The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
(Image credit: Flickr user Medien Bundeswehr)
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
The repetitive---yea, rhythmic---impact of a rifle wielded by a highly disciplined military man can puff up his chest. This sometimes leads to worry, or worse.
Many manly soldiers, famously fascinated by big breasts, harbor a horror of what would happen if they themselves grew a pair. Or if they grew just one.
Drilling, Pursued Diligently
Some men do experience this affront. A study called "Gynecomastia in German Soldiers: Etiology and Pathology" analyzed the plight of 211 male German soldiers who suffered from, or at least exhibited, one or two enlarged breasts. The ailment has a formal medical name: gynecomastia.
"Gynecomastia in German Soldiers: Etiology and Pathology [Gynäkomastie bei Soldaten der Deutschen Bundeswehr: Ätiologie und Pathologie]," Sandy Egler, Stefan Lenz, André Lieber, Dietrich Doll, Björn Dirk Krapohl, and Hans-Peter Kuhne, GMS Interdisciplinary Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, January 9, 2012. (Thanks to investigator James Harkin for bringing this to our attention.)
The study's authors, Prof. Dr. Dr. Björn Dirk Krapohl, Dr. Dietrich Doll, and four colleagues at Bundeswehrkrankenhaus, the German Armed Forces Hospital in Berlin, played detective. They set out "to investigate the increased incidence of left-sided gynecomastia in members of the German Ministry of Defense Guard Battalion who perform ceremonial duties in Berlin.... A possible explanation is the mechanical impact of the carbine against the left side of the body during the drills that these soldiers regularly perform as part of their ceremonial duties."
(Image credit: Flickr user Wir. Dienen. Deutschland.)
The doctors compared those patients with other gynecomastic men who had not spent years frequently and intensively slapping rifles into their left breast.
They noticed a stark difference.
Seventy-five percent of the gynecomastiacal Guard Battalion chest-slappers had an enlarged left---only the left, not the right---breast.
The other patients---the non-chest-slappers---as a group, showed neither sinister nor dexter breastedness. One third of them did have an enlarged left breast only. But another third of them had only a big right breast. The third third had a big pair.
The doctors suggest that this ritual breast-beating damages the tissue so much that "surgical resection of excess breast tissue is the only effective treatment."
This medical investigation, with its tight focus on one possible cause of gynecomastia, smacks of an old national stereotype: that Germans overindulge their love of military precision.
The Search for a Cannabis Connection
An earlier medical inquiry, also performed by military physicians in Germany, looked at a different possible cause of gynecomastia, in soldiers from a different nation. Their homeland, far from Germany in both place and spirit, was famed at that time for its fascination with marijuana.
Two doctors at the U.S. Army Hospital in Nuremberg published, in 1977, a study called "Gynecomastia and Cannabis Smoking."
"Gynecomastia and Cannabis Smoking. A Nonassociation Among U.S. Army Soldiers," William Cates, Jr, and James N. Pope, American Journal of Surgery, vol. 134, no. 5, November 1977, pp. 613-5.
They examined eleven low-ranking, abnormally big-breasted male American soldiers. Some of those swell-chested fellows admitted to smoking marijuana. Others did not.
The report ends with a clear, sober statement: "Our epidemiologic evidence does not support [any] relationship between chronic cannabis use and gynecomastia."
The cannabis report, seen in retrospect, is incomplete. It makes no mention of how many of the toking soldiers had just one enlarged breast, let alone which.
Detail from the study "Gynecomastia and Cannabis Smoking. A Nonassociation Among U.S. Army Soldiers."
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The article above is republished with permission from the September-October 2013 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
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http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/joseph_mccarthy_reborn/
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150685937090986&l=b5d605b39b
The famed then 87-year-old Kazan's unforgivable crime was to have truthfully told the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1952 that he and eight of his friends had been fellow members of the communist party, from which he had resigned in disgust. Some of these men later admitted that Kazan told the truth. Nevertheless, until his death in 2003 at the age of 94 Kazan remained a political leper among Hollywood's politically correct.
These are same people who in October 1997 streamed into the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berverly Hills to see Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a film glorifying unrepentant Stalinists who wanted to turn the US into another Gulag. Needless to say, these are also same celluloid intellectuals who support cop-killers and murderous dictators – but only so long as they are socialists." -- "Hollywood leftists, their blacklist and their treason", Gerard Jackson
Amazing. The leftists who have wrested control of our colleges and universities are, next to Hollywood, the greatest blacklisters of all time. They have ideologically cleansed the faculties of these institutions of conservatives while ironically making a fetish of "diversity". How utterly hypocritical for any left-wing academic to complain about "McCarthyism" and "targeting".
Gee, I wonder what would give hime that idea.
Dem. Socialists of America claim 70 Democrat congressmen as members?:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35733956/DSA-Members-American-Socialist-Voter-Democratic-Socialists-of-America-10-1-09
Wake up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
Start there and then read the books:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Haunted-Wood-Espionage-Paperbacks/dp/0375755365/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335282353&sr=1-7
http://www.amazon.com/Venona-Decoding-Soviet-Espionage-America/dp/0300084625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335282353&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/In-Denial-Historians-Communism-Espionage/dp/159403088X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335282353&sr=1-3
McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy were right, the communists had infiltrated our cultural institutions and had gained access to the highest levels of our government.
How sad that the apologists for the "red fascists", as George Orwell called them, continue to push the ahistorical garbage contained in this post.
Here's a protip: McCarthy was a piece of garbage who was willing to make innocent people suffer to further his own political career.
Still, the Venona papers which were released in the early 90s, while not justifying all tactics used to track down Soviet spies, do prove that there were Communist spies deep inside the US government.
http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf