Archive for November, 2010

Labeling Muslims

Posted in Politics, Religion, Society on November 27th, 2010

In the West, especially within America’s borders, Muslims and their enablers rant, rail, and whine that Muslims are labeled by Americans and that those labels are universally negative.

Muslim Labeled
Got A Problem, Tifl Al-Khanzeer? Prove Us Wrong!

Beyond the sad fact this is nothing more than their attempt to legitimize their agenda, there are two fundamental and incontrovertible flaws in their incessant and ever more strident rants.

Societal Requirement for Labels

Labels are a necessity for societies, a necessity that grows proportionately to the size, density, and complexity of a society, along with its amount and perceived necessity of interaction with other, disparate societies.

Partly this is the natural and needed quest for normalcy whereby a societal identity is forged based upon a median approach to what constitutes an integrated and contributing member of that society. Partly, this is based on threat analysis whereby citizens use initial cues to determine the possible danger presented by individuals before that danger can be actualized.

Burden of Proof

In functioning societies such as those of the Civilized World – America especially – labels applied to subgroups are not fixed; they are mutable by both perceptual shifts of society at large and by individual actors changing what labels society applies to them. In the latter case, however, the burden of proving that the existent label is not applicable and that new one should be applied is upon the individual seeking the change.

This is indefeasible; the minority grouping, by their nature non-normative, always bears the onus of changing the opinion of- and labeling applied by the larger society as a whole.

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It’s truly, at this point, up to the Muslims in America to either prove that they’ve been mislabeled or accept the consequences failing to do so.

Ranting, raving, and whining about being assigned labels they don’t like will just exacerbate the situation, especially when they use groups such as CAIR to try to impose changes by fiat through the subornation of courts system in a form of paper jihad that Americans tend to find even more reprehensible than direct and overt violence.

Signs Of Victory

Posted in Politics on November 26th, 2010

The American EagleIn the long war to rebuild, restore, and renew the great, if beleaguered without and within, nation of America there are signs that we, the People are gaining the upper hand and are on the road to real victory over the neo-Socialist Liberals, Progressives, and other Statist domestic enemies.

Some signs are large and easy to recognize, such as the results of the 2010 elections.

Other signs are smaller, harder to see and analyze. Yet, it may well be these signs that truly presage Americans’ final victory over the Left.

Comments Are Closed

I’m in the Blogosphere more than a little and, in order to make this more efficient, my various tools roam the internet scanning for keywords and tags of interest to me. This gives me a partial overview of what’s happen in the world of alternative journalism that I can analyze with other tools.

If you’re one of those who’ve commented or complained about my commenting on your article mere moments after you published it, at least now you know how and why it happened.

A recent trend I’ve seen is Liberal blogs having closed the comments on their posts. I don’t mean on older posts; I mean that they’re publishing articles and not allowing any commentary upon them from the start.

This is very much one of those smaller, harder to see signs that we, the People are on the course to victory!

At the very grassroots level, the more vocal of our enemies are in retreat. They’ve given up the argument and, in the method of their doing so, they’ve isolated themselves from each other.

How long can they maintain their efforts without the reinforcement of their Leftist echo chambers? I can’t say, but it’s likely that they’ll only howl in their lonely personal wildernesses for so long before going silent.

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Keep your eyes open. Travel light but load heavy, and always put another round in the enemy after they’re down. 😉

TSA’s Image Problem

Posted in Humor, Politics, Society on November 26th, 2010

TSA Checkpoint - Spoofed SignageThe Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is experiencing a lot of protests against their new backscatter X-ray full body scanners and the enhanced pat downs by TSA personnel which are the allowed alternative to the scans.

This is nothing but an image problem. People are opposed to the intrusive pat downs because they don’t want to be “groped” by the TSA agents.

This is a fixable issue. All it takes is for the TSA to change their image so that people want to be patted down by their agents in our airports. Changing the public image of their personnel would be a good start. 😉

Turning The Onus Into a Perk

Yes, this can work and has worked well in the past. All it takes is spinning a bug into a feature – at least in the minds of the consumers, in this case the flying public.

One thing – they let women be fondled by female agents, but what about we men? Can I demand a female TSA agent to fondle my junk rather than undergo a homosexual sexual assault?

If General Electric (GE) can try to shift the current image of coal as an energy source and the image of coal mining as a disgusting, dirty, dangerous, and mind-numbingly degrading means of making the rent, then the TSA should be able to adjust people’s opinion of the full body scans and enhanced pat downs.


GE’s Model Miners – Making Coal A Beautiful Way To Heat Up

Of course one would hope that the TSA would learn from GE Energy’s mistakes. Their setting their quasi-erotic Model Miner commercial to the tune of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s cover of Merle Travis’ Sixteen Tons, a song about how much working in a coal mine sucks, was avoidable error.

The TSA’s image problem is fixable. It just takes a bit of creativity, good marketing, a faith in the prurience of the masses. 😆

The Cost Of Treatment

Posted in Politics, Society, Technology on November 25th, 2010

3D Model of HIV VirusIt’s a pretty good time in the fight against AIDS. A recent study showed that a daily pill, Gilead Science’s Truvada, which already on pharmacy shelves as a HIV treatment could actually help prevent new HIV infections.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine was conducted on 2499 men at 11 sites in six countries: Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand and the United States.

Gilead Science's TruvadaDiligent use of the medication (90%+ daily usage) resulted in a 73% reduction in infection rates over the course of the year-long study. Quite surprisingly, even lackadaisical usage ( 50% daily usage) resulted in a 50% drop in infection rates among the men in the study.

It’s a fact of life, however, that such treatments and potential prophylactics come at a cost.

Associated Press via Yahoo News:

Because Truvada is already on the market, the CDC is rushing to develop guidelines for doctors who want to use it to prevent HIV, and urged people to wait until those are ready.

As a practical matter, price could limit use. The pills cost $5,000 to $14,000 a year in the United States, but roughly $140 a year in some poor countries where they are sold in generic form.

Whether insurers or government health programs should pay for them is one of the tough issues to be sorted out, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

So there’s a median cost of $10,000 per annum in America and $140 per annum in the Third World. That’s approximately a 7,150% variance in price between what Americans must pay for drug and what Third Worlders and/or the various institutions helping them in their fight against HIV / AIDS must pay!

Hellfire! In Uganda where’s there’s a shortage of Truvada, there’s a black market for the drug and, even at black market prices, the cost is only approximately $720 per annum ($2 / dose).

Why is there such a discrepancy and inequality in pricing for this drug? Why is it that Americans with HIV already have to pay such comparatively high prices for Truvada as a treatment?

Big Pharma’s Greed

Is the inequality of costs based upon the greed of the pharmaceutical companies? That’s a seductively easy answer, and one that anyone who studied healthcare costs during the battles over ObamaCare would have to say is not totally without merit.

Yet that would fully explain the degree of inequality in pricing. Given US foreign aid and American based NGOs continued widespread assistance to the Third World’s struggle against HIV /AIDS, one would reasonably expect higher prices than what are being experienced. “Charge all that the market will bear” is an axiom but the market would not, in truth, be the Third World; it would still be America in the form of our federal government and our various charities.

Eating The Rich

An alternative theory would be that the inequality in pricing is based upon some form of ethnoguiltism- and/or oikophobia-driven class warfare which causes our own people to be charged what seems to exorbitant amounts of money in order to subsidize the nearly free care provided to the the Third World.

This is not as easy or pat an answer as corporate greed, but it’s not, in any way shape or form, without merit. We’ve seen this neo-Socialist mindset many times before – in the details of the AGW movement, in ObamaCare itself, in most things billed as “Social Justice,” and in just about anything involving “spreading the wealth.”

Intellectual Miscegenation

A third and, to my mind, more probable hypothesis is, “Why Chose?” I find it likely that the reasons for this disparity between what Americans must pay for treatment vs. what the populace of  the Third World must pay is based upon some misborn hybridization – mongrelization really – of the first two possibilities.

Gilead Science, the makers of Truvada, and the other pharmaceutical companies are private sector firms and, hence, profit-driven. Their investors and shareholders are expecting and demanding positive returns on their investments from these companies. When you factor in the broad use of health insurance, it would be – or should be – expected that they would maximize their returns by charging Americans as much as they could manage to do.

At the same time they well might feel the moral and/or – yes, it could be both – public relations need to provide very low-cost medicine for the rest of the world’s poor.

This would cause an intrinsic conflict with their investors and stockholders who want and/or need these companies to focus on profits and market cap so as to maximize the  investors’ returns. Charity and profits rarely go hand in hand after all.

Therefor, somebody has to pay for this charity, and who better to pay than the American people? After all, we’re all wealthy and we all owe restitution and reparations to the Third World for that fact – or so those of a common mindset keep claiming.

My Thoughts On The Matter

I care about the reason why there’s such a discrepancy and inequality in the pricing of Truvada only insofar as discovering those reasons would be the first step towards correcting what I see as a problem. I don’t even care that much in particular about Truvada or any other of the antiretroviral drug cocktails used to combat HIV / AIDS; the disease doesn’t, despite it’s being an ongoing cause celebre,  affect near as many people – by whole orders of magnitude – than other, less “popular” diseases.

Yet, Truvada’s pricing model is indicative of the entirety of current medical science and technology, especially pharmaceutical science. Americans, rich and poor alike, pay far higher costs than what is charged to the Third World and that just doesn’t seem right.

NOTE: Don’t bother coming here and ranting about how it’s the fault of America’s for-profit health insurance industry; I’ve little tolerance for foolishness and even less for the fools themselves.

The costs of the medicines and procedures are the costs the medicines and procedures. Health insurance, whether it be private, public, or single-payer only spreads out those costs among a pool of payers; it doesn’t positively change the costs themselves.

Adding Insult To Insult

Posted in Politics, Religion, Society on November 23rd, 2010

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf the smiling face of jihadImam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his co-conspirator, Sharif El-Gamal aren’t satisfied with forcing the insult of Park 51 nee Cordoba House, aka the Ground Zero Mosque, upon New York and America at large; now they demand that the American taxpayers help fund what the vast majority consider an abomination.

The insults to America just keep spewing from these “moderate” Muslims.

Most Americans are firmly against any Muslim showpiece edifice being constructed anywhere near Ground Zero but admit that it would be wrong to use the law to prevent these Muslims from building it. Rather than take this to heart and be grateful for the unearned tolerance that Americans are willing to show the brothers and sisters of our enemies, these creatures want Americans to pay for the “privilege” of their insults and gloating mockery.

From the Daily Beast:

Developers of the controversial Park51 Islamic community center and mosque located two blocks from ground zero earlier this month applied for roughly $5 million in federal grant money set aside for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

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The application was submitted under a “community and cultural enhancement” grant program administered by the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation (LMDC), which oversaw the $20 billion in federal aid allocated in the wake of 9/11 and is currently doling out millions in remaining taxpayer funds for community development. The redevelopment board declined to comment on the application (as did officials from Park51), citing the continuing and confidential process of determining the grant winners.

While news of the application has not previously been made public, developer Sharif El-Gamal outlined it in closed-door meetings, according to two individuals he spoke with directly.

Both Muslims and their dhimmi apologists will stridently claim that applying for a federal grant is not demanding $5 million from the American people. This is nothing, of course, but another example of taqiyyah, the Islamic practice of lying to unbelievers.

Be assured that, if they’re denied their “request” they, with the always eager aid of the Muslim Brotherhood’s front group in the US, CAIR, will launch a paper jihad in the courts, tying up the available grant funding and shutting down the entirety of the Lower Manhattan Community and Cultural Enhancement Program until they get the $5 million plus whatever “damages” they could manage to extort through New York’s uber-Liberal civil courts system.

Gods above and below! Given his track record, Obama would probably have his boy, Attorney General Holder lend them material aid and comfort in their attempt.

At a bare minimum Obama would have Holder file an amicus curiae brief on their behalf, thereby tacitly threatening federal reprisal if his preferred decision isn’t reached.

Adding insult to insult to grievous injury is all these Muslim vermin are doing. It’s the best that we can expect from the Muslims. It must always be remembered that Moderate Muslims differ from their Extremists only in methodology and personal courage. The Moderate Muslims will wage jihad against America via paper terrorism and suborning the courts system, whereas the Extremists prefer direct violence.

Jihad bi-al-Lisan and Jihad bi-al-Qalam, Jihad al-yad, and the bloody Jihad as-sayf are all the same; they’re all Jihad, the Muslim holy war to create the Khalifat for the Mahdi to rule.