Monthly Archives: August 2004

Buddha, on Prayer

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I found this on the internet somewhere and thought it wonderful.  I may write more about it later, but just in case I didn't get around to it, I wanted to share it with y'all:

The Buddha was walking on a river bank, when he was approached by a man with a question. He wanted to know if prayer was a valid way of accomplishing desired ends. The Buddha asked him, “If you wanted to cross this river, how would you go about it?” The man replied, “Well, if it is shallow enough anywhere near here, I could wade across. Or, I happen to know there is a ferryman not far away that will take me across for a small sum”. The Buddha nodded. “What then would you think of a man that sat down and prayed that the other bank would come to him?” he asked. “I would consider him to be be very foolish!” was the reply.

The Buddha made no further comment.

Coincidence Can Be Pretty Funny Sometimes

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So I fired up my BlogLines news aggregator today and took a peek at the Yahoo News — Presidential Elections RSS feed.  I saw these two articles listed one right after the other… kind of says it all:

Apparently, the party of “tax and spend” is being endorsed by nobel laureate economists, while the party of “small government” is endorsing more government regulation of something as personal and private as marriage (of all things)…

From Ten Economic Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Kerry (AFP):

Concerned over Republican President George W. Bush's handling of the US economy, 10 Nobel laureates in economics announced in a public letter their endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry…

…According to the letter, the Bush administration has “embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation.”

Kerry “understands that sound economic policy requires a substantial change in direction, and we support him for president.”

The differences between Bush and Kerry regarding leadership on the economy “are wider than in any other presidential election in our experience.

Bush believes “that tax cuts benefiting the most-wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem.”…

…The main effect of Bush's fiscal policies “has been to turn budget surpluses into enormous budget deficits. President Bush's fiscal irresponsibility threatens the long-term economic security and prosperity of our nation.”

From Republicans Endorse Ban on Gay Marriage (AP):

Republicans endorsed an uncompromising position against gay unions Wednesday in a manifesto that contrasts with Vice President Dick Cheney's supportive comments about gay rights and the moderate face the party will show at next week's national convention.

A panel made up largely of conservative delegates approved platform language that calls for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and opposes legal recognition of any sort for gay civil unions.

The party's full platform committee was taking up the marriage plank and other planks late Wednesday, meantime seeking ways to appease Republicans who support gay rights or abortion rights without embracing their positions.

“We are the party of the open door,” said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who led platform deliberations on social issues.

BWAAAAAAAA HAA-HAA-HA-HA-HA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah… and maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot.*

But activists who support gay and abortion rights said they felt shut out, and sharply criticized their party for adopting a hard line in advance of a convention next week that will seek support from swing voters and more liberal Republicans.

Christopher Barron of Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP gay-rights group, was livid after the panel endorsed the first-ever call for a constitutional gay-marriage ban in a GOP platform and went beyond that to oppose legal recognition of any same-sex unions.

“You can't craft a vicious, mean-spirited platform and then try to put lipstick on the pig by putting Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger on in prime time,” he said in an interview…

Sure you can. I hope the Republicans make the same mistake the Gingrich house made back in the 90's. Win a few seats and suddenly conclude you have the “mandate of the people”. That's just the sort of stupidity that will make moderates vote Kerry. Thanks guys!

…Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition advised the network of conservative churches not to worry about the religious right's exclusion from prime time next week, given the advances against gay rights.

“Don't be distracted by Schwarzenegger or Giuliani or even the vice president,” she said. “It is what George Bush says that counts and he has been faithful and fearless on this important issue.”

She dismissed the other side as “RINOs” — Republicans in Name Only…

…Bauer, for example, said Cheney's comments making clear his opposition to a constitutional ban on gay marriage were “just the sort of thing that discourages and demoralizes voters the administration desperately needs.”

Ann Stone, who leads Republicans for Choice, was just as insistent Bush must heed voters in battleground states who might be driven away by the hard line against abortion.

“Bush can't win with just his base,” she said. “He needs base-plus. We are the plus.”…

Stone has it correct. If you seriously think that if Bush came out tomorrow in support of gay unions that the right wing Christians would (a) vote Kerry or (b) stay home and let Kerry win, then I've got some lovely oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you. They may not be the brightest bulbs in the flowerbed, but they're smart enough to know that even a gay-rights Bush would more closely represent their values than Kerry… ergo Bush doesn't need to court those voters. That's like asking Kerry to campaign for an extended period in Massachusetts. Why? I mean, sure I'd love to go hear him speak and all, but he's got this state locked up and it would be a waste of valuable time to try to win votes here. He needs to court gay-rights republicans, pro-choice republicans, and moderates. Those are the votes he needs to win.

Personally I hope the religious right completely hijacks the republican party and turns it into the party of extremism. The backlash will be fun to watch.

…Overall, Republican convention delegates overwhelmingly disapprove of gay marriage, according to an Associated Press survey of about three-quarters of the 2,500-plus delegates. About 72 percent said they opposed same-sex nuptials, while just over 2 percent favored it. The rest did not respond or had no opinion.

Gay-rights and abortion-rights advocates, knowing they could not shape the platform on those issues, concentrated on getting the party to adopt a “unity plank” that explicitly welcomes dissenting views on those matters. That was an uphill fight, too…

Yeah I'm not surprised that was an uphill fight… they're “the party of the open door” as in “we keep the door open so it is easier to throw people out.”

Anyway it's nice to see that both camps have got their priorities straight. 

* This is a quote from the 1993 comedy/horror movie “Army of Darkness” (which, by the way, is my new nickname for Republican extremists, who are starring in a comedy/horror movie of their own.)

Religion Survey — A Meme

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James, on Aces Full of Links, has made available his results in a 'Religion Survey'.  The survey is not very well designed (it assumes some sort of theism on the part of the respondant), but perhaps you will find it interesting anyway SimpleSurveys provides a service whereby “meme” surveys for blogs can be created at no charge.  Here's what my filled in survey looks like…

 
Religion Definition
 
are you mono or polytheistic? I'm an atheist. (i.e. non-theistic)

do you subscribe to a major religion? no

how do you feel about Jesus? I find many of his teachings appropriate, but there's been so much alteration to the Bible over the years, it's hard to say what he really taught (see, for example, the Gnostic scriptures).

what holy book do you feel is most accurate
(Bible, Koran, etc)		 Most accurate about what? I don't understand the question. They aren't really history books, and they each define a religion, how can one be more “accurate” than the other?

do you believe in reincarnation? no

do you believe in the traditional
heaven and hell?		 no

do you believe in ANY
heaven and/or hell?		 no

do you think the god(s)
are vengeful or nice?		 there are no gods

do you believe in angels? no

do you believe in miracles? no

do you believe in predestination? no

do you believe in original sin? no

do you believe in freedom of will? yes

do you believe in souls? no

what do you think will happen to you
when you die?		 I will die, I will be buried, I will decay and return to the earth.

do you think there will be an armageddon? In the religious sense, no, but there is no doubt the world as we know it will end at some point.

why do you think we exist? Because we do. Existence needs no reason.

do you believe in life on other planets? Considering that life evolved on this planet, and there are undoubtedly trillions upon trillions of other worlds out there, to argue that NONE have life sounds pretty stupid to me.

do you believe in evolution? yes

do you think religion and science will
always oppose [each] other?		 Science and nonscience will oppose each other as long as they both try to explain the same phenomena. The afterlife is supernatural, science is firmly grounded in the natural. If you want to claim there is a God, heaven, and the afterlife, Science really can't dispute you, if you want to claim that God made the earth in 7 days and made Adam out of clay, Science says you're full of shit. Therefore, Religion should stick to nonfalsifiable beliefs, and leave the natural world to Science.

what would you say to God
if you met him/her/them today?		 This would never happen, so why ask?

anything else we should know? Your survey is theistically stilted. All the questions assume some sort of theism. There are belief systems, some of them spiritual, that include no God or Gods, and therefore you probably should revise your survey (or at least put NONTHEISTS NEED NOT REPLY at the top).

CREATE YOUR OWN! – or – GET PAID TO TAKE SURVEYS!
EDIT: Be warned, the HTML churned out by this survey generator is pretty crappy…

Moral Relativism

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Those are two words I hear applied to Liberalism a lot, usually by people who mean to cast it in an unfavorable light, and as such people are prone to do, calling liberals “moral relativists” is a wild exaggeration at best.  If you can find a liberal who thinks armed robbery is okay, then you've found a moral relativist.  (Stupid comments about taxation as stealing will be deleted, so don't waste your breath.)  So what is moral relativism? Read on…

Moral Relativism is a system of morality that holds that there are no absolute or universal morals.  All morals are personal and/or cultural.  An example would be an American thinking it is okay to stick your tongue out in public, versus a Middle Easterner who thinks it sinful.  Thus a moral relativist would never expect anyone other than himself to adhere to his set of morals.

A *true* moral relativist therefore, would never say “murder is wrong”, for example.  He would only say that it is up for you to decide for yourself if it was wrong.  In fact a true moral relativist wouldn't even say whether moral relativism itself was right or wrong.  I've yet to meet a liberal this describes, and I know a lot of liberals.

The moral absolutist on the other hand only sees the world in black and white.  There are absolutely no shades of gray, and no such thing as “mitigating factors”.  Further, the moral absolutist does not distinguish between personal and absolute values… all values are absolute.  If a moral absolutist thought that wearing yellow was offensive to God, then anyone wearing yellow is a sinner, even if they belong to another religion and only wear yellow in the privacy of their own homes on the other side of the world.  Further if asked whether or not moral absolutism was right or wrong, an absolutist would immediately say that it was appropriate.  I've yet to meet a conservative who fits this description, though I've seen some that come disturbingly close.

If you step outside of the realm of humanity, then the Moral Relativist position is probably correct.  Alien beings from another world could not be counted on to adhere to any values we hold, even if we hold them as universal.  (This doesn't mean if a martian landed and started killing people, it would not be immoral, but that it might not be immoral from the martian's perspective.)  A universal value then, is held to be universal only with respect to humanity.  As I am a member of the human race, and so are all the liberals and conservatives I know, I'm not prepared to hold a purely moral relativist position.

Therefore when conservatives start calling liberals moral relativists, they're really only objecting to the size and shape of the core set of “universal values” that the liberals have.  Why?  Because it is differently sized and shaped than their own core set.  This is simply the age old conflict of Intolerance versus Tolerance.  In fact most liberals and conservatives in America share a pretty similar set of core values: it's not okay to murder, it's not okay to steal, it's not okay to rape, it's not okay to kidnap, etc, etc, etc.

Many liberals have a fairly simple formula for defining the boundary of universal values:

  • If it doesn't hurt anybody, it's not immoral.

This covers most of the basics, and there are of course refinements.  Is it immoral to smoke a cigarette in the privacy of your own home when nobody else is present?  I think most liberals would say no, even though clearly it hurts someone, the smoker himself.  But this basic definition will suffice.  Thus while a conservative may say that gay marriage is wrong, and give a whole host of reasons other than the real one, most liberals I know would retort that it hurts nobody and is none of the conservative's business.  This is where the charge of moral relativism would come in, which is silly, since both sides adhere to moral relativism in different areas.

So pay attention, you are about to hear a liberal taking a clear moral stand:

  • It is right and good for two consenting adults of the same gender to marry.
     
  • And, for the record, it is immoral to impose personal religious values on others.

The latter point flies in the face of both true moral relativism and true moral absolutism.  So there.

New Brunswick

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After a long delay in shipping, the 1967 New Brunswick plate came last night.  It has taken the place of the “Robert's Chrysler” plate, which is the last oddball plate.  Robert's Chrysler plate was moved into the barn to hang with the other oddballs.

