Tag: link

Mustache Transplants on the Rise in the Middle East

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Earlier today…

Turkish plastic surgeon Selahattin Tulunay says the number of mustache implants he performs has boomed in the last few years. He now performs 50-60 of the procedures a month, on patients who hail mostly from the Middle East and travel to Turkey as medical tourists.
He said his patients generally want thick mustaches as they felt they would make them look mature and dignified.

“For some men who look young and junior, they think (a mustache) is a must to look senior … more professional and wise,” he said. “They think it is prestigious.”

Pierre Bouhanna is a Paris-based surgeon who, for the past five years, has been performing increasing numbers of mustache implants. He says the majority of his patients come from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey, with men traveling to France to have the surgery performed.

“My impression is more and more they want to establish their male aspect,” he said. “They want a strong mustache.”

Via:
Mustache Transplants on the Rise in the Middle East – ktla.com
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Rick Santorum Lashes Out At Disability Treaty

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God Wills It

God Wills It

Earlier today…

But these aren’t reasonable times. Some right-wingers are urging the Senate to reject the treaty, saying it’s a plot by one-world-government bureaucrats to undermine American independence. Rick Santorum, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, called it a “Pandora’s box” that could lead to the United Nations making medical decisions for disabled children like his daughter Bella, whom he brought into a Senate hearing room last week while he made his point.
Mr. Santorum, having fallen far from his moment in the electoral sun, has found a new platform at the conspiracy-mongering right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily. That was where he wrote a column condemning language in the treaty requiring that actions concerning disabled children be taken in the “best interests of the child.”

Via:
Rick Santorum Lashes Out At Disability Treaty – NYTimes.com
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The Morning Plum: No more false equivalence. Both sides are not equally to blame

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tapeworm diet

Earlier today…

There is an actual set of facts here (re fiscal cliff). They are central to understanding the current situation, and belong in every account of what is going wrong:
1) Democrats have offered a comprehensive proposal that meaningfully details the tax hikes they would like to see and contains substantial deficit reduction, but Republican leaders have not offered a comprehensive proposal that meaningfully details the spending cuts they would like to see. And what Republicans have proposed — such as it is — doesn’t contain nearly as much in deficit reduction as the Dem plan does.

2) Many experts believe that substantial deficit reduction simply requires Republicans to drop their opposition to raising tax rates on the rich.

Via:
The Morning Plum: No more false equivalence. Both sides are not equally to blame. – The Plum Line – The Washington Post
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Shirky: ‘We are indeed less willing to agree on what constitutes truth’ | Poynter.

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Earlier today…

in most places for most of history, publicly available statements have been either made or vetted by the ruling class, with the right of reply rendered impractical or illegal or both. Expansion of public speech, for both participants and topics, is generally won only after considerable struggle, and of course any such victory pollutes the sense of what constitutes truth from the previous era, a story that runs from Martin Luther through Ida Tarbell to Mario Silva, the drag queens outside Stonewall, and Julian Assange.

There’s no way to get Cronkite-like consensus without someone like Cronkite, and there’s no way to get someone like Cronkite in a world with an Internet; there will be no more men like him, because there will be no more jobs like his. To assume that this situation can be reversed, and everyone else will voluntarily sign on to the beliefs of some culturally dominant group, is a fantasy. To assume that they should, or at least that they should hold their tongue …

Via:
Shirky: ‘We are indeed less willing to agree on what constitutes truth’ | Poynter.
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Many drugs are just fine years after they expire

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Earlier today…

If you’ve wondered whether medicines really do need to be tossed after their expiration date, you’re got some company at the California Poison Control System, UC San Francisco and UC Irvine. Researchers from those institutions decided to satisfy their curiosity by testing the effectiveness of eight drugs that had been sitting around, unopened, in pharmacies for years after they had supposedly gone bad.

These drugs were not just a few years past their prime, these medications were a full 28 to 40 years past their official expiration dates.

…
The tablets and capsules were dissolved and subjected to chemical analysis using a mass spectrometer. That revealed how much of the active ingredients remained in the pills.

Out of the 14 active ingredients, 12 were still at high enough concentration – 90% of the amount stated on the label – to qualify as having “acceptable potency,” the researchers found.

Via:
Many drugs are just fine years after they expire
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Daily Kos: Jack Welch takes ball, goes home after Fortune doesn’t back up his BLS conspiracy theory

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Earlier today…

except for the part where people were mocking you for being so obviously wrong and ignorant about how the BLS numbers are arrived at, not about you “questioning authority” or the like. Every conspiracy theorist considers scorn for their theory to be part of a plot against them; most then grumble that they are “just asking questions” and wonder why their “questions,” say, about how perhaps Obama operatives visited tens of thousands of American homes and forced citizens to claim they had jobs when they really didn’t, are not being treated more seriously. Few of them have access to the Wall Street Journal to write their subsequent I-was-just-misunderstood pouts, but that’s because they do not have enough money.
Have our wealthy Americans been getting dumber lately, or just louder? Trump, Cain, that Murray Energy jackass, Jack Welch; there’s no shortage of rich people who seem to have made it their special mission to demonstrate just how dimwitted our captains of finance and industry actu

Via:
Daily Kos: Jack Welch takes ball, goes home after Fortune doesn’t back up his BLS conspiracy theory
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America’s Slippery Slope Into Britishisms – NYTimes.com

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Earlier today…

MITT ROMNEY is not the “bumbling toff” he’s made out to be, wrote Daniel Gross, an American journalist, in a recent Daily Beast article. The latest iPad is a “lovely piece of kit,” in the words of John Scalzi, an American science-fiction author writing in his blog, Whatever. The Chicago Bulls were mired in uncertainty less than a “fortnight” after their star player Derrick Rose went down with a knee injury, according to an article in The Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper, last spring. Crikey, Britishisms are everywhere. Call it Anglocreep. Call it annoying. Snippets of British vernacular — “cheers” as a thank you, “brilliant” as an affirmative, “loo” as a bathroom — that were until recently as rare as steak and kidney pie on these shores are cropping up in the daily speech of Americans (particularly, New Yorkers) of the taste-making set who often have no more direct tie to Britain than an affinity for “Downton Abbey.”

The next time an American “mate” asks you to “ring” her o

Via:
America’s Slippery Slope Into Britishisms – NYTimes.com
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Constant-demography Employment (Wonkish But Relevant)

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Earlier today…

So there is real if modest improvement over the past year. Also, the September numbers looks not like an aberration but like a return to trend from what looks like noise in the data over the previous couple of months.

This story is, by the way, broadly consistent with the payroll data, from a different survey, which also suggest employment growing somewhat faster than population.

So contra Romney, this is a real recovery. Modest, but real. Unless, of course, you believe that there’s a conspiracy of socialist statisticians …

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Constant-demography Employment (Wonkish But Relevant)
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‘Love for Levon,’ Tribute to Helm at Izod Center – NYTimes.com

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Earlier, I read…

Even in an arena it was a cozy event. Dozens of luminaries from rock, soul and country — among them Gregg Allman, Jakob Dylan, Bruce Hornsby, Mavis Staples, John Prine, Joan Osborne, John Hiatt, Jorma Kaukonen and Ray La Montagne — were backed by the Levon Helm Band. It’s now led by the guitarist and fiddler Larry Campbell and, Mr. Campbell announced, renamed the Midnight Ramble Band. Fondly, fervently and with few displays of vanity, they sang Band songs and songs from Mr. Helm’s 2007 solo album, “Dirt Farmer” …Roger Waters — the non-American on the bill — gave another “Dirt Farmer” song, “Wide River to Cross,” the kind of stately, overwhelming crescendos he used in Pink Floyd. Mr. Waters had brought a red baseball cap that Mr. Helm impulsively gave him in 1990, and it hung on a microphone stand — a relic and down-home talisman — as the entire lineup gathered to sing “The Weight,” belting its tales of comic woe like a family anthem.

Via:
‘Love for Levon,’ Tribute to Helm at Izod Center – NYTimes.com
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Sally Quinn Wants Obama to Wear God, Has Gone Mad – Esquire

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Fascist Threat and Commie Lies

Fascist Threat and Commie Lies

Earlier, I read…

The continued authorship of something called “On Faith” by Beltway social-climber and Hall of Fame trophy wife Sally Quinn remains the most hilarious thing about The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now d/b/a an adjunct to the educational testing institute. In her dotage, Sal has become a spiritual explorer, a religious quester, and a thoroughgoing loon. Reading her stuff is like showing up at Lourdes and finding Bernadette Soubirous standing there, dressed in Prada, chilling the champagne and offering the Blessed Mother a couple of seats at the owner’s box at the next Redskins game.
Anyway, she seems to have been transported to something resembling ecstasy by the fact that Willard Romney took time out from stomping on the Eighth Commandment the other night long enough to mention a certain Deity, although not by name….

Via:
Sally Quinn Wants Obama to Wear God, Has Gone Mad – Esquire
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Golden Gate Bridge

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You might like this article, especially this part…

There are a couple of misconceptions about how often the Bridge is painted. Some say once every seven years, others say from end to end each year. The truth is that the Bridge is painted continuously. Painting the Bridge is an ongoing task and a primary maintenance job. The paint applied to the Bridge’s steel protects it from the high salt content in the air which can cause the steel to corrode or rust.

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Golden Gate Bridge
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Romney’s Sick Joke

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Earlier…

So, about that sick joke: What Mr. Romney actually proposes is that Americans with pre-existing conditions who already have health coverage be allowed to keep that coverage even if they lose their job — as long as they keep paying the premiums. As it happens, this is already the law of the land. But it’s not what anyone in real life means by having a health plan that covers pre-existing conditions, because it applies only to those who manage to land a job with health insurance in the first place (and are able to maintain their payments despite losing that job). Did I mention that the number of jobs that come with health insurance has been steadily declining over the past decade?
What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

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Romney’s Sick Joke – NYTimes.com
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KitchenAid Mistakenly Tweets Joke About Obama’s Dead Grandmother | Adweek

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I thought this article was worth reading, especially this part…

During tonight’s presidential debate, KitchenAid posted a nasty and poorly spelled comment on its Twitter feed about President Obama’s grandmother, who died shortly before he took office. The full tweet from @KitchenAidUSA, while quickly deleted, was rapidly retweeted by many (such as Heather Spohr, shown below) who saw it appear during the debate. It read: “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president,’

Via:
KitchenAid Mistakenly Tweets Joke About Obama’s Dead Grandmother | Adweek

Post-Debate Analysis: Mitt Romney Lied. And Wants to Kill Big Bird | Crooks and Liars

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I read…

As I watched Romney tonight, I saw the guy who made those completely candid 47 percent remarks. …but I didn’t find him pleasant or especially appealing. I found him to be exactly like that dude talking to billionaires about people being victims and dependent on government before sitting down to the cheesecake dessert with his fellow billionaires.

I thought President Obama could have done better, for sure. He missed some key opportunities to be sharper about Obamacare, …
In the end, people are going to remember that Mitt’s down with killing off Big Bird and PBS so he can do his Mitt magic with numbers that just don’t add up, no matter how it’s spun.

Jim Lehrer kept saying the point of this debate was to define their differences. Unfortunately, the biggest difference didn’t come through: one was telling the truth and one wasn’t.

In the end, Big Bird’s life still hangs in the balance, and im Lehrer should never, ever be allowed to moderate anything even resembling a debate ever again

Via:
Post-Debate Analysis: Mitt Romney Lied. And Wants to Kill Big Bird | Crooks and Liars

Shit Just Got Real

Shit Just Got Real

Factchecking the first presidential debate – The Washington Post

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I thought this article was worth reading, especially this part…

The math does not add up for this statement that Romney directed at Obama.
The president’s 2013 budget called for elimination of tax breaks for oil subsidies, which the White House estimated at $4 billion per year. Dividing $90 billion — the federal money that Romney claims went toward clean energy — by $4 billion in breaks for the oil industry amounts to 22.5 years, not 50 years.
It’s also worth noting that the $90 billion was not “breaks,” but a combination of loans, loan guarantees and grants through the stimulus program, and they were spread out over several years rather than one, as Romney claimed.
Furthermore, not all of the money went to the “green energy world.” About $23 billion went toward “clean coal,” energy-efficiency upgrades, updating the electricity grid and environmental clean-up, largely for old nuclear weapons sites.

Via:
Factchecking the first presidential debate – The Washington Post