Roy Walford Dies
Roy was a pretty renowned professor at UCLA, an author, a pioneer in calorie restriction research, ran The Biosphere and lived in there for a couple years, was part of the Tim Leary crowd, and was an old friend of mine. He died on Tuesday, at 80, from complications from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). As of yet, no obit in the LA Times (hello?), but here's a link to his site.
Peep Throat
So many nosy newspapers out there, hoping to suck you dry of your personal demographics in exchange for besieging you with pop-up ads while you try to read an article online. Then there's that long registration process you have to go through. (I generally register as the demographically worst possible reader they could have -- an 88-year-old woman on food stamps living in public housing.) Never again! Check out bugmenot.com for all your password needs.
(via Romenesko's letters page)
The Republican Attack Machine
Wesley Clark slaps the Republicans for their attack on Kerryís war record. He notes that Kerryís evaluations from his military superiors were ìuniformly glowingî:
One commander wrote that Mr. Kerry ranked among "the top few" in three categories: initiative, cooperation and personal behavior. Another commander wrote, "In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action, Lt. j.g. Kerry was unsurpassed." The citation for Mr. Kerry's Bronze Star praises his "calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire."In the United States military, there's no ideology ó there are no labels, Republican or Democrat ó when superiors evaluate a man or woman's service to country. Mr. Kerry's commander for a brief time, Grant Hibbard, now a Republican, gave Mr. Kerry top marks 36 years ago.
Now the standards are those of politics, not the military. Despite his positive evaluations, Mr. Hibbard recently questioned whether Mr. Kerry deserved one of his three Purple Hearts.
In the heat of a political campaign, attacks come from all directions. That's why John Kerry's military records are so compelling; they measure the man before his critics or his supporters saw him through a political lens. These military records show that John Kerry served his country with valor, and that those who served with him and above him held him in high regard. That's honor enough for any veteran.
Then thereís the question of the medals Kerry tossed over a fence at the Capitol in 1971 to protest the war:
Republicans have tried to use this event to question his patriotism and his truthfulness, claiming he has been inconsistent in saying whether he threw away his medals or ribbons. This is no more than a political smear. After risking his life in Vietnam to save others, John Kerry earned the right to speak out against a war he believed was wrong. Make no mistake: it is that bravery these Republicans are now attacking.
At least the guy had war medals to throw away. What does George Bush have -- matchbooks from all the bars he was hanging out at while he was serving himself another beer...uh, serving his country in the National Guard?
Why The Nutbags Support Israel
George Monbiot writes in The Guardian about some of the irrational loonies running this country, and the real reason these fundamentalists are behind Israel:
In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.
The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.
Shouldn't people who think like this be strapped down and given medication, not seats of power in government?
**Monbiot invites you to click on raptureready.com to "discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas."
Just Say Naaaaaay! To Naomi Wolf
A few choice words on one of my pet peeves from Cathy Seipp:
The most pervasive unscientific assumptions deal with that well traveled media intersection where pop culture meets public policy. Journalists are typically nervous about the un-p.c. idea that masculine and feminine behavior have any basis in biology, for instance. No, no, they insist; it's the culture. So are stallions rarely used as riding horses because the mares get their more docile nature from leafing through "How To Please a Man" articles in Cosmopolitan? (And maybe geldings subscribe to, I don't know, Eunuch Living.)
Just Say No To Jail
Jacob Sullum writes in Reason about Richard Paey, an MS sufferer with a botched back surgery who was forced to go to great (and illegal) lengths to get the pills he needed to relieve his pain:
When Paey and his family moved to Florida in 1994, he had trouble finding a new doctor. Because he had developed tolerance to the pain medication, he needed high doses, and because he was not on the verge of death, he needed them indefinitely. As many people who suffer from chronic pain can testify, both of those factors make doctors nervous, since they know the government is looking over their shoulders while they write prescriptions.Unable to find a local physician who was comfortable taking him on as a patient, Paey used undated prescription forms from Nurkiewicz's office to obtain painkillers in Florida. Paey says Nurkiewicz authorized these prescriptions, which the doctor (who could face legal trouble of his own) denies.
The Pasco County Sheriff's Office began investigating Paey in late 1996 after receiving calls from suspicious pharmacists. Detectives tracked Paey as he filled prescriptions for 1,200 pills from January 1997 until his arrest that March.
At first investigators assumed Paey must be selling the pills, since they thought the amounts were too large for him to consume on his own. But the police never found any evidence of that, and two years after his arrest prosecutors offered him a deal: If he pleaded guilty to attempted trafficking, he would receive eight years of probation, including three years of house arrest.
But, Paey was worried, his wife Linda says, that he'd go to prison if he was accused of violating his probation. Moreover, he was loathe to identify himself as a criminal since he believed he'd done nothing wrong. Paey turned down the deal. Perhaps owing to his stubbornness, prosecutors then pursued him, junkyard dog-style, through three trials, to the final miscarriage of justice -- the mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in jail -- even though they knew he was not selling the pills; merely trying to alleviate his own suffering.
Ask Auntie Lena
Lena, best friend of The Advice Goddess, recommends "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman's new book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them. Apparently, Goodman is despised left and right:
(from the book description) Bill Clinton called her, "Hostile, combative, and even disrespectful." Newt Gingrich told her that it was because of "people like you" that he warned his mother not to speak to reporters. The New York Times says she's a "reporter who's not easy-listening." The Indonesian military banned her, calling her a "threat to national security."
I haven't read the book yet, but hearing a reporter referred to like that is like hearing the other side in a negotiation whine that they hate your lawyer.
