When Anti-Infant Immunizations Become Childhood Onset Diseases

On February 17, 2012 I wrote an article — When Doctors Fire Patients — that dealt with, among other things, the anti-vaccination efforts of some people — led by debunked semi-celebrity Jenny McCarthy — who believe childhood immunizations cause Autism even though there is, and has never been, any empirical medical proof for that claim.  When pressed for scientific evidence, the anti-vaccine believers simply talk about “mother’s intuition” and other nonsense that not only puts their non-immunized children at risk for disease, but the rest of society at risk as well as these unprotected children become certain carriers of diseases that should have been eradicated from the face of the earth.

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A Death in the Village

On Janna’s way to work this morning, she snapped this image with her iPhone and emailed it to me.  She’s done that in the past with a copper moon, and a Steve Jobs memorial, but these flowers, and this mourning this morning was different.

This shrine was filled with hurt and rage and you can find it all right now at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the corner of West 8th Street and the Avenue of the Americas; for this is the spot where Mark Carson, a 32-year-old Gay man, was gunned down a few days ago — shot in the face by an impromptu stalker just for being who he was — and so the latest Greenwich Village New York City hate crime is now on the police blotter, written in blood on a public sidewalk.

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Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst

We have a severe and dangerous water problem in the Unites States.  We’re running out of that liquid gold and there’s no way to replace what we’re using at the rate we’re using it.  We can live without oil or natural gas or electricity.  We cannot survive a week without water.

Sure, we lived through the Dust Bowl Days and the horrific droughts of the 1930′s — but that didn’t stop us from building cities in the middle of the desert and the lack of such a precious resource didn’t stop us from planting tons of trees and lots of agriculture that our water tables could not naturally support.  Now, we’re not only in danger of growing fewer crops, we’re tempting the death of our Empire in total loss swaths of our nation as water wells and aquifers naturally dry up and die. Continue reading

When the City Becomes the Carceral

In today’s New York Times, there was a depressing story about the ongoing, and strategic, public incarceration of the new “World Trade Center” area before it is even officially open to the public.  Where once the citizenry roamed with wild and interested abandon in the area, the Police State have now taken over with barricades and station houses and checkpoints.

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Do the Hounds Finally have Obama?

Well, it finally happened.  The line between Republican paranoia and Democrat fear finally met in the middle and Barack Obama is caught, dead center, in an inescapable vise of his own doing.  The Republican hounds have been after him since day one, hoping just to nip him up a bit to put a bit of blood in the water so the President is belittled and begrudged bite-by-bite until there’s nothing left of his presidency except an empty shell of what could have been and what never was.

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The Review: Paying for Google Play Music All Access

I have not been been much of a fan of Google’s play into music — but today, I think I might just change my mind with my new “Google Play Music All Access” subscription.  The new service is an odd dog, to be sure, but it seems to be worth both its bark and its bite so far.

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Chris Brown’s Urban Semiotic Problem

I’m not a big fan of singer Chris Brown.  I don’t like how he treated his girlfriend, Rihanna, but I do appreciate the pressure he’s feeling from his neighbors over an invented Urban Semiotic problem that he’s deeply invested in on a career angle.  No, I’m not talking about his Graffiti album, I’m talking about his driveway.

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Bidding Farewell to Angelina Jolie’s Beautiful Breasts

In today’s New York Times, Angelina Jolie shares the story of her decision to have a double mastectomy after her BRCA1 and BRCA2 tests came back with bad news:

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

As a red-blooded American boy back in 1998, I remember when Angelina Jolie set the world afire in her debut as Gia, the star-crossed SuperModel.  The hallmark of Angelina’s performance was the baring of her beautiful and natural breasts that became their own phenomenal meme in the lives of all young men long before there was an active internet.  The Google now preserves that original beautiful and naturalistic naked memory – and here’s the start of the stunner that became the star:

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A 30-Year-Old Perfume Poisoning and the Three-Day Sneeze

Is it possible to poison oneself with a spritz from a 30-year-old bottle of perfume?  Can one create their own self-inflicted bioterror attack and suffer the consequences for three straight days of full-body sneezing?  I am here to testify that it is not only possible, it just happened to me!

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Sitting on a Script Professor Domain Squatter

On February 6, 2012 I wrote — David W. Boles is THE Script Professor — because some unsavory person in another country created a new domain based on my ScriptProfessor.com domain by merely adding a “the” before “ScriptProfessor.com” to create “TheScriptProfessor.com” and I was outraged:

Let there be NO DOUBT on the Internets that I, David W. Boles, am, are, and forever shall beTHE Script Professor!  I have been  THE Script Professor since November 28, 2005, so let there be no question to my authenticity as pale imitators and purposeful thieves step forward and try to wrangle in private and modify in public my mark to serve their selfish ends by fogging reality and futzing legal authority.

This week, I was able to reclaim that illegally registered domain and “TheScriptProfessor.com” now rightly redirects to “ScriptProfessor.com” and the world is right and good again as you can see in this partial screenshot of some of the domains I own and operate:

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The Liberator: Using 3D Printers to Kill

If you had access to a 3D printer and could create only one thing out of plastic, from scratch, what would you make?  An implantable human ear replacement?  A filter for pumping clean water in thirsty third-world nations?  What about forming something fun and whimsical like, say, an acoustic guitar?  Or, would you take the tunnel of least resistance, and the road of the lowest common human morality, and choose to print a plastic gun for killing people?

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Rise of the Flat Numbers: Chase Sapphire Preferred and Discover It

I appreciate good design and aesthetic challenges to the common core.  One new trend I’ve noticed in credit card design from some of the bigger, more daring, banks is to eschew using raised account numbers on their credit cards.  My new Chase Sapphire Preferred card is quite beautifully designed in shape and substance, but it is a little less daring than the same card that was issued only a year ago.

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The Mentalist: Why Teresa Lisbon Must Be Red John

Season Six of “The Mentalist” ended last night and it was a terrific season finale.  We were left wondering about the “seven suspects” that I suspect are no longer suspects at all since Red John has identified them all to our beloved protagonist Patrick Jane.  As much as I love Australian actor Simon Baker, I am distraught that I now realize the only proper way the series can finally end is in his death at the hands of the Real Red John:  His soon-to-be-lover-and-still-boss, Teresa Lisbon.  Yes, Teresa Lisbon is Red John and always has been because, you see, it can be no other way and still honor the moral code of the series.

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When Religion tries to Become Science, Bad Things Happen

There’s a lot of righteous arguing on The Internets recently concerning the way religion and science are cleverly being mashed up by fanatical Christian fundamentalists to create a whole new anti-science, anti-reality, anti-educational rhetoric that is being fed to our children as something real and true and factual when it is not.  The monsters behind this religious terrorism of the mind are the same evildoers who invented the “Creation Museum” where they argue that people walked the earth with the dinosaurs even though there is a 65 million year gap between the last dinosaur and the first human.

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