Laying Waste to 'Waste'

Industrial systems be damned! It's how we make-do that matters, finding value in those things deemed unvaluable. These rhythms will rip a path right to your very core. Enjoy!

We Feed the World

Food. We eat it everyday. We love it. We hate it. We are indifferent to it.

In this age of all things efficient and heartless, modern food stands out as one of the quintessential ways our collective lives have been done wrong by the mechanical logic of the Industrial Ages. Nothing typifies the violent disconnect we experience with those things that populate our daily lives like the very food we eat.

Such an ancient, sacred, and intimate act, and yet most of us know nothing about how our food is grown, who grew it-raised it-cared or didn't care for it-butchered it, how it got to us, and so on. Often we don't even care!

With this in mind, it came to me that perhaps a poignant visual journey through 21st century food system would be in order. It just so happens that I've happened upon just such a ticket. It's called We Feed the World and it take us to places we rarely ever see. Let's learn from it and be brave and then let's dig up our fuckin' driveways and plant tomatoes! YAAA!!! Come on!!!

The effect of Pedophilia within the Catholic Church - One Man's Perspective

A very moving, hard to watch speech given yesterday during the Ryan Commission Reports. Most of us will never know what it is like as a child to be abused and raped constantly, let alone by priests whose religious order you belong to. This man is brave enough to weather the emotional storm and cut straight through the bullshit.
Of course, this type of thing only happens in Ireland, right?

The dark power of atrocity

The title of this post comes out of the celebrated study on modern violence by American Colonel Dave Grossman, On Killing. It's one of the few books I've come across which tries to understand the "rationale" of a wide range of hysterically destructive violence - uh, atrocities - in times of "conflict." I wondered while reading it, and the many case studies Grossman explores, which came first the atrocities or the conflicts. It seems to me that there's a bit of a feedback loop at work in these sorts of things. The massacre and rape of villagers most certainly exemplifies both an atrocity and a conflict, but I wonder if we place too much emphasis on the latter, as though it in some why helps to "explain" the former. I want to claim that conflict doesn't tell the whole story, that stated differences on whatever issue do not "explain" why gangs of males pillage, murder and rape innocents in times of crisis. It seems to me more about base opportunism and group mentality, the desire to belong in a deeply significant way to your pals. "Let's all rape her!" a young man exclaims, a flush of excitement coursing through his body as he sees the reciprocated excitement in the faces of the men who dress, talk and behave like him.

For some reason I can't get away from this stuff. Everywhere I look I'm struck by the insane barbarity of males against the innocents in their midsts, most especially women and the people they most regularly tend after, children and old folks. Just the other day, another harrowing article by one of the English-speaking world's canaries in the coal mine, Nicholas Kristof, told about the ongoing culture of mass rape which characterized life of the vast majority of women in Liberia. The war-ravaged country isn't even technically in a "conflict" yet many of the lads there think nothing of forcing women and girls to do whatever they want, and without the slightest consequence. While Liberia deserves plaudits for electing the first female president on the continent, the culture of male violence towards women is an issue which deserves far wider recognition. Kristof says the world's political leaders must work "to demystify it, dismantle the taboos, and address it directly." Hundreds of thousands of profoundly disempowered and demoralized women are expected to carry on without slightest mention of justice in their cases.

Of the cultures of mass rape ongoing in our time, perhaps the most famous and thoroughly studied is that which characterized the Rwandan genocide of 1994. A recent book was published entitled, The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence. The first hand accounts in this book bear repeating but are hard to repeat, and I'll not bother here. The most ridiculous B-movie horror violence might approximate it, but when you consider the real lives ripped apart in the case of Rwanda, the impact is decidedly more affective than the crap movie-makers film in Los Angeles sound stages. As I'm sure any female who has experienced sexual violence in her past, the trauma echoes down through the years. It is not and should not be forgotten. It is not and should not be forgiven. And the violence, rape and atrocity has only been continued, indeed continued since the genocide itself in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Rape is a vitally useful tool for terrorizing and demoralizing civilian populations and is common everywhere. It was a technique used in the horrific civil war in Guatemala between 1975-1985. Recently unearthed police records from that time show conclusively that rape was systematic and widespread. Rape was also a prominent feature of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in March 1968, when young American infantry men rampaged a series of villages murdering and raping almost everything in sight. The American military worked hard to deny and cover up these atrocities and just one soldier was ever convicted of the madness, his sentence mitigated by a personal pardon from President Nixon.

