Alarums, Alarums, To Arms, To Arms!
6 years ago
"God is a comedian
playing to an audience
that is too terrified to laugh."--Voltaire
Group A -- South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, FranceIt's a pretty formidable array of talented sides, and great traditions. History and tradition suggest Argentina, England, Germany, Holland, Italy, Brazil and Spain are pretty much locks for the next round. The other 9 spots should be hotly contested. Of all the traditional "powers," France, who played poorly throughout the qualifiers, and only won their spot by a cheat, seem the most vulnerable, even in a relatively weak group. Ghana is the strongest African side, and could advance, too. I doubt the home-side (South Africa) can get past the Group stages.
Group B -- Argentina, Nigeria, South Korea, Greece
Group C -- England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia
Group D -- Germany, Australia, Ghana, Serbia
Group E -- Holland, Japan, Cameroon, Denmark
Group F -- Italy, New Zealand, Paraguay, Slovakia
Group G -- Brazil, North Korea, Ivory Coast, Portugal
Group H -- Spain, Honduras, Chile, Switzerland
The US have a good chance to advance, since two sides from each group go on to the round of 16. Those matches begin June 26:
Match 5, June 12 1930: England v USA (Rustenburg)
Match 6, June 13 1230: Algeria v Slovenia (Polokwane)
Match 22, June 18 1500: Slovenia v USA (Ellis Park, Johannesburg)
Match 23, June 18 1930: England v Algeria (Cape Town)
Match 37, June 23 1500: Slovenia v England (Port Elizabeth)
Match 38, June 23 1500: USA v Algeria (Pretoria)
t is difficult to foresee the USer side beating England to win Group C, but they could be runner up. The USer team is ranked 14 in the world, and COULD advance to the Quarters, but it will take luck, skill, and more luck...
Match 49, June 26 1500: Winner Group A v Runner-up Group B (Port Elizabeth)
Match 50, June 26 1930: Winner Group C v Runner-up Group D (Rustenburg)
Match 51, June 27 1500: Winner Group D v Runner-up Group C (Bloemfontein)
Match 52, June 27 1930: Winner Group B v Runner-up Group A (Soccer City, Johannesburg)
Match 53, June 28 1500: Winner Group E v Runner-up Group F (Durban)
Match 54, June 28 1930: Winner Group G v Runner-up Group H (Ellis Park, Johannesburg)
Match 55, June 29 1500: Winner Group F v Runner-up Group E (Pretoria)
Match 56, June 29 1930: Winner Group H v Runner-up Group G (Cape Town)
By promoting the idea that ‘normal’ women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch ‘female sexual dysfunction’ (FSD).
It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.
You are among the “43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function,” according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties—but only if the woman feels “personal distress” about it.
So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.
By promoting the belief that “normal” women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works—and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills—containing (how-could-it-not-work) “horny goat weed extract” in order to “feel like a real woman today.” Its website promises, “You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal.”
But the big swinging dicks of global FSD marketing (and off-label marketing) are Pfizer—whose stop-gap strategy is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for men, and Procter & Gamble (P&G), which, using the same logic, has put its money on testosterone.
Viagra’s failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions. FSD is “a classic example of starting with some preconceived, and non-evidence based diagnostic categorization for women’s sexual dysfunctions, based on the male model,” said John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute, in an interview with BMJ (British Medical Journal).
No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone. Despite FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote 2 million off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007. Like Pfizer’s little blue pill, the Intrinsa patch doesn’t really work for women. No wonder: Researchers don’t even know what constitutes a “normal” female testosterone level, and women with low levels of the hormone are as likely as those with high levels to be happy with their sex lives. And as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm, Inc., (www.orgasminc.org), testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen, which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia.
The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest.
A Pfizer survey in Malaysia found that Malay women are even more diseased than their American counterparts, with “69.6 percent experiencing some form of FSD,” according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported supplement on FSD. Journal editor and urologist Irwin Goldstein denies a conflict of interest. “Science is science,” he says. “It comes down to the bottom line. What the data shows, the data shows.” Actually, no. Drug company-funded studies are more likely than independent studies to find the new drug superior to the old. Perhaps the bottom line Dr. Goldstein refers to is his income as a paid consultant for drug companies, including P&G and Pfizer.
