Well, because you have no heart and are only worried about the bottom line, you immediately exploit. Take out an Internet ad campaign, like the one above, from which I snagged the screen snap.
Only distilled or sterile water should be used when irrigating the sinuses, the Missouri health department said today in an alert following the deaths of two people in Louisiana.
The deaths were caused by an organism called Naegleria fowleri that can lead to a brain infection called primary amebic meningoencephalitis. Both people had used tap water to flush water through their noses with a device known as a neti pot.
The organism travels to the brain through the nose, destroying tissue as it goes. It can not cause an infection by drinking water through the mouth …
The infections can occur when people swim in fresh water lakes and rivers and inhale water up their noses. In rare cases the cause has been linked to untreated swimming pools or tap water … There are about three cases of Naegleria fowleri infections a year in the U.S. according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Tap water is sanitized by chlorination but not rendered sterile. That is,
most microbes — but not all, are killed. And in the case of Naegleria, if a couple of them are present in the tap — in areas where the water is taken from sources where they are found — shotgunning them into the sinus with a “neti pot” is … not so good.
Way way back in the day, when trying to pick Ph.D. research, I was interested in invasive microorganisms because of their potential production of proteolytic enzymes, catalysts which degrade connective tissue.
Because of this I occasionally browsed papers on Naegleria infections. They were always fatal. And in the years since not much progress has been made on Naegleria infection for two reasons: Its relative rarity and the fact it presents so late the patient is beyond hope and no treatments can be tested for efficacy.
As for use of “neti pots”? It’s a vile habit, old wive’s tale preventive scam medicine for stupid people in modern America.
I had allergies as a child. Many kids do and it’s no big deal.
However, with my parents all slight illnesses or infirmities were to be vigorously attacked, no matter the pain and cost involved.
So every other Saturday morning in the spring and summer for a couple years I was taken to an eye, ear, nose and throat man in the county seat for mechanical neti-potting treatments.
There I’d be strapped into a chair, my head restrained and my body tilted back. A nozzle would be stuck up my nose and a machine would begin pumping saline water through my sinuses for a few minutes.
Sh-pummm, sh-pummmm, sh-pummmm went the machine.
“Cough, ackkkk, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle!” went me.
When I could snatch a breath, I’d scream. It was kind of like being water-boarded, I suppose.
Guitar Player magazine has bowed to the inevitable. The issue now on newsstands features a cover story on affordable guitars for the rock n roller. With one exception, they are all made in China or Indonesia. The outlier is manufactured in Canada and is on the high end of the price range the story dictates, instruments under $500.
All the guitars are either licensed American designs, copies of US designs, or fundamentally based on old US models. Many of them are made under American brand names, companies which now manufacture more in China than they do domestically, where production is relegated to high end custom pieces for the artisan (read wealthy snob) economy.
The magazine is a bit tortured by the turn of events, as evidenced by loud assertions in the introductory ‘graphs on how every guitar was rigorously tested for quality in workmanship by its reviewers. But its editors now well know that the buying power of a great deal of its readership, being American, is either destroyed or seriously impaired. (No link — GP magazine does not put publish its features on the web.)
And the only instruments average readers can afford are those made in China.
There is a bit of delicious irony here. The Chamber of Commerce being a trade lobbying group which represents so many of the large multi-national corporations which have mercilessly downsized American jobs, for the sake of cheap labor in China.
The hacking story is not novel. There is nothing new here, just the usual revelation that Chinese spying operations are aimed at everything.
Although true, most of the quotes — taken from the usual officials — take on a laughable quality, considering how much has already been either carted off to China, or ceded to that country, simply for a corporate shareholder’s grasping benefit.
“I don’t think the Chamber of Commerce has anything worth stealing, but it’s part of a pattern of the Chinese stealing of everything they can, and that’s worrying,” Clarke said.
