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+
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