Scott's Brain Meat: Health

Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts

Monday, May 19, 2014

Don't Get Me Started (A Much-Deserved Rant)

RANT, this way (Photo credit: Nesster)

There's only so much of it you can choke down before the bile has to rise. There's only so much of it you can absorb without reaching a breaking point, especially in the age of Facebook and Google and Smartphones. And so you hit a point where you can't take any more. How can you? You've got kids being sent home from the prom for being too sexy and removed from the yearbook because girls shouldn't be wearing tuxedos while elected officials run around blaming women for rape and saying that women deserve to earn less than men because they don't work as hard and should be devoting themselves to home and family instead anyway, and access to birth control is suddenly an issue again as a large segment of the population is trying to wish this country's female population back into the nineteenth century. Slut shaming has ceased to be an adolescent bully tactic and has instead become an accepted life lesson by the same adults who defend bullying as a rite of passage and then defend their own kids when they cyber-bully a classmate into a suicide attempt or rape an underage drunk girl at a party by claiming she was asking for it anyway as towns rally behind jocks and run rape victims out of town because popular high school football players are more important than protecting young girls from date rape because our daughter doesn't behave like that so its really not our problem, is it? And the kids are fucked anyway because childhood obesity is becoming a massive epidemic and you've got people blaming the kids for for being lazy and eating too much while completely ignoring the fact that their diet consists of the poisonous crap being sold as food these days, with something like 80% of processed foods containing added sugar or even worse corn syrup because the food manufacturers just had to go out of their way to find a more harmful sweetener than cane sugar, since the pathetic state of the FDA where they can't even inspect a fraction of the food industry and level wrist-slap fines that don't even put a dent in the profit margin that the unsafe preparation of food offers still isn't killing people in this country fast enough, and they still haven't figured out how to turn mercury into a flavor-enhancing additive. Which shouldn't be so surprising since this country excels in intentionally poisoning itself with an unending supply of cigarettes and alcohol while the government hypocritically spends billions combating the recreational drugs that don't have corporate sponsorship, and so our government is still attempting to protect it's people from ingesting potentially harmful recreational drugs while eagerly allowing the food companies to shovel shit down their throats, and they care so much about American lives that we're the only industrialized nation left that still has the death penalty but is repelled by the idea of socialized medicine, because nothing says Freedom like being free to die a slow and painful death because you can't afford treatment for your illness in the richest fucking nation on the planet, so the lower class die in emergency rooms and the middle class lose their houses to pay for a week-long hospital stay after a necessary procedure while other people and politicians alike scream about the inequalities and dangers of providing healthcare to all Americans and talk shit about other countries with socialized medicine while the U S of A sports the highest mortality rates and is beat out by Cuba for quality of medical care provided, and this outcry against giving something to people for free, God forbid, doesn't even include the constant attacks against programs designed to assist poor families with shelter and heating and helping them feed their poor children, starving children for fuck's sake, because what kind of a moral Christian nation would we be if we allowed our hard-earned tax dollars to go towards feeding starving innocent children because what kind of commie pinko nation is this that we're so afraid of letting the poor and inform die in the streets and clog up the gutters which are clogging up on their own anyway since the richest country in the fucking world can't be bothered to even maintain its own infrastructure, so at least the US government isn't that hypocritical since it doesn't even believe in maintain its own health, let alone the health of the people the government is supposed to be serving, not exploiting and ignoring. But why bitch about the government when you can just wait a few minutes and listen to the caterwauling insanity of the growing portion of the population dead-set against any kind of humanistic or empathetic world view, the mewling asshats who live in constant fear of anything happening that they don't personally approve of, shouting out against gay couples being allowed to marry as if it was an affront to anything more than their own myopic world views, arguing against shit that doesn't affect them on any level except what could only be referred to jokingly as an intellectual level, these soulless motherfuckers that compare immigrants and poor people to animals then look around for a high-five as if they'd just said something urbanely wise and clever, like they're some kind of modern day Jonathan Swift instead of just another unsympathetic asshole more concerned about somebody else getting something they didn't than any heartfelt consideration for other human beings, rallying