If I thought it would do any good I’d sign the petition, but on reviewing the success of American Apparel’s (bordering on pornographic), marketing tactics over the years, I don’t think it would do any good. People need to stop buying the stuff in order for petitions to work and it just hasn’t happened here. Won’t happen. Throwing up a petition…easy. The root of the problem it is more difficult to tackle, and not nearly as fun to write about. Sex sells. More often than not anything which denigrates women, or represents women with body parts, sells. That is the problem. Solve that and you won’t have to worry about hundreds of young women rushing to expose their junk in hopes of becoming America’s Next Top Buttock, you won’t have to worry about signing sad little petitions either.

There’s no doubt this contest is disturbing on many levels, the most disturbing being that I probably wouldn’t object to participating in this contest if my winning it meant that say…everyone in the world would have clean drinking water, vaccinations and vitamins.

Peace

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I started the tab, and labeled it women. I inadvertently left their “I feel lucky” box checked. The six sites which showed up under women for my blocks were, Hot Blonds, Beautiful Naked Women, Jumping Elephants (real sex real people), The Best (private sexy personals) and so forth. Most sites were soft core porn. I had to redo it several times to get these relatively innocuous swimsuit photos.

Got to give it to them, an abundance of suggestions for women exist in Google if you leave the box checked. Continuous reloads give a totally new group every time. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be an accomplished scientist, medical doctor, lawyer, writer, poet, teacher, academic, entrepreneur, or even an academic among them. Even if there were, we’d wouldn’t know it. The women are nameless, they are just women.

This irritated me, so I tried it for men. The page for men looks like this…..

Google could cough up only two ideas for “men”. The main entry, the same one that appears over and over if you reload, is a head, or waist to head shot of a man, sometimes shirtless often not. There is only a rare classic “I’m a sexy boy” shot, you know, where the guys jeans are unsnapped, his zipper looks on the way down, and he is gazing at his hinterlands longingly. Otherwise the men are most always fully clothed, and unlike with any one of those sites which appear under “women”, there is a scroll down to a biography telling who the guy is, what he does for work, his claim to fame, if any, and other random information, things that let us know he is human, like his lifelong goals.

The other Google suggestion, as you can see, was a site of random little male head shots from some Flickr-like site..

Go figure.

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The bill from the immediate care center is for the suturing of a finger. The immediate care center accepted insurance, but as he has a $1200 deductible he expected this to be something he had to pay in full because the deductible hadn’t been met. The bill has two columns of charges. The amount insurance would pay if he had no deductible is $329.78. The excess was 446.22. So he had to pay $329.78 because his insurance company has a contract with the immediate care center, which is owned and run by the local hospital.

This is good yes?

Is $329.78 a reasonable charge for the service? According to him the doctor spent 1/2 hour with him, at most, suturing his finger. That would mean the doctor portion could be $329.78 an hour ( 164.89 for the half hour) with the $164.89 going toward cost of equipment and administrative fees — I’m not sure exactly how they divide it up that is just one of many possibilities. That seems reasonable to me. Yet, if the individual going there did not have insurance it would have cost him $776 for the same service, jacking the doctor fee up to what is equal to $776 an hour ($388 for the half hour) with $388.00 in administrative/medical equipment fees. Not so reasonable.

There is apparently some kind of “gun to the head” situation going on here. Have insurance, even though we jacked up the premium 18 percent this year, or get charged double what you’d have to pay if you had insurance? I can only ask why. Why do people without insurance get what appears to be an unreasonable charge? Why is there not just a fair and reasonable charge?

Things I’ve read:

The biggest political fight of the week, sadly, over liberals not coming out and complaining loud enough about that ridiculous misogynistic playboy article (sorry about this link) touted proudly on Politico and complained about on some AOL political site. Both posts were pulled. The article was a sick piece of work about women Guy something or other would love to fuck even though he hates them. Having decried Playboy as a piece of misogynistic trash when I was 18 years old it is merely redundant to do so again. The more disturbing thing is reading the comments on various sites, where it doesn’t look like either liberal or conservative men have a great deal of respect for women. The largest difference I see is that conservative sites remove comments that show that to be the case, or don’t allow comments at all, and liberal sites do not, flaunting their misogyny for all too see. Men are way too skilled at attacking a women on their looks, sex appeal, choice of clothing, or their attitude, rather than her ideas. A reinforced nugget of previous knowledge was all that excursion onto the blogesphere got me.

Surviving the World. Loving it.

Top Ten Black Blogs for June. Some great blogs there, with more added every month.

The worst in-kind donations, from Good Intentions are Not Enough

Ross Douthat Makes No Sense.

Kabul’s K Street Project seeking more lobbyists. Where Afghanistan’s ambassador learns the rules of acceptable corruption in D.C.

What I Watched:

Mildred Pierce, pretty good movie if you like that kind of thing.

peace

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