Unless I'm mistaken, this is my only orange license plate… the picture doesn't really make it clear, but it is a dark tangerine color.  Cool!

William Rood versus The Swift Boat Liars for Bush

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Here we go again.  Despite the fact that conservatives everywhere are decrying the Swift Boat Liars for Bush ads as utterly baseless fabrications, Bush refuses to do so.  This should come as no surprise, as Aces Full of Links recently noted, Bush is a coward.  William Rood, an editor at the Chicago Tribune, who has long refused to speak of his time in Vietnam, came to Kerry's defense yesterday calling the allegations of the Swift Boat Liars untrue.  Rood has a perspective that most of the Liars do not, he was there the day that Kerry earned his silver star…

There were two other swift boats on the Dong Cung tributary the day that Kerry courageously charged two ambushes.  The captain of one of them perished in Vietnam six weeks later.  The other was captained by William Rood.

From The Chicago Tribue “Swift boat skipper: Kerry critics wrong” (sign-up required):

…William Rood, an editor on the Chicago Tribune's metropolitan desk, said he broke 35 years of silence about the Feb. 28, 1969, mission that resulted in Kerry's receiving a Silver Star because recent portrayals of Kerry's actions published in the best-selling book “Unfit for Command” are wrong and smear the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry.

Rood, who commanded one of three swift boats during that 1969 mission, said that Kerry came under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong forces and that Kerry devised an aggressive attack strategy that was praised by their superiors.

He called allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were “overblown” untrue.

“The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there,” Rood said in a 1,700-word first-person account published in Sunday's Tribune…

…Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager, said Bush's refusal to disavow the advertising by the swift boat veterans group was “an unfortunate and classic move by a Bush-Rove campaign,” citing the president's senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

A report in Friday's New York Times disclosed connections between the anti-Kerry vets and the Bush family, Rove and several high-ranking Texas Republicans. [emphasis mine] Some of the recent accounts from veterans critical of Kerry have been contradicted by their own earlier statements, the Times reported.

Rood's account also sharply contradicts the version currently put forth by the anti-Kerry veterans. Rood, 61, wrote that Kerry had personally contacted him and other crew members in recent days asking that they go public with their accounts of what happened on that day.

Rood said that, ever since the war, he had “wanted to put it all behind us–the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. . . . I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service–even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune.”

“I can't pretend those calls [from Kerry] had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this,” Rood said. “What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it.”…

The Boston Globe via Boston.com is also carrying this story, as are several other major newspapers.

Karl Rove (who like Cheney, used a college deferrment to avoid the war BTW) and his deserter boss have quite an appetite for chewing up and besmirching the reputations of fine young soldiers who paid a high price defending this great nation.  John McCaine–POW, Max Cleland–who gave three limbs for his country, and now John Kerry–decorated swift boat captain. A bunch of draft-dogders pissing on the records of enlisted men. You would think if veterans were going to be angry about anything, they'd be angry about THAT.

Conservatives in this country continue to be bamboozled into aligning themselves with a party that does not have their best interests at heart.  This does not bode well for our future.  The Republicans are staging a major power grab that is going to change this country in ways that are going to hurt conservatives and liberals alike.  Whether its the erosion of civil liberties, the destruction of our international reputation, the explosion in corporate welfare, the rapid deterioration of social services, the soaring deficits, the lies and manipulations that sent young Americans to Iraq to die, or the renewed commitment to destroying the environment that we all depend on, the warning signs are clear.  Wake up America… before it's too late.

There is no Such Thing as a Bloody Cat License!

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Actually there is, if you live in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Residents of Lincon may own up to 5 cats legally, but to keep any more in their homes requires a special permit… and even then you are limited to a maximum of 15.  Somebody should have told Rickey Meyer of this, because when the alarms in the Cat Detector Van started going off, he had accumulated 146 cats in the basement where he lived…

From the Lincoln Journal Star “146 cats taken from home“:

Upstairs, the smell wafted out the front door and into the tree-lined street, right into the nostrils of Animal Control manager Jim Weverka, who found himself in the middle of the largest cat rescue his office has ever seen.

