Ghost Bum
On Hollywood Boulevard, the night of the Razzies party that Cathy Seipp, Emmanuelle Richard and I threw at Cinespace.
Boohoohoo, We Can't Have It All!
Anne Applebaum complains about the limitations, on women, by the physics of life:
...Economists such as June O'Neill or Harvard's Claudia Goldin, who have accounted for different job choices, hours worked and time taken off for raising children, have concluded that it is these factors, not discrimination, that account for most of the difference.And that is the point: Too often the missing component of the debate about the dearth of tenured female scientists, or female chief executive officers, or women in Congress, is the word "family." But Summers did call the work-vs.-family choice the most important problem for women who want tenure: In academia, as in other professions, high-powered employers "expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, they expect . . . a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women." It isn't ability or discrimination that hold women up most, in other words, but the impossibility of making a full-time commitment to work in a culture that demands 80-hour weeks, as well as to family in a society unusually obsessed with its children.
We all know this anecdotally, but research confirms it. A British sociologist, Catherine Hakim, recently concluded for example that out of 3,700 working-age women she surveyed, about a third were fully focused on their jobs, about a third were fully focused on their families, and about a third wanted a mix -- meaning, invariably, that they took the sort of job that doesn't lead to fast-track promotion. If these numbers hold there never will be a 50-50 split between men and women at the highest professional or managerial levels of anything: The ratio will always hover around 2 to 1.
Is this nature or nurture? I don't see that it matters. What matters is that those women who want to become high achievers can do so, but those who want to stay home some of the time aren't forced, by economics or social pressure, to take high-pressure jobs.
Wouldn't it be nice if life were one long wade in rose petals by moonlight? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. Joyce Purnick, Metro Editor of The New York Times, weighed in on the issue a few years ago:
If I had left the Times to have children and then come back to work a four-day week the way some women reporters on my staff now do, or if I had taken long vacations and leaves to be with my family, or left the office at six o'clock, instead of eight or nine, I wouldn't be metro editor. Should women and men who have taken the detour of the Mommy-Daddy track be as far along as those who haven't? Would that be fair? I reluctantly have to say that it would not be fair.
By choice, I work seven days a week -- some of them longer than others. Monday morning, for example, I'll wake up at 5am and work all day, and much of the night, then wake up at 4 or 5am on Tuesday and work to noon or 2pm, depending on my success chasing the muse (that bitch!) I don't stop for anything. Not to drive kids to school, wipe their noses, take them to the pediatrician if they're burning up with fever or their heads are falling off, or any of that. Why not? Because I don't have kids because I'm not interested in stopping to drive them to school, wipe their nonexistent noses, or any of the rest. As somebody in The Godfather once said, "This is the life we've chosen."
Watch Amy On Dennis Miller Right Here And Now!
Here's the clip of my most recent Miller appearance. I'm talking about the state of relationships along with Dr. Drew Pinsky and Samantha Daniels, a high-priced, marriage-at-all-cost matchmaker.
The Crap We Believe Because A Lot Of Idiots Believe It
Ridiculous ideas, not based on any form of proof, simply the fact that they are widely held, are gaining ground in the latest push against enlightenment thinking, writes sociology prof Vladimir Shlapentokh in the IHT. The mob is rising up against reason under the slogan of "diversity," among other things:
Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, casually noted that it is possible that the difference in the proportion of men and women among the faculty in the natural sciences at the country's leading universities could be partially ascribed to some genetic factors. He proposed further study into this issue.After these statements, a witch hunt started in the liberal community. Lacking the courage of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philospher who was ready to be burned at the stake, the poor president of one of the greatest universities in the world retreated from his remarks almost immediately.
However, his apology and clarification did not stop his persecutors. Summers has been attacked by the presidents of three major universities. Objectively, the goal of this campaign, as any other of this sort, is to destroy any reflection or scientific inquiry that could cast doubt on one of the most simplistic dogmas of political correctness, which suggests that men and women are genetically the same in all possible ways.
I remember vividly the ideological onslaught on genetics in the Soviet Union in 1948 under the direct guidance of Stalin. He used Trofim Lysenko, a scientific adventurist, to proclaim genetics as a false, bourgeois science. The scholarly community was ordered to stop thinking in terms of genetics and in general not to deviate from the dominant ideology.
Almost simultaneously we have seen another attack against the spirit of the Enlightenment, but this time by conservatives: The defenders of Intelligent Design - an evident variation of Creationism - published an opinion article in The New York Times, the symbol of intellectualism in the United States, as if this idea were equal in legitimacy to the biological mainstream. Of course, the newspaper could not stop this trend. Creationism is a fast-spreading epidemic here in this country. Teachers of natural science are made to be afraid of teaching evolution. To legitimize an antiscientific trend by writing under the guise of diversity is a terrible sin against the concept of progress.
Both victories - on the left and the right - mean only one thing: growing self-censorship in academia. There is an increasing number of taboo subjects in classes. More and more, students are being schooled in intellectual hypocrisy and conformism.
International Wi-Finder
Great resource out of USA Today for finding free and paid Wi-Fi hotspots all over the world.
Ugly Sells
Apparently. Because this Santa Monica store (on Broadway between 4th and 5th) has been in business for quite some time, and over the past year and a half or so, I have yet to see one outfit in their window that I'd use for more than wiping up something unpleasant.
An Estrich With Its Head Stuck In The Sand
Heather Macdonald takes on the ravings of Susan Estrich:
For the last three years, Estrich’s female law students at USC have been counting the number of female writers on the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages (and she complains that there aren’t more female policy writers? Suggestion to Estrich: how about having your students master a subject rather than count beans.). She provides only selective tallies of the results: “TWENTY FOUR MEN AND ONE WOMAN IN A THREE DAY PERIOD [caps in original]” (she does not explain how she chose that three-day period or whether it was representative); “THIRTEEN MEN AND NO WOMEN” as authors of pieces on Iraq.Several questions present themselves: how many pieces by women that met the Times’s standards were offered during these periods? What is the ratio of men to women among experts on Iraq? Estrich never bothers to ask these questions, because for the radical feminist, being a woman is qualification enough for any topic. Any female is qualified to write on Iraq, for example, because in so doing, she is providing THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE. (This belief in the essential difference between male and female “voices,” of course, utterly contradicts the premise of the anti-Larry Summers crusade.) Thus, to buttress her claim that Kinsley “refuses” to publish women, Estrich merely provides a few examples of women whose offerings have been rejected: “Carla Sanger . . . tells me she can't get a piece in; I have women writing to me who have submitted four piece [sic] and not gotten the courtesy of a call—and they teach gender studies at UCLA. . . .” It goes without saying, without further examination, that each of those writers deserved to be published—especially, for heaven’s sakes, the gender studies professors!
...The assumption that being female obviates the need for any further examination into one’s qualifications allows Estrich to sidestep the most fundamental question raised by her crusade: Why should anyone care what the proportion of female writers is on an op-ed page? If an analysis is strong, it should make no difference what its author’s sex is. But for Estrich, it is an article of faith that female representation matters: “What could be more important—or easier for that matter—than ensuring that women's voices are heard in public discourse in our community?” Her embedded question—“or easier for that matter?”— is quickly answered. She is right: Nothing is easier than ensuring that “women’s voices” are heard; simply set up a quota and publish whatever comes across your desk. But as for why it is of paramount importance to get the “women’s” perspective on farm subsidies or OPEC price manipulations, Estrich does not say.
I dunno, I always find it insulting when people refer to me as a woman writer. I'm a writer, and I'm rational, and I'm funny. Or I'm dumb and inane. But, can we please take the gender bias out of it? Let's ask Estrich that, since she's the one putting it in. P.S. The LA Times doesn't publish me either, and I think it's because editors there don't like me, and don't like my column, and would really rather not have the angry readers it smokes out of the woodwork. Also, word has it that (feminist!) editors there were offended by a joke I made about my breasts in the one piece I did write for them, Return Of The PInk Rambler:
My search fruitless, I decided to head home, after dropping in at the Hollywood police station.BEING A GIRL, I find in-person visits in such situations to be quite helpful. ("Hi, I have big breasts, will you find my car?")
Gender studies, huh? I think she's referring to those people in that profession who confuse being equal with being the same and get paid for it. Oh, let's definitely hear more from them! Regarding not getting so much as a call, I didn't get so much as a call from the editors when I've submitted pieces they didn't print, and I'm sure it would have been no different if the name on them had been Andy Alkon instead of Amy. Amy to Estrich: Oh, grow up!
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Renting Green
I drive the Honda Insight hybrid these days. Well, except for this week, because my car is in for some repairs. The story behind that is to come: my third piece of successful part-time detective work, tracking down the guy who hit my car and thought he'd could get away with leaving me to pay to fix the gash. Bad idea!
Anyway, let's just say I'd dug up a pretty strong case -- which includes videotape of him looking at the damage he'd done!, so his insurance company agreed to pay to repair my car. (Of course, the call to pay for fixing it did come after I called them, after it was taking a while, to say, "Who do I sue in small claims court, Mercury, or the slimebucket who hit me?!")
