Well my Kittens it has been a fun ride over here at Crudely Interrupted. Sadly though due to bits and bobs I’d rather not go into the might Crudely Interrupted as now closed for business.
Fear not though Kittens, it’s big brother Keep Your Coins, I Want Change is getting a new fangled makeover this week and you can check in there for more.
Hope you all had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
Cheers!!!
J~
Ideas.
They are fairly important.
You might even be inclined to suggest that we may still need them as part of our evolution.
Ideas are good.
So if ideas are important vital to our continued evolution and our survival why the hell are people not talking about their ideas and only posting them on the side of buses so that they can shout down the opposing idea alongside a maxi pad advertisement?
From the Toronto Star:
‘Does God care if I’m gay?’ ads irks TTC riders
Complaints about a new religious ad campaign on TTC vehicles have prompted a review.
Launched on March 18, the campaign by Bus Stop Bible Studies is meant to get people to “consider their relationship with God,” says founder David Harrison. The posters, featured on the exterior of buses and streetcars, pose 24 questions, including “What is hell?” and “God, is 2012 the end?” Each question is followed by the address of a website where the topic at hand is discussed.
The one that’s drawing ire is “Does God care if I’m gay?” The photo of a tattooed young man directs transit riders to the page http://www.answerme.com/doesgodcare. The long answer to the question reads, in part, “We know from passages throughout Scripture that God hates homosexual acts BUT no more than any other sinful act.”
By Wednesday night, the answer on that site had been removed.
“It has become apparent that, while one is free to ask the question, `Does God care if I’m gay?’ one is not so free to answer the question from a Biblical perspective,” the edited site said.
“It seems that the whole message of God’s justice and grace was being misinterpreted. If anyone was offended by the original narrative we offer our sincerest apologies, this was never the intent.”
Before it was removed, the answer to the question read, in part: “We know ….
TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said he didn’t know how many complaints had come in, but he did say that after five objections, the commission’s ad committee undertakes a review. The Ontario Human Rights Code obliges the TTC to accept ads from religious organizations, he added.
Harrison, who said he attends a Brethren church in the city, said reaction to the ad has been “blown out of proportion.” “I don’t think the Bible even teaches that homosexuality is a sin,” he said. “The Bible does teach that any sexual act outside of marriage, straight or homosexual, is a sin.”
When asked about gays and lesbians who have had legal same-sex marriages in Canada, Harrison said “Who made same-sex marriage legal? God or man?”
“The fact that it’s legal doesn’t mean in God’s sight it’s right.”
Bus Stop Bible Studies has been running ads on the TTC since 2006, as well as on public transit in Burlington, North Bay, Sudbury and Calgary. A registered charity, it funds its campaigns through donations.
Last year, the Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign ran an ad on the TTC that read “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” After a similar complaints and review process, the TTC decided to let the ad keep running. Ross said he doesn’t know when the decision whether or not to pull the ad by Bus Stop Bible Studies will be made.
There you have it my Kittens.
God either does or does not definitely take public transit to work every day.
Not only that he definitely wants you to know that he absolutely does or does not exist and he may or may not love you. God may love you if you are gay (possibly in a very gay way in a bath house somewhere) or he thinks you are a dick for being gay and doesn’t love you, not even very gayly. We now also know for sure that God is either really pissed at you or isn’t for believing in him. Or her.
I think.
Oh who knows or really even cares anymore?
At least these folks aren’t running around with swords fighting the crusades again but have finally decided to really get serious about their very important messages and take their firmly held sacred beliefs to something as important and awe inspiring as an ad on the side of a bus. This way we know they aren’t screwing around and have really thought their messages through.
Since when does anyones beliefs, non beliefs or casual passing ambient thoughts have any bearing on each others lives?
After a few thousand years of this nonsense isn’t it finally enough to belive what you choose to believe, respect each other and leave everyone else the hell alone to think what they want? How does forcing other people to believe what you believe somehow galvanize your own faith or lack of it?
Is god or the atheist movement paying commission for membership renewals?
Has it become impossible that if somebody even feels like they want to share their personal thoughts on these matters to find somebody of an opposing belief and just simply have a rational respectful discussion for the purpose of learning? If so, why and if not then who gives a toss anyways?
Do we also all need to walk around dressed in a sandwich board telling the world that we also secretly listen to Rick Astley, enjoy the colour mauve, own a doggie named Mr Puddles and on Fridays after work like to masturbate to the Nature Channel while smashing ourselves in the head with a rolling pin for kicks after dressing up as a RuPaul? Should also then try to make everyone we encounter do exactly the same thing?
It’s a bit like hearing over and over now in 2010 that some folks are here, are queer and we have to all get used to it.
Here’s the thing. We are.
Congratulation on the gayness folks, hopefully you are getting quite good at it by now but we are all very used to it.
The same goes with these people beliefs, non beliefs, partial beliefs and everything in between. Who cares?
It’s pointless for all of these people to shout their way into our lives with bus posters, church signs, lapel pins and bumper stickers. They never change anyones mind and all they do is act as a very loud ridiculous banner proving the closemindedness of all sides by showing their inability to accept other peoples beliefs.
Nobody ever found god or stopped believing in a god because of a bus advertisement and if they did, would you really want anyone who will change the very fabric of their lives because of a slogan?
I am an atheist. Big fat deal. Does it make me better or worse than anyone else? Nope. Just another stinky human mammal. I’m not looking for converts, tax exemptions, a club to join, donations, hand outs, salvation or even a holiday to celebrate nothingness.
Morality and actions make the person, not what they believe about what happens when we die and if I were to need an alter to pray at, I’d worship love and human kindness.
