Dixie-Chick Foot-in-Mouth Disease

Years ago I remember all of the stink about the Dixie Chicks and how the squirrelly-little lead singer Natalie Maines (who sounds more like the whines of a tortured cat than actual singing) made some remarks about George W and the war in Iraq, and there was a big hoopla that followed. What really struck me, though, wasn't necessarily the comment, but rather, the nutty foot-in-mouth syndrome that resulted when the following happens:

A celebrity/actor/singer makes a nutty comment that has NOTHING to do with their craft!

I don't know why this isn't more common sense. If you're a singer... sing, and be quiet about politics. If you're an actor... act, and shut your mouth about politics. For crying out loud, I pay to see Matt Damon jump from rooftop to rooftop trying to recover his lost memory, not to hear his snooty opinions about politicians. Unless you are a political pundit full-time, well, don't give up your day job to let us know what you think. We don't care! You just come across looking stupid, you alienate people, and your sales go down the toilet! There are seriously actors that I will not support or watch simply because I can't stand political remarks and comments they've made.

A recent example I can think of, oddly, was Dr. Andrew Weil, the bald, bushy-bearded health and nutrition guy. I really used to enjoy him and his teaching, but I was listening to one of his books the other day, and for no reason at all, he starts ranting and railing about stem cell research and how terrible the opposition of the so-called "religious right" is. What the heck? One minute he's giving valid nutritional and scientific data, the next he's spewing out his political views. I seriously stopped listening and I won't listen to anything else he has to say. Why? BECAUSE I WANT TO HEAR HIM TALK ABOUT NUTRITION, NOT HIS INANE POLITICAL VIEWS!!! It's not just because I do believe that stem cells represent the very earliest - and viable - stage of human life, but it's because I didn't get the audio book to listen to him talk about that. I got it to listen to science and nutrition, not pushy appeals for Josef Mengele-style human experimentation on human life and inane political accusations.

(and for the record, I'm NOT a part of any "religious right" - I consider myself more of a "religious removed-from-politics". Politics revolt me, and no one, left or right, fairly represents Christianity, so I'd prefer to separate my beliefs with anything going on in Washington - especially from characters like Sarah Palin. I've studied enough history to know that when Catholics and Anglicans run the State, that it's the genuinely faithful Christians who live peacefully and believe the truth of the Bible that are the most heavily persecuted, tortured and killed. But I'm getting off-topic...)

Dr. Weil - when you read this, do me a favor: talk about vitamins, nutrition, supplements, exercise, probiotics, organic farming, raw milk, clean water, etc. Leave your sophomoric political views out of things. You lost my support. And this goes for all of you singers and actors. To put it another way...

(sing to the melody of Stevie Wonder's most awesome "Higher Ground")
Singers.... keep on singin'
Actors.... keep on actin'
(and keep your politics out of it!)

BTW - I've long wondered what it would look like if Dr. Andrew Weil and butter-cooking woman Paula Deen had a child. Well, via the magic of Photoshop, here you go!

"Super Earths" - and why aren't we there yet?

Stories like this one about the potential of other earth-like planets really has me wondering why we aren't there already.  This is the type of thing that scientists should be concentrating, not with nonsensical speculations about apes turning into men and other valueless recreations.  If anyone believes that "science has all the answers" (which it doesn't....  It has some good answers, and a lot of BAD one's too, like asbestos, chemical warfare, killer pharma, nuclear waste and fallout, etc) should realize that space exploration is THE thing to be focusing on.  Not stupidity about fish turning into lizards, but rather, how the heck do we get working warp engines.

If you go to a bookstore, instead of seeing shelves filled with goofballs speculating about stupid things like evolution, there should be TOMES of books about space travel, star ships, and warp engines (the stuff of Star Trek should be the stuff of reality by now.)  There's nothing I hate more than going to a science website or magazine and reading pages about neanderthal nonsense.  For crying out loud, get us into space first, and then speculate your silly caveman ideas!

If I was a scientist, that would be my focus and path.  As it stands, I nearly failed every science class I took because, while I like the ideas, I hate the actual study.  Go figure.

Space exploration should be THE prime focus of all science, followed closely by the science of making the environment safer, followed then by the science of making food and water safer and cleaner.  But I don't hear nearly enough about these subjects, and instead it's just scientific monkey business.

10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media

Gospel coalition had this post recently: 10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media

But I think they missed out on the biggest one:  "What about the medical side effects of abortion?  Are women being fairly and honestly informed about the medical consequences of a surgical abortion, both immediate and long-term?"  From a strictly naturalistic viewpoint, abortion is NEVER safe.  It's foolish to ever apply a word like that to a procedure in which a woman has an unborn child surgically destroyed and vacuumed from the body.  A back-alley abortion could be considered "more" dangerous compared to a hospital-setting abortion, sure, but even at a hospital, or a posh abortion clinic, the fact remains: when a woman gets a DNC, it isn't safe, and there are plenty of medical risks such as uterine puncture, hemorrhaging, scarring, internal bleeding, side-effects from the medication, etc, etc.

