May each of you have the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, and the hand to execute works that will leave the world a little better for your having been here. -- Ronald Reagan

Monday, July 12, 2010

From the People That Will Save You Money By Their Taking More of Your Money

I'll meditate for nearly half a $million; I do it for free. There was a study, “Treatment of Cocaine Addiction with Integrative Meditation,” that resulted in a grant that totaled $410,625 so coke heads could meditate. From the National Institutes of Health: “Our clinical experience and pilot studies suggest that Integrative Meditation (IM) from Chinese medicine may help clients engage in treatment, reduce cravings/withdrawal symptoms, and increase treatment retention, which appear missed by a typical behavior therapy.”

This is how IM works:
“Now, imagine you are sitting on a beach by the ocean. “The ocean is creating peaceful waves to the rhythm of your breathing, and surrounding you with white energy--All the pores of your skin are open. When you breathe in, feel the white energy being absorbed into your body through the pores of your skin; when you breathe out, imagine the white energy going into your belly. Focus on the pores of your skin when you inhale, and the ball in your belly when you exhale. Breathe in--the white energy enters through the pores of your skin. Breathe out--the white energy rushes to your belly--(Let 30 seconds go in silence).”

“You become a large balloon, and start to float away.”

You're almost done here, so contemplate on your saliva.

“Close your lips and chomp your teeth about 36 times (pause 5 seconds). With your lips closed, slide your tongue over the front of your teeth on both your upper and lower jaws. Your mouth will fill with saliva. Slowly swallow it in several portions. As you swallow, picture the saliva flowing down to your lower belly. Lightly pat your head from front to back; and pat your body from your head to feet. Take a deep breath in and sigh lightly on the exhale.

“Now you are feeling pure, clean, relaxed and very healthy…”


Okay, can I have a toot now? Guess what? Twelve Step programs are a huge huge huge success for every addiction.

Every wonder how male prostitutes are doing in Ho Chi Min City? Again for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), going directly to one of their mini-bureaucracies, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). This is a four year study costing you $1,442,515 so far that started in July 2008. Two more years to go.
The statement of purpose of the study is the "social milieu" of Saigon's male prostitutes: 1,442,515 X 2 = lots of money to spend on studying hookers with penises in a foreign country.
“This study seeks to address an important public health question: what is the impact of male sex work on the growing HIV epidemics in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam?” “HIV rates in Vietnam are rapidly increasing, and yet there are limited data on the role that different populations play in this increase. Existing data are based on the assumption that HIV is found primarily in injection drug users and female sex workers, with only recent attention being paid to men who have sex with men.”


Oh jeeze, here comes the NIH again. Hookers again too, only this time in China. Not clear if these have penises or not. $2.6 million to train Chinese hookers to drink responsibly; not just anywhere, but on the job! I'll skip the quote from the NIH abstract. They just want to measure the correlation between sex, alcohol and AIDS. Here's a clue, and we'll save two and a half $million. If you get drunk, and you poke a drunk prostitute that's poking a lot of other drunk guys, and ya don't wear a rubber, chances are, somebody is going to get a nasty disease.

Oh no! Here comes the NIH again. This is another little mini-bureaucracy of theirs, The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), gets $3.9 million over five years to develop a video game. It's suppose to teach kids, 9-14 years old, “sex, drug and alcohol negotiation and refusal skills". Brought to you, no doubt, by the same knuckleheads that mocked Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. Here's a helpful hint. Parents raise their kids and make sure they don't do this nasty stuff. Maybe they could incorporate IM into this program, maybe put IM it on a Wii.

Here's the hit parade of your money that's gone to the job stimulus package that has done so much to employ so many people.
$5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years *
$1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina *
$100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota *
$2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev. *
A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism” *
$500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics *
Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants *
Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there *
$219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk *
$210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees *
$700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots *
$5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
$54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
$1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work **
$15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin **
$800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania **
$3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida **
$1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma **
$10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade **
$578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there **
$233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa ***
$2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen ***
North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers! ***
$54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest ***
A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously***

Ah yes, the care and competency of government spending your money. Do you think, jeez, maybe it I kept more income to spend on me and my family, instead of government projects and programs, we'd be better off, and if I and everybody else were buying more stuff, then more people would be put to work making and selling the more stuff and more people were buying more stuff, and more people making money buying and selling more stuff, we'd all have more money and stuff. Oh yea, a side effect of people having more money and buying more stuff, is that with more people working, more people are paying more taxes, so maybe we could pay down a couple $trillion of debt. Naw, it's better we keep an eye on Saigon hookers with penises, video games, meditation for drug addicts, and little trains that go nowhere. What was I thinking?

No comments: