Pink Stink

Boycotting Susan G. Komen for the Cure over this latest dickish political move of ending their partnership with Planned Parenthood? Yeah, same here. I've been boycotting them already for awhile over previous issues.

Pinkwashing
Corporations whose products are unhealthy can participate in a pink ribbon campaign (e.g. KFC and their pink "Buckets for the Cure") and get people to buy their products because of a portion going to Komen, and improve their ethical standing with the public. The charity and their corporate sponsors have a sweet mutual back-washing deal... mega-donations balanced by pinkwashing and increased sales. That is par for the course, but what is a bit more disturbing are the drug controversies that have sprung up. There are quite a few in-depth articles about this, worth checking into for your own benefit or curiosity if nothing else. A few links:

Healthier Talk: Breast Cancer Deception Month: Hiding the Truth Beneath a Sea of Pink - Part I -- Part II
Mother Jones: Is Susan G. Komen Denying the BPA-Breast Cancer Link?
In These Times: Seeing Red About Thinking Pink
Pinkwashing ridiculousness: Pink Fatigue (blog)

Huge non-profit CEO salaries irk me
Although it's very common, and SGK is certainly not unique here, it makes me sick to learn that the CEO of this charity - one that rakes in money from the grassroots where people may not have much to give but they care enough to do it anyway - is paid over $450,000 per year (again, not singling them out... fyi... according to Charity Navigator, the CEO of the American Red Cross pulls in nearly $1 million per year for a salary).

Petty legal action against other charities over colors and names
Susan G. Komen For the Cure has reportedly been spending about $1 Million for year cracking down on smaller charities that use the color pink and the word "cure" in their name - even if the offending charities are not fighting breast cancer. [reference][reference] This is the first thing I heard about SGK that caused me to remove them from my list of preferred charities. The practice of a charity fighting for its 'brand' is, again, not limited to this one - but a $million a year to crack down on hundreds of small charities?

You can pink it but you can't un-stink it.

The beaches are open.

Don't you feel kind of funny when there is some big disaster and you are worried sick because the consequences just might be catastrophic or at least highly dangerous... then someone who happens to have a vested interest in things assures you that everything will be fine. Those assurances just don't work very well on the skeptical.
I mean, you have to keep the beaches open, keep the fishermen and shrimpers working, keep people coming to the hotels and restaurants. Remember last Spring and Summer when the reports seemed to be rolling in about how seafood was pretty safe to eat, and even that the oil had nearly disappeared!?! (except for those tar-balled beaches)

Like this report from April of 2010:

Expert: Gulf Oil Spill Won't Ruin Your Shrimp Dinner
Says Mike Voisin, past president of the National Fisheries Institute:
“No one should be worrying about whether the shrimp they're having for dinner is going to have oil on it... First, no company wants to put that kind of product on the market... And those areas that have oil in them will be blocked by state health officials and not harvested.”

Voisin also claims that fish like tuna and shrimp will instinctively migrate away from the oil spill. He did admit that oysters are the most at risk because they lack the ability to move.

Here is something more recent that suggests otherwise:

Multiple independent lab tests confirm oil in Gulf shrimp

In two separate cases, a toxicologist and a chemist independently confirmed their seafood samples contained unusually high volumes of crude oil and harmful hydrocarbons -- and some of this food was allegedly being sent to market.

One test, conducted by a chemist from Mobile, Alabama, employed a rudimentary chemical analysis of shrimp pulled from waters near Louisiana and found "oil and grease" in their digestive tracts.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) tests, which are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have focused on the animal's flesh, with samples shelled and cleaned before undergoing examination.

Unfortunately, many Gulf coast residents prepare shrimp whole, tossing the creatures into boiling water shells and all.

{shudder}

I don't eat seafood, as you probably already know, but this is a pretty big concern for the health of the general public, in my opinion. Have you read about the recent rash of baby dolphin deaths? At last count it was up to 60, which is many times what is considered normal. Dolphins are on top of the food chain, and it's still not clear what is causing this death. Wondering how long it will be before the human health consequences become evident, and also wondering how the corporate-influenced media will spin it.

My work retreat was merely boring

HuffPo Quick Read: "Attorney Steven Eggleston was suspicious when his boss pressed him to attend a weekend male retreat, but refused to tell him what would be happening there, saying participants were sworn to secrecy.

So he did a Google search and found out why.

Men would be holding hands and walking naked, blindfolded, through a forest. Then they would sit nude in groups of 30 to 50, passing around a wooden dildo and giving lurid details of their sexual history. Eggleston said he found out that the men will grab each other's penises if they wish."

Whole article: What Do You Say to a Naked Lawyer? Here's a Suit.

He says that the retreat was optional, but not attending caused the firm to stop paying him.

Goodbye, dirty neighbors

That cluttered and tacky fixer-upper of yours was a matter of National Security and Civil Defense back in 1954, when "The National Clean Up-Fix Up-Paint Up Bureau" figured out (through numerous experimental nuclear explosions) that nukes aren't nearly as big a problem if you just clean up a little.

It could have been a real Bureau, or even if it was made up, its existence was part of the bigger lie delivered by the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Not surprisingly, this little gem of a Public Service film was sponsored by the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association (I think it's likely that the "bureau" was a film production company that was a branch of the paint/varnish/lacquer group, and allowed to masquerade as a government entity. How's that for some varnish?). And here you thought that corporations heavily influencing the government's actions was a much more recent trend.

Search google.

Found via flick filosopher.

Big Brother in your jeans

I felt something scratchy digging into my skin inside the jeans I had on, and discovered it was this (below). It was made of thin metal strips and was a little sticky. It was sewn in, with a little cloth patch barrier sewn on top, and I guess the cloth patch kept me from feeling this bugger before.



I got these Old Navy jeans at Goodwill, so they've been worn and washed who knows how many times before I got them, and I've worn/washed them quite a bit too.

Here is an excellent rant about these things, which are radio-frequency ID (RFID) chips. Attaching something like that to clothing in the store is not unusual, but apparently Old Navy is not willing to remove it for you as a store normally would for those thumb-tack gizmos.

At least I didn't go through the embarrassment of getting stopped for suspected shoplifting like the guy at the linked post, but I can't remember the last time I was in an Old Navy store. It's been a few years.

Corporate retail greed

Found this story on HuffPo which is sourced at NYT here. It’s a report of how retail clothing sellers routinely destroy and trash merchandise that is being replaced by more current styles rather than donate them to the needy. The article specifically talks about Wal-mart and H&M's habit of slashing and cutting the items to make them unusable if found, and putting them in the dumpsters - where there are scavengers waiting to sort through them.

In the bitter cold on Monday night, a man and woman picked apart a pyramid of clear trash bags, the discards of the HM clothing store that reigns in blazing plate-glass glory on 34th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed.

This story focuses on 2 retailers, but this practice has been around for awhile and I believe it is common. My first husband was a manager for that sports merchandise chain in the mall, the one where the employees wear the striped referee-looking shirts, you know the one. They were routinely ordered to pull certain old shoes and shirts off the racks, and cut them up so as to make them unusable before discarding - in case a dumpster-diver would find something then it would not be wearable. I guess the thinking is that for people to be motivated to buy the stuff, the company doesn't want potential customers just holding out until they can luck onto it in a dumpster.

He did what he was told, but it really bugged him, and quite a few times he broke the rules and kept some items, either for us to wear or to give away. He would have been fired on the spot for doing that. These were high-quality, pricey items that had been deemed out of style or no longer a hot seller.

Followup: H&M is now saying that they will not longer slash and discard their obsolete merch, but will donate to charity instead. Well, that’s one down. Bottom-line-driven corporate entities have no heart and soul. They will do something for the common good only if it coincides with avoiding bad PR.

Time to freak right out - again!

GE... we bring good things to... BLAM!!!

Here's another tale of corporate negligence, followed by danger to consumers, followed by a bullshit explanation that attempts to put the blame on the consumer and is obviously a CYA lie.

GE microwaves are exploding, sending glass shards and who-knows-what-else all over the kitchen and occasionally people. It's not just the glass breaking through consumer misuse (as they allege) - these things are going BOOM when they are not even in use.

Check out the article, where there is also a video than I couldn't embed here, and you might want to look into this further, especially if you are a GE microwave owner.

WHAT'S YOUR RealMotive?

Well, color me not surprised. Why would they spend all that money getting people to take their quizzes if the only benefit they received was the comfort of possibly helping a few people change their lifestyles to more healthy ones?
[NYT: Online Quiz is a Window For Drug Makers]
If you've taken the test, you know that they ask not only a lot of personal questions (that can be considered health-related) and they get your email address - then - apparently they turn your info over to some drug companies... OK, I'm sure they don't just turn it over, they SELL it. Then Big Pharma can hit you will even more marketing campaigns for their Happy Fun Ball products that MAY or MAY NOT be the drugs you need.

Austin Lounge Lizards

Dicks du Jour

[LINK] Company lays off 3,000 workers (one third of workforce) (1,200 of the jobs were local) without providing severence pay. Now they can afford to restore executive salaries to their previous levels after cutting them by 10% last October.

Workers noted that former CEO Bertrand Cambou was paid a full year’s base salary (just over $751,000) plus a four-month consulting fee when he resigned suddenly at the end of January.