evolution

If you ever need to “loosen up”, toss about 10 chiles japones in with your next meal.

The new preventive care guidelines are out, and they say that if you are a woman in your 40s, don’t bother getting regular mammograms.

Just six months ago, the very same group were warning that not enough women of that age were getting mammograms.

Which should be proof enough for most people not to listen to this task force at all. Consult your doctor and give him or her your full family medical history. Some doctors will order the test no matter what — they don’t like being sued, and they like collecting money. Most, I’d imagine, will tell you honestly what you need to know. I’m all for keeping down cost and utilization trend, but I think this — and most other blanket statements / recommendations — are a bunch of garbage.

One thing I’ve learned in my short career is that it takes a long time to gather useful health statistics. These techniques haven’t been around all that long in the grand scheme of things. No doubt we will have much more to learn about them and their relative necessities.

Ignore them and decide for yourself what’s best for you and your pocketbook.

By the way, your preventive care benefit under ObamaCare will be determined in large part by this task force’s recommendations (which may actually explain the reversal). Neat, huh?

So, a cheer has rung out: finally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried on U.S. soil in the very city where 19 people following his plan did… something… to somebody, a celebration of the “rule of law”, so cavalierly ignored by the Bush administration — which, of course, means that it represents exactly the opposite.

President Obama has as much as said flat out that KSM will not be allowed to go free no matter what happens. That is not a celebration of due process; it is a mockery of due process. If KSM is acquitted and released, Obama is finished.¹

I guess I don’t get it. Why go through with the charade if that’s the plan?

1. and in a just world, self-styled “progressives” — whose insatiable will to power has revealed itself, has it not? — would be play-acting their little revolutions in dank hipster bar bathrooms instead of on every single media outlet everywhere. But, due to the lack of busty supermodels in my living room / bathtub, I have long ago accepted that the world is not fair. Also, it’s a safe bet to put your money on continued American stupidity. So don’t count on it [↩]

Guild Wars more fun than issues blogging. Go figure.

This paper by CATO on the forthcoming health care debacle gave me a laugh:

It is ironic that Barack Obama won the presidency with 66 percent of the vote among voters age 18 to 29. That’s a larger share than any presidential candidate has won in decades. Yet his health care overhaul could impose its greatest burdens on the young.

And who do you suppose they will hold up at gunpoint to pay for their health care?

With any luck, we — and they — will get exactly what we deserve. It’s the only way we’ll ever learn. That, and maybe a junior-high math book.

Another in what I imagine will be a series. You know that I despise pretension and cultural fraudulence, and cruelly mock its perpetrators: the “anarchist” who thinks giant government bureaucracy should take care of everything for him, pretty much all religious evangelists, hipsters, Internet engenues … and pretty much all artists.¹

This is why:

Richard Whitehurst is a Columbus-based artist who made his mark on the Ohio scene by showing at the William Strunk Jr. Museum of Contemporary Art in Akron and internationally regarded galleries such as Alexandria Asheton Gallery and Seward Projects Space. He was the 2006 recipient of an Akron Culture Committee fellowship and has quickly become a seminal figure in the often overshadowed Rustbelt regional art scene, rapidly moving from sculpture and installation to more challenging situational based work that would make Nicolas Bourriaud’s head spin.

In fact, his new controversial work, THE RAPE TUNNEL, which is set to go on view at Columbus’ 4D Gallery on October 30th, has come under fire from Columbus-based feminist groups not to mention, local law enforcement officials. The artist plans to place himself in a room, the only entrance or exit being a 22 ft long plywood tunnel constructed by Whitehurst himself. Then he says that for the duration of the gallery’s opening (from 7:00 p.m. to midnight) he will rape anyone who travels through the tunnel into that room.

It gets even more retarded:

Why rape?

Because as an artistic gesture, it’s one of the most impactful I can think of. For the past ten years Ohio’s art scene has been largely centered around a string of alternative spaces in Akron’s warehouse district, where people had been putting on art shows. At the beginning I happily participated along with everyone else but then I started to feel like it wasn’t going anywhere. It dawned on me that if the work we created had never existed the world would be no different than if it had. None of it mattered to anyone outside of our small and insignificant circle of peers. I wanted something that would have more impact.

I started to think differently about my work. In 2007 at the Seward Projects Space in Columbus, I had my first breakthrough with an installation that was to be the prototype for this current one. It was called THE PUNCH-YOU-IN-THE-FACE TUNNEL. It was the same set-up as THE RAPE TUNNEL except at the end of the tunnel I’d punch the subject in the face instead of raping him or her. The impetus was completely reactionary to the current state of art, and motivated by pure frustration.

As it turns out, I ended up breaking the nose of the third person to crawl through the tunnel, an aspiring model. She went to the hospital and eventually sued me. Her modeling career was put on hold. The civil case was long and drawn out and the matter still hasn’t been resolved. To this day she still has unpaid medical bills. The point of this long aside is that all this took place two years ago, and I’m still having an impact on this young lady’s life, something not many other artists could claim about their work.

Rape seemed like the next logical step.

I’m thinking IRRELEVANT-SHITBAG-WHOSE-FIFTEEN-MINUTES-ARE-TICKING-TUNNEL. Stick to Barack Obama propaganda.

Really, one should ignore these childish tantrums. However, even one so cultured as myself needs to hunt for sport every once in a while.

1. Except musicians. I’ll give them a chance to disappoint me. [↩]

Earlier I gave you Grizzly Bear with Michael McDonald – but in McDonald’s case, he had a non-sucky past (Steely Dan). The same cannot be said for Weezer’s latest collaborator – Kenny G.

No – really:

It also doesn’t have another redeeming quality: in McDonald’s case, he fit the song that he and Grizzly Bear did, and it sounded great. Am I mistaken, or does this sound like saxophone wanking glued onto a typical Weezer song?