Delta Burkha
A Louisiana idiot, uh, legislator, wants to make Louisiana a fashion police state, reports Michelle Krupa, in the Times-Picayune. Rep. Derrick Shepherd, D-Marrero, is proposing legislation (House Bill 1626) that would punish anybody wearing low-riding pants -- a $500 fine or six months in jail, or both. He sponsored the bill "because he was tired of catching glimpses of boxer shorts and G-strings over the low-slung belt lines of young adults." Now, I must confess, when I see a girl waddling around in a baby tee with fat handles hanging over the waistband of her pants, I'm the first one to see "there ought to be a law." That said, I don't go out and write up a bill about it. (Besides, running away screaming usually gets the point across so much better.) Hello? This guy is a congressman, and so are the other twits signing on to support. Is The First Amendment really a foreign concept for these people? Scary!
(via Romenesko's Obscure Store)
Seipp On Underparented Show Biz Brats
Cathy Seipp reports in National Review Online that it's the kids who are unsuccessful in show biz who are the most ill-mannered -- not the successful ones. She also quotes from my recent blog post on my encounter with a bellowing underparented toddler:
My friend Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist who's always tangling with the parents of badly behaved children in cafes near her Venice-beach home, calls this indulgent style of child-rearing "go-right-ahead mommying." The other day, she stepped in when one of these oblivious moms plopped a howling, chair-kicking toddler down on a stool and then went to stand in line for coffee."You need to be quiet," Amy told the child. "It makes it not nice for all the other people here if you're making all this noise." Miraculously, the child did indeed quiet down, perhaps shocked into silence by a stranger's disapproval.
"My reward for my triumph for drive-by parenting?" Amy recounted on her blog. "His mother marched over to my table, shaking with rage, and demanded, 'Did you just reprimand my child? It isn't your job to reprimand my child!' I agreed with her ó no, it isn't my job ó and what a shame that the person whose job it is isn't doing it."
NRO reader "K" e-mailed me about my remarks in Cathy's piece. He was not amused, and got into some volunteer nannying of his own:
amy, got whiff of your drive-by parenting in a NRO catherine seipp article.Ý some kids do need a little verbal attention from the 'village'.Ý but, as bad as a screaming child is,Ý it isÝinappropriate for a stranger toÝaddress someone elses child.ÝÝif you ever feelÝinclined to complain about such behavior, ADDRESS THE ADULT WHO IS NOT ACTING PROPERLY, NEVER THE CHILD.and rememberÝ 1] you're in a public place, 2] where there are numerousÝadults who are annoying...to us parents.Ý if you want peace and quiet; if you want privacy, GO SOMEWHERE PRIVATE.Ý otherwise,Ýlighten up there.Ý-K
Okay, "K", point by point, here goes:
1. "it isÝinappropriate for a stranger toÝaddress someone elses child."
ME: Inappropriate says whom?
2. "...if you ever feelÝinclined to complain about such behavior, ADDRESS THE ADULT WHO IS NOT ACTING PROPERLY, NEVER THE CHILD."
ME: Thanks, but since mommy seemed utterly incapable of managing her children, wouldn't it have been an act of futility? I actually provided her with an example of effective parenting - one I'm sure she's too self-absorbed to learn from.
3. "and rememberÝ 1] you're in a public place, 2] where there are numerousÝadults who are annoying...to us parents.Ý if you want peace and quiet; if you want privacy, GO SOMEWHERE PRIVATE.Ý otherwise,Ýlighten up there."
ME: If you're in a private place -- ie, your apartment or home, which you pay to live in, you are free to let your children run around screaming if you so desire (providing they don't knock out the eardrums of the people next door while doing so). In a private place, you need to be concerned with the needs of others -- starting with their need to remain sane for most of their adults lives.If the public place is a nursery school, I would be inappropriate in acting on my desire to read the paper in peace and quiet. In the Rose Cafe, I like to hear the quiet murmer of adult conversation interspersed with their classical music. Apparently, others feel the same, since I can't imagine they're being deluged with requests to hear the sounds of screaming children piped in over their loudspeakers. Or are they? Hmmm.
Does it "take a village" to shut up a child? No, but you can bet the "village" was thrilled to have a grumpy, meddling crank like me around after they got to go back to reading their morning papers in peace.
UPDATE: More comments on this over in Seipp-land.
Parlez-Vous 'Merican?
Perish forbid we should elect a president who's shown some interest in other countries in the world and has even gone to the trouble of learning to communicate with people who don't hail from Cleveland, Ohio. John Kerry is now being made fun of by right-ring radio numb-nuts for...and I'm embarrassed by how jingoistically dumb this is..."looking French." Now, Joshua Kurlantzick of The New Yorker reports, Kerry seems to feel he can't even speak French, lest he offend those Americans who, to their credit, don't still think the world is flat, but do seem convinced that any land of consequence ends at our borders.
Foreign Policy By Roman Genn
From Cathy Seipp's blog, from the talent-crammed and darkly adorable USSR-born cartoonist Roman Genn:
"You hit people back with a chair, they stop calling you kike," he told me. "They'd still call other kids kike, but they'd always add, 'Not you, Roman.'"
Roman now has a Web site, RGenn.com, and there are rumors that he now accesses the Internet with some regularity; surely, all unfounded.
The Cloud Club
That was the name of the swingin' joint on top of The Chrysler Building. I'm borrowing it for my new New York City dream home. Got roof? Get a Loft Cube.
(via Metafilter)
Conda-LIE-LIE-LIE-LIE-ezza Rice
Maybe you're a Democrat. Maybe you're a Republican. Maybe you're kinda-sorta libertarian...like me. ("Libertarian" small "l" means you wash). Whoever and whatever you are, a lie is a lie is a lie, right? Well, check out these WHOPPERS from our National Security Advisor...whose main security concern seems to be keeping George Bush's behind in the seat behind the desk in the Oval Office. And it seems she'll say just about anything to do that. Hmm, remember what happened to the last idiot in the White House who lied under oath?
Yes, Rice did seem to come off well to many people, immediately following the hearings. But remember, the lies she told weren't exposed until that Presidential Daily Briefing was unclassified -- something she clearly didn't expect to happen (oops!)...even as she was being asked questions straight out of its text, and answering them with her very special blend of meandering obfuscations. Read it all - parts 1-4, and beyond, and see if you aren't even the tiniest bit disgusted...even if you're a Republican.