“When I first walked in the room, it looked like the floor was just fur,” Weverka said. “Then we realized they were cats. Real cats.”…

…an Animal Control officer went to the home. The residents let him in but not downstairs at first. The officer called police, other Animal Control officers, the city-county Health Department and Weverka… When the residents finally let officers downstairs, it appeared they had tried to clean up, Weverka said, and there was little feces on the floor.

Animal Control officers found nearly all of the cats in a 12-foot by 13 1/2-foot basement room. They were on the floor, on a mattress, on white plastic chairs. Several cages in another room held eight or nine cats.

A yellow ring, left by male cats spraying the area, surrounded the concrete block walls, Weverka said. There was no evidence of litter boxes or food, though there were several water bowls…

…Rickey Meyer, 49, who was living in the basement of his mother-in-law's home with his wife, Sharon Meyer, was ticketed.

Mentha Grabowski, Meyer's mother-in-law, lived upstairs. She told authorities she didn't know that many cats were living in her basement…

DING! Sorry, the bullshit detector just went off.  While I can believe that Ms. Grabowski might not know the exact number of cats living in her own basement, she had to know SOMETHING was wrong.  Heck I have ONE cat and I know had bad it stinks when she decides to pee on something.  I can only imagine the unholy stench of 146 cats.

…Meyer told officers that about five years ago he had just four cats. The feline family grew from there…

…Steve Hale lives next door and could occasionally catch a whiff of the odor, but it didn't bother him. He gets along fine with his neighbors, he said.

He often saw them bringing home bags of cat litter.

“I just figured they had a few cats.”

If ever there was an argument for spaying or neutering this is it.  Looks like Mr. Hale must have been upwind from the Meyer's… lucky him!

Quiz question: The title of this article and the ”Cat Detector Van” are references to what? 

Don't Mess With Monkeys…

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Apparently widespread deforestation has led to organized monkey attacks in Kassala, a city in Sudan.  Apparently the day-long attacks are driven by a need for food.  The monkeys are purportedly snatching food from children, shelves of bakeries and grocery stores, and invading homes to raid refrigerators…

From The Advertiser “Monkeys attack women, children“:

Hordes of monkeys are running wild in the Sudanese state capital Kassala, attacking women and children and looting shops for food, Al-Anbaa newspaper reported today.

The groups are going on the rampage in two suburbs of the city, close to the frontier with Eritrea, the newspaper said.

The monkeys launch “organised attacks which last several hours”, targeting “bakeries and grocery stores”.

They attack women and children, run into homes, “breaking kitchen utensils and snatching food from the children” and open the doors of refrigerators to get at the food inside, according to one resident, Salah Osman al-Khedr.

He put the phenomenon down to the wholesale cutting down of trees which has deprived the monkeys of their sole source of food.

The attacks start at dawn and sometimes last until dusk, he said.

U.S. Military Offers Free Breast Augmentation to Soldiers…

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…and liposuction, and facelifts, and so forth.  Apparently the military surgeons think it is great because it gives them practical experience that comes in handy when they are attempting to do reconstructive surgery on an injured soldier.  Is this an appropriate use of tax dollars?  Our soldiers risk their lives for all of us every day, should we consider this a fair benefit? What do you think about this and about breast augmentation in general?  Read on to hear more about this story and also (of course) more about what I think on the subject…

The Story…

From The New Yorker “All That You Can Be“:

…Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview the other day, “We're perfectly capable of increasing the incentives and the inducements to attract people into the armed services.” For years, the military has offered its recruits free tuition, specialized training, and a host of other benefits to compensate for the tremendous sacrifices they are called upon to make. Lately, many of them have been taking advantage of another perk: free cosmetic surgery.

“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense. (For breast enlargements, patients must supply their own implants.) … For most procedures, there's at least a ten-day recovery period, and while soldiers are recuperating they're on paid medical leave rather than vacation.