Gregg reminded me that I'd have a rental while my car was being fixed, and asked if I would get a hybrid. Good idea! I told the lady at the car-hitter's insurance company, "I'm not going to pollute the air just because this unethical creep hit my car!" I asked for a hybrid -- not necessarily an Insight, but whatever they could get in the hybrid category. (Seeeee...I'm not totally inflexible!)
So, this week, I have a Prius from Enterprise. It seems they have, like, one Prius (or close to it), to rent, in Southern California. I had to wait from last week until yesterday to get my car fixed because they had to wait until they could get the Prius I'm now driving back from San Diego. That said, there are other eco-friendly rental places in Los Angeles. When I thought I wanted to buy the Insight (because, among other things, I'm a design ho, and I thought the Prius was too ugly), Gregg rented me one from EV Rentals, by the airport. I loved driving it. It's tiny, darling, looks like something out of a Tom Swift book, and I can get into what aren't parking spaces but mere suggestions of parking spaces. Made it without being late to a sexpert casting session last week because I could park in the suggestion between a huge-mobile and the cement pole in a parking garage.
The thing I didn't seriously consider when I was buying my car was getting a biodiesel vehicle (which runs on vegetable oil and smells like a rolling French fry), because I am too big a techno-loser to deal with it. Still, I have read that somebody who is savvy can convert a diesel Mercedes into a biodiesel-mobile for a few thou. More on all of eco-rentals below, in this New York Times article by Bonnie Tsui, called "Renting a Green Car: French Fries, Anyone?"
LAST October, Suzy Smith was looking for a rental car with good mileage for a weeklong vacation in Maui. She searched for "rental cars on Maui" on Google and found Maui Bio-Beetle, a company that rents cars that run on biodiesel fuel. She didn't know what to expect from a vehicle that used fuel made solely from recycled vegetable oil, but decided to give it a chance."It was fun!" said Ms. Smith, who owns a conference-call business in Seattle. She ended up renting a Volkswagen Golf from Bio-Beetle for the week. "The car had 'This vehicle powered by vegetable oil' written all over it, and people would stop and look and ask a million questions," she said. "Every now and again when we stopped at a stoplight, we'd get a whiff of something like burned French fries, but other than that it was like driving a regular car."
Bio-Beetle is part of a growing trend in environmentally friendly rental cars and other forms of for-hire transportation. In several places across the nation, it is possible to rent - by the hour, the day or the week - hybrid gasoline-electric cars or cars that run on electricity, natural gas or, as in the case of Bio-Beetle's VW, vegetable oil.
Fueling the car, Ms. Smith found, proved to be fairly easy, with a Pacific Biodiesel station in a convenient location near Kahului Airport in Maui. And it was cheaper, too. "When we refueled to go back to the airport, the price of biodiesel was quite a bit less," Ms. Smith said, about $2.30 a gallon versus $2.69 on average for regular unleaded.
High gas prices are another reason why renting green is an attractive option. These days, alternative rental car companies like Bio-Beetle Rental Cars, which opened branches in Maui and Oahu in 2003, are seeing a rise in business, and larger rental corporations around the country like Budget and Enterprise have added environmentally friendly cars - mostly hybrid gas-electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid - to their own fleets. Though still a small segment of the economy, the market for green cars is attracting attention in the rental car industry.
Given the popularity of vehicles like the Prius and the Civic Hybrid, it seems logical that companies like Enterprise - with 5,400 locations, it's the largest rental car company in North America - would add them to their fleets. And they have: in 2004, Enterprise had 2,700 Toyota Prius cars available for rent. But the shortage of cars available for sale is also limiting the numbers being sent to rental agencies. Enterprise had to return most of its Priuses after a few months, when its short-term lease on them expired, and by May the company will have none available.
EV Rentals, Fox Rent a Car, Maui Bio-Beetle, and Electric Time Car Rentals at Fisherman's Wharf in SF are four places you can find hybrids, electrics, and/or french fry cookers on wheels.
A Night Of Nachos And Race Hate!
Great story in SF Weekly by Harmon Leon, who is actually Jewish, but briefly went under cover to infiltrate a white supremacist group:
After e-mailing the hate group about its next meeting, I'm truly paranoid. I'm not only a member of the No. 1 religion the group wants to wipe off the planet; once I push "send," I also get the uneasy feeling that I've immediately been put on an FBI watch list. Hurrah, my e-mail will now be monitored!Day turns to night, then back to day again. Pages fall off my calendar (not really). The seasons change (still not really). A week later, eerily sitting in my inbox is an e-mail from my prospective hate group:
"We should have our next meeting coming up mid to late January I would like to meet with you in person before then."
The next hurdle: a little new-potential-hater questionnaire I'm asked to fill out. I start by answering with extreme sarcasm:
Ethnic background: "What do you think! Come on!"
Profession: "Children's birthday party entertainer"
What prompted you to want to become a racial activist or at least look into it?: "I really want to get more involved in activism in my community. I work well with others and have good organizational skills. I have a pickup truck if that's needed at any events."
Then I throw in for good measure: "Also, I hate the Jews! Lol"
And in closing I add, "Where shall we meet?"
The local leader of the hate group -- an organization that is a direct spinoff from the old American Nazi Party and that sees itself as carrying on Hitler's dream to purify the white race and prevent Jews and blacks from degrading "our" culture -- responds:
"How about Applebee's? I'll be coming with my wife, baby, and one other member. We can meet in the reception area. I'll be coming with two women and a baby?"
Bingo! I've got a date with hate! And who doesn't love Applebee's? It has quality dinners and a wide selection -- and all at budget prices!
Not So Deep Throat?
Michael Hiltzik questions the publicity pitch for the docu about the movie Deep Throat that claims it is the most profitable pic ever made, and has grossed over $600 million. He takes the press to task for failing to question the numbers:
Leaving aside that "Deep Throat" was financed by mobsters and that therefore any figures are suspect, logic and arithmetic alone are enough to tell you that its box-office gross could not remotely have approached $600 million.We're talking about a movie that was released in 1972, banned in half the country and generally exhibited in one theater at a time even in the biggest cities, such as New York and Los Angeles.
The average U.S. ticket price in 1972, according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, was $2.05. By 1980, when the "Deep Throat" phenomenon was way played out, the average was still only $2.69.
For the movie to have made $600 million at the box office, in other words, it would have had to sell tickets to enough customers to populate the entire United States one and a half times over.
The No. 1 mainstream movie of the 1970s, by the way, was "Star Wars." To date, its domestic theatrical gross is $461 million. You want to tell me that "Deep Throat" has sold more tickets than "Star Wars"?
One credulous report in the New York Times recently attributed the lofty gross enjoyed by "Deep Throat" to "videocassette and DVD sales and rentals." Unfortunately, home video players didn't even appear on the market until two years after the movie's release, and didn't become a mass-market device until after 1990. (In 1985, the average price of a home VCR still exceeded $600.)
I've seen references to a videocassette of "Deep Throat" being the "bestselling sex videotape of all time," but hype is hype. Oddly enough, this miraculous product seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth without leaving a trace; you can't even find it on EBay.
Contemporary box-office reports also put the lie to Universal's PR. The most commonly cited estimates of ticket sales when the movie became the focus of a 1976 obscenity trial in Memphis were $30 million to $50 million, nationwide.
In 1981, Pussycat Theaters, an X-rated franchise in Los Angeles that screened the movie for 10 years straight, placed its L.A. gross over that period at $6 million — and that included money attributable to pictures with which it shared a double bill. Are there 100 other cities where "Deep Throat" was shown nonstop for a decade? Is there one?
"A Christian Nation" Is The One Early Americans Left To Escape Religious Persecution
Brooke Allen knocks down the widely accepted myth that the founding fathers were Christians:
It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.
In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].
In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:
As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.
The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans--the fundamentalists of their day--would "whip and crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time."
Hmmm...sound familiar, anybody?
It's Miller Time Again!
I'll be on Dennis Miller tonight, talking about the state of relationships along with Drew Pinsky and matchmaker Samantha Daniels. (CNBC, 6pm and 9pm on the east coast; 9pm and midnight on the west coast.) Samantha was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine article on matchmakers, The New Arranged Marriage, by Melanie Thernstrom:
Behind all of Samantha's counsel is a simple message: if you want to marry, don't blow it. Play ball, don't rock the boat, avoid controversy, get along, don't drag her or him into heavy conversations. Go out, have sex, take trips. Eventually, you'll become comfortable, and attachment will grow, and pretty soon you'll be cruising on a lane toward that tollbooth, and it's harder to get off than to go forward. It's not just that you should delay turning on that bright light of serious scrutiny (Is this really the right relationship for me?), which inevitably produces ambivalence; you should leave it off forever.
In brief: Ick.
The Asshole Of Evil
The pope warns of gay marriage being part of "the ideology of evil" and says it's insidiously threatening society. This is so sick, but so over-the-top, it's almost funny. Let's take a glance "the ideology of evil" -- two people, who happen to be of the same sex, who want to make the same lifelong, legal commitment to each other that two people of different sexes are able to do. The guy who bought my old Mercedes is gay. He bought it because his boyfriend needs their Scion to drive their adopted child to school. Do you see Satan in this picture? Or is it in some old man, head of the church that's spent, probably centuries, shuffling around pedophile priests? Perhaps old Pope-ie needs stronger glasses so he can take a better look in the mirror.
Speak Up For Freedom Of Speech
Locally and globally. It's "Free Mojatba and Arash Day" here in Advice Goddess-land, and around the blog world. These are two Iranian bloggers, thrown into prison in Iran simply for publishing views that don't plant a big wet one on the government. Please, if you're a blogger, publish this on your blog, and get the word out. These creepy, freedom-loathing foreign governments might be less likely to squash dissidents (and/or murder them) if they feel the world is watching.
Portable Shut-The-Fuck-Up-ers
Cell phone jammers hit the streets (and buses) of New York, where people are a little too free with free speech:
Unsuspecting cellphone users may find themselves saying that more often now that cellphone jammers — illegal gizmos that interfere with signals and cut off reception — are selling like hotcakes on the streets of New York."I bought one online, and I love it," said one jammer owner fed up with the din of dumb conversations and rock-and-roll ringtones.
"I use it on the bus all the time. I always zap the idiots who discuss what they want from the Chinese restaurant so that everyone can hear them. Why is that necessary?"
He added, "I can't throw the phones out the window, so this is the next best thing."
In lieu of illegal mechanical devices, I sometimes like to register my protest by joining in the rude phoner's loud, obnoxious fun. Last week, at Whole Foods, I was pleasantly lost in thought, when some chick turned into the aisle, shouting her dull life into her phone. I looked straight at her, sans aggression, and said, loudly, "THAT IS SO FASCINATING."
"Hold on," she says, pulling the phone to her chest and turning to me. "I'm sorry, what did you say."
"THAT IS SO FASCINATING, WHAT YOU WERE SAYING! I CANNOT WAIT TO HEAR MORE."
She rolled her eyes and went back to her call. I kept it up as I moved down the aisle. "NO, REALLY, I'VE NEVER HEARD ANYTHING SOOOO INTERESTING!"
Not surprisingly, she remained on the phone. But, at least I got some live entertainment in exchange for the live interruption.
The Science Without The Scientists
When the Bush administration talks science, they prefer not to have those pesky scientists around, writes Paul Recer for the AP:
Speakers at the national meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science expressed concern Sunday that some scientists in key federal agencies are being ignored or even pressured to change study conclusions that don't support policy positions.The speakers also said that Bush's proposed 2005 federal budget is slashing spending for basic research and reducing investments in education designed to produce the nation's future scientists.
And there also was concern that increased restrictions and requirements for obtaining visas is diminishing the flow to the U.S. of foreign-born science students who have long been a major part of the American research community.
Rosina Bierbaum, dean of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, said the Bush administration has cut scientists out of some of the policy-making processes, particularly on environmental issues.
"In previous administrations, scientists were always at the table when regulations were being developed," she said. "Science never had the last voice, but it had a voice."
Hmmm, maybe marionettes would be an idea?
The Kettle Talks Pot
Bush said he'd remain mum about the marijuana:
''I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions,'' he said, according to the Times. ''You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried.''
Especially not if they lack rich, powerful daddies to cover it up after they do it.
Revenge For Two
A lovely little tale by a Manhattan waiter:
“Good evening gentleman. May I get you something from the bar? A glass of wine or a cocktail?” I ask in greeting.“We’ll have tea,” the thinner of the two sniffs.
Oh great. Tea for an aperitif. I’ve got the last of the big time spenders.
“Do you have lapsang souchong?” the fat one inquires, his lower lip trembling.
“I’m afraid we don’t but we have a nice selection of other teas. I’ll bring the tea box.”
“Mmmmm, no lapsang,” Fatty murmurs sadly.
“Sorry sir.”
“Just fetch the tea box,” Thin orders.
Fetch? I think about emitting a little bark but think the better of it.
Now, any waiter will tell you that serving tea is a monumental pain in the ass. Unlike coffee, tea requires about a dozen accoutrements for its preparation and presentation. First you have to lug out a tea box the size of a cigar humidor, stand around while the patron agonizes over the selection, run back to the kitchen, steep the cup in hot water, assemble saucer, spoon, biscotti, lemon, milk /cream, lemon wedge, sugar bowl (which better have every cancer causing brain cell killing artificial sweetener ever cooked up in a lab), a miniature teapot of scalding water, and, finally, honey. God forbid you forget a single thing.
Imagine doing that for five different tables at the same time and you get a taste of my pain.
I deliver the tea humidor to the Bohemians. There are about a hundred tea packets in the box. They flip through every single one. After what seems like an eternity Fatty pulls out four herbal teas and a bag of Lipton. Thin draws out five herbals and a decaf Lipton. I stand there in confusion. How much tea are they going to drink?
“Well aren’t you going to get us some hot water?” Thin huffs impatiently.
“Sorry sir,” I say, beating a retreat to the kitchen.
When I return, tray laden with supplies, I notice there are only two bags of Lipton tea on the table. The other nine tea bags have vanished. (continued)
The Pot Is Not Melting Too Well These Days
You know, when my piss-poor Russian and German ancestors got chased out of Europe by the Cossacks and other equally Jewish-positive types, and ended up in that Garden of Eden, Detroit, Michigan, nobody was bending over backward to see that German and Russian were spoken so they could get by. No, they were expected to learn the English language, imagine that -- and they did. My Russian-born great grandfather learned it while collecting scrap metal off the streets, and my Russian-born grandfather was the first in the family to go to college, and med school at that. Until recently, that's always been the way in America: move here, melt in, move up. Not any more. I call any number in California and there's usually a wait while a message plays in Spanish first, then "Press One" if you want English. Now, I understand if this is the case when you call an emergency number. But, the rest of the time, maybe we shouldn't be making it so easy on people to keep from blending in. Maybe what it's ultimately doing is making it nearly impossible for them to move up.
I Do Love A Great Ass
The Hag Rule
When Atlantic City's Borgata Casino hires "Borgata Babes," which is what they call their waitresses, they'd really, kinda, like them to be...well...babe-like. So, they told them they could lose their jobs if they gain weight.
Reality check: No, contrary to the "fat acceptance" ladies' contention, fat is not attractive. And men, except for a few chubby chasers, find fat women especially unattractive. Fat women know this. They're just rather pretend it's not true, which takes a lot less effort than prying the fork out of their jaws, reading this book, and dragging their wide loads to the gym. (Note that you don't hear thin women saying they "accept" themselves for how they look. And hot waitresses draw customers.)
The company told CNN/Money on Friday that the new policy applies to anyone -- including male bartenders -- who gains more than 7 percent of their body weight. But if the weight gain is caused by pregnancy or a medical condition, the company said, the server would be exempt."We find this policy to be legal and fair, because the job is defined as a 'performing art' profession at Bogata," Bogata spokesman Michael Facenda told CNN/Money. "Our guests have to come to expect a certain level of service and appearance, and it's our intention to maintain (that image)."
The policy infuriated women's rights advocates, the cocktail servers' union and others, who call the move discriminatory. The cocktail waitress union is also filing a complaint against the new policy. But so far no legal actions have been taken.
Imagine that: They want hot women waitressing in a casino. Gasp! Not every woman is hot enough to be an Atlantic City cocktail waitress. Gasp! Every profession in the world is not open to everybody. For example, I can't ever be a supermodel. Gasp! Double gasp! Then again...perhaps I could make a few bucks suing Vogue for not putting me on the cover. In fact, I don't recall seeing myself on the cover of Elle lately...or ever, as a matter of fact. DISCRIMINATION! What is that number...1-800-LAWYER? Sorry, must wind up this blog item and get phoning.
The Land Of Equal Rights
That would be...Canada! Here's what Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin had to say about giving gays the same rights as straight people -- something America, ruled by the primitives, has become too backward to do:
I rise today in support of Bill C-38, the Civil Marriage Act. I rise in support of a Canada in which liberties are safeguarded, rights are protected and the people of this land are treated as equals under the law....First, some have claimed that, once this bill becomes law, religious freedoms will be less than fully protected. This is demonstrably untrue. As it pertains to marriage, the government’s legislation affirms the Charter guarantee: that religious officials are free to perform such ceremonies in accordance with the beliefs of their faith.
In this, we are guided by the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, which makes clear that in no church, no synagogue, no mosque, no temple – in no religious house will those who disagree with same-sex unions be compelled to perform them. Period. That is why this legislation is about civil marriage, not religious marriage.
Moreover -- and this is crucially important – the Supreme Court has declared unanimously, and I quote: “The guarantee of religious freedom in section 2(a) of the Charter is broad enough to protect religious officials from being compelled by the state to perform civil or religious same-sex marriages that are contrary to their religious beliefs.”
The facts are plain: Religious leaders who preside over marriage ceremonies must and will be guided by what they believe. If they do not wish to celebrate marriages for same-sex couples, that is their right. The Supreme Court says so. And the Charter says so.
One final observation on this aspect of the issue: Religious leaders have strong views both for and against this legislation. They should express them. Certainly, many of us in this House, myself included, have a strong faith, and we value that faith and its influence on the decisions we make. But all of us have been elected to serve here as Parliamentarians. And as public legislators, we are responsible for serving all Canadians and protecting the rights of all Canadians.
