John Kenneth Galbraith

"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

"We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect."

From the NY Times obit: "He was not regarded by his peers as among the top-ranked theorists and scholars. ... Some suggested that Mr. Galbraith's liberalism crippled his influence."

Quotes from Liv Tyler's Celebrity Playlist on iTunes

Horses is really such a great record.
I think (Nancy Wilson's) such a great guitar player.
The Joan Jett version is great.
I just love Iggy.
I've always loved the song and loved singing it.
I've always loved Heart.
I love the Beach Boys.
I love the whole fantasy of L.A.
I love Marilyn Monroe's voice.
It reminds me of what I love about him
He loved the whole record.
I used to love listening to this record.
I love Aretha Franklin.

Everybody Wanted to Be Dean.

No joke. The guy was better than Sinatra. Maybe better than Bing. At least as good as Bing.
Forget the shrill clown at his side. Forget the roasts and the drinks and the bad spy movies. Or don't, because the guy could entertain in a dozen ways.

But listen to him sing "Solitaire." Wow. The Capitol Years: 40 tracks on 2 CDs.

Jollibee Sunday!

The new Jollibee place opened down the street from me. It's so crowded that it nearly causes traffic accidents. I havent ventured in yet, though my previous experience with their Big Aloha Yum Burger at another lcoation was less than stellar. New product info time though! This week: The many moods induced by Spicy Chickenjoy Anghang-sarap!

How a drumstick can cause a mere human to make the emotional journey from wonderment to infatuation to love to respect is truly a miracle that only the bumblebee god-chef can fathom. Jollibee's efforts to link their food to strong emotional outbursts can only be interpreted as layingg the groundwork for total mindcontrol of the fine fine Filipno communities world-wide. Bida Ang Sarap!

Past Jollibee features here:
Crispy Bangus Belly Ennui
Palabok Fiesta National Pride
Rejoicing of the Chicken Torpedo

What Would Ernest Borgnine Do?

More installments of "What Would Ernest Borgnine Do?" here.

Great Moments in Relgious Thought and Action

Northern Nigeria was the location of half of all documented polio cases in 2003, but Muslim clerics have repeatedly inveighed against the vaccine as an effort by Westerners to sterilise young Nigerian Muslim girls. Another issue was the belief that the Polio vaccine caused AIDS. The national vaccination program was suspended in several states in August of 2003, and the disease nearly quintupled in frequency (119 cases in first quarter 2004, vs. 24 in 2003). By May 2004, polio was reported to have spread from there to several other African nations which had previously been declared polio-free.

Past installments of Great Moments in Religious Thought and Action

I do hate cabbage...

...and the Irish. Why aren't they here?

A Bored God is a Dangerous God... or...

...Your Prayers Make the Real Gods Angry

A 3-year-old Moreno Valley girl accompanying her mother to a Bible study meeting drowned Wednesday night in a Riverside swimming pool, authorities said.
Julissa L. Zhang was last seen about 7:30 at the home with about a dozen other children, according to Steven Frasher, spokesman for the Riverside Police Department. About an hour later, she was found face down in the backyard pool. She was unconscious when police arrived and was later pronounced dead at Riverside Community Hospital.

Thursday Funnies!

My New Wine Glasses

They are huge.

They hold 27 ounces; so I won't have to constantly keep refilling my glass or looking for the bottle as much.

Also, they are unbreakable. I'm not sure how this works. They're glass - or something like glass. They ring. But you can bang them against things, and they don't break.

We live in a wonderous age.

Malawi Today: When It Rains, It Pours (and your crops are washed away)

Flooding wouldn't itself be such news, except that Malawi has been in the grips of a drought that has decimated their crops and livestock - until now.

A heavy down pour in the lakeshore districts of Karonga and Nkhata Bay last Sunday dashed hopes of a bumper crop to 650 families who have had their crop fields and livestock swept away by the heavy rain spillage

In his address to parliament president Bingu wa Mutharika had predicted that after many years of poor harvest due to drought, Malawi, this year expected a "bumper maize harvest."

That outlook has changed.

“We are finished. We had hopes of bumper yields this year but look, our cassava, maize and livestock have been swept into the lake,” cries 72-year-old Jikama Nyabanda. Flood continue since last month to destroy yield.

Last month they run down the country’s southern region lake shore district of Mangochi, leaving 400 families without hope of ever having a decent meal and food self-sufficiency. 90 per cent of Malawi’s population depend on rural subsistence farming.

Daily Fantasy Art (and bonus monster pic)

Jesus is Risen

To celebrate the birthdeathbirth of jesus, I got to round 27 in Dig Dug.
Take that Satan. And Pookah.

The Little Continent That Couldn't

Today's news from Africa. (Malawi seems quiet today, though some are upset that Mugabe is coming to visit.)

Lake Chad has shrunk from 15,000 to 500 sq miles. Baga was a waterfront town. Now it is stranded many miles from the lake as the land around it becomes desert.

Burundi has lifted a midnight to dawn curfew that has been in place for 34 years, saying the country is stable. This, following a civil war that killed 300,000.

Chad's government has announced it has cut off diplomatic relations with Sudan after repelling a rebel attack on the capital. The 200,000+ Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad will likely be expelled. Don't all volunteer to take them in at once!

A Rwandan ex-mayor has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for aiding and abetting killing in the 1994 genocide. 800,000 people were killed in about 3 months.

Monkeys

Malawi Today: Is that a penis in your pocket or are you just happy to - OH GOD! THAT'S A PENIS IN YOUR POCKET!!

Lilongwe, Malawi - Police arrested three people in broad daylight at Lilongwe Hotel for being found in possession of male sexual organs. The parts, which included a penis and testicles, were oozing blood at the time of the arrest, police said. According to Chitimbe, the suspects wrapped the penis and testicles in a plastic bag to keep them fresh.

“The penis and testicles looked so fresh because they were still oozing blood.
From the look of things, they must have been removed them from a man the same day in the morning,” he said. “The two, at the moment, are still insisting that they did not know that the parcel they were carrying contained those items,” said Chitimbe. “They were seen to be busy trying to make some connections on the phone until two CID [police] appeared and arrested them.

---

In other African news, life doesn't begin at 40 in Zimbabwe. In fact, most people never reach 40.

The average Zimbabwean woman is dying at 34, according to figures released on Friday in the World Health Organisation (WHO) annual report for 2006. Zimbabwean men can expect to live only to 37.
While the WHO linked the shocking statistic to the high incidence of HIV-Aids, many doctors complained that it was also because of the collapse of the health system in the country, which is struggling through its worst political and economic crisis since independence in 1980.

"Many women are dying during pregnancy, or during or after delivery. It is shocking," said Peter Iliff, a doctor and a member of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR). In just one year, Zimbabwean women's lives had become, on average, two years shorter.

All 10 countries with the world's lowest life expectancy were in Africa. People in Swaziland and Sierra Leone are also expected to die before they reach the age of 40, the report said.

More Adventures of Our New York Scientist Correspondent

Thursday Funnies! Friday News

This Sums Up Everything

Live in Seattle: Have Flesh Eaten Off Your Bones

Seattle is the glorious mecca for flesh-eating bacteria.

(no pictures. Too gross.) In just the first quarter of this year, eight people were eaten alive by necrotizing fasciitis in Seattle; many others managed to survive it by seeking treatment from "western medicine" which may or may not have been aided by belief and prayers in the Lord Our Savior Jesus Christ.

In the latest case:

After being misdiagnosed with shingles on Friday, he was admitted to Evergreen Hospital Medical Center's emergency room Saturday night when the pain on his left side wouldn't let up, she said.

The left side of his chest started to swell and bruise, she said. "It looked like someone beat him up," she said.

Doctors performed exploratory surgery and discovered the dead tissue, she said. They removed some, stabilized him and transported him to Harborview. In the time it took to get there, it had traveled down his arm and killed the tissue, his wife said. He died the same day.

It is therefore clear that the residents of Seattle play a daily game of Russsian Roulette. Will today be the day they contract necrotizing fasciitis? Or will it strike tomorrow? It's clearly just a matter of time.

God Proven Powerless Against Fettuccine Alfredo

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer
Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested. ... A significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. ... The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group — 18 percent — suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers.

---

In other words, telling people you are praying for them will only hasten the cold hand of death cluthing their hearts, and dragging them into the black, endless void, where nary an angel, harp or cloud may be seen.

---

(back to the story:) Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

A 1997 study at the University of New Mexico, involving 40 alcoholics in rehabilitation, found that the men and women who knew they were being prayed for actually fared worse.

---

What I find interetsting here is this:

- The people who get prayed for do worse.

-The researchers then look for a rational scientific reason for this.

-But if the research had shown that prayers made people better, all the money-stealing religious leaders out there would say, "See? We told you prayer works! God loves those who worship him!!"

-So why aren't we accepting the religious reason that these alcoholics and weak-hearted failures got worse? It's that their measly prayers ANGERED GOD? And God, being the capricious and vengeful fuckwad that he is, decided to punish them by making them into drunks and blessing them with a multitude of heart attacks? Perhaps the Jews were right, and what God really wants is millions of animal sacrifices.

How You Eating Your Bacon?

Or rather - Who is Eating Your Bacon? Two birds, at a cafe in San Diego, eating some delicious looking bacon. In fact, they had whole plates full of it. Their owners were eating eggs.


I, on the other hand, am living not as well as these birds. Without owners to buy me bacon at a fancy cafe, I had the new breakfast sandwich at the always-bacon-friendly Quizno's. It was decent; made with chunk bacon, as opposed to wafer-thin strips. But the old bacon / orange cheese / egg thing is a little tired. It could have used some red onions, perhaps a few mushrooms and another egg. A couple of days later, I considered thee Burger King French Toast sandwich; trying to one-up the McGriddles. Two pasty British tourists eagerly ordered the sandwiches, which in the end, looked gross, and whatever I ended up with, it had the usual Burger King consistency: Soft; as if designed to be eaten by people who no longer had teeth.

BK HoBonus: A hobo came in with a jaunty hat and a tennis racket, as if he'd just finished giving a couple early morning lessons on Coronado to some wealthy rich widows, and promplty came up to every person in the place and demanded, "Do you have a dollar?!" It was an ill-placed strategy, though certainly to the point. It netted him nothing. I thought of asking for the racket in trade for the dollar, but in the end I remembered that I actually dislike talking to hobos. (I dislike talking to anyone really; hobos just slightly more.) As he left the establishment, he was nearly run down by a car he walked in front of, at which he yelled continually "Do you have a dollar?! Do you have a dollar?!" The car did indeed give him a dollar.