MORE: How's this for an oath? "I swear to tell the partial truth, a bunch of half-truths, and make a lot of obfuscations, so help me, god." Too bad that isn't the one our National Security Advisor had to take.
All about lies, Condo-LIE-ezza, and her oath to tell it like it was, by CNN/FindLaw columnist Sherry F. Kolb.
Job Creation And Reality
"Show me the jobs," writes Judith Gorman about Bush's brag about all the jobs he's created:
So what are these "new jobs?" 13,000 of them are California grocery workers returning to work after an extended strike. Another 31,000 represent new government jobs. 71,000 "new jobs" are in the construction industry, a seasonal upswing independent of the President's policies. 11,000 "new jobs" are in credit intermediation, reflecting the surge in home refinancing due to low interest rates. And 36,000 "new jobs" are in healthcare/social assistance, jobs created to help people who no longer have jobs.
How do you lie to the country like this and still think of yourself as a patriot?...and beyond that...still sleep at night?
UPDATE: Slime-Side Economics All Around! Wheee! Equal Opportunity Lack Of Ethics! Not a surprise -- Lena points out that Kerry's a liar, too! Same topic, different wrong numbers! Here's the quote from Spinsanity:
Earlier this year, Kerry and his campaign engaged in a more subtle form of exaggeration, claiming that three million jobs had been lost during Bush's term and omitting the qualifier that this represented the decline in net private sector jobs at the time...
What great candidates for president we have to choose from! Vile and Viler! Which ethically bankrupt team are you on?
A-O-HELL For Mac OS X
For about a week (AOL keeps saying it's been a day or three days...and has been since I called them to complain this past Tuesday), AOL for Mac OS X has been really buggy...spinning beach ball to get to your mail, you click on a piece of mail and the cursor jumps halfway back up your mailbox. After five tries, maybe you can get to the piece of mail. Replying is another story. The experience of typing an e-mail is comparable to chipping out the words with a chisel, but probably slightly pokier. AOL is very hush-hush about this issue -- but if you call a Mac OS X tech at AOL, they'll tell you the last 20 people they talked to just complained of the same issue.
Apparently, AOL is "working very hard" to fix this. Right. Anyway, the last tech guy I talked to -- an American, with perfect English, thank goodness -- told me that "the address book isn't populating." I'm a bit dim when it comes to making sense of technology, but apparently, your AOL address book is also on their server, and the corruption is there, up on the mother ship.
Anyway, it's been a nightmare, and I've been leaving much of my e-mail unanswered...but an AOL tech just helped me with a techno-bandaid. You go into your USER file on your hard drive, and pull out the AOL Contacts for each of your screen names, and put them in a folder on the desk top. You can't access them, and the address book in your e-mail will be blank, so it's probably good to print them out first. They still exist on AOL's server, the tech told me, and are accessible right now from any Windows piece of crap, uh, computer. Sorry, I'm a bit testy. I even screamed at my dog yesterday for yapping at a squirrel, which is extremely embarrassing, considering she's only 2.5 pounds, and the squirrel was taunting her, and deserved it. Rant over. Now I must nap -- the weenie alternative to following through on promises to kill oneself if relatively minor technical difficulties aren't magically resolved.
Seen And Kurd
Blogger Mike Silverman asks a good question:
As long as we are handing states out...Why do the Palestinians get to jump ahead of the Kurds?
Hmm, maybe people in the Muslim world who want to live in peace in Israel are...welcome?!
(via Instapundit)
What George Bush Didn't Know And When He Didn't Know It
We had a liar in the Oval Office last time; we've got a liar in there this time. That said, according to this New York Times article by David Johnston and Jim Dwyer, the last liar seemed a little more effective on terrorism, vis a vis the warnings received, than the current liar. And if you're going to lie about something; quite frankly, I prefer that it's the whereabouts of your penis. Unfortunately, Clinton, too, lied about something terribly serious: the genocide in Rwanda.
Regarding the Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," Bush actually claims he didn't get information specific enough to necessitate action. Excuse me, but how much more specific does it have to get? As I've heard somebody, somewhere, say: It's like he expects life to work like a Game Boy, complete with a big arrow: "Osama attacking right here! Shoot the dancing monkey!"
Say you're president, and you hear that some nasty evildoers from a group intent on killing Americans are casing downtown New York...ya know...this might be a good time to put in a few "go to it" calls to the CIA -- not go home to Crawford, TX, for a few shit-kicking photo-ops.
The Problem Of Backwater Barbarians
Theodore Dalrymple thinks the mono-minded, Qu'ran-toting "fanatics and bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle." I wish I could believe he's right.
...the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs.
Unfortunately, unless we bomb the Middle East, as the joke goes, centuries into the future (bringing them up to about The Middle Ages), I don't see the barbarians dissolving away anytime soon.
UPDATE: In the comments section below this blog item, Jeff R recommended Howard Bloom's book, The Lucifer Principle, A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces Of History, as a key to getting background on the psychology at work here. Here's what I posted in response, with slight edits for coherence:
heh heh...I would like to recommend that, too. Bloom is a very good friend. That book reads like a great novel, but it's about science and history. There's a great chapter in it (p239, "The Importance Of Hugging") that references James Prescott's survey of primitive cultures, which discovered that the difference between cultures which took pleasure in "killing, torturing or mutilating the enemy" were those which were physically cold to their children. These societies produced, (in Bloom's words), "brutal adults." He notes how this plays out in Islamic society, with Islamic mothers, "warm and nurturing," and fathers treating their children "harshly, acting cold, distant, and wrathful." When an Arab boy reaches puberty, he is "expelled from the loving world of his m other and sisters into the realm of men. There "...physical affection between men and women is frowned upon. A vengeful masculinity stands in its place. The result: violent adults." Bloom supports his contentions in the book -- you'll have to read it. I'll put up a link (ABOVE).
