, Oct. 11 — A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.
Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.
The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.
“We now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,” Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the W.H.O. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said in a telephone interview. “What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.”
But the legal status of abortion did greatly affect the dangers involved, the researchers said. “Generally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner,” Dr. Van Look said. “And the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.”
The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute.
In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. “In the past we didn’t have this kind of data to draw on,” Ms. Camp said. “Contraception is often the missing element” where abortion rates are high, she said.
Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. “These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data,” said Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington.
He said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. “They have equated the word ‘safe’ with ‘legal’ and ‘unsafe’ with ‘illegal,’ which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,” he said.
The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.
The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries.
The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.
The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
Worldwide, the annual number of abortions appeared to have declined between 1995, the last year such a broad study was conducted, and 2003, from an estimated 46 million to 42 million, the study concluded. The 1995 study, by the Guttmacher Institute, had far less data on countries where abortion was illegal.
Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.
Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.
===================================
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
ROME, Oct. 11 — A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.
Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.
The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.
“We now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,” Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the W.H.O. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said in a telephone interview. “What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.”
But the legal status of abortion did greatly affect the dangers involved, the researchers said. “Generally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner,” Dr. Van Look said. “And the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.”
The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute.
In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. “In the past we didn’t have this kind of data to draw on,” Ms. Camp said. “Contraception is often the missing element” where abortion rates are high, she said.
Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. “These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data,” said Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington.
He said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. “They have equated the word ‘safe’ with ‘legal’ and ‘unsafe’ with ‘illegal,’ which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,” he said.
The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.
The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries.
The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.
The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
Worldwide, the annual number of abortions appeared to have declined between 1995, the last year such a broad study was conducted, and 2003, from an estimated 46 million to 42 million, the study concluded. The 1995 study, by the Guttmacher Institute, had far less data on countries where abortion was illegal.
Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.
Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.
===================================
Friday, October 12, 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
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