A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit. According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.

…Janis Garcia, a former lieutenant commander and jag attorney in the Navy, who is married to a retired Navy fighter pilot, says she grew up hating the way she looked. “I wouldn't even smile in my own wedding pictures.” She checked in to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego for a nose job, a chin realignment, and a jaw reconstruction, free of charge. She also had her teeth straightened. “It changed my appearance drastically, and I became a more confident person,” she said. “It literally changed the direction of my life.” The doctors told her the work she had done would have cost her nearly a hundred thousand dollars…

…The Army's rationale is that, as a spokeswoman said, “the surgeons have to have someone to practice on.” “The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient,” Lyons said. “If there's a happy soldier or sailor at the end of that operation, that's an added benefit…

…Some plastic surgeons question this logic…

…There has been talk lately among soldiers that this benefit is indeed being used as a recruiting tool, but there is no mention of it in any of the recruiting literature…

Indebted as I am to those who defend my nation and ensure the safety of myself and my loved ones, I'm inclined to give them anything they want, within reason.  Is this within reason? 

The money is of little concern to me.  If the military feels it can afford to do these sorts of surgeries, I doubt I have any financial expertise to say otherwise.

I read the story of Janis Garcia above, who served our nation, and in return got the face she always wanted, and I feel happy for her.  But there is a threefold tinge of concern as well…

I'm saddened that Ms. Garcia couldn't be happy with herself as she was, I'm concerned that some may see military service as a ticket to bigger boobies or a well defined chin, and overall I am concerned about the safety of these procedures.

On the first matter, we all have imperfections of varying degrees, physical, behavioral, emotional… part of learning to love oneself is accepting those imperfections.  That can be one of the hardest things for a person to do, and I think the best way to do it is to keep firmly in mind that the people who love you do so willingly despite any defects you perceive in yourself.  Some might read that and say “Easy for YOU to say… you don't have teeny breasts or a malformed nose.”  That's true. But I do have rotten teeth and nasty red skin patches smack dab in the middle of my face for all to see.  But those who love me, love me anyway.  If they can do it, surely I can?

Post from a Philadelphia Daily News discussion forum on this topic:

Hey, I think we should think about joining the military!

Posted by: Julie on July 23, 2004 10:19 AM

The second matter has me more concerned.  Superficial issues of appearance are accorded extremely overinflated importance in modern American culture.  I worry that an impressionable 19-year-old person may make a decision to join the military simply to get bigger breasts, or a nicer nose, or to lipo away a bit of flab on thighs or buttocks only to find themselves shipped overseas to a place where their new nose, or chest, or thighs are likely to get shot or blown off.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are these procedures safe?  There's a lot of safety questions circulating about breast implants in particular, and I have trouble finding material that doesn't seem biased in some way.  There's no question that many women want bigger chests, and there's a subset of those who are willing to go under the surgeon's knife to get them.

Then there are those who are against breast implants whether they are safe or not.  In Hollywood on August 18 a group supporting “natural breasts” staged a protest over the military's policy of making breast augmentation surgery freely available to female soldiers.

From Reuters, via Yahoo “Porn Star Tells Military 'Bullets, Not Boobs'“:

…The group, led by porn star and former California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey, said the military should spend its money on “bullets, not boobs.”

“I think girls should have natural boobs and natural beauty,” Carey said after unveiling her own breasts in the protest at an Army recruiting office on Sunset Boulevard.

“Women should be happy with their bodies and what they're blessed with,” the 24-year-old star of 37 porn films said…

The protest was organized by porn impresario Mark Kulkis, president of Kick Ass Pictures, the company for whom Carey stars… Kulkis said he opposed military breast implants because they are an unwise expenditure of tax money and because he does not like fake breasts…

…A military spokesman for the recruiting office where the protest took place said he had no comment.

Ok, that was pretty silly, but it serves to lighten the mood.

