Contessa Brewer on MSNBC shows emotion: Grossed Out!

...by the Taco Bell Rat story, reported with continuous video of rats running around the restaurant. She must ahve said the word 'gross' eleven times in 45 seconds.

That being said, I'd like to see the same disgust when the bodies of ordinary civilians are shown blown to bits while they leave their markets or their homes.

WTF did we do to a country and its people?

horror would be a more appropriate emotion. Why we don't see news coverage of what we are doing to other human beings in the name of 'freedom' is a compelling question. Would we watch it? I think it would end all doubt about a 'christian' war for freedom. True Christian's heads would explode with the hypocrisy and insanity. It would end the war. Just as viewing rats in Taco Bell will end some customer's partaking of their food I suppose.

we had a visit from a forensic dental pathologist who would show us slides of bodies found in various states of, shall we say, decomposition, or, even worse, freshly dead. Many of these circumstances were ironic, some confused, some demonstrating mental illness on the part of the decedent.

That being said, the response of the class was, at first, 'shock and awe', to coin a phrase. After a while, we became iniured so that after 120 minutes, seeing someone's head run over by a semi such that their teeth were individually collected and x-rayed for identification was no big deal.

It doesn't take long for this process to evolve in this fashion and you have to remember, we were from the generation of humanism and peace. Many in the class were pretty far left, anti-war, pro-civil rights, but they reacted, or didn't react in the same fashion.

seen more horror than I care to recall! I'm quite familiar with the gruesome task of sorting 'tusks!' post-mortem. The woman dental forensic pathologist was awesome! I would be aghast and gagging and she always kept her cool and the only reason she did it was to bring immediate relief to grieving families. I think she was paid very little (if anything) in addition to her faculty teaching salary. I tried to become immune to what I saw, but to no avail. Photographic slides are nothing compared to the real thing. They ought to have a 'scratch and scent' button on some of these forensic shows. It would quickly eliminate a lot of 'enthusiasts!'

People who are not acquainted with Death are in for rude awakenings. There is a pic going around on the Web of an Iraqi who was picked off by a sniper. His head is opened as though someone took a Stryker and sectioned right down the middle and unfolded it with the concomitant internal matter spread rather symmetrically on the road. I believe its origin was at rotten.com.

I 'love' when people shrug at the wounded. If they knew that the battlefield more resembles an abbatoir than a 1950's black and white film, they'd be less anxious to send their kids into an arbitrary war.

wounded and dead in wartime is anything but glamorous. I can't stand the thought of these poor young kids having to participate in that, and witnessing their own part in it.

Slaughterhouse (abattoir-had to look that one up) is the right term for the battlefield. Many years ago when I was teaching a course in Biochemistry as a grad student, I had to obtain fresh blood for extraction of proteins from red blood cells for a biochem lab class. I didn't even really know about slaughterhouses! I guess I had naively assumed that the meat we obtained from the grocery was from animals who had died naturally on a farm somewhere! I traveled there, and obtained the blood, and I tried to avoid looking at all the dead and hanging animal carcasses in the distance, but I could hear the living cattle wailing! Talk about pitiably gruesome. I didn't eat meat for a long time afterwards, and still wouldn't I bet if I knew the treatment of animals in most slaughterhouses. But I've gotten 'used' to it.

Are you arguing that if people were exposed to more of the horrors of war that they would become immune or desensitized? Above I argued the opposite, but maybe you're right.

that is not to say that PTSD does not set in, but those who lived in conquered or war-torn countries live daily livves as it were. A Latin prof of mine lived thru the Blitz and he remembers horrible events, like pulling a woman out of rubble, only to have her arm come off her body intp his hands. He was rather matter-of-fact, although quite scarred, he could discuss this stuff rather dispassionately - as he said, it wasn't the WORST thing he'd seen.

They had live shots of the rats running rampant and the woman anchor was getting sick to her stomach.

If I didn't know that it was in a restaurant, I would have thought, they were cute and someone, who made up the scroll this morning on the same news show, wrote that the rats were scampering (which does sound cute)!

According to regulations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 50 g of corn meal--about what is in a taco shell--might contain up to 50 insect fragments, two rodent hairs, or one piece of rat feces. http://scope.educ.washington.edu/gmfood/commentary/show.php?author=McHughen



while I am glad there are regs about how many rodent hairs and feces can be found in food, it still grosses me out.
how to sample
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/mpm-toc.html#table

If that's not grotesque, what is?

:puke: