Ricky's April "Read It Later" Roundup

I've talked before about the Read It Later Firefox download, which is basically a button that files URLs in to a Bookmarks folder called "Read It Later."

It is both a curse and a blessing. Blessing because I otherwise might not keep track of some of the stories I come across and you would lose out. Curse because I tend to both procrastinate and lose track of when "later" should occur. Because of this, I need a steady cleaning session, and today's the day!

US-funded health search-engine censors all results for searches on "abortion"

From BoingBoing:

Popline is the world's largest health-information search engine, run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with funding from the US government. They have just changed their database so that queries for "abortion" show no results, even though the system has access to more than 25,000 documents on the subject. They say they've done this because they believe it's a requirement of their federal funding.

The Bush Administration limits most of their sex ed funding to abstinence-only training, the results eight years later show higher incidence of teen pregnancy and STDs, the media ignores it, and we're supposed to be surprised by this? Bush != Science. Surprise!

Flu Vaccine Not So Good

(fake update: where I Chanel the Flaming Fashionista)
Another one for the Sur-prise! cache. The CDC done fucked up. Again. It's not their fault; they have to guess, during the nadir of influenza outbreaks, what three, hot, fashionable strains will be picked up by the most folks in the coming season.

The reason they have to do all this mad guessing? They've freaked so many people out about the necessity of getting a flu shot that they've got to deliver. Okay, so it is their fault. And constant reminders that Bird Flu Gonna Getchu - not even going there, my chicken-lovin' sistahs. No Whammies!

And this time around, it looks like two of the three picks were duds. Better luck next season! Even Vogue gets it wrong some of the time. Who am I kidding; Vogue never gets it wrong.

Cafferty is Plated Chinese Shit Sandwich

I was going to go all out, rage for paragraphs on this one, but I think it's better in concentrated format.

What he said:

I don't know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different. We're in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They're holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper.

We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars' worth or trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we're buying from Wal-Mart.

So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years.

And he was right: China owns us and is using the leverage to make us smile while they walk on our nuts with a conga line of piss-poor products. Wal-Mart is King Pimp, whoring Chinese goods to us while assassinating American jobs in the back room.

The average Chinese salary is $0.35/day. A day. If the angry Chinese now protesting CNN pointed their concern at China and attacked the real problem - lack of human rights, product regulation, and a humanistic wage - then they might actually accomplish something. This is nothing more than misplaced aggression, throwing stones at the film critic when the movie truly, truly sucks.

But they're suing CNN. $1.3 billion. Enough to pay every Chinese citizen the average of about 3 days wages of the average worker. And the douchebox known as NewsBusters (semantic note: a douchebox can and often does hold many douchebags) decided to basically reprint the story and call Cafferty names. As I believe I've already noted: douchebox.


Thus ends the April Roundup. I hope you enjoyed. Good night and don't let the bed bugs bite.