On Breast Augmentation in General…

For most of my life I have been dead set against breast implants out of safety concerns.  What if they leak?  What if they delay the diagnosis of breast cancer?  According to the FDA there are many risks involved (note that link includes some pictures and is therefore not-safe-for-work).  If one could demonstrate scientifically sound evidence that the risks of such surgeries were extremely low then I might feel otherwise.  After all, if it were really safe, and it meant the difference between self-loathing and self-esteem for someone, then I would not have any objections.  Self-loathing is also unhealthy and leads to a host of other problems.

I make no claims at being an authority on the matter, but when it comes to breasts, I'm of the opinion that one can usually tell by looking at them whether they are artificially augmented or not, and generally such breasts are less attractive (at least to me).

Also I'm not foolish enough to believe that I can speak for all men, but personally, I have no preference when it comes to breast size.  A woman can be beautiful with small breasts (for example, Kate Bosworth or Gigi Edgely), medium sized breasts (for example, Helen Hunt), or very large breasts (for example, Laura San Giacomo).  According to a (dubious) survey reported at Tickle.com, about two thirds of men surveyed preferred larger breasts.  Yes that's a majority, but that still leaves millions upon millions of people who find smaller breasts attractive.  So from the perspective of attractiveness alone, it would appear that large breasts, and particularly artificially enhanced breasts are not necessarily desirable.

Ultimately what's really important is how one feels about oneself.  I'm sure at least some women who seek breast implants aren't doing it to be more attractive to men.  Our society has a rather warped view on what it is to appear “womanly” and having (unrealistic) ideals communicated to you throughout your life may one in a position of self-loathing when one discovers (surprise surprise) that one doesn't match the ideal. I find that sad.

Some argue (such as 007 Breasts — not-safe-for-work) that it is American culture that has sexualized breasts and resulted in so many self-esteem issues among women concerning their size, shape, or appearance. 

Vicious cycle

The less women breastfeed, the less people get to see the real purpose of breasts. At the same time media everywhere touts the view of female breasts as sexual. That in turn makes it harder for women to breastfeed, since many of the reasons for not breastfeeding are linked to the idea that woman's breasts are sexual organs.

So the less women breastfeed, the harder it becomes for women to breastfeed. We have a cycle that self-promotes the view that the main purpose of female breasts is for something else than feeding babies!

The cure?

Women, breastfeed your babies!
Men, support women in that!
Everybody, remember they are 'baby-feeders'!

They do have a point, I think.  Breasts definitely are baby-feeders and oversexualizing breasts makes it difficult for women to breastfeed–a perfectly natural nuturing function which shouldn't have to be hidden away behind closed doors.  However I don't know if it is possible to completely desexualize breasts either.  Yes they are for nuturing babies, but they are also sexual organs.  During arousal they increase in size and become very sensitive.  It is hard to deny that they are an erogenous zone for females and males alike.

But I do think our society's obsession with big breasts is unhealthy and a source of many problems.  So much visual disinformation is available that many women who would otherwise be thought to have medium sized breasts are considered small or flat.  In an interview for Prevue Magazine, Kim Oja, described her character on 'Son of the Beach' as “the flat-chested one with the measurable IQ.”  Kim Oja is not flat.

What a wonderful world it would be if we could all just be happy with ourselves as we appear, if desires to reach an unreachable ideal did not lead to eating disorders and other unhealthy conditions.

I believe there's beauty in everyone… humans are beautiful creatures in many ways.  Is that a healthy outlook?  Maybe.  I think so.

Only In America…

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If you're going to be in New York perhaps you should check out the Meow Mix Cafe.  Bring your cat…

From Restaurant for cats opens in New York (USA Today):

…The midtown restaurant serves Meow Mix packets for its feline customers with corresponding dishes to satisfy human palates…

Meow Mix president and CEO Richard Thompson said the feline-friendly restaurant has two main rules: no dogs and no catnip, which must be checked at the door.

“Our goal is to keep cats happy,” Thompson said. “The idea is that you can bring them and start socializing them.”

EDIT: More at meowmix.com…