“You stack all of that up and I think there’s a case to be made that this may be the greatest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of the world and we are on the losing end of it,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
“This is a national, long-term strategic threat to the United States of America. This is an issue where a failure is not an option,” said Robert Bryant at the National Counterintelligence Executive.
National long-term strategic threat. The greatest transfer of wealth in history. The sound you can’t hear in cyberspace is DD’s loud horselaugh when reading the pompous piffle of miscellaneous hypocrites and shoeshine boys.
Nice drink, not made in China. I heard about it from the famous cyberwar plutocrat.
“Some scientists believe we can live forever …” exclaims one the hosts. That means, for the purposes of the story, two scientists. One of whom speaks with a lisp, perhaps because his ZZ Top-length beard is getting tangled up in his lips and … teef. Sadly, messing up the perception Britishes don’t suffer fools gladly like Americans.
Cue the lecture room with a PowerPoint presentation shot. (Alternatively, some very wealthy libertarian computer programmers musing on how old age could be programmed away with just the right combination of algorithms and megadose pill-taking.)
“The main reason I want to live forever is because it’s fun to be alive,” says another scientist, running with his older Dad in the desert.
Shouldn’t the fellow be in the lab working on lengthening those telomeres? The clock’s ticking.
“There are some doubters,” says NBC newsperson Michelle Kosinski.
“Research is in the early stages … and there’s not a lot of funding,” she adds, just before the break for a commercial.
Mythbusters, the popular TV program of minor science, engineering and explosive parlor tricks for the answering of trivial questions no one with sense gives a shit about, had a bit of a problem yesterday:
A “MythBusters” experiment went awry Tuesday, sending a cannonball blasting through a home, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said.
Sheriff’s spokesman J.D. Nelson told NBCBayArea.com that a projectile from an Alameda County firing range in Dublin missed its intended target and hit a home near Tassajara Road and Somerset Lane — going through one wall and exiting through another.
The Sheriff’s Office said it was a cannonball fired by a “MythBusters” crew that “took a few unfortunate bounces.” It was not known what the experiment entailed.
The zany team on the Discovery Channel TV series attempts to verify or debunk urban legends, popularly held beliefs and movie scenes by conducting experiments — repeatedly warning young viewers not to try them at home or without a parent.
“MythBusters has examined whether a collision with a bug can kill a biker (debunked), whether it is possible to shoot the hat off a person’s head without harming the wearer (debunked) …” reads the story, explaining the show’s durable appeal for a mass audience of miscellaneous dummies and very young children.
“The MythBusters’ Twitter account retweeted a post from one of the show’s cast, Grant Imahara, stating the team was to be working with artillery,” the news piece concludes.
Along with Ghostbusters, the SyFy channel show in which a crew of white trash morons employ lots of cheap electronic kit and night vision goggles in the pursuit of cold drafts, heat spots, thumps and creaking noises in empty houses, Mythbusters is the very pinnacle of exploratory entertainments for curious and inquiring but somewhat enfeebled minds.
When I was in the Boy Scouts of America for a blessedly brief period of time back in Pine Grove, PA, we had one senior scout who was the very epitome of the type Mythbusters appeals to — the stupid person who cannot be told anything but dangerously believes he has a talent for empiricism.
So he had done a bit of trivial reading about white phosphorus and convinced a science teacher in the school district to give him a bit of it as part of an exciting chemistry experiment he wished to show the troop in its weekly meeting at a church. Of course, this was back when school labs still were allowed to have interesting and potentially dangerous elements and compounds as part of science education.
The splinter of phosporus was brought in under water and the fellow explained how it would burn when exposed to air. He had a C02 fire extinguisher and I raised my hand to explain that white phosphorus would indeed catch fire. And then it would generate a choking smoke in the small room where we were and that carbon dioxide would only put it out briefly. When the fire extinguisher was turned off or had run out of CO2, the white phosphorus would again burn.
“Shut up, Smith,” he said.