If in my spare time when the dishes were put away and there was nothing decent on television I liked to kill some time by setting my balls on fire while singing “O Come O Ye Faithful” dressed up as General Patton and stuffing furry animals in my ass it probably wouldn’t affect you very much. Mostly because it would be private and non of your damned business. It would be just another one of those goofy things that people do to make themselves happy that doesn’t affect any other aspect of their lives and yet nobody has any bus stop posters encouraging others to try that particular activity for a refreshing change of pace.
These people never ever spend their money on an advertisement saying things like;
“Did you know Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking are atheists?”
Or
“I believe in God because it gives me comfort, peace and has taught me more about tolerance of others.”
They only attack each others and provoke each other while encouraging others support their groups with more donations. That’s all they accomplish. The make more money for themselves and keep people divided and pissed off.
So why do we even care what these dummies think anyways?
If your message is bullshit and seeks to shout down others who oppose you then shouldn’t they just simply be ignored or at least chuckled at like a fat kid with pudding on his shirt?
Taking the freedom from these people to spend their supporters money on advertising campaigns would be stifling freedom of speech. It is everyones right to say what the hell they want and we should always fight for our own and other peoples right (especially the people we disagree with) to keep that fundamental right. It might also be a good idea just say “who cares what you think anyways? Now go wave your brochure around somewhere else because what I think is none of your damned business anyways.”
One thing is for sure about religion and atheism and is a bit too long and complicated to fit on the side of a bus.
You sure won’t find any atheists strapping bombs on themselves and blowing themselves to pieces in a crowded subway station.
There also wasn’t one religious person in The Soviet Union who thought that killing people of faith and destroying churches was a good thing.
Both sides have been very clear about their willingness to inflict their opinions about the after life in a very big way.
Here’s another bus poster you will never see an atheist organization pay for;
“Did you know Fidel Castro is an atheist?”
You’ll also never see any Christians print any posters that say;
“We got it a bit wrong. Jesus was black. White people with blue eyes didn’t live in that part of the world back then. Ooops. Sorry about that.”
Kittens do you know why the Mayan people disappeared? I’ll give you a hint. They didn’t go shopping one day, forget where they parked and then wandered off. They disappeared because they really enjoyed gold.
They Mayans weren’t exactly the fun lovable bunch that most people think they were. They loved human sacrifice, war, torture, greed, lust and sports. Their favorite sport was believed to be a form of football (soccer) mixed with volleyball where competitors gathered in a dug out arena where they would violently kick a ball across the filed over a form of net while beating each other to death. They would play for days and night at a time until there was only one competitor left standing and as a reward for his victory, they would then kill him.
The Mayans didn’t all die off in the arena or on an altar while being tortured and sacrificed. When they weren’t killing each other or being killed they extracted gold from the local indigenous rock and made jewelry.
For those of you not familiar with the highly complex working of metallurgy, here is how they did it.
They started a big fire, tossed some rocks into a pot and waited for the gold to liquefy. and release itself from the rocks. Then they took the rocks out of the pot (probably burning themselves while doing so) and kept the gold while tossing the rocks away.
Yep. That’s it. Pretty simple stuff isn’t it Kittens?
It was all very golden and lovely until it killed them and here is how it happened.
The Mayans weren’t killed by an alien attack, it was because of the fire that they needed to get gold out of the rocks.
As we all know fire requires one key component. Wood. The bigger the fire, the more wood you will need. The Mayans probably would have burned each other alive if they could have but humans do not ignite very easily unless you are Richard Pryor on a crack bender.
They cut down tress from the rolling hilled forests for their fires until there was simply no more wood. The rainy seasons came along, soil erosion tore the landscape apart and vegitation would no longer grow. That vegitation was also their food.
No soil meant no food so the Mayans buggered off.
It’s as simple as that. They pooched themselves out of exitance because they just wouldn’t leave nature the hell alone to replenish itself and thus themselves because they were greedy little punks that loved to look at shiny objects.
Does any of this sound familiar yet?
As we now know they forests and vegitation returned and if wandering around some old ruins is your idea of a nice family vacation you can go and check out the Mayans hometown without being pestered by any actually Mayans because now they mostly just hang around towns selling tourists clay snow globes. Nature sorted itself out without the pesky annoyance of humans and everything worked out just dandy, unless you were a Mayan.
This all happened thousands of years ago and not very much has changed except now we have cell phones that you can watch porn movies on and microwavable bacon wrapped funnel cake Spam burgers on a stick. We’re still just humans wandering around keeping ourselves busy killing each other for fun (not that this is a bad thing) behaving badly and gathering up as much shiny objects as our oversized over mortgaged houses will hold. If we could, humans would wipe their asses on an orphan child with a third degree burn and set fire to a basket full of puppies in trade for a new diamond encrusted monogramed celebrity endorsed salad shooter.
Thousands of years have passed and billions of people have lived and died on earth and hardly any of them have learned one single fucking lesson about the planet and our very small place on it. This is why I always root for nature and against mankind.
Simply put, it’s because humans suck.
Thankfully it isn’t much of a gamble. Inevitably nature will always win, just ask Sonny Bono. In the age old epic battle of man on skis versus a large tree, the tree always wins. Sonny 0 – Tree 1. If that reference seems a tad bit arcain, then Pompeii is also a handy reminder. People who live on a volcano better learn to run. This is why I wish there were more volcanos and all cities were built upon them.
You’d think that after a while humanity would have gotten the message and learned a thing or two.
After recently spending a couple of weeks sitting on a beach getting tanned and watching aging baby boomers lose the fight against gravity and dolphins frolicking alongside some whales and pelicans with my family, a person tends to get humbled very quickly. Not because watching folks shuffling around in knee high black socks and wing tips in shorts on a beach reminds us of our own mortality, but because when you spend an extensive amount of time listening and watching an self cleaning ocean in an un manicured environmentally protected southern chunk of gator country you tend to notice how little you mean to your surroundings.
It was an odd awakening to put it mildly that came to me on a day where I stood literally in opened mouth awe of a two thousand year old tree in the Everglades that it occurred to me I had accidentally become an environmentalist.
As one would assume a two thousand year old tree is fairly impressive. Not because it is massive (and it is) but mostly because it has endured two thousand years of hurricanes, fires, wars, lighting strikes, disease and most horrifyingly, visits from environmentalists to admire it.
Environmentalists are usually annoying enough to make an average person want to club them like a baby seal with their yoga mat and not just because they rarely see the Adrienne Barbeau through The Fog. Environmentalists claim to want to preserve nature and the planet so they do impressive things like interfere with it in every way possible. Nobody every asked the tree if it needed a hug. Chances are that unlike the people trying to hug a tree, the tree is capable of sufficient self esteem and probably doesn’t need to have it’s ego reinforced by the panderings of a stinky human in a Phish t-shirt and a soul patch. Why don’t these people every try to hug a gopher in a bad mood or a hungry pissed off vampire bat?
It’s because Steve Irwin did it one too many times and a fish killed him and then swam away to mind it’s own business.
People who claim to champion the environment do so because it makes them feel like they are helping to shape the world into a better place, but who are they doing it for? They sure aren’t doing it for any poo flinging monkeys, they are doing because they are interested in protecting THEIR environment, not THE environment.
They want to have a nice place to live and exploit. That’s all there is to it. Nothing more, nothing less and why I have accidentally become an environmentalist. It’s because after being truly humbled by the spectacle of an unmanicured natural harsh planet, and grasping a basic understanding (basic is roughly about as good as it can get because human minds are small and nature is old large and wise) that when nature is left alone it it will at best hopefully do the same to you. It’s rather like a bear that way. You will probably never be savagely mangled by a bear if you stay our its way. If you try to keep one as a pet because you want to own and exploit a bear, don’t be too surprised when it eats you.
The Mayan people raped and gutted the land to satisfy their lust for trinkets and shiny bits of metal they melted from the very bedrock they lived on and died off after they took from the land until it had nothing left to give and nothing has changed since then. We are still doing exactly the same thing and will probably be met at least partially with the same fate and that probably isn’t such a bad thing.
Humans are selfish repulsive foraging mammals who think that just because we have invented such delightful things and rituals like Pop Tarts, racial hatred and crotchless undies made out of hemp for horny eco friendly hipsters we have some sway over what the planet thinks of us. A smaller group of humans think that by attending massive arena benefit concerts performed by over earnest rock stars who travel by private Panda burning zeppelins and participate in 1k fun runs to save an endangered Jackalopes they will have an impact to make the world a better nicer place for them to live. As if they think they can reason with a fault line or distract a typhoon with their iPods and play them a little Dave Mathews to make it go away or even better, destroy somebody elses place to live.
Humans are to the planet what Nick Nolte is to a dinner party with a fully stocked bar. Rather than doing the inconceivable and learn from a group of nearly extinct people that vanished a few thousand years ago and stop using up so much of the planet so we can have more trinkets and just buy less stuff, we’re more satisfied to just make ourselves try to feel better with distractions and slogans.
Televisions, waffle makers, vibrators, Steely Dan compact discs, beer hats, removable tattoos, garage door openers, Zima, bubble gum, gold teeth, rubber dog shit, Groucho Marx glasses and turkey deep fryers all come from the earth in one form or another, and most people own at least one of not most of those items.
This is what killed off the Mayans. This is what is killing us off in short order and not even Woody Harrelson armed with a solar powered ray gun that fires good intentions is immune.
That old tree was around when the Mayans were busy ripping the still beating hearts out of each other for giggles but unlike them, the tree is still here. Frankly, I’m happier the tree is still here and they took a page from the Corey Haim big book of party tricks.
This is why I am an accidental environmentalist. I don’t need pretend solutions and if I want to feel good about the world I am luckily enough to temporarily live upon, I know where to do it. Outside watching some pelicans eat a fish and not on the Discovery channel in a La-Z-Boy with a bucket of battered creamy Ranch style jelly bean coated chilli dogs.
Nature is a pretty big screen and that never has any commercials and doesn’t try to sell you a Comfort Wipe. It’s the best show on earth if you just leave it alone and try not to make too much of a mess because we’re really only just house guests. It’s when you forget that last bit when it gets pissed off and reminds you who is boss with a nice refreshing ice age or volcanic eruption.
I just wish there was more of the latter in the places that need reminding the most.
Philly would be a good start.
The Guardian’s quick carbon calculatorCalculate the impact of your travel, home and shopping habits with our simple carbon footprint calculator.
Drag the sliders to the left or right based on your spending and lifestyle patterns to compare your footprint to the UK average and other countries around the world
Check it out. This is an online carbon calculator from the British paper The Guardian. Just give it a click, read the instructions and take a look at what your carbon footprint is like. Dammit the Brits are clevver little bunnies aren’t they?
Hello Kittens! Big Daddy has some bad news for you today I’m afraid. By reading this blog you are single handedly killing every last living creature on earth. The sky will burn, the oceans will boil, volcanos will erupt and after mankind has been forced to live upon catamarans armed with machine guns for a while because the world becomes one big puddle and grow gills, will eventually perish. I hope you’re proud of yourself, perhaps now you’d enjoy some nice cleansing self flagellation.
