Aspirin is in fact very dangerous and millions of people take it everyday to reduce the chance of heart attack, when in fact they are also increasing the chance of a fatal hemorrhagic stroke. Aspirin interferes with your body’s ability to prevent bleeding by clumping platelets together at the site of the wound (clotting). This clotting action is the cause of heart attack if your arteries are clogged by fatty deposits, and also stroke if clotting blocks blood flow to the brain. However, thinning the blood makes hemorrhagic stroke and gastrointestinal bleeding worse, and can cause allergic reactions and hearing loss in some cases. When combined with ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, etc.), aspirin’s effectiveness is reduced, and when combined anti-coagulants (Coumadin, generic: warfarin), it is very dangerous.

According to the Mayo Clinic, you should only consider taking a baby aspirin daily if you’ve had a heart attack or clot-related stroke, or you are at high risk of either. Risk factors are high blood pressure, bad cholesterol levels, smoking, heavy drinking, diabetes, stress, obesity, inactivity, and family history. Aspirin should not be taken if you have asthma, hemophilia, stomach ulcers, or heart failure. Aspirin is more dangerous in diabetics, so the American Diabetes Association recommends low-dose aspirin only to men over 50 and women over 60 who have at least one risk factor for heart disease. Aspirin should not be taken during pregnancy. Stopping an aspirin regimen abruptly is dangerous. Your risk of heart attack or stroke may become even greater than it was before you started taking aspirin.

Aspirin results from the unnatural mixing of salicylic acid with sodium and acetyl chloride. It was first patented, named, and marketed by Bayer in the 1890s. Along with heroin, also developed by Felix Hoffman, aspirin was the literally started the pharmaceutical industry. Aspirin initially sold …

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The purpose of any good government is to protect the lives and property of the people. Property is money. Money must be solid. It must be free, in that it is independent of the nefarious deeds of plutocrats. It doesn’t matter how much free speech or free love you have. If you have no money, you have no property, and all your “freedoms” are worthless.

The Federal Reserve, masquerading as part of our government, bails out corporations that have gotten themselves far into debt. In theory, this protects the jobs of the people, because the corporation keeps going. How does the Federal Reserve do this? They print lots more money, backed by nothing, and give it to the corporation, making up for billions of accumulated debts. How do corporations like General Motors and Bear Stearns lose so much money? By becoming unprofitable, bureaucratic failures. Companies that should go out of business are propped up by the government. Every time they do this, our currency gets closer to worthless. An invisible tax is placed on the money in your bank, because its value declines progressively.

When you prop up failures, you bring down everyone else. Small businesses that are rightfully profitable get no help, while losers are supported by the public debt. The rich get richer, the poor (us) get poorer, and the middle class disappears as we turn into Soviet Russia.

We continue creating more and more money out of thin air to fund wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Yemen, and more, all for the continual war on “terror.” We have troops in 100 countries, spread all over the world. This is all funded by the continual whoring of our dollar. We give China I.O.U.’s in exchange for billions of dollars in goods. What’s going to happen is that we won’t be able …

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2009-12-20 Update: There is value in higher education but there is a lot of baggage that goes along with it. Consider both sides before quitting college or going to college.

A college education is thought to be a requirement for success in modern America. We swallow, hook, line, and sinker, that higher education is an unassailable good. But what if it isn’t?

• Revisionist history. You get to learn that our founding fathers were unchristian, that the American Indians were peaceful savages, and that the Earth would be better off without humans. Then you’re tested on this, and you’ll “fail” if you don’t give the right answers.

You got enough of this in high school; do you have to subject yourself to four more years of it?

• All the great entrepreneurs skipped college, or dropped out as soon as their idea went big. (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the creators of Google and Facebook, etc.) If the college experience is so inherently valuable, why would anyone leave as soon as they started making lots of money?

• A continuation of high school . . . The modern Associate of Arts degree is nothing more than a repeat of what you were supposed to be taught in high school. You aren’t gaining any “specialized” skills for your place in the workforce, nor any “life experience” that you wouldn’t be better off acquiring on your own.

• The whole idea of going to college to get a job, to “appeal” to your employers, is all that higher education stands.

• Algebra. Who ever thought that you should mix letters with numbers in math? In the computer science degree I’m working on, I have to go through five courses of this nonsense (algebra, precalculus algebra, trigonometry, calculus 1, calculus 2). All of it completely unuseful to the math problems that …

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Our “treatments” for cancer are no good, kill everyone, and waste a lot of money. The cure for cancer is simple and has been widely known for thousands of years, but is kept hidden from the typical American. But first, let’s tackle some of the arguments for our beloved cut/burn/poison regimen.

Investment is nothing. It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been “treating” people with cancer and letting people die. It doesn’t matter that we have billions of dollars and lives invested in our phony treatments, or how many relatives and friends you’ve lost through traditional treatment. No matter how far we’ve gone, we must turn back. There is no progress to be had on this path, no matter how we are invested in it. We were invested in alchemy too.