Goldstein established an FSD clinic with Dr. Jennifer Berman, who now heads a Beverly Hills clinic and appears on Oprah. As one of the health professionals on a 1998 panel that received financial sponsorship from eight pharmaceutical companies, she helped define female sexual dysfunction. Some 22 drug companies, including Pfizer, had financial ties to 18 of the 19 authors of that panel’s report, the BMJ revealed.
“Maybe the best approach is not ineffective, over-hyped drugs with nasty side effects, but an end to disease mongering and a strong dose of comprehensive sex education,” says filmmaker Canner. Her film hits female erogenous zones that pharmaceutical fixes can’t find: your brain and your funny bone.
"Just heard from the good folks at Warner Archive that the transplendent 1980 concert film Gilda Live -- starring the unutterably adorable Gilda Radner and directed by Mike Nichols -- is at long last making an appearance on DVD.
This is wonderful news on all sorts of levels, but one of them is it means that, finally, you can watch a high quality digitally remastered version of perhaps the greatest song and live musical performance of the 20th century."
If you have never read Genesis from start to finish, you might not be aware that the stories are as full of sexual perversity and surreal plot points as any comic book. Genesis has lust, inebriation, nudity, polygamy, harlots, men pimping their wives, masturbation, penis cutting, sex with a 90-year-old woman who gives birth, sodomy, incest and a father who offers his virgin daughters up for strangers to rape.With material like that, he doesn't need to be cynical.
That's a lot of great material for an artist like Crumb, and the genius of his Genesis is that he portrays it all - every word and every illustration is given equal weight. That's not how they taught it to us back in Sunday school.
Our Bible coloring books had only selected scenes: Noah and his animals, but never Noah lying passed out drunk and naked in his tent. And even when we outgrew the Sunday school cookies and punch and graduated to wafers and wine, we still never heard about Abraham selling his wife Sarah to Pharaoh in exchange for cattle, gold and slaves.
It was a kind of scam for the couple, and they did it more than once, targeting King Abimelech of Gerar next and getting cattle, sheep, slaves and land in return.
Crumb's compositions are cinematic and the rendering of detail is deliciously fine. One is amazed at how well the text adapts to the comic book form with its speech balloons and narrative boxes. The "sweet" Crumb comes through here with tenderly drawn and emotionally insightful expressions. And the faces! Where did he get them all? Each individual in the "begats" is unique. They are all raw, rich and human.
The musical was written and performed by Billionaires for Wealthcare, according to the group, a "grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, HMO lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system." A group official writes to say: "We'll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to health insurance, if we ain't broke, why fix it?"
This is my theory on how it all happened, and since you cant prove that it DIDN'T happen this way, it must be correct. (Just an idea that came to me on the bus one day.)
Just for fun, this one. Nothing too serious here. Although I'm looking forward to the creationists' defense of the wacky things inherent in our sexual biology. There are far too many to put into one video. Not to mention the reasoning behind Yahweh's attitude to things like foreskins and dead goats.
Part of the inspiration came in the form of a book by Rick Warren that I happened to have contact with, called "A Purpose Driven Life", in which he teaches that the entire life purpose for every single human is to worship Yahweh. That's apparently why we're here.
A being who makes something other than himself in order to be worshipped. That's not godly, it's pathetic! It is so small, so petty .... so essentially humanly fragile!! So I sent it up in this movie. Hey - he made the universe in order to house some beings who would worship him - it's not such a stretch to imagine that he might alter a few details of that design in order to get a little bit MORE worship, is it?
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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Minutemen Bikini Battalian from JC Christian on Vimeo.
Oppressing Patriots And Their Tiny "Little Soldiers"I would dearly love to hear the actual colloquy between hard-schwingin' Schwilk and that samll, blonde reporter...
Sure, Minuteman leader Jeff Schwilk may have a very tiny little soldier, but by gawd he looks like a magnificent warrior when he's attacking Mexicans, the Gays, and women while wearing the most manly bikinis (Fashion show begins at 1:30-you may not want to watch this at work).
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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With great kindness and even greater disgust, America's Best Christian appears at the 2009 Atheist Film Festival (via satellite to avoid mingling with the unsaved) to accept her award for "Most Humorous YouTube Video." The award winning video "Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage to Everyone Else" can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFkeKKOr here...