As predicted, the white phosphorus caught fire and begin throwing off a good cloud of choking smoke. The CO2 fire extinguisher was employed, fruitlessly. Smoke filled the room, coughing broke out, and the church was evacuated. Someone eventually extinguished the burning phosphorus — a lot of it had been consumed — by covering it with sand or a non-flammable powder of some kind.
Putting up the first evah “About” page today involved checking links. One to the old Crypt Newsletter turned up the above, used as art for a T-shirt that I actually had made.
The art was one of the leaflets the US military dropped on Iraq over a decade ago.
Now it’s an obscure absurd anachronism. It indeed looks like something a country that had gone out of its mind would make by the hundreds of thousands.
I have the best song for the new tourism trade association campaign to boost America overseas. It’s “The National Anthem!”
What better way to show off our best side than to indicate that after a long time, yes, some of us still do have a grim but inviting sense of humor. And that we’re able to ridicule ourselves.
Say hello to “the United States of Awesome Possibilities” as it looks to visitors from abroad to help lift it out of the economic doldrums.
By soft-pedaling patriotism, the newly-formed US national tourism board tasked with getting more tourists — and their money — onto US soil is reinventing the nation as a hip new land of diversity and possibilities.
“We’re rebranding America for the first time,” said Jim Evans, chief executive of the Corporation for Travel Promotion, ahead of the World Travel Market that opened Monday in London.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years, people have seen America as unwelcoming as we’ve focused on security …
Central to that message is a pixelated “USA” logo, unveiled Monday in London and a world away from the Stars and Stripes, that is meant to represent what the corporation calls “the United States of Awesome Possiblities.”
“It is not about patriotism, flag-waving or chest-beating,” says the corporation in a capsule explanation of the design. “It is meant to be welcoming, unexpected and inclusive.”
“We have to rekindle the romance with the United States,” Chris Perkins, chief marketing officer at the Corporation for Travel Promotion, told AFP.
“It pains me, as a proud American, but we’re viewed as arrogant and brash …
Of course, in addition to curbing the national image as brash and arrogant, we could do with a lot less of the patently phony and stupid, too.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary … we all get here, eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich. And we do it right, without no hitch!
Welcome to the United States of Greed. It’s the only country you’ll ever need! If you’re into frauds and useless devices, Uncle Sam — the best of choices.
Welcome to the United States of Security! We’ll check you now for purity!
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell!
The Great Divide (or the new Civil War) quote of day:
“I think (the Occupy movement) makes the Tea Party look a lot better. We’re not playing drums, masturbating on the street, or defecating on cars. I don’t think there’s anybody (out on the street) who is for American [sic] the way it was founded. They are like from another planet or something.”
The feeling’s mutual, although I’d vouchsafe my belief that Tea Party members would never indulge in a bit of a polish in public.
And who says “defecating on cars” in the heartland? It’s “s——- on cars.” Everyone knows that. Elitist snobs.
But how do you follow quote alleging your foes are subhuman aliens who jerk off in the roads and take dumps on cars? Everything you follow it with is anti-climactic.
Warm-up before going to a Halloween party as myself, with guitar, to play a few songs.
Honeytone $20 9-volt battery driven made-of-plastic-in-China amp from Guitar Center, not priceless that’s for sure. But handy and a conversation starter. And it sounds just barely OK if you know what you’re doing.
Was going to post a photo of the original China Toilet Blooz toilet seat, which didn’t make the video. Maybe later.
Posting will be light. Spending time with a friend debilitated by a hard regimen of chemotherapy. Once again, reality shows there’s been no innovation. Unless you call carrying a fannypack purse/pump for the poison strapped to you a wonder. The poisons aren’t new or better since the Eighties. And they’re still very much toxic.
Which is why they get the view counts in the first place.
By no means are these songs “hits.” But they do get views and, apparently, the algorithms notice.
Second situational funny, the constant juxtaposition of “The Pothead Anthem” by Janis Joplin — at the top of the “recommended videos” column — on an increasing number of my properties. (See here. I’m so lucky.)