It turns out according in the Britain’s Guardian newspaper yesterday, the internet has become rather popular these days and therefore uses quite a bit of energy. Who knew that by playing hours of online poker whilst simultaneously downloading ring tones and porn while checking your email, shopping on eBay and making sure you Twitter as much of your life story as humanly possible one sentence at a time, might actually have some environmental repercussions and end up murdering a baby seal or two as if you personally swung the club? Apparently, that’s exactly what you’re doing, you naughty, naughty web surfer you. I suspect you may want to take a moment for self reflection and behead a few crying tiger cubs. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Now that you’ve had a nice refreshing glass if dying baby tiger tears, here’s how it goes. It seems a pack of scientists and industry leaders had a chit chat with The Guardian about how companies like Google, Microsoft, Sun and so on are crapping microchips over the cost of energy to deliver one and a half billion internet users billions of web pages, videos and files online. It’s interesting what happens when you read a newspaper for something other than the gossip section, and especially one from (gasp!) another country than your own. You pick up a nugget or two.
Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of web servers is a guy who probably knows a thing or two about this stuff. He said in the article “In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption,” “We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more,” he said. “If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm.”Jesus tap dancing christ, that doesn’t sound good does it?
It turns out that the energy footprint of the internet is growing at 10% per year and that according to Credit Suisse, the good folks at YouTube are going to get Dirty Sanchezed and lose roughly $470m this year because of the high cost of delivering all of those videos of people being hit in the balls that we can’t seem to live without anymore. Companies like Google, YouTube, Microsoft are pissing themselves not only over the cost of energy that is only going to continue to grow, but how their carbon debt has gone all Hiroshimaey and is now even bigger than the airline industry. To put that into prospective, peoples use of the internet for things like stalking people you dated in high school has a greater negative effect on the planet than flying planes loaded with overweight American tourists to Europe so they can speak too loudly on their cell phones in restaurants about how they can’t get a decent cheeseburger anywhere and how nobody speaks ‘American’.
Now we all enjoy the internet. Some folks even make a living goofing off on it (tee hee). It’s great for Googling things, it helps lazy drunken students do their homework so they can pretend to learn stuff, nauseating skanks like Tila Tequilla can use it to get famous, you can post every last ambient thought you’ve ever had about the daily minutia of your life on a social networking site or blog, it’s swell for shopping for even more and more stuff online, everybody loves those emails friends and co-workers send each other not so comically slagging the opposite sex, there’s all that wonderful celebrity gossip and some really super fun folks like Gary Glitter get to play around on it and have a jolly good time on it, so much so that occasionally some Thai policemen want to talk to them about it. Yessiree, the internet and all of its many good uses fucking rock. It’s a shame that it we may as well all harpoon a whale every time we use it. Sorry about that Shamu, but the folks really enjoy Twitter.
So by now folks on both side of the energy debate should really be shitting themselves. It’s one thing to talk about things, but threaten something important like your favorite porno site and people get SERIOUS. If you put your ear to your hard drive you will hear cries coming from around the world of “but what about my blog! I have so much to share about my life!” That is the kind of thing that wakes people up and gets their attention pretty damned quick and may possibly do the previously unthinkable, research it for themselves.
Sadly, that won’t be to easy. The good folks at Google see these things as trade secrets and are clamming up on the subject. They won’t talk about how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have. Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California who is a fellow who seems like he also knows a bit about this kind of thing, did a study on it. He said that US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.
Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year. “Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services,” he said. “It’s a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand.” He also pointed out that this would lead to communications disruptions and would cost businesses millions every hour.
Google is taking this stuff so seriously that they are actually doing something about it. Hell, they’re Google, I should hope so. Urs Hölzle, a guy with the most impressive name yet who really sounds like he knows something about this stuff told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. “You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don’t have exponential growth of revenue to go with it,” and that “With good engineering we’re trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up.”
I’ve never been a man to argue with anyone whose name contains that many consonants and an umlaut. If they can be bothered to learn how to pronounce their own names and take the time to put a couple of dots over the vowels, then chances are they have a little something upstairs. Urs and his gang has gone so far as to fork out $2.3bn by building it’s own its own data centres, but nobody seems to know if they are working yet. Companies like Microsoft are trying things like new cooling methods and using older technology that can be found in older laptops because the batteries are more energy efficient. So there you have it. While people are debating away online and dicking around about who is right we are wiping our asses with a rain forrest, companies like Google are dumping billions of dollars into finding ways for you to still check up on your ex on Facebook for free, and trying to slay fewer panda bears while doing it.
The companies aren’t getting any more revenue from advertisers of their trouble either. They are doing this for free, so you can still surf their sites for free and provide their advertisers with affordable rates. They are taking expensive measures to find a way to deal with their energy costs and find way in which to least fuck up the planet. You can still read and contribute to all the blogs you wish until your heart is content and until the reading of this particular blog to could have done so without realizing you may as well just ignited a small mountain of cast away truck tires and thrown some giraffes onto the flames for all the good you are doing for the environment.
No matter what side of the nuclear argument you are on, you have to admire these companies. They owe absolutely nothing to anybody other than their shareholders, workers, advertisers and users. They could care less about the impact it has on the earth. They could just find new ways to streamline themselves or pass on the costs to the end user, you, but they don’t.
Our government(s) sure haven’t spent $2.3bn on research to find new and better solutions for the end user, but they damned sure have charged us in taxes. Google is making certain that they never suffer a brown out of their service thus causing problems for the people who are trying to watch dancing banana peels on YouTube and are would like you to murder fewer badly burned Albanian boys so while you are doing it. Our government(s) haven’t considered any of these things as part of their quest to make the world a greener place. If the government gets its way no matter what kind of investments companies like Google make, these things will still happen anyway because they will be reliant on whatever power source they have to draw upon. The goverment took the advice of some kid with a myspace page and decided that it was just lovely (because if you can’t trust myspace folks, then who can you trust) and they should believe them. Perhaps if we can find anything unifying in determining which way we should proceed is to look at the things that effect us, and what we are prepared to do about them. If we don’t think things like paying a few extra bucks is worth investigating, then how about something really important that effects us all. THIS!
Kittens I have a couple of interesting facts for you today. The first fact is that 78 out of 34,011,000 equals 0.0002293375672576519%. The second is that 16, 000 of 6,804,600,000 is 0.00023513505569761634%.
Now you may be asking yourself if I have just offered you the odds of winning the 6/49 lottery. Those odds are actually 1 in 13,983,816 to win the full jackpot and send you to a real estate office so that you can buy and island and populate it with personal slaves.
Here are some other odds to put the first set of percentages into perspective, and yes…they are real.
Odds of bowling a 300 game: 11,500 to 1
Odds of getting a hole in one: 5,000 to 1
Odds of getting canonized: 20,000,000 to 1
Odds of being an astronaut: 13,200,000 to 1
Odds of winning an Olympic medal: 662,000 to 1
Odds of an American speaking Cherokee: 15000 to 1
Odds that a person between the age of 18 and 29 does NOT read a newspaper regularly: 3 to 1
Odds that an American adult does not want to live to age 120 under any circumstances: 3 to 2
Odds of injury from fireworks: 19,556 to 1
Odds of injury from shaving: 6,585 to 1
Odds of injury from using a chain saw: 4,464 to 1
Odds of injury from mowing the lawn: 3,623 to 1
Odds of fatally slipping in bath or shower: 2,232 to 1
Odds of drowning in a bathtub: 685,000 to 1
Odds of being killed on a 5-mile bus trip: 500,000,000 to 1
Odds of being killed sometime in the next year in any sort of transportation accident: 77 to 1
Odds of being killed in any sort of non-transportation accident: 69 to 1
Odds of being struck by lightning: 576,000 to 1
Odds of being killed by lightning: 2,320,000 to 1
Odds of being murdered: 18,000 to 1
Odds of getting away with murder: 2 to 1
Odds of being the victim of serious crime in your lifetime: 20 to 1
Odds of dating a supermodel: 88,000 to 1
Odds of being considered possessed by Satan: 7,000 to 1
Odds that a first marriage will survive without separation or divorce for 15 years: 1.3 to 1
Odds that a celebrity marriage will last a lifetime: 3 to 1
Odds of getting hemorrhoids: 25 to 1
Odds of being born a twin in North America: 90 to 1
Odds of being on plane with a drunken pilot: 117 to 1
Odds of winning a straight up on a single number in online roulette: 37 to 1
Odds of being audited by the IRS: 175 to 1
Odds of having your identity stolen: 200 to 1
Odds of dating a millionaire: 215 to 1
Odds of dating a supermodel: 88,000 to 1
Odds of writing a New York Times best seller: 220 to 1
Odds of finding out your child is a genius: 250 to 1
Odds of catching a ball at a major league ballgame: 563 to 1
Odds of becoming a pro athlete: 22,000 to 1
Odds of finding a four-leaf clover on first try: 10,000 to 1
Odds of a person in the military winning the Medal of Honor: 11,000 to 1
Odds of winning an Academy Award: 11,500 to 1
Odds of striking it rich on Antiques Roadshow: 60,000 to 1
Odds of getting a royal flush in poker on first five cards dealt: 649,740 to 1
Odds of spotting a UFO today: 3,000,000 to 1
Odds of becoming president: 10,000,000 to 1
Odds of winning the California lottery: 13,000,000 to 1
Odds of becoming a saint: 20,000,000 to 1
Odds of a meteor landing on your house: 182,138,880,000,000 to 1
Chance of an American home having at least one container of ice cream in the freezer: 9 in 10.
Chance of dying from any kind of injury during the next year: 1 in 1,820
Chance of dying from intentional self-harm: 1 in 9,380
Chance of dying from an assault: 1 in 16,421
Chance of dying from a car accident: 1 in 18,585
Chance of dying from any kind of fall: 1 in 20,666
Chance of dying from accidental drowning: 1 in 79,065
Chance of dying from exposure to smoke, fire, and flames: 1 in 81,524
Chance of dying in an explosion: 1 in 107,787
Chance that Earth will experience a catastrophic collision with an asteroid in the next 100 years: 1 in 5,000
Chance of dying in such a collision: 1 in 20,000
Chance of dying from exposure to forces of nature (heat, cold, lightning, earthquake, flood): 1 in 225,107
Chance of dying in an airplane accident: 1 in 354,319
Chance of dying from choking on food: 1 in 370,035
Chance of dying in a terrorist attack while visiting a foreign country: 1 in 650,000
Chance of dying in a fireworks accident: 1 in 1,000,000
Chance of dying from overexertion, travel or privation: 1 in 1,428,377
Chance of dying from food poisoning: 1 in 3,000,000
Chance of dying from legal execution: 1 in 3,441,325
Chance of dying from contact with hot tap water: 1 in 5,005,564
Chance of dying from parts falling off an airplane: 1 in 10,000,000
Chance of dying from ignition or melting of nightwear: 1 in 30,589,556
Chance of dying from being bitten by a dog: 1 in 700,000
Chance of dying from contact with a venomous animal or plant: 1 in 3,441,325
Chance of dying from being bitten or struck by mammals (other than dogs or humans): 1 in 4,235,477
Chance of winning a bingo game where 100 players manage four cards each: 1 in 100
Chance of dying from a mountain lion attack in California: 1 in 32,000,000
Chance of dying from a shark attack: 1 in 300,000,000
By now my Kittens you may be thinking that I have given you the chances of the likelyhood that you will be bitten by Dracula or that Jesus will return to earth and become your shoe shining butler.
Nope.
0.0002293375672576519% if the percentage of Canadians who have died from H1N1 in Canada during the 2009/2010 flu season and 0.00023513505569761634% is the percentage of people who have died from H1N1 globally during the same period of time.
That means 78 out of 34,011,000 people have died in Canada and 16,000 out of 6,804,600,000 people on earth caught H1N1 and bought the big banana.
This is what the World Health Organization, the media, our governments and even ourselves called an alarming pandemic and scared everyone over the edge with terror. You literally have a better chance of being hit by a meteor and then end up being sainted for it than dying from H1N1, but here is the really good news. The World Health Organization says you can all relax now, because the danger is over and you can now relax and enjoy your lives. Please adjust your trajectory accordingly.
H1N1 flu pandemic unofficially over for now;
February 24, 2010
Theresa Boyle
HEALTH REPORTER
While the World Health Organization says H1N1 has not peaked internationally, the pandemic is considered unofficially over in Canada.
“Clearly, in Canada, H1N1 is gone,” Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infectious disease prevention and control with the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, said Tuesday.
“It doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, but it’s gone right now. There is really no flu around. That’s everywhere across the country,” Gardam said. Toronto Public Health closed the last of its mass vaccination clinics in January, but some physicians continue to offer the shot in their offices, said Dr. Barbara Yaffe, the city’s associate medical officer of health.
“Over the last while we have had zero to two to three cases reported a week,” she said.
The WHO’s emergency committee, composed of 15 experts, met Tuesday and said it’s premature to downgrade the global flu outbreak.
WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan will make the official announcement Wednesday, and governments and the public will be watching the wording very carefully.
Dr. Nancy Cox of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a member of the WHO emergency committee, said in an interview with Reuters that “it’s very, very difficult to get the wording exactly right.”
According to the WHO’s latest weekly update, H1N1 transmission persists in limited areas of eastern and southern Europe, South Asia, and in East Asia.
Officially, Canada is still in pandemic mode and won’t move away from level 6 on the alert scale until the United Nations agency does.
According to statistics from the Public Health Agency of Canada, visits to doctors by patients with flu-like symptoms spiked in late October.
Of every 1,000 doctor visits, about 113 were from patients with influenza symptoms.
“It peaked by Halloween, and by the end of December it was largely gone. Over the last two months it has been essentially nonexistent,” Gardam said.
A feared “third wave” won’t happen here since so many people now have antibodies against the virus, Gardam said.
Estimates show that 20 to 30 per cent of Ontarians got the bug, he noted. And according to the health ministry, 38 per cent of the population has been vaccinated.
Nevertheless, a similar strain is expected to come back as seasonal flu next fall. But much of the population will have the antibodies to fight it and a vaccine will be ready in time for flu season.
The H1N1 virus itself was not as lethal as officials first feared. Worldwide, it has been responsible for almost 16,000 deaths. In Canada, it resulted in 78 deaths and 1,488 hospitalizations.
Oh my that is uncomfortable isn’t it Kittens?
The World Health Organization says the pandemic that was never a pandemic is over and all of you may now enjoy the tasty side effects of the flu shots they ordered everybody to go and have stuffed into them.
The media got everyone into a nice frothy terrified state and boosted their ratings and some very rich people made a crapload of money selling the flu shot to countries and patients. Even the very source of this story, The Toronto Star newspaper also warned us that Coco Rice Krispies aren’t a cure for H1N1.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
H1N1 Vaccine Manufacturers: Stocks That May Soar
Here is a list of H1N1 vaccine (swine flu shot) manufacturers. These are expected to benefit from the purchases of hundreds of millions of dosages by governments around the world.
Note that this is purely from a stock market point of view. These companies may become quite popular and their shares may soar. There is nothing stated here about the safety of the vaccines.
NOVARTIS (NVS)
Novartis is the Swiss company we reported a few weeks ago was the first to have a successful H1N1 vaccine. It expects to have a vaccine ready by October. It has several orders for H1N1 vaccines.
GLAXOSMITHKLINE (GSK)
Glaxo is testing a H1N1 flu vaccine in humans and expects to start giving the results to government agencies in September. It has won orders for H1N1 swine flu vaccine from nine governments, for a total number of doses ordered to 300+ million, with more orders still to come. Potentai windfall: $3 billion in the next six months or so.
SANOFI-AVENTIS (SNY)
SNY is one of the world leaders in flu shots and has received large orders from the U.S. and France, and it is in discussions with more than 30 countries about supplies.
It has a $250 million deal to provide the U.S. with the swine flu antigen in bulk.
ASTRAZENECA (AZN)
Astra had an initial $90 million order from the U.S. Its vaccine technology is different from traditional injectable flu shots in that it is a mist sprayed into the nose, making it far more comfortable to apply.
SINOVAC (SVA)
China’s SVA was the first company worldwide to complete clinical trials for an H1N1 vaccine, and that received approval from Chinese health authorities.
BAXTER (BAX)
Baxter completed its first commercial batches of H1N1 vaccine made using a cell culture process designed to be faster than traditional chicken egg-based vaccine production methods. It has supply contracts with several countries (Britain, Ireland and New Zealand). It said it could not take on additional orders.