against lowering costs or interest rates or god forbid offering free higher education because they want to make sure we have enough stupid people to flip their burgers and dig the ditch they want to shit in because by their reasoning if everyone has access to affordable education then nobody will drive a garbage truck, and they don't like their tax money going to education anyway because they're constantly bitching that the public school systems are a joke and don't teach anything, which is usually an awkward argument because most of the time the people saying this are products of public schools anyway so by their own argument they just might be too fucking stupid to be listened to if they were products of the public school system, but of course they were probably just so smart to begin with or they don't mean their schools but "other" schools which means schools in poor and urban areas which should be gradually shut down by implementing voucher systems so we can revert to the good old days when only the children of wealthy families got any schooling so these greedy bastards can be sure that there is enough of an uneducated workforce to keep the cost of their Egg McFucking Muffin down, and of course this goes right into their reasoning against raising the minimum wage, because not only will their plastic cheap-ass Walmart patio decorations cost them fifty cents more if a multi-billion dollar corporation actually has to pay its workers a living wage, but because they claim you need to underpay laborers less than they can live on otherwise they won't have any incentive to work harder even though the working poor are working harder than these loudmouthed motherfuckers have ever worked in their miserable lives just so they can pay the skyrocketing rent on their shitty one-bedroom apartment and make sure their kids can eat corn-syrup-injected processed crap that keeps them simultaneously fed and malnourished because some fucknut managed to get the meal programs budget cut at the school they won't even be able to go to once the new voucher system allows them to go to a really good private school even though studies have shown that private schools aren't that much better just because they turn a profit and free-market economics doesn't work when you're not producing an actual product asshole, but in reality that voucher is not going to cover the entire cost so the father working three shit jobs and paying payroll taxes on all of them won't be able to pony up the cash for the voucher difference and will the dickhead greedy taxpayer want to spring the bill for shipping kids two hours each way to the nearest public school crappy enough for an equal voucher exchange, why of course not what are we commies or something? And these assholes are everywhere, and they are loud and obnoxious and the symptom of a larger disease, the growing Apathy of the American public, not a physical apathy or even mental apathy but an emotional apathy that is increasingly removing any desire of people that are otherwise active in getting involved in ideas and philosophies and debates and arguments but cannot be bothered to actually attempt to feel anything for anybody but themselves and their ideological viewpoints that are the new religion of a country supposedly founded on Christian morality but is actually serving the deities of money and vanity and won't even consider any kind of concept that doesn't involve an increased profit margin or confirmation that they are everything that is right with the world, this shallow unsympathetic fucks who bitch about tax dollars funding art students or poor children but couldn't give a rat's ass how many innocents are killed by the flying killer robots their tax dollars bought or anything else except how much they have to pay the pool guy or tip the waitress or pay for anything because what the hell are we except cash receptacles and if you don't have enough to make you count as a real person than its your fault for not being smart enough or lucky enough because we don't want public schools teaching evolution while we force survival-of-the-fittest economics theory into common practice instead of using the collective wealth of a nation to benefit all of its citizens, and not just the ones that can afford to live the American Dream, what a fucking joke, the American Dream has become the world's largest Ponzi Scheme that will bankrupt the ones defending it as well as the unappreciated masses they dismiss with contempt, and I can't debate fuckwits like this anymore and pretend that their arguments are valid and treat them with even a fraction of the respect they refuse to show the people they dismiss and denigrate and even blame for everything wrong with this vast social experiment gone vastly awry, and I can't go on playing nice with these vile fucks, they need to be shouted down and cursed out and treated like the soulless bastards they are, because there is only so many times I can be fed "let's agree to disagree" before I have to refuse to pretend their inhumane and narrow-sighted ideas are relevant in any rational sense of the word, and maybe if we stopped playing this he-said-she-said let them think what they want and we don't want to sink to their level game and lashed out against the idiots screaming offensive ideologies into the wind as if greed and arrogance were noble traits, perhaps the sooner we just call out these people for being the scumbags that they are, then maybe we can all vent this growing frustration that results from dealing with this level of ignorance on a daily basis.

