F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

First, there was THIS. 

Fresh from being mocked in the Wall Street Journal for the stupidest newspaper article ever, the Journal Star gives us THIS.

They could have presented it with a quite or two from someone disputing the posibilty of ghosts. They could have presented it as a joke. Instead we get the linked article.

NPR is going Oprah. Bad science (not actually science at all) and bad journalism. Just bad all around, with a few laughable moments pertaining to magic mushrooms, but still really, really bad. And not science.

So now we all know what the 10,000 calorie breakfasts were all about-the munchies! I noticed the Michael Phelps cereal box was still on the shelf at my grocer today, so I guess people aren’t out snapping them up as collector’s items. Maybe we’re in the post-collectible years, or the post-post Beanie Baby collectible years. He needs a tea manufacturer for a sponsor, preferably green tea.

I could give a rat’s ass if Aqua Man IS a tea head. I do have to laugh that this news broke while his mother, trying to cash in on his success was in town giving paid lectures about "Overcoming ADHD." She really struck me as an unlikable person and I won’t deny feeling a bit of delight at the poor timing. ADHD=Always Doing Hits of Dope? What sort of mother publicly discusses their kid’s mental disorders anyway? Well, there’s THIS one. Oh, she’s a real piece of work. This is the same uh…"journalist" that referred to her brother and his family as "deeply troubled" in an offhand blog post. Nice, eh? I’ll bet the family gatherings are a hoot. What a rotten witch. It’s like she revels in her child’s diagnosis and plays the martyr nonsense as far as it will go. I can only hope her child grows up to have an equally embarrassing moment.

Ever read an article and think, "Thank you God for not making this person someone I will ever need to know or interact with because I’d probably have to reconsider that vow of nonviolence." Really? You haven’t? Well read THIS article, and I guarantee by the third or fourth paragraph you’ll want poke her in the nose as well. I knew it was going to be bad when the first paragraph mentioned Oprah Winfrey and a crazy diet. Sure, that’s not horrible, but it gets worse:

"For years I’ve career-climbed, but lately I’ve had to strip-mine my creativity to put words on the page. My three children routinely take more time, wisdom and energy than I have. A woman who was like my second mother died last year. Newspapers are letting go of fellow journalists nationwide, gas is almost $4 a gallon and I need reading glasses."

-Sounds like an excellent reason to starve yourself and shove an enema bottle up your arse! But wait, there’s more:

" I crave energy and balance. I ache for still purpose. I don’t struggle with weight, but I struggle almost daily with bouts of hypoglycemia, and my blood sugar often drops precipitously low, leaving me addled and spent. For years I exercised regularly, but that was years ago. My modern American woman’s life is making me sick, but I don’t have time for wellness. I feel toxic. I need an intervention."

-Well, I dunno. Most people who go looking for purpose in their lives go off to do good works, they don’t drink expensive snake oil supplements and shove an enema bottle up their arse. To each his own, I guess. Then again, I’ve never met an actual real, live person that used terms like "wellness, toxic and intervention" in the same breath. I’m probably not up to date on my daytime television viewing-damn all those meaningful activities taking my time away from Oprah! Yeah, it gets worse:

"But 21 days to get control of my health? And not just for me, but also for my niece Ryan, chunky from discovering wine during a semester in France, and my husband, Ralph, who was just laid off and is fighting his own battles with weight and focus? That sounded about right."

-Oh, a martyr-excellent! I’m sure her "chunky" niece and unemployed husband are thrilled that she’s making this sort of sacrifice. Particularly as she isn’t overweight (116 lbs. to start) but is going to do this anyway.

"My head hurts. The book calls it a “healing crisis”: a reaction “as the body flushes toxins out of your cells so you can” get rid of them. It often comes after a few days. I’m early with mine."

-No you moron, it isn’t a "healing crisis", it’s low blood sugar. After a while, chunky niece has had enough of Auntie Herbal Poop Chute and decides to quit:

"8 p.m.: Ryan says she wants to quit. “Your journey isn’t just about you,” I say. Ralph and I spend an hour talking her down from the ledge." (my emphasis).

"D Day 13I lunch with a friend at an upscale restaurant. Actually, I have tea and watch her eat. My weight has fallen to 108 pounds. I look “Sudanish,” she says. DeLuz warned me that I need to drink protein shakes to stabilize my blood sugar and counter the weight loss. But I haven’t done so. Again I feel a revelation. Allowing myself to get frail isn’t taking care of myself. I start the shakes as soon as I get home."

-Yeah, pity all those starving Sudanese can’t just whip up a protein shake to get their glow back.

"D Day 15Ryan stops. She has finished her internship and is heading back to her senior year in college. She has lost 15 pounds and decided to become a vegetarian."

-I guess her journey really was just about her own journey after all! I wonder if she’ll ever speak to "skinny martyr aunt with an enema up her arse", again? I mean, she starved and did all those colonics for her benefit and now she’s just going to go vegetarian and eat deep fried tofu.

"It has been less than a week since Ralph and I finished. I maintained 110 pounds; Ralph lost 31 pounds. His skin looks great, and he’s working on three job prospects."

-Wow! His skin looks great, and now he can send out three resumes? What is it with this woman’s obsession with people’s skin? He lost 31 pounds because he consumed only fluids and then flushed them out with colonics. This is not permanent weight loss. I lost a similar amount of weight after a bout with amoebic dysentery, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a diet plan.

The article ends with more platitudes about being "mindful" and so on. Really, how utterly frightening is it that this ran in a major US newspaper and was distributed across the country in smaller syndicates? Someone made the decision to pay for this rubbish. Look, I don’t care if people want to starve themselves and use colonics-really, I don’t. I do care when it is presented in a long-ish article filled with psychobabble and not a shred of scientific evidence that it works. Having Oprah Winfrey declare something works is not science. We know why there’s no mention of science-because it is not a nutritionally sound diet. Our bodies are not "toxic" (unless you’ve been exposed to something or sit around at home sucking on lead paint chips). What’s more, if our bodies were toxic, an herbal colonic probably wouldn’t do much to alter the situation. You’d probably need your stomach pumped out through your nose, and coated with charcoal-which is a lot less elegant than having someone shove an enema up your behind whilst filling your head with slogans and platitudes. Gee whiz, when did we get this stupid? Did you hear about the people sticking hot candle wax in their ear canals as a detox? I know, I know, this isn’t new and people have always been suckers for this sort of thing (think Reich and his Argonne boxes, and at least he came with the added bonus of going up to his roof each night to engage in battle with badass spacemen). This isn’t even entertaining rubbish. I expect more-maybe they can send the reporter out to try trepanation. I’m sure it won’t harm her-she’s already an imbecile.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed the recent slew of self-help books designed to aid people in manipulating people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. "Convince anyone to do anything!" What’s worse, these sneaky violations of trust are presented as being not only useful, but emotionally healthy ways to approach interactions with others.

The most recent one I’ve run across deals with manipulating one’s spouse to help with household chores. You can read excerpts HERE. That’s OK, I’ll wait. You’re back, great. So what have we learned? How to manipulate by playing games( leaving the folded laundry for him to put away as a reminder of how much work you do)? How to treat your husband like one of the children? How to threaten him with maid service and expensive child care if he does not help around the home? Swell.

I’ve been married a long time and I have a little piece of advice I’m going to pass along-overlook. A lot.  You might be able to ‘train" your husband to change certain behaviours, but decent people do not go into relationships trying to change someone’s behaviours to their liking. I know there is an entire industry built around the idea of counseling and therapy, but I can’t think of anything more disrespectful to your partner than trying to manipulate them into doing something differently. If you can’t work out an agreement or compromise based on a desire to be courteous to each other-out of genuine respect, tricks like leaving the folded laundry on the bed aren’t going to accomplish much. Honestly, I’ve never had to do more than ask, "Can you help me with this" to get some help around the house. I realise he’s not a mind reader though, so I have to ask. I don’t leave his underwear on the bed or hire a maid out of spite. He does have a habit of leaving his clothes where they drop, but honestly, it isn’t that difficult to pick them up and walk to the hamper. Really, it isn’t and I can’t imagine making it a struggle of wills involving sneaky manouveres to feel I’ve asserted myself. Yay, you win-now what?