It is vital to me that my interests and inquiries cleave to the remotest regions of obscurity and neglect. I want to trumpet issues which are difficult to acknowledge let alone do anything about. It's not something I understand too well myself, I just seem to have a natural inclination towards these topics, some taboo, others though not taboo are nonetheless easily and regularly overlooked, ignored or under emphasized. Here's a simple example. In our post feminist age, when many look at the "affirmative action" initiatives of the 1980s and 90s as bungled failures, there appears to me to be a general sense that things have been pushed far enough. Women are sort of visible in a variety of formerly male-only domains, they seem relatively successful, and though persistent wage inequality remains the norm, only a foolish cynic would deny that women have achieved some measure of social - political and professional - mobility. I too admit that the lot of women, to generalize about a little more than half the globe's population, have wrestled some power away from the old boys clubs which are everywhere deeply woven into the customs and ethos of societies the world over. But the way I see it, through the little bit of experience apportioned to me, James Brown was correct when he emphatically observed, "It's a man's man's world."

That's why I'm always irked when I see something on the old idiot box or this new one, that gatherings of violence and anger around the world are described as involving "people" not more accurately "males." There are so many examples of this I'll leave it to you to notice for yourself where the women are at these momentous gatherings. Yet the euphemism "people" is almost always chosen to describe enormous crowds of males. Sure, there might be the odd odd-ball female in among the herd, saying no to American imperialism or throwing rocks at fashion boutiques, just like the boys do. So perhaps editors and writers are deeply earnest in their feminism, and spying a lonely female among the throng of lads inspires them to use the humane and capacious signifier "people." I hope that's what it is. But I have my doubts. I choose to look at the remote fringes of civilization so that I can help Kristof and others sound the alarm. We need to pay more attention to the use of rape in conflicts! There, I said it.

Why I don't Believe in God.

Well frankly I don't believe anything, but that's beside the point.
You see, I was reading the bible the other day. What's that? Yeah. I read the bible. It's a cracking read. I keep it in a place that is most sacred to me, the lavatory. Strangely enough, it is the only place in the world that I can be assured of some kind of spiritual movement.
Bad jokes, yes, but whatever.
Anyways. The other day I stumbled across one of those moments where god makes his/her presence known in the world. It is one of those rare instances where s/he doesn't act like a six year old and doesn't kill thousands of people. In fact, it is probably the glory of the lord at it's most blatantly obvious.

And I finally saw the truth. God just doesn't exist.

S/He did for a moment. But it wasn't a supreme being. It was flesh and blood. It was a form like you and me. It's just that Moses was duped. Either that, or we misinterpreted his deity of worship somewhere along the way.

So, I'm in the bathroom, bible in hands. And I come across this passage;

Exodus 33:17-23

17 And the LORD said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken: for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.

18 And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.

19 And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.

20 And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.

21 And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:

22 And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

23 And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.

Well, Moses was struck with absolute belief after this initial meeting with the presence of the lord. Personally, I can't blame him. Who wouldn't be?

Picture of the LORD.
Please don't click on this sexist representation.

There you have it. Everyone can throw out their religious texts. It would seem that the greatest prophet of all time was merely a horny bugger who wanted a show.

Unbought and unbossed

"Unbought and unbossed" were the wise words of pioneering American politician Shirley Chisholm around the time she ran in 1972 as a candidate for presidential nominee for the Democrats. The earthshaking newness of her act - a black woman seeking the highest office in American politics - remains a powerful historical event, though it has been robustly and certainly forgotten outside a few university courses and a couple documentary retrospectives. Strange that both as a woman and black person, a doubly marginal person in American society if ever there was one, Ms. Chisholm's ballsy move has faded into obscurity. Given how excited our twittering, facebooking, blogging culture is about social innovation, it's strange that such an iconic event has been forgotten and ignored, its potency as a radical act of political and social expression withered and gone. But a few decades have passed since then, and it would seem that our technologically teeming, instantly engaged era, we need the same old, same old - that is men - to tell us what's what, and to push the boundaries of social insidership a little farther out, where they might rope in a few more deformed, less than paradigmatic individuals into the white man's domain of normalcy.

I only discovered Chisholm's story myself by accident. I was astounded to watch as this tiny African American woman expressed values as ennobling and enlightened as any which come out of Barack Obama's eloquent speeches. And while in a way I'm grateful that such calls for tolerance, compassion and curiosity to understand differences are being uttered at all, it is dismaying (just a little) whenever I relearn that it's all been said before, again and again and again. Why the inertia? So the truth of virtues - tolerance, compassion, curiosity - depends more on the branding, how they're packaged and pitched than on the truth of the content itself? As I ranted in an earlier post, we seem quicker than ever to celebrate whatever comes to mind as an historic event. Everything is of historic importance until a few seconds pass and new historic events and entities need to be identified and praised. And so it goes.

Our short attention spans, and the natural but erroneous feeling we all have that the times we happen to live in are of monumental importance, act as a leaven on our ideas. It lightens, weakens and loosens our grasp of truths that were as true for our grandparents as they are for us. History is not linear, an incalculable though simple matter of chaining events to events. I would also not make the claim that it is cyclical, that what goes around comes around, though I do think there's something deeply true about repeating mistakes once known but later forgotten. We need to look at Shirley Chisholm's story and ask ourselves, "Why is change taking so long?" Just as we need to remember our elementary school years when our teachers encouraged us to turn of lights and taps, and told us of the insidious perils of the greenhouse effect. The truths of our society's ongoing inequality, over consumption and indifference in the face of short-sighted ecological destruction have been known for a few generations at least. What's taking us so long to change?

The other day I was thinking

Just kidding, I wasn't. I used that title to attract your attention but half way through writing it I became deeply ashamed of my duplicity and deceit and underhandedness and chose to use this opening sentence to admit my error and apologize. I deeply regret the falsehood that I advertised as truth. Indeed, I did not think the other day, and it passed. The sun rose in the morning, bright as ever, and I greeted it with not a vacuous whisper of a conscious thought. In this state I passed the day, occasionally wiping the drool from my gaping mouth and changing the angle of my empty stare. Once or twice a lumbering particle of dust past through my field of vision and a feeble flicker of awareness almost sparked, but not quite, and though my eyes were poised for action, prepared at the slightest notice to follow the particle as it made its way, my empty head called for no such activity. The silence and echoes of nothing which my mind cultivated in great quantities took up all my time. And the sun waned and the light dimmed. For a moment the sky looked quite beautiful, casting mellow unexpected colors along the western horizon. But I failed to notice this, being that my head was empty of all thought, and the sun sank and the color faded. And just as the day began I found my self in bed, now swallowing the drool instead of letting it trace artful paths down my chin. I closed my eyes and no thought passed between my ears. Then I slept.

Rofous Hummingbird

I captured this little guy's photo in our yard.

Do we know what we're doing?

Having recently been asked to contribute to “Knowing, Doing,” I decided to take my first post as an opportunity to reflect upon this blog’s title. Although it won’t be anything stellar (and I hope that any potential readers won’t judge my potential future output on the sketchy nature of this posting) I must say, I find the blog’s title suggestive, provocative, and humbling. Its simplicity seems to provoke critical insights: “Knowing, Doing.” It almost sounds like a koan. In fact, the tagline which appears beneath it—“know what you’re doing”—strikes me as a very Zen-like sentiment—and for that reason, a very humbling one. Do we know what we’re doing? Really? No, I think not. But, then again, I must ask, is knowing not a form of doing? If so, then why do we distinguish between “knowing” and “doing”? If “knowing” is a member of the class, “doings,” what is it about the act of “knowing” that makes it irreducible to the order of “doings”? In the answer to this question, I submit, is an important insight into the very nature of being-human—that is, of human doings. Y’know?

Leslie White, an influential anthropologist working in the first half of the twentieth century, often remarked to his students that the ability to distinguish between knowing and doing is what makes us human, and not (just) ape. It is not just a linguistic matter. It is also our capacity to think symbolically. “No ape,” White said, “could ever appreciate the difference between holy water and tap water, because, chemically speaking, there isn’t any.” Culturally speaking, of course, there is all the difference in the world, but apes do not make such distinctions. The ability to posit sacrality is a peculiarly human trait. The ability to make and mark cultural distinctions is distinctive, and perhaps even constitutive, of human nature. It is also the source of a frailty that is specifically human.

Sometimes, we know what we do. Rarely, I think, do we do what we “know.” For instance, everyone who smokes “knows” that it’s not a salubrious habit. Heavy drinkers “know” that consuming more than one alcoholic drink per day may cause health problems, and that drinking more than 14 per week will eventually damage his or her liver irreparably. And everyone who walks into a McDonald’s or a Burger King “knows” that the food they buy there is full of trans-fats, deadly to their heart, and not good for their health and well-being. Yet they still “do” all of these things. Likewise, people who are not terribly active know that they need to exercise in order to maintain health, yet they “do” nothing. Why is this?

To some extent, I believe, it is because most of us can conceive of the Sacred as a possible force in the universe. If we grow up in a culture which posits the existence of non-obvious beings, states, and events—as it seems all cultures, trans-globally and trans-historically, have done—then there is the likelihood that we might believe those beings might give us a “pass,” and protect us from the consequences of our actions. There is also the brute fact of our evolutionary heritage—we survived because we adapted successful means of avoiding nearby threats, but not necessarily of diverting long-term possibilities (the fact that there is very little current concern to change our way of life in the face of impending environmental disaster, but a great deal of concern for making enough money to buy nice things, cars, and clothes for our kids and families, is an illustration of this fact). But mostly, I believe, it is simply the fact that, in our culture, we know too much about ourselves. We know too much about the effects of what we do that the information eventually becomes meaningless.

To illustrate, consider the 2002 film, “About Schmidt,” starring Jack Nicholson. Nicholson plays the part of Warren Schmidt, a recently retired actuary, who worked at an insurance company where he calculated the life expectancies of potential clients. Based upon an assessment of the client’s family history, medical history, and current lifestyle habits, Warren was able to calculate with remarkable accuracy and reliability exactly how long the client is likely to live. For instance, as Warren writes to Ndugu, a young African child that Warren began sponsoring just before his wife died, Warren knows that a widower at his age will likely be dead in the next seven years—provided that he doesn’t remarry! The fact that we know this much about ourselves and of the fragility, and even cold, mathematical predictability, of our time on earth is a frightening thing.

Maybe we’ve gotten too smart for ourselves. Maybe, in pursuing certain kinds of knowing, we have forgotten to think about the consequences of what we are doing. And maybe, with our culture’s valorization of “doing” in service of acquiring and consuming, we forgot to think about what we “know.” And maybe, in the final analysis, this necessity of forgetting is what makes us human. As Nietzsche said, the evolutionary breeding of an animal which could make a promise—a long-term project in service of an as-yet-imaginary goal—required the possibility of forgetting. We must eventually forget the "what-ifs" and focus on the "what-nows." We must pick a goal, not many goals. We must live one life, and try not to dwell or attempt to engage in the endless lives we could have lived. And, I think, that is why our lives are so often tragic: so rarely do we truly know what we’re living: a life of near-endless possibilities, with no re-takes or refunds. We know this, surely.

But is that what we're doing?

Life Inc.

Mallard

Roll Call.

Alright.
Let the shit roll downhill.

I am all in favor of having a community of somewhat committed contributors, committing something sometimes...

Yet, what we appear to have here, seems to be a blog with a member ratio greater than a contributing ratio.

So;

• Erasmus Herzen
• Batty McDougall
• Lord Gnome
• Fleeting Mortality
• Andrew Patrick
• opoihths
• Freilly
  

Write something. Do Something. Anything.

Make it a haiku.
Make it a soliloquy.
Make it a dirty limerick.

Post something.

You have fifteen days.
Otherwise; dead weight sinks.

Dig?

Unfortunately for you, the creators of this blog blessed me with editorial responsibility.
Do something or something will be done to you.

This 'ere Taser ain't dun no harm

Another Taser-related death means another opportunity to reassure the public that Tasers are in no way related to death. "Gosh, we sure lucky that there be people who done what learned about science," says the village idiot, "Otherwise, crazy fool people everywhere be accusin' the po Taser of takin' a man's life. Ain't done it, no sa." Taser-using police forces and Taser International sure are philosophical about it, quite refreshing in our times. So a man is shot with electric current and afterwards dies, did the first event cause the latter? On the surface it might seem that yes, obviously if a man dies after and not before receiving an electric current, it would be prudent to assume that there is some connection. Ha! Fools, say the cops and robbers, I mean Taser International, if only you ruminated on the problem a little longer, let the cud grind rhythmically on your back molars, only then will you be able to grasp the silk-like threads of philosophical reasoning necessary in this case.

It's the old problem of causes and effects. How do you know one thing has caused another? Because they happened or appeared one after the other? Really all you can say for sure is that two events happened in succession, there's no certainty about precisely what the cause is no matter the issue. It's so deep it's practically retarded. The great David Hume's famous often used example of the billiard balls gets at it more clearly. He used to say that we are merely used to, hard-wired or programed for all you AI dorks, viewing a succession of events as having a causal-effectual relationship to one anther. So when the cue ball runs into the black ball apparently causing it to just miss the corner pocket (I'm a terrible pool player) we think we're watching a simple chain of events but it's more subtle than that. So while I nurse my embarrassed ego and my competitor takes the opportunity to sink the ball and win the game, I consider why it is I think I know that the cue ball caused the black ball to move. "Because it hit it and that hitting started the other one to move" I say, petulantly. That's at least how our brains organize the information, but Hume always reminds us that there's really no way to observe the cause at all, it's profoundly invisible, something which underlies the constitution of matter to its remote roots. A cause is merely the word we use to stand in for something we have no means of truly grasping. We shouldn't be surprised if our rather crude 5 senses fail to perceive what's really going on. Better to drink a few pints and lose a few games of pool than trouble our poor heads about it.

If you trekked through that strange paragraph I might wonder what caused you to do so, but just now I remembered that I was talking about Tasers not killing people. Back on track now, one thing is clear after all this Tasering and men dying, the police are impressively sophisticated about it. With the case in Brooks Alberta, no one's even sure if the Taser "was deployed properly." Sure an anxious, heart-thumpingly alert police officer pressed the trigger, but after that... well it's that old problem of causes and effects again. Was it working properly, did the charge make contact, these are questions for the smoke room over a glass of scotch and discussion of the ancients. Did the Taser play a role in the death of a man in the relative prime of his life? Who knows? Best to offer condolences to the family and frown for a few moments at the sadness of it all.

I want to spit about one more thing related to Tasers and death which is this. Be warned everyone, Taser International and the police forces who sign long-term contracts with them have taken up a controversial psychiatric term to help explain these deaths: Excited delerium. It's an amazing thing that such an old world as ours is still offers up fresh newfangled entities for each generation to call their own. So while excitable, probably intoxicated, probably mentally unstable/ill males have long been threatening and committing violence to their families and neighbors, we must wait until the hysterically violent 20th century for someone to muster the gonads to contrive a disorder as crazy as this. Excited delirium means that people die when in police custody not because of the tactics or Tasers being used by the police, but because they're too excited and basically have heart attacks. This was trotted out to explain the death/murder of Robert Dziekanski. He was violently agitated and in a hyperactive state, the multiple Taserings and knee on his neck had little to do with it. Let that be a warning to you, don't excite yourself to death.

Now you go on and leave those po conducted electricity devices alone chillren, they ain't but dun ther jobs don't ya know.

Tyranny of the emphemerati

It's no good. No matter how incessantly the word Tranquility flashes at me in green neon, I do not feel tranquil. Across from my living quarters I can see a range of neon signage at night, but this tranquil one is the most enigmatic and perplexing. It's like an infant bedazzled by a game of peek-a-boo. Does the feeble creature actually imagine that the person hiding behind hands just inches from her own nose has actually disappeared? "Where in god's name did mother go?" inquires the infant. Equally bizarre is the brief emblazoning of the night sky: Tranquility before dissolving back into nothing a moment later. But what's this, the timing switch has triggered the mechanism once more and the previously untranquil space is again reminded, Tranquility.

Who would imagine that such an abrasive and gaudy green thing would actually induce the mindset which ridiculously pulses in a steady rhythm through the night? Is there a neon sign factory which specializes in new age meditation slogans? "Be the change you want to see," "Eat, Pray, Love," "Always got time for Tim Hortons." I mean, do they understand something I don't? Perhaps vacuous electrified imperatives are another sign of the times which unfortunately escapes my ever-backward looking gaze. Perhaps vague concepts such as this one don't occur to people unless it momentarily flits in front of their eyes. "I'm so busy, I've got so much to do," says a man before seeing the sign, Tranquility goes the sign, "Oh yeah, I really got to slow down and take life as it comes, thanks neon signage, you flash the truth." As always I am reminded of the noble goat who disturbs the morning silence with an optimistic bleat, perhaps to call the herd's attention to greener pastures up ahead. Her throaty tones cause the others to lift their heads and wonder for a moment if perhaps there isn't something more to life. "Perhaps there is greener pasture up ahead," a young buckling might think, assuming he had a working knowledge of English.

Here it is, I've found it. The proprietorship which has the sign mounted on its premises is actually a little bit skeptical, just like me. It's owners and managers are being ironic. They've deliberately selected a means of conveying a message precisely opposite to the sign's declared motive. They're trying to offer a biting lampoon of contemporary urban life under the guise of peddling new age cure-alls. And they've succeeded! I laugh in shared insight with my unknown neighbors, tipping my hat in kudos at their brazen criticism of the meaninglessness which has cluttered our time and place. Like a neon sign flashing "Life" in a graveyard, they have sought out a vague slogan of mail-order meditation and subversively foisted it upon any hapless onlooker who might happen to walk by and have its absurdity flash on her rods and cones, mostly cones. "Ha! Nice one neighbor, I get it. You're saying Tranquility is impossible if one expects it prompted by a beacon of electric light! That's great, so clever."

So I guess the sign has achieved its aim, for every bleat of Tranquility I am plunged into an anxious gloom. At least it's green though, so we can rest easy knowing that ecological concerns are not far from the minds of those who employ a little electricity to mock one and all deep into the night.

Got Real?

All Implants!
All May!
110% Fun

This is what I read on a strip club billboard as I was driving. After a double-take, I looked again and saw that it was correct and I could do nothing but be mortified and amused. The strip club was promising their clientele that they'd be guaranteed to not see a single natural breast for an entire month. The mind reels.

Alright, so men like breasts. Nay, men love breasts. I get that. But what kind of a society do we live in, in which people who mangle their bodies beyond their natural means, are sought out? It would be easy to blame the mainstream media. I think it goes deeper. These symptoms I fear spring from what I call "Wrestling Syndrome." Basically, it is a byproduct of a society in which imagination has been greatly suppressed.

Little boys are highly imaginative. Without television, a group of kids can play for hours with sticks and cardboard boxes. At a certain age, a little boy may be taken aside by an authority figure or a more mature friend, and be told that they now have to accept certain "realities". They are told that they must one day grow up and that once they shed their capacity to imagine, this will occur. But they like their imagination. It's always been a great ally. So they compromise. They maintain their sense of make-belief, but shift it to somewhat accepted but ultimately shallow activities. The worst of these compromises is televised wrestling. Yes, we all know that it is not real and that the stories between the wrestlers are very rudimentary, but we are given room to flex our now maligned sense of being able to use our imagination. We purposefully move into a realm of hyper reality in which everything is bigger and more dramatic than it ought to be.

So where do the breasts come in? Usually, mammary glands are the first bit of anatomy that a young man will truly desire. This may be a hangover from our motherly upbringing. And it just so happens that around this early curve of puberty, most young men will be exposed to the sexual version of wrestling, which is hard core pornography. Now, as mentioned in the previous sentence, most porn has and will be the equivalent of wrestling. Two or more willing sparring partners who act more like athletes than lovers show off their strange and unnatural physiques, doing tricks and acrobatics than no person in their sane mind would do. As usual, these acts and two dimensional characters appeal to our imaginations. There's nothing real about it. We know this, but somehow, some of us prefer it.

So, what to think? A certain amount of body mutilation via breast augmentation comes from a man's fear of women, and a woman's fear of not being accepted by men. Men fear women because in many ways they are superior to the testosterone-riddled sex. We know this and it scares us. Due to (somewhat) equal rights in North America, a woman's power is gaining authority. Dealing with this reality is harsh but appropriate, so some men would rather deal with the athletes, the unnatural actors and wrestlers. And for women, equal rights is a double edged sword, you no longer have good-looks to rely on. Hard work, inner-strength and intelligence are valued more than ever before in this part of the world. In a woman, this is a formula that will always keep you ahead of the rest.

Keep your breasts as they are. They're awesome. If they happen to be small, leave them alone. If they're big, hopefully they got that way naturally; junk food or genes.