Drinking At The Y
It's always enlightening, and not a little depressing, to see where the government spends some of the money it confiscates from the working population through taxes. It's been said that the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money, but governments, be they in the UK or US, spend other people's cash like it grows on trees.
Problem number one is waste - governments just don't work hard to eliminate waste because if they run out of money they can always increase taxes. There's subway line in Boston which is "forced" by outdated union practices to employ two drivers on each train, while every other Boston line, and just about every subway line in the world, uses only one. The Boston Globe has estimated that the second, utterly unnecessary driver costs the government $30 million every year. It's pathetic that they keep coming back and putting their hands in our pockets when they don't even have the decency to run a competent administration.
What is even more galling, however, is problem number two - stupid spending. Today's case-in-point is a report that the National Institutes of Health has awarded $3 million to the University of Illinois in Chicago to identify the things that cause lesbians to drink alcohol. Newswise has reported:
The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing has received a $3 million federal grant to continue research to identify risk factors for excessive drinking among lesbians.
The five-year study, led by Tonda Hughes, professor of health systems science, will examine how stressful experiences -- childhood sexual abuse, adult sexual assault and discrimination based on ethnicity or sexual orientation -- are related to psychological harm and hazardous drinking in adult women.
Data will be collected from a diverse sample of 384 adult lesbians in the Chicago area who were previously interviewed by Hughes and her research team in 2000 and 2004. Another 250 new subjects -- who are 18 to 25 years old and of African-American and Hispanic descent -- will also be interviewed.
The grant is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, one of the National Institutes of Health.
Here we are, arguing about how to pay for a massive overhaul of health spending in the US, and the government is throwing money away, millions of taxpayers' dollars, on utterly worthless, politically correct bullshit "research". A bunch of workshy, job-dodging post-graduate researchers will no doubt spend the next five years living off the government teat while they ask a bunch of minge-guzzlers why they drink so much. Note the reference to two previous studies, presumably also funded by the public purse. This "professor" has already, according to the report, spent the last 20 years working on "lesbian health issues". You couldn't make this shit up.
Never mind that $3 million could instead be spent dealing with some of the very real, and very treatable health issues in the US. Or, failing that, that it could be returned to the poor bastards who had it confiscated from their pay packets (including me, thank you very much). No, let's instead spend it on some research with the vague purpose of gaining "...a much more realistic picture of the patterns and variability of lesbians' drinking, and to provide information for developing alcohol abuse prevention and early intervention strategies." This, in spite of the researchers' having found that lesbians who drink do so at levels similar to those of heterosexual women. This is therefore money wasted investigating a problem that doesn't even exist, and which, if it did, would be a self-inflicted disorder, not a genuine health issue.
We'll never solve the health crisis in this country as long as crap like this is considered a priority, or a "reasonable" use of other people's money. This is bullshit.
Of course, I'd be happy to take the $3 million myself, and I'd be prepared to advance a hypothesis that would be at least as credible as anything this team could come up with. It didn't take me five years, either; just five minutes in fact:
Q: Why do lesbians drink alcohol?
A: To take away the taste.
Problem solved - just send me the check...
Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison
Problem number one is waste - governments just don't work hard to eliminate waste because if they run out of money they can always increase taxes. There's subway line in Boston which is "forced" by outdated union practices to employ two drivers on each train, while every other Boston line, and just about every subway line in the world, uses only one. The Boston Globe has estimated that the second, utterly unnecessary driver costs the government $30 million every year. It's pathetic that they keep coming back and putting their hands in our pockets when they don't even have the decency to run a competent administration.
What is even more galling, however, is problem number two - stupid spending. Today's case-in-point is a report that the National Institutes of Health has awarded $3 million to the University of Illinois in Chicago to identify the things that cause lesbians to drink alcohol. Newswise has reported:
The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing has received a $3 million federal grant to continue research to identify risk factors for excessive drinking among lesbians.
The five-year study, led by Tonda Hughes, professor of health systems science, will examine how stressful experiences -- childhood sexual abuse, adult sexual assault and discrimination based on ethnicity or sexual orientation -- are related to psychological harm and hazardous drinking in adult women.
Data will be collected from a diverse sample of 384 adult lesbians in the Chicago area who were previously interviewed by Hughes and her research team in 2000 and 2004. Another 250 new subjects -- who are 18 to 25 years old and of African-American and Hispanic descent -- will also be interviewed.
The grant is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, one of the National Institutes of Health.
Here we are, arguing about how to pay for a massive overhaul of health spending in the US, and the government is throwing money away, millions of taxpayers' dollars, on utterly worthless, politically correct bullshit "research". A bunch of workshy, job-dodging post-graduate researchers will no doubt spend the next five years living off the government teat while they ask a bunch of minge-guzzlers why they drink so much. Note the reference to two previous studies, presumably also funded by the public purse. This "professor" has already, according to the report, spent the last 20 years working on "lesbian health issues". You couldn't make this shit up.
Never mind that $3 million could instead be spent dealing with some of the very real, and very treatable health issues in the US. Or, failing that, that it could be returned to the poor bastards who had it confiscated from their pay packets (including me, thank you very much). No, let's instead spend it on some research with the vague purpose of gaining "...a much more realistic picture of the patterns and variability of lesbians' drinking, and to provide information for developing alcohol abuse prevention and early intervention strategies." This, in spite of the researchers' having found that lesbians who drink do so at levels similar to those of heterosexual women. This is therefore money wasted investigating a problem that doesn't even exist, and which, if it did, would be a self-inflicted disorder, not a genuine health issue.
We'll never solve the health crisis in this country as long as crap like this is considered a priority, or a "reasonable" use of other people's money. This is bullshit.
Of course, I'd be happy to take the $3 million myself, and I'd be prepared to advance a hypothesis that would be at least as credible as anything this team could come up with. It didn't take me five years, either; just five minutes in fact:
Q: Why do lesbians drink alcohol?
A: To take away the taste.
Problem solved - just send me the check...
Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
2:42 PM
2 Comments:
Give me $3 million and I'll tell you why they drink alcohol: The same reason everyone else does.
They drink to get laid. It's the only way that the fat, ugly, butch ones can find each other attractive. Like there's anything other than fat, ugly, butch lesbians. The only ones I've ever seen are a million miles away from the porn industry's depiction of rug munchers.
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