INOVIO BIOMEDICAL (INO)
Inovio claims its DNA-based H1N1 flu vaccines provide protection against the swine flu strain in pigs and mice. It expects to begin manufacturing vaccine supplies for H1N1 clinical studies soon (this was August) hut it does not yet have the U.S. approval to begin human trials
NOVAVAX (NVAX)
U.S. biotech company Novavax has a new kind of influenza vaccine that works against the swine flu virus in animals. It would have to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before it could test the new vaccine in people and years of testing are likely to be required before such a new formulation could be widely used in humans
CSL (CMXHY.PK)
Australia’s CSL trades as an over the counter stock, it has been in mass production of H1N1 vaccine for several weeks, completed a first batch of 2 million shots and is producing 1-1.5 million doses per week until it fills all orders.
It has received $180 million contract from the U.S. for H1N1 flu vaccine and an order for 21 million doses from Australia. It expected to book sales of about $250 million from swine flu vaccines in the year to 2010.
SOLVAY (SVYSK.PK)
Belgium’s Solvay said that production of a cell-based H1N1 vaccine for clinical studies would start in August.
HUALAN BIOLOGICAL This Chinese company received the go-head from a Chinese panel of experts for an H1N1 vaccine.
GREEN CROSS
South Korea’s Green Cross can be expected to benefit from the $155M set aside for H1N1 vaccine preparations.Getting the picture yet Kittens?
This is what happens when fear and ignorance win.
Fear was artificially created by the media for their sponsors to sell more of their product. This is not funny stuff, and the figures and facts here are real. They aren’t the artificially inflated numbers that you read about H1N1 at the beginning of the flu season, and you sure won’t find these numbers in the media today now that the World Health Organization says it is over.
Australia’s CSL makes this point by selling $250 million worth of H1N1 shots to the USA. When the H1N1 flu was reported in the media we did what any sane family would do. We checked into it and by that I don’t mean watching CNN and letting them form our opinions for us.
It took about 45 entire seconds to remember that since the world is not flat, seasons are different all over the world and those lovely criminals, Australia had just entered into their summer when our winter was beginning they would know how bad H1N1 was because they already finished their flu season and are also heavily populated by Chinese immigrants and are closely situated to China where swine flu began.
After another minute or so it took to Google how it effected Australia we learned that after all was said and done with their H1N1 season, it had turned out to be no big deal. In fact, there was so very little impact from H1N1 in Australia they reported they had a lower flu season casualty rate this year than in previous outbreaks.
This is something that the media never ever tells you when they are busy writing about the deaths from H1N1 or whatever the next pandemic du’ jour may be.
We read that 78 Canadians died from H1N1 but you never are exposed to any statistics regarding deaths from the flu in previous years. You are also never told of any pre existing medical conditions that the people who died may have had, where they lived in geographic relation to a hospital or even a pharmacy.
There is never any information on the age or any demographic background on these people and all of these facts contribute to whether H1N1 is a real threat and how bad it is compared to previous years. The media never reports these facts and even our own government doesn’t make it easy to find and there is a reason for that.
An aware media savvy population of critical thinkers is bad for business and H1N1 is business. It kept you glued to CNN to watch stories about the H1N1 pandemic that was sponsored by the advertisers of the flu shot.
There were no hard questions raised about the statistics from previous years at all. Nothing about demographics, previous health or even so much as geography. Not one useful piece of information to keep the public actually informed so instead most families raced their kids into a doctors office and had them jabbed with a potentially poison with a dangerous toxin.
H1N1 sold a hell of a lot of newspapers. It also sold millions of dollars of advertising time on news media stations to makers of the flu shot and it sure did get governments to spent billions on the flu shot with your tax dollars. These are indisputable facts.
Another fact is that you could not go to a bank and get a loan to refurbish a hot dog cart business unless you could show your last 5 years of sales, expenses, inventory and liquidity, debt servicing ratio or even what corner you park the hot dog cart every single day.
These statistics and facts where systematically omitted by the media and our government and the voting population went along with what they were told and couldn’t even be bothered to Google the facts for themselves, but you can bet your ass that they would Google themselves into a spastic euphoric frenzy if they had stock in one of the makers of the flu shot and were tracking their stocks profits.
The people who pushed the panic button in the media should be ashamed of themselves. Yes there was a pandemic and it will be back next year but it wasn’t a case of the sniffles. It was fear mongering and ignorance and there is no shot you can take to prevent it from happening, but you can immunize yourself with those rarely used tools that you do not even need to leave the house to find. The facts and they are available on Google when you aren’t busy wasting away on Twitter.
Here is another statistic that is true.
You have a 1 in 15,263,000 chance of being adopted by Madonna in Malawi this year. That is still twice and one third more likely to happen than contracting H1N1 in Canada.
Maybe the media should report that fact because Madonna sells a lot of newspapers as well.
Today my Kittens I have a special treat for you all.
The family and I are going to be packing up and boarding a train for a long awaited break from the real world and heading deep into the southern bits of the USA for a while to a place called Flagler Beach.
Rather than walk you through the history of Flagler my out right outta sight Missus is going to be your tour guide today and fill you in on Flagler and some of it’s stories.
She spent a good portion of her life there and since I have not yet been to Flagler she is far more qualified to set up the story.
While we’re down there I’ll be writing our daily accounts of what we are up to and the terrifying inevitable interactions I will be forced against my will to have with the locals. Since subtlety has never exactly been my forte’ and I will probably have little to no interest in even explaining the definition of the word forte’ to a bunch or Americans who think french fries are a food group she isn’t exactly encouraged that I will be able to place nice with the natives.