Fuck it. I need a nap.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Book Review - My Footprint by Jeff Garlin

Having never watched Curb Your Enthusiasm (yeah, I'm THAT guy), my only familiarity with Jeff Garlin in the past has been recognizing his voice as the Ship's Captain in Wall-E. So when I picked up his book, My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World, I did so with no preconceived notions or expectations, other than that I was about to read a humorous story about one man's quest to lose weight and 'Go Green'. I give this disclaimer only to separate myself from those familiar with Garlin who have gone on to either devotedly praise the book or trash it because they expected so much more.

As someone who has struggled with weight loss, I found a great deal of sincerity and honesty in Garlin's writing. Unlike many books on the subject, Garlin focuses more on the ease of failure rather than success, and how hard it can be to change ingrained and previously unrecognized habits formed over a lifetime. Like most comics, Garlin turns as harsh an eye onto himself as he does others, and he is the first to make a joke at his own expense, adding a glaring truthfulness to the recording of his attempts at weight loss. Without this kind of sardonic and insightful self-awareness, the book (and his journey) would ring hollow. In this respect, Garlin's book is a resounding success. Where it falls short, however, is the overall reading experience. Despite the author's obvious desire to take the reader on a journey through his own experiences, there is no real flow to the novel, and progressing through it feels more like a stumble through disjointed thoughts and anecdotes than it does a trip through one man's story of self-discovery.

Perhaps what hurts Garlin's book more than helps it is the diary format. While this approach might seem like the logical choice for the author's desire to bring his readers along on his journey of self-improvement, it can often feel as random and disjointed as, well, a diary. Much of the ground covered within the book is spread thin and jumbled nonsensically, resulting in a disjointed structure that continually fails to draw the reader in. If Garlin had taken the time to arrange his thoughts and experiences into whole chapters dedicated to a particular focus, like a chapter about the pitfalls of dieting on set ("How to CURB Your Appetite") or his experiences with Ed Begley Jr. ("My Green Guru"), then perhaps his struggles would have had more of a literary impact. Even more importantly, he might have been more successful in thematically joining his desires to lose weight and decrease his carbon footprint, rather than have them continue to feel like two almost unrelated personal goals. If the idea behind the format was that our increasingly Twitter-truncated communication culture would make a book in bite-sized segments more popular, it was a bad idea. Most readers, despite the popularity of text messaging and Facebook status updates, prefer to read books that are more than just random thoughts and musings jotted down throughout the day and faxed to an editor.

This isn't to say that Garlin's book is bad. As I said earlier, his struggles with weight loss and environmental awareness are inspiring as they are humorous. But the way in which he tells his tale makes the book feel like little more than an afterthought. In the end, as endearing and humorous as it might be in spots, My Footprint comes off as haphazard and unstructured as Garlin's admittedly slipshod approach to dieting, leading to the wish that he had struggled to improve his writing before writing about his struggles to improve.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Making Unpopular Literary Connections

Image via Wikipedia

About two hours into my late night English class, an integral part of Project Unending Education, Robert Frost's poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening came under scrutiny when one of the students interrupted the Professor's praise of the rural imagery to point out that many people consider the poem to be about suicide.

A friendly yet heated debate broke out, with the Professor rejecting this interpretation despite its growing popularity among the students. Not be left out of the conversation, I decided to add some cultural background to the discussion:

"Actually, it seems to be a common interpretation," I blurted out. "The last stanza of the poem was even used as the trigger phrase to activate sleeper-agent suicide assassins in the Charles Bronson espionage thriller Telefon, which ironically was an adaptation of a novel by the same author who wrote the book that Die Hard 2 was based on."

The entire class freezes in an uncomfortable, wide-eyed silence, all eyes focused on me sharing the same
mixed expression of confusion and disbelief.

Someday I'll learn that not everything has to do with movies, even when it does.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

GOP Releases Unrealistic, Unpassable Health Care Bill

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The New York Times (or, as witty wordsmith Mark Levine would call them, The New York Slimes) has an article out regarding the alternative Health Care bill the Republicans have finally released after almost a year of claiming that they could do better.

Short story: they really can't.

Heralding the slim volume's 230 page count as a testament to the Bill's simplicity, one could be forgiven for assuming that the pages contained nothing more than the phrase "Same Shit, Different Day" typed over and over again. While it isn't quite that bad, the result is almost the same.

The first thing that really jumps out is how the GOP rarely manages not to contradict themselves these days. For instance, Republicans have been stomping around claiming that the Democrats obsessing on 36 Million uninsured people was a waste of time considering what a small percentage of the population. Not content on merely contradicting themselves when they claimed that insuring this inconsequential percentage would in turn bankrupt the country, they have turned around and proposed a bill that would only insure 2 Million Americans, which apparently isn't too small for them to worry about.

Smugly waving around their response to the resounding criticism that the GOP was criticizing something without offering their own suggestions, John Boehner (pronounced Boner) and others proudly declared that the Republican plan increases incentives for people to use health savings accounts, caps non-economic jury awards in medical malpractice cases at $250,000, provides various incentives to states with the aim of driving down premium costs and allows health insurance to be sold across state lines.

Let me break that down for you:

1. Increase incentives for Health Savings Accounts: Give the banks more money to play with, and still be unprepared for a major health emergency, but at CD rates.

2. Cap non-economic jury awards in medical malpractice cases: You can sue the doctor that maliciously botched your son's operation for the cost of the hospital stay, but your pain and suffering from his death is only worth a quarter million, tops. This is a good thing, however, as it makes providing inferior and potential lethal medical care less of a burden on the hospital's shareholders.

3. Provide incentives to drive down premium costs: Make medical insurance mandatory, then fine poor people for not buying into it.

4. Allow health insurance to be sold across state lines: Deregulation. Works every time. Right?

My favorite part of the article, however, is this insanely humorous little nugget:

House Republicans, including their leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, have said that they did not intend for their legislation to expand insurance coverage, because they viewed that goal as unaffordable. Instead, they said the bill was tailored narrowly to reduce costs. According to the report by nonpartisan budget office, the Republican bill would reduce future federal deficits by $68 billion over 10 years, compared to a reduction of $104 billion by the House Democrats’ legislation.

So, expanding health care (the whole idea of creating a new Health Care Bill, by the way) was deemed to expensive, so the concentrated on cutting costs, the end result being that they still somehow managed to reduce the deficit 36 Billion less than the "unaffordable" Democratic bill.

Honestly, who could possibly argue with logic like that?

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Book Review: Tears of Rage by John Walsh

Don’t ask me why, but John Walsh has always rubbed me the wrong way. That’s the main reason I read his book Tears of Rage; if I’m going to have an opinion on somebody, I’d rather it be an informed one. Ultimately, that’s the only difference this book has had on my opinion: it has informed it.

John Walsh isn’t a bad guy, and it is undeniable that both his political movements and his television shows have helped people and changed awareness and legal procedures for the better. But despite all he has done, it’s still hard for me to actually like him.

The first fifty pages or so of the book deal with his personal background and history, spanning from his childhood through the early years of Adam’s life, and it is this completely self-indulgent section that really displays Walsh’s personality. By his own account, he is street-smart, a tough and skilled fighter, a great athlete as well as extremely bright, has never known fear or a lack of confidence, has saved lives without even thinking twice about it, and has never failed in any endeavor that he has pursued. Basically, he’s perfect. But what really bleeds through is that he suffers from an overinflated ego that informs his self-centered world view.

This self-centered (bordering on selfish) attitude is apparent in stories related by him in such away that you must assume that he doesn’t see it himself. When Adam is born, for example, he is told by the hospital where his sick father is recuperating that he can not bring the child into the cancer ward, at the risk of infecting the floor full of patients with little or no immunity left. Knowing only that he wants his father to his grandson before he dies (which he would have anyway, as later they all go to Disneyworld together), he sneaks the newborn into the hospital via a fire escape, regardless of the risk he puts the others in the cancer ward.

Also, it is impossible that anything done by him or his wife could be wrong or ill-informed. When mentioning Adam’s natural birth without the aid of Lamaze, he makes a point of saying “I don’t even think there were those classes back then.” Being 1974, the Lamaze Method was already part of a strong movement towards natal health, especially on the east coast where they were at the time. Later, for their second child, he states that she started Lamaze classes then, but only in her eight month, when the fifth or sixth is when you usually begin. Nothing out of the ordinary there, right?

This self-centered egotism extends immediately to his son, whom he declares was the only perfect baby in the hospital. “All the other little babies, some were splotchy, others a little misshapen. Adam was the perfect little baby everyone was looking at.” Granted, every parent feels that his or her child is special, but by John Walsh’s factual depiction, it is quite possible the Adam, had he lived, would have been revealed as the Second Coming. Apparently, Adam did not share a single negative trait with the other dirty, filthy, and ill-mannered children that wander the planet. Everybody loved him and wished he were theirs, and all of their adult friends felt more comfortable talking to him than to other adults, because he was that well-mannered and mature and responsible and perfect. Blech. Some of his praise towards Adam also reveals a sort of class elitism, as he takes great pride that “Adam had sharp clothes. On the playground all of the other kids looked kind of scruffy compared to him.” It seemed important to Walsh that his son wore “not sneakers, but Top-Siders. And small Izod shirts instead of regular tee’s.” And let’s not forget about the Captain’s Hat, “…an expensive one with a black braid and a visor.” In the course of Reve Walsh’s description of the day that Adam disappeared, she makes mention of the hat at least three times, pointing out at each instance that it was “a nice one, not a cheap knock off version” like the other children wear. She even goes as far as to complain that this detail (among others) should have been used when the store attempted paging Adam.

