Suddenly the redhead sneezes, and her glass eye comes flying out of its socket toward the man. He reflexively reaches out, grabs it out of the air, and hands it back to her.

“Oh my, I am so sorry,” the woman says with embarrassment as she pops her eye back in place.

“Let me buy your dinner to make it up to you,” she says.

They proceed to enjoy a wonderful dinner together, and afterwards they go to the theater followed by drinks. They talk, they laugh, she shares her deepest dreams and he shares his. She listens.

After paying for everything, she asks him if he would like to come to her place for breakfast in the morning. They had a wonderful, wonderful time.

The next morning, she cooks a gourmet breakfast with all the trimmings. The guy is amazed. Everything had been SO incredible! “You know,” he said, “You are the perfect woman. Are you this nice to every guy you meet?”

‘No,’ she replies. . .”You just happened to catch my eye.”

One the brighter side, approx. 1500 poor women per year will be able to be referred by Planned Parenthood to breast cancer screaming service providers.

For those Americans who understand that abortion is the murder of the most helpless and only guaranteed innocents in the world – and who are actually against it even if childbearing inconveniences some females, Komen’s rapid capitulation to the abortionists in painful and maddening. There are, however, other points to consider in this matter.

Do Not Act As They Do

Komen For The Cure’s mission is stated as the eradication of breast cancer, not the ending of on-demand abortions in America.  The two things are not related beyond the simple fact that both are “women’s issues.” It just doesn’t make sense for Komen not to reverse their decision in the wake of the Feminists’ shrill and strident objections because not doing so could jeopardize the success of their mission.

Anger should be directed at those Feminists who placed on-demand abortion above women’s health, not at Komen.  Remember always that it was exactly these Feminists who called for Komen’s destruction for not supporting abortion. Americans should not sink to their antisocial level and similarly put the fight against breast cancer in jeopardy.

Market Forces In Action

Utterly irrespective of whether we, as Americans, like Komen’s giving in to the abortionists, this was a direct case of free market forces in full operation. It was empirical proof that, in the absence of governmental intervention and meddling, people can directly impact and change the course of business. Certainly, we don’t have to like this specific occurrence but we must respect it for what it was.

Enough of Komen’s consumers were against the new funding policy to potentially negatively impact Komen’s revenues enough to make a difference. Komen responded as is required by the free market and, unless we’re willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we have to understand and accept that.

~*~

Many of us donated to Komen For The Cure when they donated approximately 0.17% of their annual outlays to Planned Parenthood, which funded only 4% the breast cancer screenings Planned Parenthood provided, and I can’t see the point in turning away from them just because they tried to change that and failed due to market pressures.

Our domestic enemies might be comfortable behaving that way, but we should be better and more intelligent than that.

The Feminists or, at least those who publicly define the movement, will willingly throw any other plank of their platform on trash heap along with scalded and dismembered corpses of their murdered unborn children in order to further their ability to kill those unborn children at any time for any or no reason at all.

If you want a synopsis of the Feminists’ instantaneous hysteria and vitriol, it can be found here. Alternately, you can go to the cited WaPo article, Why Komen defunded Planned Parenthood, and grind your way through the earlier comments (Sort Oldest to Newest).

NOTE: Some of the later negative comments were more rational and thoughtful, touching on other aspects of how Komen For The Cure conducts business. None of my rage is focused on them.

Those earlier comments and the general knee-jerk reaction across all the Feminist websites definitely show that these sorts don’t care about women’s health, only their continued privilege to terminate their pregnancies at will.

Some very basic – and grim – statistics follow. Based upon them you tell me if these Feminists who were so quick to rant at- and call for the destruction of Komen For The Cure are at all interested in women’s health.

Pregnancy & Abortion

22% of American pregnancies end in induced abortions. Only 3% – 12% of those were reported by the women having them to have been due to concerns about their health and we have no statistics on the sources or severity of their concerns. Even this low percentage seems inflated since the US has only an approximate 0.024% maternal mortality rate.

Breast Cancer

12.5% of women in America will be diagnosed with one form or another of invasive breast cancer during their lives. Another 3% will be diagnosed with one form or another of in situ breast cancer. 17% of these women will die from the disease within 5 years.

~*~

It seems to me that, if one really cares about women’s health, one doesn’t immediately call for the end of America’s largest and most successful breast cancer awareness organization just because they’ve shown insufficient ideological purity by moving away from the very politically and socially controversial Planned Parenthood.

To be fair though, I’m both very pro- breast cancer awareness and research and staunchly anti-abortion and am, thus far less likely than these Feminists to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But About Komen…

As I noted near the beginning of this post, while there’s no excuse for the early rants against Komen, some valid questions were raised later, both about Komen’s business model and continuing usefulness.

There’s a huge intellectual and ethical difference between instantly seeking the destruction of an organization over their not adhering to ideology only tangentially – at best – related to their mission and having that ideological divergence be the last straw on a pile of disappointments.

Changes in affiliation and funding aside, is Komen For The Cure a good charity? Some data follows:

Charity Watchdog Ratings

• Charity Navigator gives Komen it’s highest ranking, 4 stars, and gives them an overall numeric score of 66.20 (higher than Planned Parenthood’s 61.03 score)
• Charity Watch lists Komen in their Top-Rated Charities and gives them a B+ rating (same as given Planned Parenthood)
• Give Well doesn’t have a rating for Komen but one of reviewers expressed disappointment with Komen (and the American Cancer Society)  because they spent more on education, awareness and treatment provisioning programs than on medical research, but she implied that this was because public education and provision of existing treatments in the “Developed World” don’t translate well into global improvements, which seems to be Give Well’s focus.

Those seem like pretty strong ratings from the groups devoted to monitoring the behavior and efficiency of charities.

Komen’s Financials

• Total 2011 FY Revenues: $439,451,449.00
• Total 2011 FY Expenditures: $408,977,824.00
• Expenditures – Research: $75,301,537.00 (19%)
• Expenditures – Education: $181,092,283.00 (44%)
• Expenditures – Health Screening: $54,089,036.00 (13%)
• Expenditures – Treatment Services: $23,251,563.00 (6%)
• Expenditures – Operating Costs: $75,243,405.00 (18%)

Data is derived from Komen’s 2010 – 2011 Consolidated Financial Statements prepared by independent auditors (Ernst & Young)

Both Komen’s research and education expenditures are larger than their operating costs and their operating costs, at 18% of total expenditures, are far below the national average of 24%.

Komen also spent over $54 million on breast cancer screening services, of which only the $700 thousand they had previously given to Planned Parenthood has been reassigned.

It is, however, obvious that Komen’s focus is on education and awareness programs, not screening or treatment programs since their education expenditures are more than double the combined screening and treatment expenditures, and are more than research, screening, and treatment expenditures combined.

Some Achievements Komen Has Been Part Of

• Almost 75% of women over 40 years old now receive regular mammograms as compared to less than 30% in 1982.
• the five-year survival rate for breast cancer, when caught before it spreads beyond the breast (60% of diagnosed cases), is now 98%, compared to 74% in 1982
• US Federal government expenditures for breast cancer research, treatment, and prevention now exceed $900 million per year, compared to $30 million in 1982.
• At 2.5 million, breast cancer survivors are now the largest the largest group of cancer survivors in the US.

Those are some substantial achievements. True, Komen was only a part of them but I believe that it can’t be truthfully said that Komen and their pink ribbon weren’t the leaders in these efforts.

~*~

Looking at the data it seems that Komen For The Cure is a lean, highly focused charity that has to-date done a great deal of good and who will do what is necessary to ensure that they can keep doing so. If that means shuffling some small amount of their grants away from a controversial entity that could bring political pressure down upon them by association, they’ll do it in order not to jeopardize their mission.

There is the question though of whether or not Komen’s mission is still worth pursuing in the manner that they’ve chosen to do so. Their focus is on awareness and is there a continued need for such efforts and monies to be spent on such awareness?

“Pink Ribbon Fatigue” is real. Some, such as medical sociologist Gayle A. Sulik, Ph.D even go so far as to claim that the “Pink Ribbon Culture” has reached the point where it has built a “breast cancer industry” which many pharmaceutical companies are profiteering from.

And they have a point. America is very much aware of breast cancer, so continued extensive efforts in that area might be – and could definitely be seen as – more self-serving or inertia-based than truly useful.  It’s also quite true that the sentimentalism of Komen’s “Pink Ribbon Culture” keeps breast cancer at the forefront of what I choose to describe as the “cancer maintenance industry” instead of refocusing medical science on the less profitable curing of the disease.

Personally, I’d like to see them shift some of their money away from education and awareness programs and into more research and/or treatment and screening programs. It’s not, however, enough of an issue to me that they’re not doing so would cause me to stop donating to them, just as whether or not they work with Planned Parenthood never affected my donations to them.

Sadly, the rabid, infanticidal harpies who’ve managed to become the public and political face of the Feminists have dramatically differing priorities.

One of many indications of of Star Wars’ lasting success is the quantity and quality of fan art surrounding it, especially those that skillfully transpose Star Wars onto other genres.

Digital artist Clinton Felker provides us with a stunning series of Star Wars fan art depicting Boba Fett, Darth Vader, and a Stormtrooper as feudal Japanese warriors.

These are, to my mind, absolutely awesome images and I always thought that Darth Vader would have favored Sasaki Kojirō’s Ganryū school of swordsmanship, so I especially like that piece.

It seems that politics has gotten too raw and real for some people.

This, of course, begs three related questions: who are these people crying for increased civility, what is it that they actually want, and why do they want it so much?

Who’s Crying For Civility

I see two disparate and unrelated general segments of America’s population crying out for an increase in civility in political speech and argument. They are respectively the apolitical drones and the Leftists, the Liberals and Progressives. Each makes similar outcries but for seemingly different reasons and with different real goals.

What Do They Really Want And Why?

The apolitical people just want things to go quietly. They’re uninvolved in politics, fervently wish to stay that way, and are both bothered and scared by the passion that is being shown by many others. Whether from cynicism or self-centeredness, they do not want to pull their heads out the oh-so-comfortable sand and become involved and the fire of current political discourse is preventing them from doing this.

