*canned laugh track*

I admit I’m not too swift with the nuances of reconstructive surgery, but I’ve seen at least two cases of skin grafts growing nipples in odd places (one on a leg, one on the underside of a foot). I was of the impression that a chunk of skin which once held a nipple would form another one when it got settled in. Making a new one from scratch seems like a lot of work when you could just graft a bit of skin from near the other nipple and wait for it to work its magic. Apparently, it doesn’t work that way.

Incidentally, it also seems a bit outrageous that mastectomies are often covered by insurance, but reconstructive surgery is not. Reconstructive surgery is often covered for accident and burn victims, so why not cancer survivors? (Men who’ve lost a cojone to cancer also have to buy their own dummies if they want to look normal, but that’s an irrelevant gripe for another thread).

tl;dr – To hell with those State Department assholes and their Beaver Cleaver aesthetic. I want to see some positive changes in the medical and insurance fields.

All the boobs are over at Homeland Security.

The State Department is still boxed in by a paradigm where it desires to control the discussion in an extremely precise fashion, as are all diplomatic agencies. From State’s point of view, you can’t have diplomats spouting off on personal matters when they are effectively acting as representatives of the United States for everyone they interact with. It detracts from your diplomatic message, and may unintentionally alienate the populations with whom you are trying to build relations. This is especially true with the Foreign Service, as F.S. members are having daily contact with foreign citizens. I imagine someone in high command saw she was blogging about Iraq and breasts in the same breath and hit the panic button. 

But this type of controlled message propagation goes completely against the grain of social media, which focuses on more spontaneous and personal types of interaction. Conflicts like this are only going to happen more and more as State continues to try and make diplomatic in-roads through social media, a process which is already well under way (see the work and statements of Alec Ross, or read in between the lines in the QDDR)

The other day i watched a documentary on the French/German channel Arte about Scientology: they showed a nightmare nazi-like town called Clearwater where countless crowds of thousands of people in brown pants and white shirts uniform were criss crossing streets with videocameras on every corner. 5 mins later they were ordered to stop filming–from the sidewalk!
This in comparisson with the “nipple” type of censura draws a very very dark picture. I mean, you should experience the sick FEEL of this clearwater shithole place!

It seems clear they’re looking for individual stories about what *foreign service* is like, not about breast cancer.

You mean they’re looking for what life in the foreign service would be like for the Cleavers or the Bradys.  In other words, they want free propaganda submissions.

Lady, you and your nipples are not welcome here.

Needless to say, the ‘reason’ given for it having been removed seems to be in conflict with the email she had already posted…

She had been writing about it in detail for years at this blog, and the issue only became an issue when she recently used the word “nipple” in the context of describing the most recent of many surgeries.

Read her blog posts.

And no, your BB/TDDB analogy doesn’t work.

Slight difference, I imagine the truth is not that it didn’t have relevant content, but that it contained content that was not deemed relevant. One strike and you’re out.

The US Government is the most conservative political body in the country.

The outrage here is about as justified as it would be if BB removed the “Tom the Dancing Bug” link on the right because they no longer felt the comic meshed well with their audience.