More impotence commercial rants

Anyone else notice the irony inherent in the Cialis impotence ad, where the guy is getting cozy with his lady-friend, and snaps off the kitchen spigot, leading to a gusher that interrups their romantic interlude?

Guess the makers of Cialis want us to associate their product with firm streams of gushing liquids in a romantic setting, huh?

Ya THINK???

As I look around at the twisted world around us, I realize how screwed up our culture is when I see what passes for "entertainment", especially the videogames that my peers use as babysitters.

Many friends who have kids park their children's fat little asses in front of the television, X-box or Playstation in hand, and leave the kids to spend HOUR upon HOUR playing all the latest "FPS" (first-person shooter) games, which constitute a considerable majority of the most popular titles sold.

Well guess what? Just like MTV contributed to the coarsening of American culture, and the spread of rampant materialism with it, now an expert on the subject has come out with this:

TV plays role in youth violence, expert says

Visual imagery has a 'profound effect,' he says in wake of killing

By Rachel McGrath
Correspondent

Saturday, February 23, 2008

One of the nation's leading experts on young people and violence has a simple word of advice for Ventura County parents in the wake of the school shooting in Oxnard: "Turn off the TV."

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is the author of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "On Killing" and has been involved in counseling or court cases connected with several high-profile shooting sprees such as the Jonesboro, Paducah, Springfield and Littleton school shootings.

"These juvenile mass murderers had all dropped out of life and immersed themselves in media violence," he said.

"Words and communication are what makes us human, but violent visual imagery has as profound effect on us as it does on animals," he said. "We have a generation of kids being raised on violence and seeking out violence in music, television shows and video games."

Grossman, 51, is a West Point psychology professor, professor of military science, and an Army Ranger who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor, which has been termed "killology." He has testified before U.S. Senate and Congressional committees and numerous state legislatures, and he is the director of the Killology Research Group, based in Arizona. He is the co-author with Gloria DeGaetano of "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence."

Grossman will address the issue of the root causes of school violence at a meeting open to the public next month in Camarillo. He had been invited by the Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo to be the guest speaker at the second annual ONEClub Breakfast before Ventura County's first classroom shooting at E.O. Green School in Oxnard.

Timing may prove useful

"We thought we'd be starting a conversation, not continuing one," said Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo President Greg Stuart, who booked Grossman nine months ago to address an invited audience on the issue of school safety. In light of the events in Oxnard, Stuart said, Grossman will host a two-hour session open to anyone who wants to attend.

Stuart said he's "horrified" at the way the timing of Grossman's visit has turned out, but he hopes it will be useful to a lot of parents who have fears about violence in the classroom. "We need to be taking all the steps we can to create healthy environments for our kids," he said. "We have to be aware of all the influences."

Ventura County Undersheriff Craig Husband is on the Board of Directors of the Camarillo Boys & Girls Club, and he suggested Grossman as a speaker.

"Grossman addresses the root causes of teen violence and explains what we're exposing our youth to at a very young age," said Husband. "He dissects and explains school violence and how we are desensitizing our youth through video games, television and movies."

Husband said there is a dramatic increase in violence in the society, and Ventura County is not immune to that trend. He said fights are becoming more frequent, and there are a growing number of incidents of after-school violence among young people, often gang-related, he said.

"It's important to get the community engaged and working on this issue," he said. "We've been preparing in law enforcement for something like this (school shooting) for several years, and all of Ventura County law enforcement knows the potential for this sort of thing is there."

"If you look at the communities involved in these mass school shootings like Columbine and Littleton, they are very like us in demographics," he said.

Interest stems from military

Speaking by phone from the headquarters of his research group in Jonesboro, Ariz., Grossman said he became interested in the subject after studying the psychology of killing as part of his military career.

"The military conditions human beings to kill using simulators and social conditioning, but it does so with discipline," he said. "We are doing the same thing with video games to children without any of the safeguards."

Husband said he thinks Grossman's theories make a lot of sense.

"They're making video games out of simulators which are used to train soldiers to shoot in combat," he said. "You can see their influence in the way these school shooters aim and shoot accurately and move from one target to the next, moving through people dispassionately. These games are teaching people to shoot and remove the human elements from the process which would ultimately hold us back."

Grossman also blames the media for making celebrities of those who go on shooting rampages and said there is a powerful copycat phenomenon going on, which in part explains why there have been so many campus shootings this month.

He urges parents to monitor their children and focus their child's attention on books, newspapers and the written word.

