No, really. They said that:

A monument to the enema, a procedure many people would rather not think about, has been unveiled at a spa in the southern Russian city of Zheleznovodsk.

The bronze syringe bulb, which weighs 800 pounds (363 kilograms) and is held by three angels, was unveiled at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, the spa’s director said Thursday.

“There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art,” Alexander Kharchenko told The Associated Press. “An enema is almost a symbol of our region.”

The Caucasus Mountains region is known for dozens of spas where enemas with water from mineral springs are routinely administered to treat digestive and other complaints.

Well, if the region makes its living from shooting mineral water up the asses of the well-to-do, they might as well celebrate it, right? It sure beats a giant bronze sphincter, no?

(I just hope D.C. doesn’t follow suit and erect a giant douche bag.)

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Pop! Goes the Culture

The National Institutes of Health have issued new guidelines for American doctors to diagnose and treat alcohol “abuse”:

With alcohol abuse […] most physicians don’t go looking for trouble and don’t recognize it until it’s breathing in their face. Over-drinking patients often don’t think of looking for help even if they know they are heading in the wrong direction. And society as a rule looks at alcohol treatment as a last-chance, 90-degree corner taken only at high speed.

All this will change if American physicians adopt the new guidelines for “Helping Patients Who Drink Too Much” promulgated by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The idea is to simplify the screening for excessive alcohol use in general medical practice and to convince clinicians and patients that early intervention for drinking that hasn’t yet wreaked havoc is both possible and useful.

“We’re trying to increase the accessibility and attractiveness of treatment to a much broader spectrum of people,” said Mark L. Willenbring, a psychiatrist who directs the Division of Treatment and Recovery Research at NIAAA.

Those especially targeted in the guidelines are heavy drinkers who are not yet physically dependent on alcohol but are at risk for becoming so.

a.k.a. - People who don’t have a problem.

“We know that that group responds very, very well to what we call facilitated self-change and brief motivational counseling. We could make that very widely available without much cost,” Willenbring said.

“Facilitated self-change?” That makes about as much sense as ‘mandatory volunteerism.’

A big part of the new strategy is to make primary care physicians — people without specialized training in addiction medicine — think about alcohol abuse the way many now think about depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Yes, because it makes all the sense in the world to equate a conscious decision to drink with an overwhelming desire to kill yourself, helpless panicking, and insatiable need for order.

Look, if your doctor wants to hector you about your drinking, that’s between you and your doctor. But the NIAAA is just another government organization establishing new rules to justify its own existence (read funding).

Heavy drinking isn’t a disease…it’s just a rack of disciprine.

Comments Off
Filed under: Profiles in Governance

So, I received a complaint from one of our long-lost contributors that a lot of my ADP’s are the same.

Well, excuse the hell out of me!

So, in deference to the individual whom shall not be named (and who should get his sorry behind blogging again), here is an ADP that isn’t so much a dance party, but a nice groove to kick off the afternoon.

Comments Off
Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

A nice little ditty from the 90s to get you ready for the weekend:

Comments Off
Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

While most people use YouTube for stupid shit, very stupid shit, and mind-bogglingly stupid (albeit highly entertaining) shit, every now and again someone harnesses the power of the Interwebs for a good cause.

In 1974, at the end of her eighth-grade year at Parkland Junior High School in Montgomery County, Kathy Beatty signed a classmate’s yearbook. “To a real sweet guy,” she wrote. “Too bad we had to get stuck with Rodman for math. See ya’ next year.”

The next year, Kathy was assaulted and left to die in a ditch not far from her home in Aspen Hill. No one was ever arrested.

The classmate, Steve Kerpelman, went on to become a police officer and then a private detective. He has now turned his attention to his former classmate, whose friendly, joking demeanor remains evident in how she signed the yearbook note: “Wov, Kathy Beatty.”

“I think this case can be solved,” Kerpelman said.

Kerpelman and his small Columbia-based firm, Legal Investigative Group, are employing an unusual tool: YouTube.

On a recent day, in a basement recording studio in Rockville, one of his investigators, Debra Hayre, narrated what would become a voice-over. “We are convinced someone knows something about that night,” she said. “And we are asking for your help.”