Years ago, I read a thread on a parenting board where the poster was complaining her husband left his empty soda cans on the computer desk where he was working from home. To show him how much this upset her, she saved them all up until she had about fifty and then tossed them on his side of the bed. Well, I’ll bet that showed him! Best part? She had a psychology degree. Insert joke about "takes one to know one." Not surprisingly, the thread was filled with well-wishes, congratulations and encouragement. Of course, this was also someone who felt it was perfectly OK to scroll through her husband’s Internet history files each day. Can you imagine? What a way to live.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that resorting to manipulation may alter behaviours for a while, but it does not build a relationship. If you can’t tell the person you’re married to that you’re tired and need help, or a break, there’s something worse taking place in the relationship than poor housekeeping skills.

Just to test out this theory, I asked my husband to trim the dog’s nails tonight and guess what? He did. Isn’t that cool? All I had to do was ask for help. Neat, huh? I should write a self-help book about it.

My spelling is dreadful. Positively dreadful. This really shouldn’t be the case, as I’m rather well read. Still, here I am unable to spell even the simplest words that I use over and over. To deal with this problem (and I do consider it one) I keep handy a dictionary or three or twenty. I think it is about twenty not counting the unabridged OED. We lost some reference books to water damage in the tornado, so I’m not positive on the count-but there are at any given time, numerous sources where I can check my spelling-which I do.

Time Magazine (yes, I’m linking to Time magazine God help me) has a piece making the argument for permitting more variant spelling in English. Swell, now in addition to deciding if we "scraped a tyre on the kerb" or, "Scraped a tire on the curb" we can wonder if perhaps we’ve simply "skrapeed a tir on the kurb." Pardon me while my fucking head explodes. Perhaps we should just accept texting spelling. Gr8. R U RED-E? why don’t we go back to the 15^th century when everyone spelled as they pleased?

I can’t believe anyone seriously believes they can get by will spell check alone. Suppose you misspell a word as another valid word-spell check won’t catch that and anyone that reads it will know you ran spell check without a careful examination first. I know this because I’ve done it enough times only to slap myself in the head wondering why I continue to do such a foolish thing.

I recognise that spelling and punctuation are important and that I’ve failed miserably with both. It would be simple enough to fall back on "Oh, my background is in science" and have it excused, but really, that’s pretty weak. There simply isn’t much of an excuse beyond carelessness on my part. If people such as myself are permitted to spell any damn way they wish it will be a worse world for it. I could understand wanting to simplify or standardise more popular spellings, but to just label misspellings as alternate seems impossible. Will editors be permitted to spell as they wish or will it only apply to primary school children whose precious self-esteem may be crushed beyond all hope by being graded on their spelling proficiency? For what it’s worth, I had to look up proficiency just now.

Next, we’ll have alternate multiplication tables because it doesn’t really matter is 2x2 is four or nine or twelve.

Ever just hear the name of an organisation and know their website will be filled with condescending rubbish? Yeah, me too. As I suspected, Healthy Families Play Outside is a consortium of interested parties from public parks and zoos that seem to think their facilities will get more use if they promote things like these tips for nature play:

Build a snowman

Make a fort.

Not that I object to either of those suggestions, or any of the others offered at the website. My objection is to the arrogance of assuming "low income and immigrant families" need to be "educated" about playing outside. Oh, please. Middle class Americans are the ones locking their children away before the telly watching Baby Einstein videos. They’re terrified to let their children go to the park because the police and their pals in the media have done such a magnificent job of making it seem there is a dirty old man behind every tree. I can pretty much guarantee that if you go to park the children you will see playing there will be either "low income" or immigrants-those are the only kids we see regularly at the park.

Really, just how do you "educate" people? By posting condescending websites telling them the children will be fat and stupid if they don’t build snowmen or go on nature walks? Ohh, scary! They trot out the old "research shows" which isn’t all that convincing since "research" is a pretty broadly and loosely applied term that can arrive at conclusions that weren’t necessarily based on the most solid scientific methods.

So there you have it you low-income immigrants…send the kiddos outside to play. Good lord.

THIS is what happens when you stop teaching science in public schools. I suppose it isn’t that surprising that a municipality would call in a pair of self-proclaimed Ghost Trackers (I shit you not) as a media stunt, but that the called-in media would report it, without the slightest bit of irony. Like they’re presenting two sides of a story that has a second side that’s even plausible.