Yes, natural childbirth is dangerous, I'll agree, but I think comparing abortion to natural childbirth is something of a false dichotomy. Natural childbirth, by it's very nature, is a natural process in which a woman, with minimal (if any) intervention, delivers a child. It doesn't need to be done in a hospital, and technically can be done without a doctor or nurses or major intervention of any major degree. Not so abortion. You can't just "naturally" have an abortion: there are doctors are nurses required, and drugs, and for a standard D&C-style procedure, there needs to be a hospital room, medical equipment, drugs, and a lot of HUMAN intervention, which can in many respects be prone to error (check out some of the YouTube "abortion clinic 9-11 calls" sometime).

 Abortion clinics generally do NOT have all of the full medical facilities/specialists that a standard hospital ER will have, so if something goes wrong during the abortion surgery, a 9-11 call needs to be made to take the woman from the abortion clinic to the hospital. The abortion-breast cancer link is another issue as well. Plenty of good research suggesting a connection, and even more convincing that there is a risk is the fact that mainstream media routinely buries these stories about a connection - and if the MSM buries a story, you know there's truth to it. And if there is no connection, then where on earth is this epic breast cancer epidemic coming from lately?

Abortion is never safe, regardless of where and how it's done, and women need to be adequately informed.  Laws should mandate that women are fully informed before the surgery so that they know exactly what the risks are.  There needs to be more objective research done into the abortion/cancer risk as well.

Things I learned from the 2012 election...

This last election was all about Obama vs. a lesser version of Obama
Mitt wasn't really all that different from Obama.  He wouldn't have come into office and radically cut back government and spending.  It would have just been more of the same.  Honestly, I don't care for Obama's platform or his grizzly, unborn-child-hating policies, but I find I care just as less for Mormon-cult-following Romney.  Yeah, I voted for Romney, but only as a protest against the incumbent, and not to support the cultist (in fact, from a religious standpoint, I'd rather have a nominal-Muslim like Obama in office than a Mormon and a Roman Catholic.  The idea of a Roman Catholic president is the stuff of nightmares, as it's a much worse cult than Mormonism that teaches a grotesque, satanic blending of church and state, with a long bloody history of burning baptists like me.

The mainstream media is a joke
The MSM is just a giant Obama hype machine and...

You know what... I'm ending this post before I even get going, because a giant lightning bolt of realization just hit me:  I really don't care.  No more politics tags for me.  I'm sick of it all, and I'd rather write about something else.

There is no such thing as a vegetarian

I've been thinking about the fact that, as human beings, there really is no such thing as a vegetarian, or, more precisely, someone who's existence does not exist at the cost of other lives.  I don't care about arbitrary and nonsensical distinctions like vegetarian or vegan or ova-lacto-vegan and similar stupidity:  just being alive, your soul inhabits a shell that is covered with bacteria, good and bad, and that your own body is a bacteria-destroying machine from birth to death.  A bacteria is a living organism, just as much as a cow is, and simply by existing, you kill bacteria.  Your gut and digestive system daily kills countless microscopic organisms.  Just being alive, you destroy other lives.  And there's no way to be alive, and be human, without doing so, unless you were just a brain in a jug of chemicals, I suppose.

So really, there are just varying degrees of being carnivorous.  You can be on the low side, and be a living, breathing bacteria killer, killing countless microscopic organisms daily, or on the high side, like me, and enjoy BLTs for lunch while also subsequently having my body killing bacteria.

The point is this:  you can't be alive without killing something.  Depending on the plants you eat, like cabbage, you'd have to kill the plant to get the cabbage on your plate.  And even a fruitarian, eating only fruits that fall from trees, would have to kill grass walking to the tree, or kill bugs and organisms on the ground by walking, or driving, or just periodically snorting a fruit fly up the nose.
Our bodies are non-stop bacteria killers.  Bacteria is no less alive than a cow or a fish.  There is no such thing as a vegetarian.  We all take lives deliberately or in-deliberately, whether or not we like it.

George Lucas: Epic Sellout

I've been thinking about the news recently about George Lucas selling out  (figuratively and literally) the Star Wars franchise to Disney, and I frankly don't care anymore.  The Star Wars franchise is so overly-marketed and so saturated with garbage, that it's impossible to tell what fits into the actual universe and what doesn't.  I've found myself getting sick of Star Wars over the last few years, especially with the Clone Wars, which seems to just be a video game with far too much light saber and ever more panning of a otherwise boring transition time between Episode 2 and 3 (we know Anakin goes bad, and we know Palpatine is the puppet master of everything, and it's just puppet-characters all fighting one another, so what's the appeal of the show anyhow?)

But more than anything with this story of Lucas selling Disney  I think the lamest thing of all is would be that he sold the one token feature of his empire that really gave him identity.  Sure, he was known for American Graffiti  Indiana Jones (making it great initially and also ruining it years later), Willow, and that dull sci-fi film with the bald people.  Oh, and Howard the Duck. But Star Wars was THE thing he was known for, and he just off and sold the one token identification that you think of when you think of George Lucas.  I guess I just don't get it.  Maybe he's like me and he's just sick of Star Wars.  "Here, take it, pay me for it, and do what you want with it."

It has no appeal to me.  I could care less about an episode 7, and if it was made, would likely wait for it to hit NetFlix instead of wasting the money.  I think George should have just wrapped up the series and put it to rest.  Disney is just going to goof it up, or have Gore Verbinski direct it with a dull and repetitive Hans Zimmer score, and chock it full of unrealistic and non-convincing Pixar special effects.  Blah.  I don't care.

George, you should have just put the franchise to rest yourself, buddy.

TEEEL: 88MPH