"As an adult, your children will never curse you for the TV shows and the DVD's they couldn't watch," he said. "They'll bless you for it."

Grossman's presentation will run from 10 a.m. to noon March 20 at the Education Conference Center, 5100 Adolfo Road, Camarillo.

Those wishing to attend should make a reservation by contacting Cindy Martinez at the Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo at 482-8113, ext. 12, or by e-mail at cindy@bgccam.org. © 2008 Ventura County Star

Goodbye, and GOOD RIDDANCE

These days, it seems like EVERYONE is trying to cut corners, get rich quick, rip people off, and generally not play by the rules...

I therefore was rather pleased to read this article from The Wall Street Journal:

Meatpacker to Shut Down
In Wake of Massive Recall

By DAVID KESMODEL
February 23, 2008 11:00 a.m.

Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co., which issued the biggest meat recall in U.S. history last week, probably will shut down permanently, the company's general manager told The Wall Street Journal.

"I don't see any way we could reopen," Anthony Magidow said in a telephone interview from the meatpacker's plant in Chino, Calif., late Friday.

The meatpacker voluntarily suspended operations in early February, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture began investigating how it treated animals.

The USDA has said the slaughterhouse might be able to resume operating if it met certain conditions. But Mr. Magidow said, "we are a small private company," and cash has become tight. Among other problems, some customers stopped payment on checks they had sent the company for meat that is part of the recall of 143 million pounds of beef, he said.

Federal food-safety regulators said Thursday that they intend to require that Hallmark/Westland, a leading supplier to the National School Lunch Program, pay for the costs associated with destroying and replacing meat submitted to the program.

"If the USDA wants payment back, we're dead meat. We're done," said Mr. Magidow, 46 years old, who has worked at the company for more than 15 years. "There's no way we could pay it all back."

The company's president and owner, Steve Mendell, was unavailable to comment Friday, and the company's controller, Juan Acevedo, referred an interview request to Mr. Magidow.

Mr. Magidow said the company has laid off 250 workers and that a skeleton group of top managers is managing the recall. Until the plant suspended operations, it was earning a modest profit on annual sales of roughly $100 million, he said. "It's a low profit-margin business," he said.

In the last government fiscal year, the Agriculture Department paid Hallmark/Westland about $39 million for ground beef for food nutrition programs, including the school-lunch program. Hallmark/Westland was honored by the department as its Supplier of the Year for the 2004-05 school year. It began supplying meat to the program in 2003 after a rigorous application process with the Agriculture Department, which has authorized about 10 meatpackers nationwide to compete for contracts to supply beef to the program.

The USDA investigation began after the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video showing workers at the Chino slaughterhouse trying to make sick or injured cows stand up with electrical-shock devices, fork lifts and high-pressure water hoses. State and federal animal-cruelty laws prohibit such activities.

The company quickly fired the two workers in the video and began taking steps to be reauthorized by the Agriculture Department. But the USDA issued a recall of 143 million pounds of beef on Feb. 17, after additional evidence showed the company had on rare occasions since February 2006 slaughtered cows that had fallen to the ground after passing a pre-slaughter inspection. In such cases, the company is supposed to contact a federal inspector before going ahead with the slaughter, and agency officials said it did not.

Slaughtering downer cows, those that can't walk or stand on their own, is generally prohibited under federal rules because the cows are believed to carry higher risks of diseases including mad-cow disease, which can cause a rare but fatal brain disorder in humans.

The government says much of the recalled meat has already been consumed, that the risk of harm is low and that no illnesses have been reported.

According to authors of a study prepared for Congress by the Government Accountability Office, the incubation period for mad-cow disease is two to eight years in cattle and up to 30 years in humans.

The Agriculture Department is under fire from lawmakers and consumer-advocacy groups because it failed to catch problems at the plant. Agency inspectors are continuously on hand at all meatpacking facilities. Congressional hearings on meat safety begin next week.

Regulators have said the facility could reopen if it met specific conditions. Most important, the company must "identify significant, and in this case multilayered, corrective actions that give us some level of confidence that it's not going to occur in the future," Agriculture Department official Kenneth Petersen told reporters during a briefing Thursday. "And then we verify their corrective actions over a multi-month period of time."

--Elizabeth Williamson contributed to this article.

Write to David Kesmodel at david.kesmodel@wsj.com

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Tough break, Mr. Magidow - I'll bet that your boss Mr. Mendell lives in a huge house, drives a fancy sports sedan or "blingmobile" SUV and lives high on the hog, taking BOATLOADS Of money out of the business, resulting in the "low profit-margin business".... just a hunch...but I could be wrong...(but I DOUBT it...)

Meanwhile, the cows lived in squalor and were mistreated by the workers,
in an attempt to wring every last dollar out of them and the business,
while cutting corners on the care of the animals until their death.

You know, maybe those vegetarians are really ON to something...
the older I get, the more opposed I am to eating red meat...

Selective criteria

This just in from a FORMERLY admired sports figure...

"Greg Norman honored with GWAA's Bartlett Award

HOUSTON (Feb. 19, 2008) Global golfer and global philanthropist Greg Norman whose commitment to charity has spanned three decades with such diverse causes as children's cancer research, relief to victims and families of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami and 9-11, and ecosystem oceanic research, has been honored with the Golf Writers Association of America's Charlie Bartlett Award.

The award, named for the first secretary of the GWAA, is given to a professional golfer for his/her unselfish contributions to the betterment of society. Norman will be honored at the GWAA Annual Awards Dinner April 9 in Augusta, Ga."

No word if Greg will be bringing his ex-wife, Laura, OR former Olympic skier Andy Mill, the two jilted ex-spouses that "Mr. Smooth" and his new squeeze, Chris Evert, DUMPED so that they could marry each other....guess ol' Greggy and Chrissie WILL NOT be in the running for any awards for the BETTERMENT OF MARRIAGE or HONORING COMMITMENTS....

Friggin SICK of ED ads....

I guess I have a high threshold for pain, but something snapped in me tonight, and I'm thinking of starting a crusade against all those STUPID "erectile dysfunction" advertisements that are SHOVELED down our throats....

The one that put me over the edge was the "Viva Viagra" ad featuring Cro-Magnon Man on his motorcycle, grinning lasciviously at his female mark, while the music track gleefully choruses"Viva Viagra" about three hundred times....

That sound you hear off in the distance??? That would be Elvis whirring in his grave...

Hey boys, I'm really sorry you have limp noodles, but interrupting my watching of the Accenture Match Play Championship to explain what priaprism is, and why a four-hour boner is considered a serious life-threatening condition just got to be too much to bear tonight....

(Isn't that exactly why these poor baby boomers are TAKING THIS SHTUFF?? So they can have a four-hour woody woodpecker, and keep their little lovebirds interested in them???)

Has anyone else noticed that the inanity factor of these ads is on the upswing recently? We've now moved beyond the implied innuendo of the symbolism of the couple in the separate bathtubs in the great outdoors to prolonged clinical explanations of why you need this magic elixir to put the lead back in your pencil, and how inconvenient unexpected kitchen plumbing explosions contributes to an unsatisfying satisfying sex life, but the male form of "The Pill" is there to save the day....

ENOUGH ALREADY!!!

STOP THE MADNESS!!!

OH, AND BY THE WAY, THE PATHETIC LOSER ASHHOLE AT PO BOX 158, AGOURA HILLS, CA 91376 NEEDS THIS SHIT BECAUSE HIS NEEDLE DICK DOESN'T WORK WITHOUT CHEMICAL ASSISTANCE - HERE'S HOPING THAT DICK DROPS OFF BECAUSE IT'S BEEN PLACES IT SHOULD NOT EVER HAVE BEEN...EVER!!! YOU ARE A COMPLETE CLASSLESS ASSHOLE "Jimmy", AND YOU DESERVE TO DROP DEAD FROM EVERY STD KNOWN TO MAN - BUT SOMEDAY YOU'LL REAP WHAT YOU'VE SOWED, YOU DEPRAVED, PREDATORY MOTHERFUCKER!!! ....GOD WILL PREVAIL!!!
+3/20, 5/21, 7/16 07+
+

More from our good friends and trading partners, the Chinese

"As long as you bring money, anyone can buy..."

Those are the words that thousands of pet owners can now inscribe on the graves of their dead animal companions, thanks to the Corporate Whores that are running the American economy these days.

In their rush to circumvent American food standards and gut the American manufacturing base to save a few pennies, the robber barons who manage quarter to quarter to "beat the numbers" without regard to the long-term (and short-term) consequences of their decisions and actions have done it again...and our pets are dying and being sickened daily as a result.

Every day it seems, another manufacturer of pet food adds another brand to the ever growing list of tainted pet food that has been spiked with contaminated wheat gluten sourced from our trusted trade partners, the Chinese.

It has been well-known for a long, long time that China is a hotbed of corruption, shady dealing, sub-standard business practices, theft, copyright infringement and a host of other unethical behaviors. This article below only ratifies that litany of sins, and it would appear that nothing has changed....

American greed plus Chinese greed equals dead American pets.

Truly, we have reaped what we have sown, and I only pray that the pendulum that has swung SO far to the favor of the unethical, lying, cheating, thieving Chinese will swing back to America, and a resurgence in American production, American manufacturing and American standards and ethics will ultimately prevail, and leave the Chinese to spread their crappy standards amongst themselves, like they used to.

In the meantime, we now have dead and dying American pets, and probably sick or dying American PEOPLE if we allow this lapse in oversight and standards to continue....you KNOW that we are in trouble when a relatively conservative Republican is taking this stance....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/30/AR2007043001865_pf.html

Pet Deaths Spur Call for Better FDA Screening
Imports Raise Concern About Human Foods

By Rick Weiss and Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 1, 2007; A01

Amid growing revelations that suppliers in China frequently spike pet food and other food ingredients with contaminants to boost profits, momentum is building in Washington to bolster the Food and Drug Administration's capacity to detect and screen out adulterated imports.

Several Chinese suppliers conceded over the weekend that adding melamine to pet food ingredients -- now blamed for the deaths of many animals in the United States and possible contamination of the human food supply -- is but the latest technique for fooling U.S. companies into thinking they are purchasing a high-quality product.

Before melamine there was urea, Chinese traders said -- another nitrogen-rich chemical that was used to give false high scores on tests of protein content but was abandoned after it made animals ill.

The task of guarding against contaminants in imports has become far more complicated because an increasing portion of the tens of billions of dollars in Chinese food and agricultural imports involves powders and concentrates for the processed-food industry -- including the wheat gluten and rice protein at the center of the pet food scandal. Animal feed imports alone grew sevenfold from 2001 to 2006, the Commerce Department says.

Such products pose three problems: Their makeup is not obvious by mere visual inspection; they can be easily and invisibly contaminated or intentionally spiked with chemicals that are not on the FDA's standard battery of tests; and their origins are often vague, because they have been through several stages of processing and trade.

Now an increasing number of legislators, scientists and others are saying it is time to modernize FDA's authority to trace the sources of food imports and punish scofflaws -- legal powers that experts say have barely evolved over the past 70 years.

Many also want to expand the agency's food-safety budget.

"I do think this pet food thing has shown people, including people at the very highest levels of the administration, that something needs to be fixed," said William Hubbard, associate director of the FDA from 1991 to 2005. "If this isn't a wake-up call, then people are so asleep they are catatonic."

Which new powers to give the FDA, however -- and how to spend any extra funding -- remains contentious. And some legislators want assurances that the agency is worthy of added support.

"Leadership has been missing for far too long, and that needs to change quickly," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee that funds the agency. Others have complained that Senate-confirmed FDA commissioners have been in place for less than one-third of President Bush's tenure.

Relying largely on laws passed in 1906 and 1938, which among other things empower it to detain "filthy, putrid or decomposed" foods, the FDA today oversees $1 trillion worth of products annually, including about half of all imports. The $2 billion agency regulates products that together account for fully 25 cents of every dollar American consumers spend, and sheer volume makes it impossible to inspect more than a small fraction of incoming food.

"It's a huge amount," said Dan Michels, a former director of the FDA's Office of Enforcement and now a Silver Spring-based regulatory consultant. "You can't even look at everything, let alone sample and test it."

About 99 percent of imported foods are simply acknowledged by computer and waved ashore.

Inspections were easier when imports were identifiable foods. Products that looked like oranges were clearly oranges, even if they sometimes had to be tested for pesticides. Raspberries were raspberries, even if some were tainted with bacteria.

But processed ingredients are often nondescript. And in China, where a national passion for commerce has far outpaced the adoption of regulatory controls, marketers have repeatedly been caught adulterating such products -- spiking pig feed with diet pill chemicals to make swine leaner, for example, and hiding sawdust in fishmeal.

Officials at Chinese companies that make melamine, which is used in plastics but can also give falsely elevated readings of a food's nutritional value, have acknowledged that the chemical is sometimes sold to makers of animal food ingredients.

"It's always been like that, people buying it as animal feed," said Xu Qin Bin, a sales representative for Shandong Sanhe Chemical Co.

Other melamine brokers said the standard policy is, in effect, one of "don't ask, don't tell."

"As long as you bring money, anyone can buy," said Zhao Yan of the Shandong Taian Ningyang County Weiye Chemical Co., which markets melamine.

A recent shift from old-fashioned trade fairs to online trading has facilitated this shadowy market by adding a layer of anonymity between producers and consumers.

By far the largest online marketplace in China, and perhaps the world, is Alibaba.com. It is based in the southeastern city of Hangzhou and specializes in business-to-business transactions. On Alibaba, buyers can order garden gnomes, customized political campaign buttons, bolts of taffeta, as well as wheat gluten and other foodstuffs -- all with a click of a mouse.

On a typical day, Alibaba vendors advertise about 1.75 million individual products, more than 30,000 of them agricultural.

Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co., the two companies under investigation by Chinese and U.S. officials, sell vegetable proteins on Alibaba. Scores of others hawk wheat gluten, rice protein or corn gluten -- virtually all advertising their products as high-quality "feed grade," "food grade" or "export grade" and none offering inferior "industrial" grade.

In its ad, Xuzhou Anying, which American authorities say supplied toxic wheat gluten to pet food makers, does not specify what uses its wheat gluten is meant for. But it cites "feed additives" as one of its main exports and claims that its gluten is "reference grade three a" -- a term that FDA officials say has no formal regulatory meaning.

When reached by phone, seven wheat gluten companies advertising on Alibaba declined to answer specific questions about where their products come from. {Ed.Note: NICE!!! And we buy from these SOB's??? Are we STUPID??? I think you know the answer to that one...STUPID and GREEDY!!!}

That kind of opacity poses enormous challenges to pet food makers, said Rodney Noel, a state chemist in Indiana and a member of the pet food committee of the Association of American Feed Control. "How can these companies know the source?" Noel asked. "They don't necessarily know if it came from China or Timbuktu." {Ed. Note: No, Rodney, it DOES NOT pose "an enormous challenge" - just buy from qualified American suppliers who follow established AMERICAN standards for food ingredients, for both PETS and PEOPLE!!!}

It also poses problems for the FDA, which has limited authority to demand records identifying the sources of food.

But that is just one of many ways in which the agency is hobbled, experts said. Another: Despite a temporary post-Sept. 11, 2001, staff increase inspired by fears of terrorist attacks on food, the number of FDA employees working on port inspections has returned to pre-Sept. 11 levels -- part of a gradual shriveling of the agency's food safety division relative to its burgeoning pharmaceutical branch.

Moreover, while the Agriculture Department -- which has parallel responsibilities for imported beef and poultry -- has the legal authority to designate 10 U.S. ports as the only ones eligible to accept foreign meat, allowing its inspectors to focus their efforts in those places, FDA inspectors -- who are far fewer in number -- must cover every U.S. border crossing.

Inspectors would also benefit from portable high-speed analyzers. Most samples today are sent overnight to distant labs. And because officials can sideline only those shipments they deem suspicious, imported foodstuffs are typically well into the chain of commerce by the time test results come back.

That problem is exacerbated by FDA's lack of authority to order recalls, which means it must rely on the cooperation of companies when products need to be pulled off shelves. And that assumes the agency has managed to detect a contaminant, which is not easy.

"There is this popular assumption -- maybe it comes from people watching 'CSI' -- that you can put a sample in a machine and get all the answers," said Michels, the consultant. "Unfortunately, it's not like that." You have to have some idea of what you might be looking for."

Congress has a variety of avenues open to it as it considers how to strengthen the beleaguered agency. One is to make permanent some provisions of the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. In response to the pet food crisis, the FDA invoked the act recently for the first time -- not because of any suspicion that bioterrorism was at play but because of the added powers it provides to obtain shipping records and detain shipments.

Some advocates want an expansion of the so-called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program that USDA uses to prevent microbial contamination of meat and poultry, and which the FDA recently adopted for imported seafood. The program makes companies legally liable for identifying where contamination is likely to occur and instituting suitable controls at those points.

"As long as the system depends on government inspectors to detect problems and pull dangerous foods, it's a failed system," said Michael Taylor, former director of the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service and a former FDA deputy commissioner. HACCP, Taylor said, "allows us to hold companies accountable."

Discussion of enhancements could start this week, as Congress begins to debate reauthorizing the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, a controversial program that aims to speed drug approvals with injections of pharmaceutical company money.

"We need to take FDA from being a toothless agency to one with the authority to act to protect the public health," DeLauro said.

That effort could still stall, but it is riding a wave it never thought it would catch: a wellspring of concern for the nation's dogs and cats.

Staff writer Nancy Trejos and researcher Crissie Ding contributed to this report. Cha and Ding reported from China.

Beauties and The Beast at the LPGA's Ginn Open