We will be influenced by our faith but we also have an obligation to take the widest perspective -- to recognize that one of the great strengths of Canada is its respect for the rights of each and every individual, to understand that we must not shrink from the need to reaffirm the rights and responsibilities of Canadians in an evolving society.
The second argument ventured by opponents of the bill is that government ought to hold a national referendum on this issue. I reject this – not out of a disregard for the view of the people, but because it offends the very purpose of the Charter.
The Charter was enshrined to ensure that the rights of minorities are not subjected, are never subjected, to the will of the majority. The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority.
We embrace freedom and equality in theory, Mr. Speaker. We must also embrace them in fact.
Third, some have counseled the government to extend to gays and lesbians the right to “civil union.” This would give same-sex couples many of the rights of a wedded couple, but their relationships would not legally be considered marriage. In other words, they would be equal, but not quite as equal as the rest of Canadians.
Mr. Speaker, the courts have clearly and consistently ruled that this option would offend the equality provisions of the Charter. For instance, the British Columbia Court of Appeal stated that, and I quote: “Marriage is the only road to true equality for same-sex couples. Any other form of recognition of same-sex relationships ...falls short of true equality.”
Wow...it's been so long since I've heard a North American leader who sounds like a statesman. Wise and fair, too. Too bad Martin wasn't running against the two boobs we had.
The Stepford Child Generation
Bill Maher was fired from Politically Incorrect for being...politically incorrect after 9/11, and warns, in a brilliant and biting LA Times commentary, Kids Say The Darndest, Most Stalinist Things, that there's more of that to come:
A new survey found that a majority of high schoolers think newspapers should not be allowed to publish without government approval. And almost one in five said that Americans should be prohibited from expressing unpopular opinions.Lemme tell you little darlings something: This is my livelihood you're messing with, so either learn the Bill of Rights or you don't deserve Social Security.
Now, to those of you who think I'm overreacting: Yes, I understand that when you're in high school you're still very young and that no one really cares what kids say anyway — it's not like priests are dating them for their brains.
But the younger generation is supposed to rage against the machine, not for it; they're supposed to question authority, not question those who question authority.
And what's so frightening is that we're seeing the beginnings of the first post-9/11 generation — the kids who first became aware of the news under an "Americans need to watch what they say" administration, the kids who've been told that dissent is un-American and therefore justifiably punished by a fine, imprisonment — or the loss of your show on ABC.
President Bush once asked, "Is our children learning?" No — they isn't. A more appropriate question might be, "Is our teachers teaching?" In four years, you can teach a gorilla sign language. Is it too much to ask that in the same amount of time a kid be taught what those crazy hippies who founded this country had in mind?
The Flip Side Of "Abstinence Only"
Nicholas Kristof has it right:
I'm sorry to report a sex scandal in the heart of the Bush administration. Worse, it doesn't involve private behavior, but public conduct.You see, for all the carnage in President Bush's budget, one program is being showered with additional cash - almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It's "abstinence only" sex education, and the best research suggests that it will cost far more lives than the Clinton administration's much more notorious sex scandal.
Mr. Bush means well. But "abstinence only" is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There's a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins - it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS.
Look, I'm all for abstinence education. I support the booming abstinence industry as it peddles panties and boxers decorated with stop signs (at www.abstinence.net), and "Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date" T-shirts.
Abstinence education is great because it helps counteract the peer pressure that often leaves teenagers with broken hearts - and broken health.
For that reason, almost all sex-ed classes in America already encourage abstinence. But abstinence-only education isn't primarily about promoting abstinence - it's about blindly refusing to teach contraception.
To get federal funds, for example, abstinence-only programs are typically barred by law from discussing condoms or other forms of contraception - except to describe how they can fail. So kids in these programs go all through high school without learning anything but abstinence, even though more than 60 percent of American teenagers have sex before age 18.
ROTC For Terrorists
The CIA says the war in Iraq is prime terrorist recruiting territory, write Dana Priest and Josh White in the WaPo. Rummy disagrees. Of course.
The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday."Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
"These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism," he said. "They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."
On a day when the top half-dozen U.S. national security and intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to talk about the continued determination of terrorists to strike the United States, their statements underscored the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.
"The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists," Goss said in his first public testimony since taking over the CIA.
And a cause for financial concern over here. Bush just asked for $82 billion in emergency aid for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...in addition to the nearly $200 billion we've already sunken into Iraq.
The emergency request exceeds the president's combined 2006 funding request for the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development, and it is nearly five times the savings Bush is seeking next year in cuts to discretionary spending.
"This is a lot of money," said Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The request was the latest demonstration of how the soaring costs of war — and the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan — have exceeded the administration's early characterizations. White House officials derided former Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey's early estimate of a $100 billion to $200 billion price tag.
"We're now officially about to hit a $200 billion war, with a likelihood of hitting $300 billion ... and a distinct possibility we'll reach 400 [billion]," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution.
Where, exactly, is this money going to come from? When, exactly, are people going to start getting a little wigged that Mr. No Nation Building is doing loads and loads of nation building, and it's all going on the public's already way over-limit Neiman-Marcus card?
How Will We Pay For The War?
"Time to come clean about the cost of Iraqi freedom," writes Charles V. Peña in Reason:
The White House has announced that it will ask Congress for an $82 billion supplemental bill to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. That's on top of the $25 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that was part of the Defense Department's fiscal year 2005 budget the president signed last August.Taken together with the previous supplemental requests—$75 billion in 2003 and $88 billion in 2004—and given that the U.S. commitment of troops and resources in Iraq is five to six times larger than its commitment in Afghanistan, the latest tally of the cost of the Iraq war is over $200 billion. The U.S. Army announced that it plans to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for at least two more years, so we should expect another supplemental request of $80 billion or more next year.
Does anyone remember what the administration said the Iraq war would cost? When White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey suggested that going to war against Iraq might cost $100 to $200 billion, he was rebuked and chose to resign three months later.
Citing Office of Management and Budget estimates, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once thought the Iraq mission might cost $50 billion or less. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz once opined that Iraqi oil revenues of $50 to $100 billion, instead of U.S. taxpayer dollars, would pay for the occupation and reconstruction.
Oops!
But, let's go after the correct taxpayer dollars...by taking Andrew Sullivan's suggestion, from August, that we tax gas. Good idea. No, great idea.
Some conservatives say it's antithetical to the American Dream. Hooey. Conservatism in America rightly emphasizes personal responsibility alongside freedom. You can't have one without the other. And using a car affects not just you but many others. When your driving habits lead to higher levels of pollution, when your ownership of a gas-inhaling 2-ton SUV puts others on the road at risk, when traffic jams drastically reduce the country's productivity (as well as make radio shock jocks into millionaires), don't you think you might give a little back in return? To paraphrase the President, can't we shift from a philosophy of "If it feels good, do it" to one of responsibility?
The real reason so many Americans hate gas taxes is that they see them. The government can eat away at your life with payroll taxes, but because they are usually deducted before you get to see your paycheck, you don't notice. But the price of gas is broadcast on big placards across the country. When it goes up, eyebrows rise a notch. But that's a good thing! The government has to tax you somehow. Isn't it better to shift taxation to places where people notice it, so they can demand accountability? The gas tax is therefore a win-win conservative-liberal synthesis. It cuts the deficit, helps the environment and keeps the government fiscally honest and accountable.
Let me add one further reason, and it's a simple one. We're at war. So far, the Bush Administration has refused to ask for a general sacrifice to pay for this effort. But that leads to a sense that we're not all involved, that we do not all owe the troops our support. More important, the war is about the Middle East. A long-term strategy to protect us from constant involvement in that region would include greater energy independence. A gas tax helps pay for our current struggle and helps us avoid future ones. Why not therefore a wartime gas tax of a dollar a gallon? If we do not owe it to our fellow citizens, to the environment, to greater fuel efficiency, can we at least owe it to the troops? Or is that minimal level of personal sacrifice too much to ask of ourselves?
Dumbass 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Debunked
Popular Mechanics investigates the 16 most common. For example:
Big Plane, Small Holes
CLAIM: Two holes were visible in the Pentagon immediately after the attack: a 75-ft.-wide entry hole in the building's exterior wall, and a 16-ft.-wide hole in Ring C, the Pentagon's middle ring. Conspiracy theorists claim both holes are far too small to have been made by a Boeing 757. "How does a plane 125 ft. wide and 155 ft. long fit into a hole which is only 16 ft. across?" asks reopen911.org, a Web site "dedicated to discovering the bottom line truth to what really occurred on September 11, 2001."The truth is of even less importance to French author Thierry Meyssan, whose baseless assertions are fodder for even mainstream European and Middle Eastern media. In his book The Big Lie, Meyssan concludes that the Pentagon was struck by a satellite-guided missile--part of an elaborate U.S. military coup. "This attack," he writes, "could only be committed by United States military personnel against other U.S. military personnel."
FACT: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 ft. wide, according to the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance Report. The exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the findings.
Why wasn't the hole as wide as a 757's 124-ft.-10-in. wingspan? A crashing jet doesn't punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building, says ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University. In this case, one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns, explains Sozen, who specializes in the behavior of concrete buildings. What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass. "If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen tells PM, "it didn't happen."
The tidy hole in Ring C was 12 ft. wide--not 16 ft. ASCE concludes it was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage.
Not Better, Just Different
Salon's Tim Grieve notes that Bush "fessed up" that his Social Security plan doesn't exactly solve anything:
Bush rattled off much of his usual misleading sales pitch about his plan -- workers will definitely come out ahead with personal accounts, retirees will get to pass on the money to their survivors, and any number of other promises that range from not-exactly-true to completely false.But there was a moment there when Bush seemed to realize -- where he actually seemed willing to admit -- that there's a disconnect between his claims about Social Security's insolvency and the need for private investment accounts. A couple of weekends ago at a forum in Tampa, Bush tried to argue -- incomprehensively -- that private investment accounts would somehow shore up the system's fiscal health. But in New Hampshire Wednesday, Bush admitted that the private investments accounts will not, in fact, fix the Social Security "crisis."
"Certainly," Bush said, "the personal account doesn't fix the system. There needs to be better reforms, more meaningful reforms than that."It may seem like a small thing. But Bush has been selling his privatization plan in the same way he sold the war in Iraq, by linking up two things that actually have nothing to do with each other. Then it was 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Now it's Social Security's financial health and his privatization plan. Having now admitted so clearly that privatization won't fix Social Security, Bush has just made it harder for himself to push a linkage that never existed in the first place.
Helloooo, Baby Pod!
Hey, all you Bush voters, thanks so much for pooh-poohing what electing the numbnut would mean for abortion rights. Oh, they weren't going anywhere, were they? Check this out...if Roe v. Wade is overturned (and how unlikely is it that it will be, given the fundanutters who have taken over in this country) -- South Dakota is the first state to take the preparative measure to make it a felony to perform abortions, writes Brad Perriello for AP:
Kate Looby of Planned Parenthood said the bill is one of the most extreme measures she has seen. The measure would tie physicians' hands and ignore women's ability to make decisions for themselves, she said."Making abortion illegal never has and never will stop women from having abortions," Looby said, urging the committee to reject the bill.
Well, when they get caught for the crime of expecting autonomy over their own bodies and the clumps of cells within them, maybe they'll have a fine career in the license plate industry:
"South Dakota: The Coat Hanger State!" sounds about right.
The Never-Wed Stigma
Now it isn't the divorced who get the suspicious stares, writes Olivia Barker. It's those who've never tied the knot:
“Coupledom is now taken to be a sign of normal psychology,” says Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love: A Polemic and a media studies professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “People who don't do it are under suspicion” for not being capable of intimacy.“What's peculiar is that this country supposedly celebrates independence yet assumes lives should conform to the same shape,” Kipnis says. Society, she says, dictates no less than one and no more than two marriages. (One divorce is allowed; more than one “people have to apologize for or account for somehow.”)
What's odd is the assumption that there's something wrong with somebody who doesn't feel they're nothing without somebody else, who doesn't feel compelled to cleave to somebody, anybody, just because that's what they're "supposed" to do? Allowing for the fact that there are a number of human ingrown toenails out there, doesn't this say they're very likely emotionally healthier than a whole lot of people? And perhaps a whole lot more logical?
What's just as peculiar is the idea that coupling for life is the ideal, when nobody looks at what that means. My late gerontologist friend, Roy Walford, predicted that people who are in their 30s today, and relatively healthy, could very likely live to be 120. So, if you get married at 35, you're pledging to be with somebody for 85 years. Do you really have anything new or interesting to say to them after the 50-year mark? (Or the 25-year-mark?) Perhaps you do...if you're Chris Rock, Bertrand Russell, and Einstein, all rolled into one. But, perhaps the real reason for your marriage and its continuation isn't being with somebody because you're more together than you are alone, but because you secretly feel you're not enough alone.
Here's an excerpt from a column I wrote on the subject, To The Better End.
What's with this idea that your life isn't complete if you're unable to get somebody to attach to you like a vacuum hose in perpetuity? What's wrong with a relationship that lasts five years, five months, or five great days? Hmm, maybe, just maybe, you aren't the scourge of humanity if you don't partner up for a lifetime. Or partner up at all. Of course, if you're underfunded, under-selved, and desperate for somebody to ''complete'' you, well, then you'd better break rocks and call it love. Unfortunately, if you're nothing without a relationship, it's unlikely that you're going to be much of anything with one.
The shovel-fulls of angry letters I'm getting from readers confirm how little people like to have the status quo challenged.
Finally, A Democrat Might Take A Stand
Paul Krugman writes on "the meaning of Dean" -- the fact that he has actual beliefs he stands for, not just poll results:
"The Republicans know the America they want, and they are not afraid to use any means to get there," Howard Dean said in accepting the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. "But there is something that this administration and the Republican Party are very afraid of. It is that we may actually begin fighting for what we believe."Those words tell us what the selection of Dean means. It doesn't represent a turn to the left: Dean is squarely in the center of his party on issues like health care and national defense. Instead, Dean's political rejuvenation reflects the new ascendancy within the party of fighting moderates, Democrats who believe that they must defend their principles aggressively against the right-wing radicals who have taken over Congress and the White House.
It was always absurd to call Dean a left-winger. Just ask the real left-wingers. During his presidential campaign, an article in the muckraking newsletter "CounterPunch" denounced him as a "Clintonesque Republicrat," someone who, as governor, tried "to balance the budget, even though Vermont is a state in which a balanced budget is not required."
Even on Iraq, many moderates, including moderate Republicans, quietly shared Dean's misgivings - which have been fully vindicated - about the march to war.
But Dean, of course, wasn't quiet. He frankly questioned the Bush administration's motives and honesty at a time when most Democrats believed that the prudent thing was to play along with the war party.
Jeff Gannon, Extremely Exposed
The sad thing for me is the sense of weariness with which everybody's greeting yet another info-swindle from the right. Another sad thing for me what boobs the left are in terms of how they deal with getting their message out. I don't think they're necessarily more honest; perhaps just less crafty; and perhaps just too unclear on what, exactly, their message is. (And then there are the libertarians, who have a clearer message but don't get it out very much at all.) Americablog dissects the Gannon scandal, complete with gay hooker photos:
So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we're talking about. It's looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a "daily basis." They reportedly made a decision to give him - one of only six - access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky - a tasteless episode, "inappropriate," whatever. Monika wasn't a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing? What kind of war-time leadership can't find the same information that took bloggers only days to find?
None of this is by accident.
Someone had to make a decision to let all this happen. Who? Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it? Who?
Ultimately, it is the hypocrisy that is such a challenge to grasp in this story. This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers? While they use a gay hooker to write articles for their gay hating political base? While they use a gay hooker to destroy a political enemy? Not to mention the hypocrisy of a "reporter" who chooses to publish article after article defending the ant-gay religious-right point of view on gay civil rights issue.
I Am Being Held Hostage
Some men try to bribe their women into sticking around with diamonds and yachts. I think diamonds are vulgar, and I throw up on boats. Humor, however, really grabs me. As I wrote to one of my readers about my boyfriend, "What, I'm going to get tired of how he makes me laugh? Come down with entertainment ennui?"
Does Eco Have To Mean Ugly?
I've been googling for grocery bags -- the kind made out of recycled soda bottles that you take with you to and from the grocery store. I have yet to find one that doesn't look like it's carried by somebody whose hairy toes are firmly ensconced in Birkenstocks. Well, for a moment, I thought I was in luck. There was a fashion show in London last week, supposedly eco-friendly...but was it fashion-friendly? Doubtful.
Reminiscent of Jessica Ogden and Marni, the hemp label Enamore showed kimono wrap-over tops and romantic knee-length culottes with trims from recycled curtains, and 1960s A-line bell-sleeved coats in an antique palette of dirty rose, chestnut and charcoal. Enamore's spring/summer show is the first collection of the Brighton-based Canadian designer Jenny McPherson."I blend hemp with luxurious silks, wools and cottons. It's time to dust off hemp's canvas sack image," said McPherson, who nonetheless plays down the eco argument. "This has to appeal to the mainstream," she said. "I can't rely on a bunch of hippies. They'll be knitting their own clothes."
I dunno, the stuff at the Enamore link above looks like the same old hippie shit to me, probably just a lot more expensive.
We Interrupt This School Day For A Message From Jesus
The public school day stops in some rural Virginia towns, writes Carol Morello, so the students can file over to the church and take bible study. Kids who don't participate do art or "remedial studies." In other words, they've got their fingers up their nose while they're waiting for Jesus time to end.
For 65 years, weekday Bible classes have been part of the fabric of growing up in this town of 24,000 in Augusta County and in a score of other small towns and hamlets in rural Virginia. It is such an accepted tradition that 80 to 85 percent of the first-, second- and third-graders in Staunton participate.But now, the practice is being challenged by a group of parents who have asked the School Board to end or modify weekday religious education. Not only do they fear that their children are stigmatized for not attending, but in a decidedly 21st-century twist, they also argue that interrupting class for Bible study hinders efforts to meet state and national standards for test scores.