The actual disappearance of Adam at Sears is, of course, the reason this book was written in the first place. It is also the main reason that I lose respect for John Walsh, as the one fact that he and Reve refuse to admit, to themselves or anybody else, is that they (or, more directly, she) are just as much at fault as anybody else. The simple fact is that Adam’s mother left him alone in the store for a period of time that, while she is unclear about (“I was gone a few minutes. Five. Maybe ten altogether.”), can logically be clocked at a good fifteen minutes by examining the list of things that she claims happened while he was from view. Also, during this time, she points out that she had made sure he was close enough so she “could have” peeked around the corner at any time to check on him, which of course means that she didn't. Then, when she suddenly couldn’t find the child she had left alone in the store, she became frustrated and angry when her situation wasn’t immediately made top priority.

This may seem a bit harsh on my behalf, but anybody who works in retail can tell you that negligent parents let their children run around stores unattended all of the time, then automatically assume that it is the store’s responsibility to play babysitter and round up their strays. This is the same attitude that Reve (understandably, yet at the same time predictably and unfairly) assumes almost immediately when her initial concerns are not met with the utmost urgency. Walsh is quick to say that this is because his wife looked young. “She had on shorts, she was a woman, and she looked nineteen years old.” The truth is that they were reluctant to scramble at her bequest was because she was acting like your typical negligent parent. Walsh goes out of his way to imply that the store and the police were slow and unwilling to help, yet neither he nor Rev can recall who finally contacted the police (which would mean that the store did, and means that they certainly didn’t), and neither do they know who informed the media during the first few hours of the search (which would mean that the police did, and again, that they didn’t). Does this make them bad parents? Not at all. But their refusal to admit that others did take immediate steps them that they did not take themselves in order to help makes them stubbornly reluctant to share in blame.

When they eventually dropped the lawsuit they brought against Sears, they claimed that they did so because the Sears lawyers were going to drag their names through the mud, and so they dropped the suit to protect their family as well as Adam’s Foundation. I personally think the truth hits a bit closer to home: Sears was no more responsible for Adam's disappearance than the mother who left him unattended for up to a quarter of an hour.

Another distasteful trait of Walsh’s is his tendency to use his dead son to win arguments. It is very evident throughout the book that Walsh has a short temper and a lack of emotional control, and in fact seems almost boastful of it. And while I like a “man of action who doesn’t play nice” as much as the next person, I tend not to trust people who describe themselves as such. Walsh rightfully argues against the bureaucracies and politics that repeatedly impede him, but his arguments always seem to be punctuated with phrases indicating that not he that demands justice be served, but rather his innocent, brutally murdered son. Being the savvy advertising executive that he never tires of describing himself as, Walsh seemed to learn early on that while you can argue with a hot-headed activist, you can’t argue with a dead child.

Again, I’m not painting Walsh as a demon; he has done much good. I am also not implying that he is completely bull-headed. He is the first to admit that he wouldn’t have gotten a fraction of the media coverage he did if Adam were a lower-class minority child, and I completely agree with his criticisms of the psychics and religious fanatics that attempted to use the situation for their own advantage, and when he defends his wife against claims by the media that she didn’t act the way a grieving mother should, as if there is a right and wrong way for individuals to handle emotions with which very few of us ever (thankfully) have to contend. While he at times seems to bend over backwards to both slam the cops and FBI for bungling his son’s murder investigation at the same time he praises both agencies for the good they do, it never appears phony or heavy handed. And, unlike Jon Benet’s parents, both John and Reve were quick to cooperate when the investigators turned their attention to them, knowing full well that it the quickest way was to eliminate themselves as suspects. I’m not out to get the guy. But when he talks about teaching his six year old son how to use a diving knife (yeah, that’s safe), and when he recalls the humorous story of when he left his six month pregnant wife alone in shark infested waters, I can’t help but feel a little contempt for him.

For the most part, Tears of Rage is a pretty good book, and tends to cover all of the bases. Just beware that it isn’t an objective view of the Adam Walsh case, but rather, one man’s crusade to tell his own story the way he sees it.