So, as my good deed for the day, here is the video:

Comments Off
Filed under: Freedom on Film, Pop! Goes the Culture

Given the surge in public transportation ridership, and the remarkable service they provide, I thought a song celebrating* the equal access for all (non-crippled, anyway) Americans was in order.

*And by “celebrate” I mean “name a song after,” ’cause I thought it would be jammin’ but examine all the flawsky-wawsky.

Comments Off
Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

Riding the Metro into the Swamp this morning, before I leaned my head against the glass to catch my last few minutes of sleep for the day, I noticed that there were stories in the freebie news rags about the dramatically increased Metro ridership due to gasoline prices. Even the conductor even commented on the number of people saying that “We all know why.”

So, it is with a great deal of chutzpah that the left-leaning codgers in the Senate tried to…get this…increase gas prices to punish the evil corporations:

The legislation at issue called for repealing some $17 billion in tax breaks for oil companies and for imposing a 25 percent windfall profits tax. Companies could avoid the windfall profits tax if they invested the money in renewable energy development or in new refineries.

…

“The Bush administration has failed to address these concerns,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. “Sadly, the Republican members of Congress have stood by his side, cheering him on, cheering on the oil companies as they make more money.”

reason’s Ronald Bailey had this to say:

In any case, [the U.S.] has had a previous bad experience with “windfall profits taxes” on oil companies. In 1980, as a parting gift, President Jimmy Carter and Congressional Democrats imposed just such a tax. How did it work out? Not so well. In 2005, the Tax Foundation looked at the issue and pointed out that the Congressional Research Service…

…found the windfall profits tax had the effect of decreasing domestic production by 3 percent to 6 percent, thereby increasing American dependence on foreign oil sources by 8 percent to 16 percent. A side effect was declining, not increasing, tax collections.

Great idea, huh? But it gets even worse. In 2005 Congressional testimony, ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva cited the same CRS study as finding…

…the windfall profits tax that was signed into law in 1980 and repealed in 1988 drained $79 billion in industry revenues during the 1980s that could have been used to invest in new oil production-leading to 1.6 billion fewer barrels of oil being produced in the U.S. from 1980-1988.

So not only does a “windfall profits tax” boost prices now, it reduces investment in oil exploration helping to keep prices high in the future. Let’s call that a “lose-lose” for American motorists.

And by the way, just how much in taxes has Big Oil paid? Back in 2005, the Tax Foundation reported…

…over the past 25 years, oil companies directly paid or remitted more than $2.2 trillion in taxes, after adjusting for inflation, to federal and state governments-including excise taxes, royalty payments and state and federal corporate income taxes. That amounts to more than three times what they earned in profits during the same period, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Department of Energy.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in Economics to understand that if you raise the cost of providing a service, the cost will be passed on to the consumer. Hell, you should be able to figure this out with an 8th grade education…or a memory that goes back further than the previous election cycle.

Comments Off
Filed under: The Dismal Science, Profiles in Governance

Okay, even the French do something cool every now and again.

PARIS — The operation in the private clinic off the Champs-Élysées involved one semicircular cut, 10 dissolving stitches and a discounted fee of $2,900.

But for the patient, a 23-year-old French student of Moroccan descent from Montpellier, the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new life: the illusion of virginity.

Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the thin vaginal membrane that normally breaks during the first act of intercourse.

Now, if we can just get her to forget all those cool tricks she learned…

Comments Off
Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Sexxx

From Down Under:

THE head of one of the nation’s elite private schools has questioned whether English should be compulsory for the senior years, saying the courses being taught are beyond the intellectual ability of most students.

Elite? Given their stated lack of ability to comprehend their (arguably) native language, perhaps they aren’t sure what “elite” means.

If the elite private school kids can’t understand English, their public school counterparts are probably just above helmet-wearing shit and drool factories.

But they’re all probably still better than D.C. schools.

Speaking of our nation’s worst school system, D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is trying to take away the vouchers that actually let D.C. kids escape the festering pit that is District public education.

For those of you unfamiliar with the would-be Congresswoman from D.C., here are a couple clips from her first appearance with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report:

This is the woman deciding the fate of D.C.’s kids. They’re screwed.

Comments Off
Filed under: Daily Rant

Apparently there was a cock-up over at the World Health Organization regarding the heterosexual HIV/AIDS “pandemic”:

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Kevin de Wha???

You really can’t make this shit up.

Comments Off
Filed under: Sexxx