(story link via Arts & Letters Daily)
Something Child
I was reading the paper in The Rose Cafe, in Venice, when a well-heeled mother, very preggers, early thirties, plopped her two small children down on two tall stools. One child was a boy, about four years old; the other, a sobbing, bellowing toddler. As soon as she left them to stand in the food and coffee line, the toddler started kicking the steel leg of the chair and intermittently yelling and howling. She returned to the table, and said something to him, causing him to cut his volume ever-so-slightly, but not entirely; probably because her version of the firm hand of parental discipline appeared to be more of a limp wrist. The moment she got back in line, the kid redoubled both his decibel level and his chair-kicking campaign.
I had a choice: Sit there until I got a migraine from the kid's piercing howls duking it out with the high notes of the slightly overloud Vivaldi on the café's speakers...or do what I did: Look straight at the toddler, and say, in a firm voice, "You need to be quiet. It makes it not nice for all the other people here if you're making all this noise, so please stop right now." And miracle of miracles, that was all it took to make him to button his tiny little yap and stop kicking the chair: a lone adult voice, from beyond that vast sea of go-right-ahead mommying, telling him, firmly, but not cruelly, that his brat-hood simply would not be tolerated.
My reward for my triumph in drive-by parenting? His mother marched over to my table, shaking with rage, and demanded, "Did you just reprimand my child?!" Mustering an air of Gandhi-like calm (out of a less-than-Gandhi-like urge to bug her senseless), I told her I did. Her jaw dropped -- all the way to the stretchy stomach of her chic LA yoga-mommy maternity wear. She launched into a bit of "how-dare-you-ing, and huffed that "It isn't your job to reprimand my child!" Maintaining my formica veneer of zen, I agreed with her -- no, it isn't my job -- and what a shame that the person whose job it is isn't doing it, thus forcing the task on irritable strangers in cafés. Unwilling or unable to contest this reasoning, she turned on her heel and scooped up her underparented offspring and took them to stand in line with her...far, far away from the odd Satan Girl, who takes issue with having her eardrums exploded by shrieking toddlers when she's attempting to read the newspaper in venues not clearly marked "Nursery School" above the door.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a child-trend -- children as the hot new status item in Los Angeles. Have one, dress one up in Petit Bateau, show it off on Montana Ave! (But enough about your needs.) Kids do need discipline or they're sure to become unmanageable brats in the short-term, and their own worst enemies for the rest of their lives. Maybe just because a woman can afford to have kids, she shouldn't necessarily foist herself on them as a sorry excuse for a parent. Yes, as alluring as it is to join in the mommy-chic, perhaps women who are well-funded but ill-equipped for the actual job of parenting might consider investing in a couple dozen Hermes handbags and a couple dozen matching Lincoln Navigators instead?
Epilogue: My friend Hank came over to talk to me a few minutes after my little exchange with the woman. I pointed to the table, just kitty-corner from mine, where the kids had been sitting. He noticed some...water...on the seat. Only, reexamining the picture of the kids in my head...the kids didn't actually have anything to drink on their table, as far as I could remember. I went over and peered at the chair. Eeeeuw! The kid had peed on the seat! (Uh-oh -- maybe it happened when cruel Satan Girl reprimanded him!?) Still, had mommy done her job, cruel Satan Girl would never have said a word, reprimanding or otherwise!
Dad To The Bone
In the journal The Independent Review, Stephen Baskerville peers into the "fatherhood crisis" and finds it more of a crisis of "policies that give mothers an incentive to initiate marital separation and divorce," taking away due process -- and a whole lot more, from a lot of dads. It's a long article, but worth reading.
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
The Culture Of Oversensitivity
In case anybody's interested, in this week alone, I have been accused of being anti-man, anti-woman, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-proletarian, anti-children, and anti-autism (after being quoted in a column by Dave Copeland). Keep those angry cards and letters coming!
The (Anti-)Science Club
The fundamentalists, led by the Fundamentalist-In-Chief are desperate to spread their puritanism-based abstinence propaganda -- even if the cost of spreading it is the spread of disease. They're hot to put warning labels on condom packets saying what they don't do: protect from genital warts. What do they think, kids will say, "Oh, we're going to get genital warts so we won't have sex at all?" Right. What they're more likely to say (while tearing off all their clothes for some nice unprotected sex) is, "Oh, why bother using a condom?" -- putting themselves at risk, not just for genital warts, but syphillis and HIV. The religious crap being pushed over a science and reason agenda has real costs, and the idiocy comes straight from the top...in the guise, of course, of legitimate concern:
...President George W. Bush has asked the Food and Drug Administration to modify the current warning to include information about human papillomavirus, commonly called HPV or genital warts.On one side are scientists who believe that condoms should be promoted as a crucial line of defense against several STDs and cervical cancer. On the other are groups that advocate waiting for sex until marriage, and who see the dangers of HPV as an argument for their cause.
Is sticking this warning on the condom packet such a good idea?
Adding that information to a condom label would be "truth in advertising," said Libby Gray. She's the director of Project Reality, an Illinois-based group that teaches public school students about abstinence -- and notes that most students she speaks with have no idea what HPV is.But scientists who study HPV worry that abstinence groups are dismissing important information to promote their own values.
"I want to be polite. But it appalls me when I see scientific and medical studies being manipulated for a different agenda," said Tom Broker. He's a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and president of the International Papillomavirus Society, a coalition of experts who study HPV.
The focus, Broker said, should be on the fact that condoms have been shown to reduce the risk of cervical cancer, which is caused by HPV and which can be detected and treated if women get regular PAP smears. (The federal Centers for Disease Control issued a recent report to Congress that included the same conclusion.)
Broker also said research has shown that HPV transmission is less likely when a person does not have other STDs, such as HIV, gonorrhea and chlamydia, which condoms have been shown to combat.
Both he and Dr. Ward Cates, former head of the CDC's STD/HIV prevention group, agreed that teaching abstinence is a key to preventing the spread of disease.
But when someone becomes sexually active, they also believe that "condoms are the best imperfect way we have," said Cates, now president of the Family Health Institute of Family Health International, nonprofit global health organization based in North Carolina.
I can just see the T-shirts now: "Some lady found Jesus, and all I got was this lousy chlamydia!"
Enlighten Up Already!
Will Hutton writes in The Observer that "only by rebutting fundamentalism in all its forms can we stop ourselves being plunged into a new Dark Age." Fundamentalism, contends Hutton, is the opiate of the empty:
(Religion) offers a moral compass by which to live - the world's great religions have a very similar moral message - and so forms a key underpinning of good behaviour. But it also offers the answer to the ontological question: why? Everybody seeks a purpose; to make a difference; to be part of something; to belong.Purpose within a social context allows us to make sense of being alive. For the secular, that purpose can be building a great society, a great work of art, a great business or a great family, against which religious values may or may not be an important backdrop.
But for the religious, the pursuit of their faith is their purpose, with the everpresent danger that because their religion answers the 'why?' question, they are compelled to impose it on others as crucial to their own purpose.
American society, where reformist social and political movements are undermined by its sheer continental scale, along with a deeply felt, faith-based individualism, is particularly prone to throwing up individuals who see no other way to give their lives purpose than by evangelising others.
For them, it is not enough to live by a religious code. They want others to live by it, too, and conversion is part of their purpose. Gibson is a classic of the genre - and so we are invited to put the clock back and live as if we were third-century Christians who believe in the reality of spirits and kingdoms of the faithful in paradise.
What is needed, he says:
...is a rediscovery of politics and a belief that purpose is best attempted in a secular guise underpinned by universal values, and that religion is a moral code to live by, rather than a purpose in its own right that gives believers the right to deny rationality and humanity.This is a tall order. It won't be helped this Easter by following Gibson's interpretation of the Passion. The values we need are inclusion and love, not exclusion and irrationality. There's too much of that around, enough, if we let it, to usher in a new Dark Age. Values, yes; religious fundamentalism, no.
Come one, come all...join the modern age! There's plenty of science and reason to go around...really there is.
Memo To The Barbarians:
Drop your Kalashnikovs, Osama and Khalid! The Pope says love is the answer!
What George Bush Didn't Do On His Summer Vacation
Stop terrorism when it potentially could have been stopped, for one, according to the contents of the Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" (PDF file to your right at the link above).
There's the argument that Clinton let stuff slide, too -- and sure, Bush and Clinton both could have, in hindsight, known better, and done better on a number of fronts. It's not a surprise that people -- be they Republicans or Democrats -- had a little trouble, before 9-11, mustering the imagination to understand the magnitude of our vulnerability within our own country.
Then again, this memo seems a pretty definitive statement of our internal vulnerability, noting "Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." You're president, and you get a memo like that, and your response is go home to Crawford, Texas, and tool around in your pickup truck? Remind us to elect you for a second term as a reward for all your industriousness.
But that Bush administration argument again? ìThere was nothing that suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C.,î said Condoleezza Rice, in her recent Senate testimony. Yes, again, "nothing" in Condoleezza-speak reads like so:
"Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
Aren't you glad a woman of her interpretative genius is in charge? Then again, she was a poly sci professor at Stanford. Is it possible she's not that dumb; merely, shall we say...mendacious?
Take your pick -- after you take a peek at a little more "nothing" from that memo:
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a ...(redacted portion) ... service.
An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an ... (redacted portion) ... service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
Yes, all that, and the loudest sound from the Bush White House? "Yawwwwwn!"
UPDATE: And here's a little tidbit from a New York Observer story by Gail Sheehy. It's a quote from an "all-source" intelligence review ... given to top officials on June 28, 2001óthe same month that Ms. Rice listed the administrationís priorities":
"Based on reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties Ö. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for a vulnerability."
Hmm, sounds kinda serious to me -- then again, I'm just a girl who writes in the newspaper about love, not one in charge of "national security" whose actions (or inaction) have life-and-death impact on millions of people.
Amy Alkon, PiÒata
There's some Alkon-bashing going on, over in the comments section at LA Observed, and more at the Spano blog over at the LA Times -- in response to my earlier post, Letter From Paris...Ohio, criticizing Spano for being frequently dull and wrong.
A Walk In The Clark
Robert Sam Anson calls Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies: Inside Americaís War on Terror, the "...best beach reading since Robert Ludlum kicked." Here's reason number three:
3. Discloses resemblance between Bill Clinton and Rambo.Ever since 9/11, the 42nd President has been taking hits from the right for being a terrorism twerp. Too busy with Monica and "promoting the homosexual agenda," etc., etc. Oh, yeah? Here he is on page 190, telling Joint Chiefs chairman and former Special Forces commander Hugh Shelton the payback he wants for the 1998 destruction of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzaniaóand thatís on top of the 75 cruise missiles heís already launched at bin Laden.
"ëHugh, what I think would scare the shit out of these al Qaeda guys more than any cruise missile Ö would be the sight of U.S. commandos, Ninja guys in black suits, jumping out of helicopters into their camps, spraying machine guns. Even if we donít get the big guys, it will have a good effect.í"
Who chickens out? The Pentagon, thatís who.
And then there's the next president's view -- oh, I mean the one we elected, not the one who got appointed:
5. Reveals thousands wasted hiring Naomi Wolf.Apart from the Supreme Court, the principal reason Al Gore isnít President today is George W. Bushís successful portrayal of him as a wuss. Naomi Wolf, youíll recall, was recruited to counter that image by clothing the then Vice-President in earth tones, the better to make him seem an "Alpha Male." Turns out, Mr. Gore already was; Florida voters just didnít know it. History might have been infinitely cheerier had they been privy to the following 1993 Oval Office meeting.
To the horror of White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, Mr. Clarke was recommending to the President an "extraordinary rendition"óspook-talk for snatching a terrorist without benefit of legal nicetyóand Mr. Clinton was still chewing his fingernails, when Mr. Gore, fresh off a plane from South Africa, walked in:
"Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, ëThatís a no-brainer. Of course itís a violation of international law, thatís why itís a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.í"
They tried. Not for the last time, they failed.
Naturally, Clark, the guy who "gets it" is out of a job, and we've got a president "swatting at fleas" and detouring after the 9-11 attacks to go after Saddam instead of Osama. Genius in government -- the American specialty!
Sleazebags Left And Right
Voice of reason Matt Welch pointed me to this site, Spinsanity.org, that cuts through the tsunamis of baseless crap put out by Democrats and Republicans alike. Worth reading. Regularly. Just wish there were more sites like this for non-partisan, common-sense-in-government fans like me.
Here's their mission statement:
Robust political debate is essential to democracy. Our national political discourse is an important part of the democratic process and serves as a critical check on those in power. We are therefore deeply concerned that our public political dialogue, largely expressed through the channels of the mass media, is becoming systematically dominated by sophisticated tactics of manipulation rather than norms of public reason. Despite widespread complaints about spin, no one is adequately documenting the full ramifications of this development to our satisfaction.Thus, our goal at Spinsanity is to use rigorous, non-partisan analysis to expose the use and intent of the simulated reason and public relations techniques that dominate political discourse, and to document how they are disseminated through the media. By exposing these tactics and demonstrating their pervasiveness, we hope to create a greater awareness of how spin operates and corrupts, and contribute to a healthy and vibrant political discourse.
Come on, bloggers, do your part to degrease Washington D.C.! Link to Spinsanity today!
One From The Revengerella Files
Some people will tell you success is the best revenge. Wrong. Revenge is the best revenge.
Not Enlightenment To Be?
We need a New Enlightenment, writes Paul Kurtz, who starts his piece by explaining the first Enlightenment (numbers refer to footnotes within the link):
The term Enlightenment refers to a unique set of ideas and ideals that came to fruition in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It began with Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and other philosophers who sought a universal method for establishing knowledge. They looked to science as the model for knowledge and debated whether reason or experience was most important (actually, both are equally important). No doubt they took impetus from the remarkable discoveries of Newton and Galileo in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The Enlightenment culminated with the French philosophes-Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and d'Holbach-who popularized its ideas in Parisian salons, pamphlets, and books, enabling those ideas to spread to a wider educated public.The philosophes criticized the ancien regime of religious superstition and dogmatism, hidebound social traditions, and repressive morality. They wished to use science and reason to understand nature and solve social problems. They were optimistic that in this way human progress could be advanced. In politics, they developed social contract theories, defended the secular state and the rights of man, and advocated economic liberty. The American Revolution was influenced by their ideals (through Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Paine). They influenced the French Revolution also, though many of them were opposed to its excesses. They wished to reform the penal code and end cruel punishments. They were anticlerical, castigating the corruption and hypocrisy of the churches, especially Roman Catholicism ("Šcrasez l'inf·me," cried Voltaire). Most were deists; some were atheists. The Enlightenment defended a humanist outlook that drew its values from the Renaissance and Greco-Roman Hellenic culture, which had also extolled the role of reason.
In his influential essay "What Is Enlightenment?" (1785) Immanuel Kant, a key figure of the Enlightenment, sought to define Enlightenment as follows:
Enlightenment is the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutelage. This state is due to his incapacity to use his own intelligence without external guidance. . . . Dare to use your own intelligence! This is the battle-cry of the Enlightenment.1
According to Karl Popper, "It was this idea of self-liberation through knowledge that was central to the Enlightenment. "Dare to be free," added Kant, "and respect the freedom and autonomy of others. . . ." For Kant, the dignity of human beings lay in their freedom, and in their respect for other people's autonomous and responsible beliefs. However, it is only through the growth of knowledge that a person can be liberated "from enslavement by prejudices, idols, and avoidable errors."2
Due to the fact that the world has now, to a great extent, fallen back on primitive, irrational thinking (decision-making founded on superstition and the anti-empirica; a category which includes most religions), Paul urges an Enlightenment re-up. He spells out his plan, with his thoughts from a new (well, not new for the few straggling fans of rationality and secular ethics) way of approaching everything from decision-making to ethics. Here's a sample:
First, it is incumbent upon us to extend the methods of science and reason to all areas of human interest. This form of methodological naturalism is grounded in the recognition that the methods of science serve us as powerful tools in unlocking the secrets of nature and solving human problems. Scientific principles should be considered as hypotheses, tested by their experimental effects and predictive power, integrated into theories, and validated by their comprehensive character and mathematical elegance. They are always open to change in the light of new discoveries or more powerful theories; hence, science is fallible and self-correcting, though its methods have some degree of objectivity. Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, science has expanded rapidly, entering into fields never before imagined possible, such as understanding consciousness, the brain, the biological world and the genome, and the micro- and macro-dimensions of the universe. Using powerful instruments of observation, it has probed aspects of nature thought to be beyond reach. We should be prepared in the future to extend the methods of scientific inquiry still further to all areas of human interest. How and in what sense we can do this depends on the subject matter under consideration. In many areas, the best term to describe this process is critical thinking, which provides a normative model for appraising claims to truth. Second, we need to respond to the besetting existential question, "What is the meaning of life?" Many theists believe that, without belief in a supernatural deity, life would be meaningless. People are unable to face death, they say, only belief in life beyond the grave will console them. Science has disabused us of such primitive concepts of God and immortality, though such skepticism has not always penetrated to a wider public. We can no longer accept the ancient metaphysical-theological interpretations of reality in the light of naturalistic accounts of cosmology. Moreover, scientific and scholarly criticisms of biblical and Qur'anic texts have shown the specious character of historic claims of so-called revelations from on high. They lack confirmation or corroboration by any reliable empirical evidence.ÝTheists are mistaken on another count: it is possible to live a full and meaningful life in a naturalistic universe, informed by scientific knowledge and devoid of supernatural illusions. Indeed, countless generations of people have experienced satisfying, creatively enriched, and morally significant lives without belief in God. A person's life in one sense is like a work of art, blending colors, tones, lines, and forms. It is what he or she chooses to do, the sum of his or her dreams and aspirations, plans and projects, ends and goals, tragedies and successes that define who and what a person is. Our ends and values are shared with others and conditioned by the societies in which we live. In open societies that respect freedom and autonomy, an individual's choices are plural and diverse and, though that person may be highly idiosyncratic, he or she is free to pursue them as long as no harm is done to others. Democratic societies afford a wider range of opportunities for free expression than do authoritarian ones. All human beings live out their lives in a universe of order and disorder, causality and contingency, regularity and chance. It is hoped that individuals can learn from experience and modify their choices in the light of consequences. They can develop common goals and values experienced with others. Thus they can find life intrinsically worthwhile and even immensely excitingófor its own sake.
No, you don't have to march in lockstep behind the men in the long black robes. Read on and see why not. Or cling in fear or laziness (you probably prefer to call it "faith") to your antique superstitions, and the way you've been told the world works -- something you believe entirely without a shred of proof...right? Or did the Virgin Mary make you your coffee this morning, unbeknownst to the rest of us?
Slack To The Future
Who clubbed all the car designers and made everything come up looking so Honda Civic -- from the Jag to the Honda Civic? How come the coolest "cars of the future" are from the 1950s and '60s? I mean, I have been looking at the Insight...but click on the "50s and 60s link above, and keep clicking and clicking and clicking, and see the cars of my dreams.
(via my man in crime, Gregg Sutter)
The Battle Between Good And Medieval
Gary Younge writes in the Guardian that presidential elections in America are largely culture wars; this election, in particular; with reason and religion duking it out for the top job:
In many ways, the two presidential candidates present a distinct cultural choice. True, both Bush and Democrat John Kerry are privileged, white, male, blue-blooded Ivy League graduates with roots in old money. But Bush is a former frat boy who wears cowboy boots and whose favourite philosopher is Jesus; Kerry has wavy hair, a foreign wife and enjoys reading and writing poetry.All of this is as trite as it is significant. Presidential elections are not just determined by who has the best policies but which candidate the American people feel most comfortable with as a person. The Republicans are trying to brand Kerry a Massachusetts liberal, while the Democrats are keen to depict Bush as a rightwing, Texan cowboy - such insults are as cultural as they are political.
At the core of this struggle lies longstanding tension between religiosity and modernity that makes the US exceptional among western nations. In no other country with America's wealth and constitutional guarantees of individual liberty and regional autonomy does religion play such a central role, with 86% of people believing in miracles, 89% believing in heaven and 73% believing in the devil and hell.
Wonderful. How about, if you believe in the devil, hell, and the stuff the newspaper prints every day for Sagittarius, you stay home and burn incense and speak in tongues on November 4 -- while those of us whose views are shaped by science and reason go to the polls and vote for the lesser of two sleazebags?
Bush's (Cough, Cough) Clean Air Policy
Yank the regulations and, Bush says, "trust" the people in profit mode at the power plants "to make the right decisions." Hmmm, the public's lungs/profits? Profits/the public's lungs? Is anybody wondering which side of the equation will win? Bruce Barcott tells the tale in Sunday's New York Times:
Power plants pump dozens of chemicals into the air; among the most harmful are nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Nitrogen oxides are major producers of ground-level ozone, or smog, and they interact in the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, water and oxygen to form acid rain. Mercury, a highly toxic chemical that is emitted as a vapor when coal is burned, has been found to cause brain disorders in developing fetuses and young children, and unhealthy levels of it have recently been detected in swordfish and tuna.The most disturbing research, though, involved fine particulates, the tiny particles of air pollution that spew out of smokestacks and lodge deep within the lungs of people nearby and even miles away. During the late 80's and 90's, medical researchers found that long-term exposure to fine particulates caused asthma attacks in children and raised the risk of chronic bronchitis in adults. Coal-fired plants account for about 60 percent of the nation's sulfur dioxide emissions and 40 percent of the mercury, and power plants as a whole are the nation's second-largest source of nitrogen-oxides pollution, after automobiles. Public health researchers estimate that fine-particulate pollution from power plants shortens the lives of more than 30,000 Americans every year. Pollution-controlling technology, while costly, can make an enormous difference. A new scrubber can cut emissions up to 95 percent.
Spurred on by that research, E.P.A. officials mounted a campaign to clean up the illegally polluting coal-fired power plants. E.P.A. agents began to go after suspected Clean Air Act violators through the companies' own accounting books. In any corporation, big capital improvement projects usually leave a trail of documents. Any department in a company that proposes a capital improvement has to justify it to the company's higher-ups, often by way of memos, briefing books, e-mail messages or PowerPoint presentations. In 1997, the E.P.A. started collecting such data, threatening subpoenas if companies didn't comply. ''We got lists of capital projects, then went after the internal justifications for those projects,'' Buckheit said.
After two years of investigation, E.P.A. officials had accumulated a daunting amount of evidence of wrongdoing by the coal-burning power industry. ''This was the most significant noncompliance pattern E.P.A. had ever found,'' Sylvia Lowrance said. ''It was the environmental equivalent of the tobacco litigation.'' Records compiled by the utilities themselves showed, according to former E.P.A. officials, that companies industrywide had systematically broken the law. If that was true, E.P.A. officials noted, the agency might have enough legal leverage to force the industry to install up-to-date pollution controls and achieve something truly historic: not merely incremental cuts in emissions but across-the-board reductions of 50 percent or more. ''On sulfur dioxide alone, we expected to get several million tons per year out of the atmosphere,'' Buckheit said.
