CoffeeT00lz.com

I can't possibly be the only person who's had it with the "Coffee Exposed" sponsored Google link that keeps showing up in my Gmail "Web Clips" box. A snap to illustrate, or to jog your memory, depending:



Apparently, there's some "shocking secret" coffee companies don't want me to know, but is it SFW?

There's a not-so-secret I want the makers of coffeefool.com to know: you don't entice me to read your exposé by forcing me to acknowledge in the very link I click that I am a "coffee fool" who's been conned by coffee companies. Thanks for trying to remove the scales from my eyes, but might I suggest a less condescending approach? You sound like all those self-appointed enlighteners of the masses who are more worried about what's allegedly wrong with Kansas than what's wrong with their own message or organizing.

And we all know that allegedly "shocking" secrets almost never deliver, anyway, so I'm doubly put off. And then there's the fact that I've ignored it a million times already, and resent having to ignore it again. But since, like good capitalists, you've purchased a sponsored link, you've taken that choice away from me.

Go the fuck away, already.

tags technorati : coffee, coffeefool.com

Suicide Bombs

More news to embolden our enemies: Army suicide rates have skyrocketed.

There were 99 Army suicides last year -- nearly half of them soldiers who hadn't reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. [ . . . ] 69 were committed by troops who were not deployed in either war, though there were no figures immediately available on whether they had previously deployed.

Most striking is the youth of the suicides. There's a theory about that.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is ''failed intimate relationships, failed marriages.''

She said that although the military is worried about the stress caused by repeat deployments and tours of duty that have been stretched to 15 months, it has not found a direct relationship between suicides and combat or deployments.

''However, we do know that frequent deployments put a real strain on relationships, especially on marriages. So we believe that part of the increase is related to the increased stress in relationships,'' she said.

''Very often a young soldier gets a 'Dear John' or 'Dear Jane' e-mail and then takes his weapon and shoots himself,'' she said.

Notes an army chaplain, ''You're away from home, you have to put your life on hold. I know soldiers whose marriages have broken up or who couldn't pay their bills.''

Sounds to me like those army wives hate america. If they were real patriots, they would support our troops by staying in marriages that are impossible, emotionally and financially. By divorcing their husbands, breaking up with their boyfriends, or even just being too emotionally or financially demanding, they embolden the terrorists.

Why do army wives hate freedom?

Bottled Water and Car Escape Tools

Dave, who has no blog of his own (or I would link to it), and who probably hates me calling him Dave, notes the new top-sellers in the Automotive category at Amazon:


The LifeHammer item page tags the item as a "Hot Deal" at 4cents off (surely it is destined to be the Club of the 2000s), and exhorts us to hurry up and wait for our supplemental insurance policy:

Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.

Hurry, order now and we'll ship this item when it becomes available. You can cancel your order at any time. Your credit card will not be charged until we have shipped your order. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

So, in the absence of quality drinking water, we filter our water and drink it from innumerable plastic bottles (those of us who can afford it), and in the absence of safe bridges, we we will now install LifeHammers in our cars.

What's the answer for terrorists? Oh, right: trust your mechanic.

I can't wait to see if these things become the Club of the 2000s. At least people seem still concerned about keeping their cars clean.

tags technorati : LifeHammer, Minneapolis, Bridge Collapse

Into the Heart

Doctors at two London hospitals will be injecting the hearts of heart attack victims with the victim's own stem cells. According to the Guardian article:

Several animal studies and clinical trials in Europe have suggested that an infusion of bone marrow stem cells, within several days of a heart attack, can repair heart muscle and grow new blood vessels.

But the British trials, at the London Chest hospital and the Heart hospital, will be the first to test whether the treatment works within the critical five hours after an attack.

Around 300,000 people in the UK have a heart attack each year and nearly half die, according to NHS Direct. Half of those who die do so from cardiac arrest - when the heart stops completely - within three or four hours of the start of the attack.

Astonishing. A quarter of all heart attack victims (in the UK) die within three or four hours from heart failure. If you can stop that by using stem cells to repair the heart, that would be amazing.

One doctor notes:

"Because the stem cells are taken from the patient themselves, there are minimal ethical issues surrounding this procedure. There is also less likelihood of rejection complications."

Per Autoplectic's point on the last post, one wants instead to say, "there are minimal ways in which anyone could pretend to object to this procedure on ethical grounds." I haven't yet heard anyone kick up a fuss about this, but it would be interesting to see how evangelical leaders handle this procedure.