We are told there are many different types of cancer… and many different treatments… and no easy solutions. The best recommendation is to be constantly tested for cancer, to constantly avoid “known” carcinogens, to constantly fear everything. We have to check your skin, your breasts, your cervix, your ovaries, your prostate, your colon, and a whole bunch of other stuff, every year for the rest of your life. The most prolific unveiler of known carcinogens is the state of California. Everything causes cancer there. I bought a computer mouse with a tag on it warning that the cord has lead in it and can cause cancer, says California. Obviously, there’s somewhere the money is going. The money is going to the companies who produce the goods that continually replace the goods that are supposedly cancer-causing. Our cars cause cancer. Smoking causes lung cancer. Drinking causes liver cancer. Sunshine causes skin cancer. Radiation causes cancer, yet also kills it when it’s convenient to us. Really, what’s up with that? If radiation causes cancer, …

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2009-12-20 Update: This article is #1 in Google for “photography sucks,” so I see why it gets so many comments. Don’t take me too seriously. Photography is really an art form and I am playing devil’s advocate here.

“I wish photography could be an art form. I love it so much, but it’s just too easy. If only there were some way to mentally cripple the majority of the population from being able to take beautiful photos, or if I could make the craft so needlessly difficult to only be accessible to a tiny few. Maybe then I can trick others into thinking I have talent where there is none. Oh photography, why must you be so simple and uncomplicated!”

We’ve been tricked—all of us—into believing that photography is an art form requiring skill, talent, patience, and “the eye,” when outside of fairy land, it requires no more skill or talent than driving a car, or pushing buttons on an elevator. What kind of art form would have these ten traits?

1. Anyone can do it. While we’ve not proven the infinite monkey theorem for reproducing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, surely a monkey could take a good, interesting photo. In fact, with today’s auto-focusing, auto-metering, easy-to-use cameras, I have no doubt that a monkey, with some practice, could take a photo as good as Sunrays or The Red-Brick House. Do you like doing the job of a monkey?

2. No talent involved. You’re in a good place, you take a good picture. You’re in a bad place; you get nothing. It doesn’t matter if you have passion or willpower. If someone else is in the right place at the right time, they can easily capture the moment just as well, even …

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I’m coming back. I mentioned way back on the 7th that I had a sore throat, but was recovering. That turned into a cold; I’d recovered by the 11th, but on Wednesday, March 12, I woke up with an awful sore throat, headache, and fever. Two days later, I noticed the white patch at the back of my throat, so Dad took me to the doctor (it’s expensive without health insurance), who proscribed one gram of amoxicillin (a sister of penicillin), twice per day. He assumed it to be strep throat, skipping the test. My Grandma notes how large the dose is; it’s interesting to read that doctors now proscribe super-doses to everyone because the bacteria has mutated, developing antibiotic resistance from decades of being slaughtered. Obviously, this can’t be a long-term solution, as just like with the Borg, the enemy’s adaptability requires an ever-changing attack strategy.

I’ve been on antibiotics since Friday; I wasn’t well enough to go to school today (Monday), though. The white patch is down to specks, and it hurts less to swallow, so I’m targeting Wednesday to return (no classes on Tuesday, though I’ll miss work). No school missed last week, because it was spring break. But plenty of lost money and grades. Instead of studying, I spent five days suffering on a couch, watching the shameful wart that is network television, sipping from a bottle of dry ginger ale when the pain of dehydration would surpass the pain of swallowing.

I’m thinking I’ll get a B in photography class (there’s no formal feedback, though). I need Monday to develop film and print, but missed today, …

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For years, I’ve been hearing this wonderful argument: don’t put all your eggs in one basket; it’s better to have several smaller memory cards than one large one, so that if one fails, you’ve only lost a portion of your prized photographs, instead of all of them.

Seems to make sense, no? Distribution and redundancy are the core of safe computing, so we take this argument without question, spending extra to get four 512MB cards, even if the best bang for our collective buck is at 2GB. Yet do we ever stop to think that the entire concept is flawed?

The multi-card proponents convince us that all things equal (reliability and failure rates), four 512MB cards is the safer option.

But hold on a second there. Are the extra cards going for live, RAID-style backups? Are we afforded the advantage that while we sacrifice the space of one card, if any one card fails, no data is lost (RAID 5)? No. We have nothing. Until you get your pictures copied to your computer, there is only one copy in existence, and your work is in danger, either way. Your camera isn’t going to mirror your data for you. Maybe your fancy $3000 Canon EOS-1D Mark II does, but for us mortals, such extravagance cannot be afforded.

Remember that everything is equal, and we’ve just reached the beautiful world of digital permanence by splitting our eggs into four baskets? Billy’s 8th birthday will not be lost, because you had to spread the shots across four cards. If one fails, all is well, because you still have great shots on three other cards, right?

But it is that if that is important. Have you noticed that when you have multiples of something, you’re more likely to have …

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