The staid, stuffy, and easily ignored ways are what these drones want to return to because they don’t want to open their eyes and choose a side.

The Leftists, these Liberals and Progressives, are quite different.  They are awake, aware, involved in the political process, and they have a definite direction that they want to take America in. Their cries for civility are really two things: cynical attempts to silent their enemies and cries for validation and acceptance.

The willfully uninvolved will just have to stop their ears better and learn to keep their heads down.

For many of the Left, their cries are just dog-whistles for censoring the American people. They don’t really want civility, as their very cries for it often show, so much as they want to stop any dissent against their foundations of their agenda.

For others on the left it is a matter of crying out for acceptance and validation. They’re looking for some affirmation that, even though their enemies disagree with their core ethos, they are still respected and approved of.

~*~

Sadly for those who’re crying out for increased civility, I don’t see much chance of- or value in its return any time in the near future. The divide in America is not too deep; it’s to fundamental. It doesn’t allow for the luxury of civility anymore. It’s not a political divide; it’s an ethical and moral divide.

We’re not going to be silenced. We’re not going to engage in carefully managed debates over minutiae of methodology when we want to change the goals and systems. And we’re very much not going to respect our enemies when we find the core beliefs that underpin their goals and actions to be utterly abominable and abhorrent.

Ad Hominem

A Hominem ( Latin for  “to the man” ) is short for argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy that is an attempt to negate the validity of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.

While Leftists of all sorts do get abused regularly be citizens of the Civilized World, especially Americans, I see only a small minority of the occurrences being truly argumentum ad hominem.

In political discussions and across the blogosphere – neither a place known for staid and polite discourse – I see comparatively few instances where people have tried to negate the validity of a Leftist’s claim by pointing out the Leftist’s negative characteristics or beliefs.

I have, on the other hand, often seen examples of what I’ll call argumentum ad factis ( Latin for “to the facts” ). Very often people try negate the validity of Leftists by pointing out the negative characteristics of their arguments.

It’s not the same thing to say that they’re wrong because of their arguments (“ad factis“) as it is to say that their arguments are wrong because they said them (ad hominem).

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– George Santayana
The Life Of Reason. Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

To put it simply, those who cannot learn from past mistakes are more than likely going to make them again.

Americans need only look into the past to when we were the invaders who refused to assimilate into the native language, culture, sociopolitical tapestry of America and accept and retain those lessens.

Is It Too Late To Build A Fence?

The Native American tribes could have done things differently and stood a better chance of retaining their nations, cultures, languages…and lives. They, however, failed to recognize the dangers and act accordingly in the early days of the European colonization of America.

…All 300 Million Of Them!

This ended up leaving the debased remnants of the Amerindian peoples in an untenable situation. No amount of Ghost Dances are going to return the land to their tribes now or bring back their languages and cultures.

• Of the 300+ native tribal languages in the US, only 175 remain many without native speakers. This is expected to drop to 20 by 2050
• In the 17th Century Native Americans in the US numbered between 12 – 18 million. By the beginning of the 20th Century they had been reduced to 250 thousand

Now we, as Americans, are on the other side of the equation and we can remember this history or we can forget and face the consequences.

Google Knows What You’ve Been Searching For

You might want to remember that Google is watching and remembering while you’re cruising the web and searching for stuff, especially you freaks in Lahore, Pakistan.

Yo, Chutiya! You’re taking a lot more into your own hands than you think if the Islamists surrounding you find out what you’re doing on the web.

But before any of us complain too stridently about this, let’s all take a moment to remember something else:

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

– Andrew Lewis aka blue_beetle

That’s pretty much how it goes in the real word which, despite the best efforts of fools, the internet is part and parcel of. So enjoy yourselves, but remember that it’s Google giving you that feeling of being watched while you….whatever.

So what, pray tell, was Obama’s problem with SOPA and PIPA bills that the House and Senate were considering?

Was he worried that Congress passing a law on the matter would provide empirical proof that he had once again illegally and unconstitutionally overstepped his law authority as POTUS by unilaterally undermining America’s sovereignty?

Or was this just another case of “crocodile tears” and false angst on the Campaigner-in-Chief’s part since he could “safely” attack SOPA and PIPA to bolster his waning support from the Left?

But if it’s that costly, how can we have this:

Boldly Going Where NASA Can’t Afford To Tread

If a space program is so expensive that the Obama Regime has to curtail NASA’s efforts, how could a small Washington DC metro area restaurant chain, Sticky Rice, with only for restaurants be able to afford to collaborate with RVA TV and Bark Marketing to launch one of their Godzirra rolls into space – and how could they manage to do it in the first place?

OK, for the sake of precision, Sticky Rice didn’t actually put a Godzirra Maki into space. They didn’t breach the Karman Line and only managed to send their sushi into the middle stratosphere.

Sticky Rice should rename their Godzirra roll. They should call it the Fukyu-Obama Maki.

If a small business can, using commercially available equipment and materials send, film, and successfully recover sushi to the edge of space then it’s disgusting to claim and laughable to believe that America needs to curtail space exploration.