Well, they expected that until George Bush took charge, and gave a big glad-hand to all the big polluters. Hey, you religious fundamentalists out there. Isn't there a bunch of stuff in the bible about respecting the planet? How come George Bush only seems to remember the stuff about disrespecting the homos?
P.S. If, in 2004, I buy a new Honda Insight, which, in ideal conditions, gets almost 60mpg city and highway, I can get a $1,500 "Clean Fuel" vehicle tax deduction (off the approximately $21,000 price tag for an automatic transmission). If, however, I keep my 3,000-year-old Mercedes for grocery store trips, and buy a Hummer (reportedly 8-10 mpg), and drive it only to pick up my mail at my mailbox place, I can get a small-business tax credit of up to $100,000. Hmmm, your lungs/my wallet? Your lungs/my wallet? Tough decision. I know...I'll turn to a real spiritual leader. WWGD? (What Would George Do?) Hmmm, that's a toughie!
An Outsource Of A Different Color
It becomes increasingly hard for me, these days, to make my mind up about various issues, because it's so hard to extricate the tiny slivers of fact from the vast tar pits of propaganda -- from both the right and the left. That's why I was grateful to find this Jacob Sullum piece -- a sensible defense of outsourcing:
When I started working in journalism, strips of copy had to be physically cut and pasted onto boards, which were then photographed to make printing plates. Today, thanks to cheap, powerful computers and desktop publishing software, this whole process is handled electronically: Instead of assembling and transporting boards, you create and transmit files.The shift to electronic composing has reduced the manpower, time, and cost involved in putting together a publication. At the same time, it has eliminated all the jobs associated with literal cutting and pasting.
Was that fair? The question can't really be answered, and the reason goes to the heart of the ongoing debate about offshore outsourcing of jobs by U.S. companies. Fairness, a concept appropriate in resolving schoolyard disputes and adjudicating legal cases, does not apply to market outcomes, which are not dictated by a referee or judge but arise spontaneously from the interactions of myriad individuals engaged in voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange.
Like the people who used to work in newspaper composing rooms, call center employees replaced by lower-wage workers in India don't "deserve" to lose their jobs. But that does not mean they have a right to keep them, any more than candle makers had a right to block electric lighting or blacksmiths had a right to prevent the introduction of the automobile.
In all of these cases, the need to make a profit in the face of competition drove people to produce better goods or services or to produce them more cheaply. The upshot of this process has been lower prices, higher productivity, and a standard of living unparalleled in history.
Polymorphous Sexual Perversity
April Fool's from Luke Thompson, with a side of Luke Ford. Or is it the other way around?
Belated April Fools
What he said.
Men Can Be Whiny Crybabies, Too!
Radio host Glenn Sacks proves that the men's movement Cassandras can be just as irritating as the women's movement Cassandras. Do men really need protecting from those meanie women? Are they really a downtrodden class? Or are they just as good as an excuse as any to give a guy a soapbox? And, finally: Can't we all stop whining and get along?
Porn Without A Brain
There are some sick people in this world, exploiting teenage girls by photographing them in various stages of undress and performing sex acts, then posting the photos on the Internet. Luckily, the Pennsylvania state police are on the case this time -- arresting the perp who took advantage of this particular 15-year-old girl. Oops, except that the photographer/pornographer turns out to be the girl herself. No matter. They actually charged her with sexual abuse of a child (herself!), possession and dissemination of child pornography (photos of herself!). As Julian Sanchez wrote over at Reason:
Now, I don't know the details; probably the girl could use a little counseling if, at that age, she's shooting strangers in chat rooms pics of "herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts." But it seems a touch bizarre to punish her for exploiting...herself.
I wonder if you fail at suicide in Pennsylvania, do they send you to jail for attempted homicide? At least, then the felons in the clink with you might finish the job. All in all, this story plays like a Hair Club For Men commercial: "I'm not just the victim...I'm also the perpetrator!"
More on this over at Volokh.com.
(via Reason's blog)
50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers
New York Press "cast a wide net and caught all manner of New York-centric frauds, blowhards and bloodsuckers." All you ex-New Yorkers can check it out here. And here are a few free samples:
#40
Donny Deutsch
Ad Man
DEUTSCH REPRESENTS THE latest trend in that most loathsome of New York traditions: the selling of adolescent greed, egomania and narcissism as charisma and depth of character. The chief of David Deutsch Associates says he only hires "Jews, chicks and fags," and is known for tearing off his shirt during office hours and sayingówithout ironyóthings like, "I can kick the ass of any CEO in advertising!" Think Steven Seagal meets Charlotte Beers. The "Elvis of Advertising" has been dabbling with a CNBC talk show and even told New York magazine that he'd consider running for mayor. Qualifications: good at selling shit, does lots of pushups. Look out, Bloomie.#39
Eric Alterman
Pundit
WHAT LIBERAL DICKWAD? Milhouse is all grown up: He has a goatee, a PhD from Stanford and an online diary where he proclaims his love for Jackson Browne. Liberal bloggers are holding it up like the fucking Alamo, but his run-in with Dennis Miller last month left Alterman looking like he was about to get his head dunked in the toiletófor the third time. Even if you agree with him about Ann Coulter and Alexander Cockburn, it's hard not to root against this smirking, center-left prick who likes his dinner dates rich and famous and his fois gras seared. "He constantly wants to remind you that he's Eric Alterman," one of his interns revealed in a rumor-confirming Village Voice hatchet-job, "[and] that he knows a lot of important people, and that you're a lowly intern." Dear future self-respecting Alterman interns: If this creepy Bruce Springsteen groupie ever cops an attitude, just take a breath, start laughing and print out some of his "Alter-Reviews" at random. If you're lucky, you'll hit a Jackson Browne box set.