French Breast Implants to be Removed

The vultures came home to roost after feasting on thousands of unsuspecting women. The vultures are the individuals at the now defunct French company, Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP). PIP began business in 1991 manufacturing silicone breast prostheses. It quickly became the world's number three implant maker because their products were cheaper than others' implants. But there was a sinister reason why PIP's implants were cheaper. At some point, perhaps even from the first implant made, PIP filled their implants with an unapproved silicone gel. PIP's gel was not a medical grade product, but an industrial gel of the type commonly used in non-medical applications. For almost 20 years PIP enjoyed stolen success at the expense of hundreds of thousands of women who are now being urged to have their shoddy, dangerous implants removed. I personally believe there are very few medically-indicated reasons for breast implants. And 'enhancement' is not one of them. But I also believe that the PIP individuals found responsible should be shot by firing squad. I wonder whether PIP began as a fraud, or became a fraud during the course of its existence. PIP was simply flesh and blood people, decision makers, exercising grossly poor judgement. Did they just sit around the conference table one day snacking on fine French cheeses and sipping wine and decide to enrich themselves by perpetrating this unholy fraud? Well, someone, that is, some one person signed off on the idea. But the decision was surely a collective one. And those are the vultures who should be shot. Dead. My sympathies extend to the affected women and those who support them.

ATF = WTF

Light Bulb Ban on Hold

I'm not sure who, individually, I should be pointing my finger toward for deciding for me which light bulbs I should be using, but the so-called Light Bulb Ban is on hold. But only until September 2012, according to CNN/money. My rant is that the government and the rest of our 'handlers' keep sticking their hands where they don't belong, enacting laws that neither they nor we understand, and attempting to fix things that aren't broken. The 'Edison lightbulb' is not broken, even if energy policies across the globe are. I don't want to give up the comfortable, warm lighting within my home only to replace it with the harsh glare of a big-box parking lot or a 6-lane highway. Nor do I want to pay through the nose to buy lighting I don't want or need. If the individuals in government feel they need their collective hands somewhere, I suggest they bend over and stick 'em up their own butts. And leave the light bulbs to people who are smarter, and who have brighter ideas.

Facebook: Agent of the Government, and the Devil?

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and some of his underling mouthpieces say they have made a few mistakes, but all is bliss, and that millions of users have nothing, absolutely nothing to be concerned about. It's my opinion that the world's largest spy agency has plenty to hide, while considering that users have nothing to hide. Even if they want to. Same story, different day. Just in the first week of December 2011, according to FoxNews.com, "Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly exposing details about users' lives without getting legally required consent. In some cases, the FTC charged, Facebook allowed potentially sensitive details to be passed along to advertisers and software developers prowling for customers. Now, a surprising security hole in Facebook allows almost anyone to see pictures marked as private, an online forum revealed late Monday. Even pictures supposedly kept hidden from uninvited eyes by Facebook’s privacy controls aren’t safe." After a brief flirtation with Facebook, I quit it because of their seemingly calculated missteps, empty promises, and meaningless apologies (much like the Obama administration). It is now popular for companies and agencies to do as they damned well please, then ask for forgiveness when caught than to ask permission to perpetrate shenanigans in the first place. It's a new era in the lying and privacy theft businesses. It's not pretty. But obviously lucrative.

Obama; A Stranger in Our Midst

Please note that the following article appeared in, and is presented here verbatim from, American Thinker, April 29, 2010. I thank American Thinker for the article. April 29, 2010 A Stranger in Our Midst By Robert Weissberg As the Obama administration enters its second year, I -- and undoubtedly millions of others -- have struggled to develop a shorthand term that captures our emotional unease. Defining this discomfort is tricky. I reject nearly the entire Obama agenda, but the term "being opposed" lacks an emotional punch. Nor do terms like "worried" or "anxious" apply. I was more worried about America's future during the Johnson or Carter years, so it's not that dictionary, either. Nor, for that matter, is this about backroom odious deal-making and pork, which are endemic in American politics. After auditioning countless political terms, I finally realized that the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally non-indigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections. It is not about Obama's birthplace. It is not about race, either; millions of white Americans have had black mayors and black governors, and this unease about out-of-sync values never surfaced. The term I settled on is "alien rule" -- based on outsider values, regardless of policy benefits -- that generates agitation. This is what bloody anti-colonial strife was all about. No doubt, millions of Indians and Africans probably grasped that expelling the British guaranteed economic ruin and even worse governance, but at least the mess would be their mess. Just travel to Afghanistan and witness American military commanders' efforts to enlist tribal elders with promises of roads, clean water, dental clinics, and all else that America can freely provide. Many of these elders probably privately prefer abject poverty to foreign occupation since it would be their poverty, run by their people, according to their sensibilities. This disquiet was a slow realization. Awareness began with Obama's odd pre-presidency associations, decades of being oblivious to Rev. Wright's anti-American ranting, his enduring friendship with the terrorist guy-in-the-neighborhood Bill Ayers, and the Saul Alinsky-flavored anti-capitalist community activism. Further add a hazy personal background -- an Indonesian childhood, shifting official names, and a paperless-trail climb through elite educational institutions. None of this disqualified Obama from the presidency; rather, this background just doesn't fit with the conventional political résumé. It is just the "outsider?" quality that alarms. For all the yammering about George W. Bush's privileged background, his made-in-the-USA persona was absolutely indisputable. John McCain might be embarrassed about his Naval Academy class rank and iffy combat performance, but there was never any doubt of his authenticity. Countless conservatives despised Bill Clinton, but nobody ever, ever doubted his good-old-boy American bonafides. The suspicion that Obama is an outsider, a figure who really doesn't "get" America, grew clearer from his initial appointments. What "native" would appoint Kevin Jennings, a militant gay activist, to oversee school safety? Or permit a Marxist rabble-rouser to be a "green jobs czar"? How about an Attorney General who began by accusing Americans of cowardice when it comes to discussing race? And who can forget Obama's weird defense of his pal Louis Henry Gates from "racist" Cambridge, Massachusetts cops? If the American Revolution had never occurred and the Queen had appointed Obama Royal Governor (after his distinguished service in Kenya), a trusted locally attuned aide would have first whispered in his ear, "Mr. Governor General, here in America, we do not automatically assume that the police were at fault," and the day would have been saved. And then there's the "we are sorry, we'll never be arrogant again" rhetoric seemingly designed for a future President of the World election campaign. What made Obama's Cairo utterances so distressing was how they grated on American cultural sensibilities. And he just doesn't notice, perhaps akin to never hearing Rev. Wright anti-American diatribes. An American president does not pander to third-world audiences by lying about the Muslim contribution to America. Imagine Ronald Reagan, or any past American president, trying to win friends by apologizing. This appeal contravenes our national character and far exceeds a momentary embarrassment about garbled syntax or poor delivery. Then there's Obama's bizarre, totally unnecessary deep bowing to foreign potentates. Americans look foreign leaders squarely in the eye and firmly shake hands; we don't bow. But far worse is Obama's tone-deafness about American government. How can any ordinary American, even a traditional liberal, believe that jamming through unpopular, debt-expanding legislation that consumes one-sixth of our GDP, sometimes with sly side-payments and with a thin majority, will eventually be judged legitimate? This is third-world, maximum-leader-style politics. That the legislation was barely understood even by its defenders and vehemently championed by a representative of that typical American city, San Francisco, only exacerbates the strangeness. And now President Obama sides with illegal aliens over the State of Arizona, which seeks to enforce the federal immigration law to protect American citizens from marauding drug gangs and other miscreants streaming in across the Mexican border. Reciprocal public disengagement from President Obama is strongly suggested by recent poll data on public trust in government. According to a recent Pew report, only 22% of those asked trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest figures in half a century. And while pro-government support has been slipping for decades, the Obama presidency has sharply exacerbated this drop. To be sure, many factors (in particular the economic downturn) contribute to this decline, but remember that Obama was recently elected by an often wildly enthusiastic popular majority. The collapse of trust undoubtedly transcends policy quibbles or a sluggish economy -- it is far more consistent with a deeper alienation. Perhaps the clearest evidence for this "foreigner in our midst" mentality is the name given our resistance -- tea parties, an image that instantly invokes the American struggle against George III, a clueless foreign ruler from central casting. This history-laden label was hardly predetermined, but it instantly stuck (as did the election of Sen. Scott Brown as "the shot heard around the world" and tea partiers dressing up in colonial-era costumes). Perhaps subconsciously, Obama does remind Americans of when the U.S. was really occupied by a foreign power. A Declaration of Independence passage may still resonate: "HE [George III] has erected a Multitude of new Offices [Czars], and sent hither Swarms of Officers [recently hired IRS agents] to harass our People, and eat out the Substance." What's next? Robert Weissberg is Professor of Political Science-Emeritus, University of Illinois-Urbana. Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/a_stranger_in_our_midst.html at July 22, 2010 - 03:10:13 PM CDT

And Then Along Came Mahony vis-a-vis Arizona

Let me say from the beginning, I am totally and wholly in favor of Arizona's recent immigrant legislation. Good for Arizona, good for the U.S. And then along came Cardinal Roger Mahony. Mahoney, cloaked in, and protected by, the vestments of a Roman Catholic Cardinal recently spewed forth from his website a vile diatribe against the law abiding citizens of Arizona who, weary of waiting for the federal government to protect and defend the southern border, decided to do so themselves. I doubt that the Arizona legislature asked Mahony his opinion before enacting a basic defense against illegal border crossings because the law doesn't sit well with him. Cardinal Mahony described Arizona's immigration legislation as, "...retrogressive, mean spirited, and useless...". And it gets worse. Much worse. With the apparent OK of the Church, Mahony attacked everyday Arizonans, writing "I can't imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation." Yes, a Roman Catholic Cardinal painted each and every law abiding Arizonan with this ugly brush, comparing them to Nazis and Communists, just for trying to protect themselves. The tenor of Mahony's diatribe is that the law is turning away good labor; farm workers, shoe shiners, fruit pickers, armadillo shuckers, marimba bands. LABOR is his soapbox and the laborers he's referring to are the ones from whose pockets he makes a payday. He pleads that if the U.S. doesn't allow in the illegals that we won't have anybody to perform all the labor. He seems to give all the credit for what is good in America to illegals, "I have met so many of our immigrant families and I am in awe at their love for our country, their care and concern for their children, and their resourcefulness in helping to improve our communities, our way of life, and our economic future." Well, perhaps, the illegals are all these things, but getting here made them criminals. They abandon their own country and their own problems and illegally make their way here to present us with a whole new set of problems, dividing us all the way. Mr. Mahony, we already have laborers. Legal ones.

Mahony asks us to ” Please listen carefully to their stories, look into their faces. The more we come to know immigrants as individual people like ourselves with the same longings and yearnings for themselves, their families, and our countries, the more we will understand the need to reform federal immigration laws to help bring these people along a path to legal recognition.”

Look, the path the illegals need is an unceremonial path right back to their own country, whichever it is. And federal laws are not forthcoming, hence Arizona's law.

Mr. Mahony is flat wrong. They are not people like ourselves.The vast majority of us were either legally born here or are here via legal status. They may have some of the same kinds of longings, but will subvert the law to realize those longings in the U.S., not in Mexico or their home country. Millions of Mexicans and others violated U.S. law to get here. We don’t need more belligerent lawbreakers, and we certainly don’t want a ‘path to legal recognition’ for these international criminals. Mr. Mahony, you obviously are not God fearing. You would better serve humanity by attempting to save souls, rather than by politicizing your views in violation of separation laws, and by aiding and abetting crime, which is exactly what you are doing with your Holier-Than-Thou stance.

Mahony goes on to beg, "Let's not allow fearful and ill-informed rhetoric to shape public policy." Mahoney, Your own rhetoric is filled with vile spitefulness, inflammatory accusations, and bareface lies. Your own demagoguery is reminiscent of the late Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. McCarty came to national prominence during the early 1950’s by accusing a number of politicians and other individuals of being either communists or communist sympathizers. Mahony, McCarthy, too, presented himself as being above reproach while anyone who questioned or disagreed with him was personally labeled by McCarthy as disloyal to the US government. And this, Mr. Mahony, is exactly what you are doing. You are shameful, despicable, and an embarrassment to the Nation and to all law abiding citizens of the United States.