On that point she is very correct. I don’t do Dr Phil, I do Mr T so it should be an mildly amusing to say the least. That is, until the mob shows up.
Thankfully she easily succumbs to bribes so it didn’t take much to request her to write down some of the things she has told me about Flagler and here are a few of her accounts;
Tasked with prepping my consort for our plummet into southern culture, I had to walk a fine line between idyllic childhood nostalgia and unbiased fact. The latter, proving much more difficult to achieve without betraying my own memories than previously imagined.
Fortunately, that duality fits well with southern sensibilities and proved to be self serving.
Flagler Beach.
Last of the true ‘small town USA’ locales…for better or for worse.
The basic demographics place Flagler 30 minutes south of St Augustine, 15 minutes north of Daytona Beach on the A1A Atlantic side. Deemed a ‘city’ within Volusia County, it contains zero retail chain franchises anywhere within visual range of the Ocean. The Northeast Florida 72-mile segment of historic State Road A1A is a local bragging right to the longest uninterrupted Ocean View on the eastern Coast of the state.
Population floats around the 5 000 mark. History enthusiasts can peruse how this place was actively bought and sold from about 1513 onward until the H.M. Flagler Oil fortune brought it’s economic development to modern day fruition via Big Iron Horse, here:
http://www.flaglerlibrary.org/history/flaglercounty/flagler3.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morrison_Flagler
These are the facts. They say nothing about the ‘truth’ of this place.
I suppose the place where truth and fact marry is perception. It is the same place that creates varied opinion. Since all I have is mine, that’s what I’ll offer up.
It is paradise. Tactile and visual paradise. The terrain, both parched and vibrant overloads the senses. Dunes of pumpkin hued sand punctuated by the spiky palm, serpentine grasses and occasional lone cactus roll gently into a seemingly endless horizon of shoreline and sky. You walk, deliciously off balance, through this dry loam towards the Atlantic. A Martimer by birth, perhaps I am biased in my love and awe of it. Perpetually overwhelmed by the comfort of feeling so completely insignificant in it’s presence. No doubt a correlation to the old timers who come here to live out their last stretch in peace. Flagler Beach blissfully offers a relentless auditory backdrop of the Atlantic’s immaculate and unrestrained power…crashing surf…battering shoreline..24 hours a day. It literally drowns out the ‘small stuff’ I am so used to dwelling on here in the city.
It is with a selfish reluctance that I disclose this sleepy Floridian town’s name. It is a spot that dances between upscale and shanty, modestly and wisely disguising it’s affluence behind the worn building façades and in the unshaven, unkempt pier fishermen’s appearances. It is surrounded by environmentally (and fiercely) protected land and indigenous species. The residents through voting locally and not so subtle scare tactics have kept out all chain restaurants and franchises of any kind here. Agree or disagree with their POV, it is a luxury to return here for the past 28 years without being subjected to golden arches or overpriced coffee ‘experiences’ . Don’t get me wrong, it ain’t perfect. You must request your pulled-from-the-sea- fresh fish grilled not fried, and I dare you to not succumb to the delicious fatty (albeit home cooked) Mom n’ Pop style fare. When in Rome….
There is not an ounce of sophistication or pretense here, and that is it’s true charm and character. Accurate of it’s physicality and residents alike. As a non-resident, a Canadian, and annual inhabitant of Flagler, I do have a stronger sense of it’s true identity than that of the average vacationer through my acquaintance with the locals.
I have NO delusions as to my perceived status while ‘stoppin’ a spell’. To the permanent inhabitants I am at best a frequent guest, and as such, I follow the local laws that apply to the nesting turtles between May and October: Observe not Disturb. My Canuck instinct to appear interested rather than interesting have proven invaluable and served me well. I am cautious during conversational turns toward local and world politics. I usually find myself injecting only enough Northern perspective to participate but not offend or escalate.
This is where I fear the love of my life shall find himself in the arena. I have my duct tape at the ready.
In truth, I love listening to the heated local banter. The drawn rhythm of speech indicative of the need to conserve energy in rising temperatures, amusingly rhythmic to me even in the midst of scorching debate. The blind patriotism that leaches into most every theory and perspective is unwavering, unparalleled and completely foreign to me. At the outset, my own haughty urban mentality resigns me to feeling superior to a political / religious blind (deaf and dumb) faith these Americans ooze out of every pore unapologetically. I will acquiesce that it is punctuated with schizophrenic episodes of shame that as Canadians, we lack a fundamental sense of pride that resides somewhere in their scary fundamentality.
Needless to say, certain ignorances of culture outside the scope of their beloved homeland can grind the intellect from time to time. This is where I take a nod from the local surfing traditions and ideology and let it roll. Frieda Zamba, Women’s world champion surfer four years in a row is a Flagler gal. She’s seen the world and managed to return here so I figure a little Zen now and then works well for endurance.
Zen is not my partner’s strong suit.
I am interested in seeing just what coping mechanisms he sees fit to deploy. There is no transit system, cab companies, nor news outlets there. The local police are reportedly among the state’s most corrupt and investigated. YouTube “Flagler Beach” and you will be bombarded by episodes of ‘To Catch a Predator’. They have had a one armed stripper as church treasurer. The surf shack’s waiter is a cab company owner in NYC. The bikers range from the initiated to family physicians. In short…we do not have much in common with the taxpayers to align sympathies if a scuffle arises. If I do not become innocent bi-stander casualty to his strategies, I hope to bear witness to his *ahem* social graces while immersed in the land o’ grits and biscuits.
Wish us luck.
Crudely Interrupted 