"I just think a Christian outreach program doesn't belong in the school day," said Beverly Riddell, one of several parents who protested to the School Board.
It's scary to me that somebody even has to say this. Clearly, bible time should be spent teaching government class -- like that part about church and state being separated that much of the nation seems so completely clueless about.
Sex Toys For Boys
Get your Fleshlight here.
Cleverly disguised as an ordinary flashlight, it's easy to store and transport without drawing attention. Fleshlights are available in a wide variety of colors, scents and orifices.
This link is "Not Safe For Work" (unless you work for Larry Flynt). You've gotta love a product that's available in a "wide variety of...orifices."
Who's Your Lame-Ass?
This is a blog item for LA residents only. Which lame-ass are you voting for for mayor, and why?
Revenge Is The Best Revenge
A note to Mr. Big Wheels, the white-bearded white dude who tried to run me off the road: I know you think you're a BIG MAN up there in your huge, SUV-style pickup, but maybe you'll think twice next time before you pick on the girls in the little cars.
It's morning in Venice, and I'm taking my microscopic Yorkie, Lucy, to the firing squad, uh, groomer (that's how she sees it when we walk in the door, then everything changes when everybody coos about how beautiful she looks afterward, the damn diva). Anyway, I'm on a short, narrow, residential street -- not too narrow for two normal-sized cars to pass -- but too narrow for a girl in a teenie weenie hybrid (my Honda Insight) and a big, black gigundo-mobile. Because I'm further along down the street than he is, the polite thing would be to let me get through the last third of the street, then be on his way. But, surprise, surprise, he doesn't do the polite thing. Instead of acting the gentleman and waiting his turn, he barrels through, and then swerves at my car to show me who's boss: Dangerous, mean, aggressive driving.
But, what's the girl in the little hybrid to do? Ooops! Picked the wrong girl! I actually wasn't quite sure what I could do, but he looked old and architecture'y, not armed and dangerous, and I always have my digital camera on me. Who knows...maybe just photo his plate and report him to the cops, and let him worry a little why the girl who's supposed to be terrified of such a BIG man in his BIG truck is following him.
I trailed him to the big boulevard, then he turned left. I went straight (didn't see him turning thanks to the delightful, house-sized Hummer in front of me), but I know the neighborhoods, so I turned left, cut through and eventually cut back to the boulevard he'd turned onto. Drat! I thought I'd lost him. Then I saw. He'd been pulled over by a highway cop! The cop was standing by his bike, writing the creep a ticket. "Oh, yoo-hooo...officer"...I got out, holding Lucy in my arms, dressed all girly, as always (which probably made the guy look that much more the aggressive pig), and told the officer my story. The guy glowered at me from within his truck as I stuffed the huge grin on my face into my itsy bitsy car and drove off.
Majority Rules
Shiites win in Iraq, writes Jason Keyser for the AP. Kurds came in second. Now it's compromise time:
The Shiites likely will have to form a coalition in the 275-member National Assembly with the other top vote-getters the Kurds and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's list to push through their agenda and select a president and prime minister. The president and two vice presidents must be elected by a two-thirds majority.The Shiite-dominated ticket received more than 4 million votes, or about 48 percent of the total cast, Iraqi election officials said. A Kurdish alliance was second with 2.175 million votes, or 26 percent, and Allawi's list was third with about 1.168 million, or 13.8 percent.
"Until now there is no estimation regarding how many seats the political parties will get, when the counts are final the number of seats will be divided according to the number of votes," commission member Adel al-Lami said.
Elsewhere Sunday, insurgents attacked a U.S. convoy and a government building near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, leaving at least four people dead, hospital workers said. Two Iraqi National Guard troops were also killed while trying to defuse a roadside bomb.
Can the country ever be stable without a U.S. military presence? What are your predictions on the outcome, and on how long we'll be there? Yoohoooo...Crid? I believe it's your turn!
Harvard Moves To Berkeley?
Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney bends over for the funda-nutters, and comes out for a ban on stem cell research planned at "prominent" institutions in his state. The New York Times editorial writers hope he's just "posturing":
The governor urged the State Legislature on Thursday to prohibit the creation of human embryos for the purpose of research. That would make it illegal for scientists to extract stem cells from very early embryos - microscopic clusters of cells, really - that would be created in a lab and destroyed by the extraction process. A ban would not only block cutting-edge research, but could also lead to an exodus of the very best specialists to California, where such research has been endorsed by a referendum and backed by up to $3 billion in bond revenues.
We've got the funds and the sun -- what more could a stem cell researcher want?
Bacall On Hepburn
A compelling snip from Bacall's autobiography, By Myself and Then Some.
Art Is Commercial
The chimp spots that first played during the Superbowl, which I believe is a popular sporting event.
The Freedom To Be Insulted
Salman Rushdie, in the face of an increasing presence of funda-nutters, in our own country and around the world, warns that the battle of The Enlightenment is in danger of being unwon:
The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted, have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd. In the end a fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other's positions. (But they don't shoot.)At Cambridge I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people's opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
Victims Gone Wild: How Feminism Has Messed Up Relationships
That's the title of the piece I wrote for the 20th anniversary edition of the alt weekly, the San Jose Metro. Dan Pulcrano, the editor, who also designed and built my Web site (but not my blog), asked for something on how love, dating, sex, and/or relationships have changed in the past 20 years. Obviously, AIDS has had a major, major impact, and the Internet and other technology has had a big influence as well. But, I think what I call "victim feminism" has had a huge impact -- and I think few people realize exactly how damaging it's been. Here's an excerpt:
"IN SEDUCTION, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine," proclaimed radical feminist Andrea Dworkin in 1976. If you're a woman born 20 years ago, you probably don't even recognize Dworkin's name. Yet, there's a good chance you've had some seriously frustrating dates with her unwitting progeny: the guy who waits until date three or four—not to grab you, throw you up against the wall and suck face—but to politely inquire, "May I kiss you?"Equal pay for equal work? It's a beautiful thing. Equal opportunity? Thrilled to have it. We women owe an enormous debt to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all who followed in their footsteps, fighting the righteous fight against sex-based discrimination.
Unfortunately, in the late '70s and early '80s, feminism got hijacked by a small but vocal gang of Victims Gone Wild. Leading the band with Dworkin was anti-porn harpy and law professor Catherine MacKinnon (most of whose outrageous, but now commonly accepted, claims about the damage done to women by pornography were neatly debunked in a 2004 analysis by psych professor Catherine Salmon).
Dworkin, MacKinnon and their hairy-armpitted underbosses gave the order to the "victimized"—women, largely privileged and white, on campuses across America—to crawl out from under the boot of "male oppression." In reality, what they were fighting wasn't male oppression, but maleness of any kind—based on the erroneous feminist notion that equality means sameness.
In their eyes, male sexuality isn't just different. It's WRONG. Penetration is a form of rape, don'tcha know? Ultimately, these femi-fascists sought to re-create men in their own image and to reshape sexual expression into something kinder, gentler and more "egalitarian." (Personally, I have no idea what more "egalitarian" sex is—and I hope I never find out.)
The rest of the piece is at the link above. The brilliant meta-analysis (study of a bunch of studies) by Catherine Salmon is in the book, Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy, and Personal Decisions. P.S. If someone asks me if I am a feminist, I generally respond, "I'm an Elizabeth Cady Stanton feminist" (i.e., for equal treatment, not special treatment) to disassociate myself from all the weepy, jack-booted man-haters and all the women shouting about their vaginas onstage.
Condi Lied
Kos has it -- a photo and PDF of a memo from Richard Clarke to Condolying Sleazebag Rice; the memo that she diminished, during the 9-11 hearings, as a mere "set of ideas." This is the memo, now newly declassified, that sounded the alarm on "Al Quida."
Remember when the Republicans called out the big guns when Clinton lied about the whereabouts of his penis?
The Perfect Child
If you can't sit next to one who's quiet and well-behaved, sit next to one with a big blank space where the screams are supposed to come out.
A Brilliant Idea About "Intelligent" Design
Reason's Ron Bailey has done it again. Not only has he written a brilliant piece that sweeps the floor with that funda-nutter favorite, "intelligent" design, he has a brilliant solution for those who would have us preach, uh, teach, it in the public schools:
Get rid of public schools. Give parents vouchers and let them choose the schools to which to send their children. Fundamentalists can send their kids to schools that teach that the earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Science geeks can send their kids to technoschools that teach them how to splice genes to make purple mice. This proposal lowers political and social conflict, and eventually those made fitter in the struggle for life by better education will win.
Not to worry. I'm sure the children of the science geeks will eventually need cleaning ladies.
And I Thought I Was Having A Hard Time Understanding The Social Security Options
Now, let's let George Bush explain (quote from Slate's Bushism Of The Day, by Jacob Weisberg):
"Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."—Explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005
Judge For Yourself
How big is the man who used the bushes in my neighborhood for his personal bathroom? Your estimate below! He said his name was "Seb," and said he was from Belgium. I suggested he drag his barnyard animal self back there and use his own country as a latrine, since it's kind of unpleasant when mine smells like the men's bathroom whenever it rains, thanks to guys like him. I also asked him for his address, so my neighbors and I could all reciprocate on his lawn, but he wasn't exactly forthcoming.
UPDATE: Ooh, cool! I'm Blog Of The Day on ImmaculateStroke.com! And a link from Emmanuelle, too, who emailed me that:
...an outraged Belgium reader reminded me that the Mankenpiss (the statue of the kid peeing in Brussels) is a national symbol there, so maybe this guy was only being patriotic!
Yes, but, when in Los Angeles...!
There Goes Georgie, Running Up The Credit Cards
But he does talk tough on being poor and old! From The New York Times' editorial page:
President George W. Bush's latest deficit-steeped budget, for all its tough talk of reining in spending, stands out as a monument to misplaced political capital. It would take some hard work, indeed, to get Congress to face up to the binge of deficit spending that is haunting the United States and future generations of taxpayers. Yet Bush is not going to face the music. Instead, he's investing his precious re-election clout in pushing a wildly expensive plan to divert some Social Security payments to private accounts, a step that would not even address the long-term financial problems with the current system. His proposed budget, meanwhile, is a picture of reduced revenue and swollen pockets of hidden spending. The lip service about draconian clampdowns will hardly solve the problem, particularly in the eyes of the international markets that are studying the administration for signs of commitment to closing the budget deficit.Bush is right to call for a healthy analysis of government programs to determine which ones cost more than they are worth. But the reductions he proposes for the biggest targets are timid ones.
...Overall, the budget is a sham that takes big cuts out of politically vulnerable programs that have very little to do with the explosion of the deficit in Bush's tenure.
Programs benefiting low-income citizens, like community development and health care, are destined to bear close to half of the cuts even though they accounted for less than 10 percent of the spending increases during the first Bush term. Some of the cruelest cuts would affect hundreds of thousands of working poor people who rely on child-care assistance and food stamps.
The deficit problem is a reflection of lowered revenue more than high spending - a fact that the president and the Republicans in Congress are determined to ignore. To the contrary, they propose to lock the once-"temporary" Bush tax cuts into stone. Meanwhile, expensive outlays will continue for the Pentagon, homeland security and mandated costs like Medicare. With such a lopsided perspective, vital environmental, education and housing programs cannot help but be disproportionately trimmed.
As a political tract, the budget neatly omits any accounting for next year's costs of the Iraq war, lately running at more than $5 billion a month. Nor do the budget figures for later years mention the hundreds of billions in borrowing that would be required to start up Bush's plan to allow Social Security taxes to be directed into private investments.
Washington hands expect many, if not most, of the president's proposed cuts to be reinstated by Congress. And given Bush's preoccupation with Social Security, it's hard to imagine him wasting much effort on a leaner Pentagon budget or saner agricultural subsidies. In the end, only the programs with the least political clout - generally aimed at helping the weakest groups in the country - will be pared down or eliminated. That might give some politicians a sense of political cover, but it would be a bad choice and would hardly solve the problem.
Today's Auto Erotica
The Ugly Twins
Uglybreastimplants.com. A pictorial tour of the detached retinas of the upper rib cage, in a number of highly unattractive flavors.
via Defamer
How Divisive Is George Bush's America?
A number of Americans are moving to Canada to escape it, writes Rick Lyman in The New York Times:
Christopher Key knows exactly what he would be giving up if he left Bellingham, Washington."It's the sort of place Norman Rockwell would paint, where everyone watches out for everyone else and we have block parties every year," said Key, a 56-year-old Vietnam War veteran and former magazine editor who lists Francis Scott Key, who wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner," among his ancestors.
But leave it he intends to do, and as soon as he can. His house is on the market, and he is busily seeking work across the border in Canada. For him, the re-election of George W. Bush was the last straw.
"I love the United States," he said as he stood on the Vancouver waterfront, staring toward the Coastal Range, which was lost in a gray shroud. "I fought for it in Vietnam. It's a wrenching decision to think about leaving. But America is turning into a country very different from the one I grew up believing in."
In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported a surge in inquiries from the United States, to about 115,000 a day from 20,000.
After three months, memories of the election have begun to recede. There has been an inauguration, even a State of the Union address.
Yet immigration lawyers say that Americans are not just making inquiries and that more are pursuing a move above the 49th parallel, fed up with a country they see drifting persistently to the right and abandoning the principles of tolerance, compassion and peaceful idealism they felt once defined the nation.
America is in no danger of emptying out. But even a small loss of population, many from a deep sense of political despair, is a significant event in the life of a nation that thinks of itself as a place to escape to. Firm numbers on potential immigrants are elusive.
"The number of U.S. citizens who are actually submitting Canadian immigration papers and making concrete plans is about three or four times higher than normal," said Linda Mark, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver.
Other immigration lawyers in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax, Nova Scotia, said they had noticed a similar uptick, though most put the rise at closer to threefold.
Not Elective
Some people aren't cheering as loudly as other people at the news of the Iraqi elections. Cindy Sheehan lost her son Casey in Iraq:
My son, Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan (KIA, Sadr City, 04/04/04) enlisted in the Army to protect America and give something back to our country. He didn't enlist to be used and misused by a reckless Commander-in-Chief who sent his troops to preemptively attack and occupy a country that was no imminent threat (or any threat) to our country. Casey was sent to die in a war that was based on the imagination of some neo-cons who love to fill our lives with fear.Casey didn't agree with the "mission"; he believed in being the courageous and honorable man that he was. He knew he had to go to this mistake of a war to support his buddies. Casey also wondered aloud many times why precious troops and resources were being diverted from the real war on terror.
Casey was told that he would be welcomed to Iraq as a liberator with chocolates and rose petals strewn in front of his unarmored Humvee. He was in Iraq for two short weeks when the Shi'ite rebel "welcome wagon" welcomed him to Baghdad with bullets and RPG's, which took his young and beautiful life. I think my son's helmet and Vietnam era flak jacket would have protected him better from the chocolates and flower petals.
Casey was killed after George Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003. He was also killed after Saddam was captured in December of that same year. Casey was killed before the transfer of power in June of 2004 and before these elections.
Four marines were tragically killed after the election. By my count about five dozen Iraqis and coalition troops were killed on Election Day. Is this the definition of "Catastrophic Success?" Is that a good day in Iraq? Hundreds of our young people and thousands of Iraqis have been needlessly and senselessly murdered since George Bush triumphantly announced an end to "major combat" almost two years ago now. All of the above events have been heralded by this administration as "turning points" in the "war on terror" or as wonderful events in the "march of democracy." Really? I don't think, judging by very recent history, the elections will stop the bloodshed and destruction.
I would have asked Larry King (she was bumped for news of the Michael Jackson trial) if he would want to sacrifice one of his children for sham elections in Iraq. Would he or George Bush send their child to be killed or maimed for life for a series of lies, mistakes and miscalculations?
This war was sold to the American people by a slimy leadership with a maniacal zeal and phony sincerity that would have impressed snake oil salesmen a century ago. The average American needs to hear from people who have been devastated by the arrogance and ignorance of an administration that doesn't even have the decency or compassion to sign our "death" letters.
In the interest of being "fair and balanced" (oops, wrong network), I would have been pitted against a parent who still agrees with the "mission" and with the president. Although I grieve for that parent's loss and I respect that parent's opinion, I would have defied Mr. King or that parent to explain the mission to me. I don't think anyone can do it with a straight face. The president has also stated that we need to keep our troops in Iraq to honor our sacrifices by completing this elusive and ever changing mission. My response? Just because it is too late for Casey and the Sheehan family, why would we want another innocent life taken in the name of this chameleon of a mission?
At Casey's page, you'll see Cindy's letter to George Bush.
Still In Movable Type Hell
Comments still don't look like they're registering (all the counters below the posts read zero, and you'll get 500 errors when you comment), but comments are going in, and they're there if you click on "Comments." P.S. While Jesus hasn't done a damn thing for me, Gregg is working wonders.
Democracy Then
Conservative Scott McConnell writes in The American Conservative that he fears the spread of fascism -- in our own country. He's joined by fellow conservatives, Paul Craig Roberts, Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, and even Fritz Stern:
...Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
The Ugly American Goes To Auschwitz
That would be our vice president, representing the United States of America, at a rather solemn, formal occasion, in an olive-drab parka, hiking boots, and a knit ski cap:
Other leaders at the event in Poland on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of the death camp's liberation, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, wore dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots."The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower," Robin Givhan, The Washington Post's fashion writer, wrote in the newspaper's Friday editions.
Between the somber, dark-coated leaders at the outdoor ceremony sat Cheney, resplendent in a green parka embroidered with his name and featuring a fur-trimmed hood, the laced brown boots and a knit ski cap reading "Staff 2001."
"And, indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults," Givhan wrote.
Britain's Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph newspapers also both noted that Cheney had opted for casual attire.
The Post's Givhan said Cheney might have been hoping to avoid the cold weather in Oswiecim, but noted he had worn a dark overcoat and no hat at all at another recent winter occasion -- his own swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 in snow-dusted Washington.
"The vice president might have been warm in his parka, ski cap and hiking boots," Givhan said. "But they had the unfortunate effect of suggesting he was more concerned with his own comfort than the reason for braving the cold at all."
Deep Throat Death Watch
John Dean says we'll soon know the identity of Watergate secret source, Deep Throat:
Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.
Youth In Where?
Kevin Roderick highlights the LA Times' Tim Rutten column about the issue everybody's ignoring as they celebrate Million Dolllar Baby.
Dead Center
Nancy Rommelmann has the cover of this weekend's LA Times Magazine, with her fascinating story on the alt-death movement -- reconsidering how we tend to and dispose of the dead; people taking death back from the funeral industry:
There's an alternative-death movement fomenting in Northern California, one that leaves the funeral industry out of the picture altogether. Proponents of home funerals and of green burials, wherein bodies are interred in natural environments and in ways that promote decomposition, insist that this country's "death-denying tradition," in Lyons' term, is not merely costly but corrosive to body and spirit, to land and communities. Fear and doubt, they say, crept into the space left when we handed death to others, and our attendant helplessness supports the multibillion-dollar death-care industry. And they know, even if we don't yet, just how badly we want to bury our own dead."We're always afraid of the unknown, until we've been exposed to it and seen that it isn't frightening," says Lyons, proffering several fat albums containing photographs of former clients: dark-haired Donna, who stenciled her own casket before dying of a brain tumor at 32; Bernd, who also died of cancer, lying in bed, wearing a prayer shawl, his mouth curled in an easy smile. There is nothing ghoulish or grotesque about the images; there is neither rictus nor putrefaction. Instead, there's a 3-year-old in foot-pajamas peering at Aunt Donna, lain out after death in her own bedroom.
There's also a picture of Carolyn Whiting, who died suddenly of respiratory failure in 1994 and whose friends, Lyons says, "were simply not ready to let her go."
It turned out that they did not have to. Convening at Whiting's home the night of her death, Lyons and others learned that she had left instructions as to how she wanted to be cared for. "She did not want to be turned over to a mortuary," Lyons says, "but rather wanted her friends to bring her body home if she was in the hospital, and prepare her body."
Lyons admits that they were caught off guard. "I don't think this would have occurred to us. At all," she says. "We, like everyone else I talk to about home funerals, would have asked, 'Is that legal?' "
Home preparation of the deceased, without an undertaker's involvement, is legal in every state but four. Today there are books (such as Lyons' "Creating Home Funerals" and Lisa Carlson's "Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love") that give detailed instructions in after-death care. At the time, Whiting's friends winged it: They took her body home, bathed and perfumed her, picked out clothing, held a wake, and then loaded Whiting into a van and drove her to the crematory.
"It was so helpful to us, to deal with our shock and our grief, and in such a loving, beautiful way to celebrate her life," says Lyons, who went on to found Final Passages, a nonprofit educational program, and Home and Family Funerals, a service wherein Lyons is paid as a "death-midwife," helping the dying and their families with everything from preparing the body to filing paperwork. She works on a sliding scale, but says a full cremation with her facilitation could cost $750. She estimates that in the last 10 years she's helped more than 250 people "pass over."
"A person, their body doesn't immediately look white as a ghost, or change rapidly," Lyons says. "People think they're going to start decomposing instantly. And that's not so."
As she teaches in seminars around the country, the body can lie in state at home for up to three days, and perhaps longer, provided measures are taken within the first six to 12 hours. The body should be well washed, especially the genitals, with warm, soapy water; the abdomen should be pressed to expel any waste. After the body is dried and dressed, ice (preferably dry but regular will do), which has been wrapped in grocery bags and then cloth, should be placed beneath the torso to keep the organs cool, as these are the first parts of the body to break down. The body should be kept in a cool room. If the person dies with his mouth open, which can be disconcerting to visitors, a scarf may be looped beneath the chin and tied around the head until the mouth sets shut. Similarly, eyes may be closed by gently weighing them down with small bags filled with rice or sand. The casket can be decorated, and a memorial display set up, plain or fancy. One family Lyons helped watched a video with their departed father that he'd rented but had not had a chance to see; another put hiking boots on dad and wheeled him into the woods for a final "hiking trip to heaven."
These people were able to take a deep breath and do what needed to be done. Others need hand-holding. Lyons recently helped a family whose belief in anthroposophy (the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner) dictated that the father's body be kept at home for three days, surrounded by loved ones, read to and cared for. This frightened his teenage daughter.
"She did not come in the room as we were bathing him," Lyons says, "but eventually she came in and started asking questions, and started feeling really relaxed and comfortable." So comfortable that a while later she had her friends over. "They were in the other room, talking and being normal teenagers. It was all a part of family life."
Microsoft In The Head
Why are you still using a PC? Mark Morford lays out the best column I've read on all the reasons it's dumb to go with Gates. Here's his description of what happened when his girlfriend added DSL to her Sony Vaio:
She got online all right. The DSL worked great. For about four minutes.Then, something happened. Something attacked. Something swarmed her computer the instant she tried to move around online and the computer slowed and bogged and cluttered and crashed, and multiple restarts and debuggings and what-the-hells only brought up only a flood of nightmarish pop-up windows and terrifying error messages and massive system slowdowns and all manner of inexplicable claims of infestation of this worm and that Trojan horse and did we want to buy McAfee AntiVirus protection for $39.95?
Four minutes. And she was already DOA.
My SO, she is not alone. This exact same scenario, with only slight variation, is happening throughout the nation, right now. Are you using a PC? You probably have spyware. The McAfee site claims a whopping 91 percent of PCs are infected. As every Windows user knows, PCs are ever waging a losing battle with a stunningly vicious array of malware and worms and viruses, all aimed at exploiting one of about ten thousand security flaws and holes in Microsoft Windows.
Here, then, is my big obvious question: Why the hell do people put up with this? Why is there not some massive revolt, some huge insurrection against Microsoft? Why is there not a huge contingent of furious users stomping up to Seattle with torches and scythes and crowbars, demanding the Windows Frankenstein monster be sacrificed at the altar of decent functionality and an elegant user interface?
There is nothing else like this phenomenon in the entire consumer culture. If anything else performed as horribly as Windows, and on such a global scale, consumers would scream bloody murder and demand their money back and there would be some sort of investigation, class-action litigation, a demand for Bill Gates' cute little geeky head on a platter.
Here is your brand new car, sir. Drive it off the lot. Yay yay new car. Suddenly, new car shuts off. New car barely starts again and then only goes about 6 miles per hour and it belches smoke and every warning light on the dashboard is blinking on and off and the tires are screaming and the heater is blasting your feet and something smells like burned hair. You hobble back to the dealer, who only says, gosh, sorry, we thought you knew -- that's they way they all run. Enjoy!
Would you not be, like, that is the goddamn last time I buy a Ford?
This post was written on a piece of art otherwise known as the new G5 iMac. My other car is an iBook. My original Mac, a Classic purchased in 1983, is still in operation in Rome. In all these years of Mac use, I've never had the need to read the directions.
Mock And Roll
That would be mock weddings and a roll of cash to throw them with, in the name of AIDS prevention. Just, whatever you do, don't say "condom." No..Shhhhhhh! Mock-wedding tossing AIDS "educator" Phillippia Faust is just one of many do-badders on the AIDS misinformation hall of shame list, but she's making it pay handsomely:
Got a lame, one-dimensional abstinence-only message for America's adolescents, ages 12 through 18? Get a grant! That's what Phillippia Faust, a nurse at Georgia's Rockdale County Medical Center, did last year. Faust was awarded a federal grant of $177,809 a year for three years (that's $533,427, or half a million dollars) to create an abstinence-only program. Now she no longer has to carry a poster from classroom to classroom -- Sex Outside of Marriage is ... Not needed. Not normal. Not expected! -- as she did in the past. Now, Faust can afford a staff, supplies and a real curriculum. "We do discuss teen pregnancy and STDs," says Faust. "But abstinence is all about strengthening the family. Abstinence upholds the family as the basic unit of society and recognizes marriage as the framework for the family, which equates childbearing within the context of family. Abstinence identifies marriage as the only acceptable and legitimate place for the sexual experience and that avoidance from premarital sexual activity, including but not limited to sexual intercourse, is the expectant standard for the unmarried." It's entirely possible that Phillippia Faust is a really nice person, but she sure does sound like an insufferable, proselytizing control freak with an astonishingly narrow and oppressive view of human sexuality. How does she stop teens from engaging in premarital sexual activity? By staging mock weddings -- complete with props, scenery, bridal attire and graphic slide show presentations of the ghastly things sexually transmitted diseases can do to your body. After two mock weddings last May, Faust told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "I just wanted kids to have a grand visual of what their day-to-day decisions can lead to for their families, with an image of two beds -- the bed of poor choices and the bed of 'we made good choices by waiting.'" Those are your tax dollars at work ... and a half a million bucks can buy a lot of mock weddings.
If this weren't so damaging it would actually be funny.
Blue Blog
There's something weird going on with my comments and archived entries. They are blue, and you can't see the poster's name unless you roll your cursor over it (unless it's different on a PC -- I'm a Mac girl). The technology director/boyfriend is on it. It will be fixed soon. You still get 500 errors when you comment, but comments are going up, and comments may not look like they're registering (counter-wise), but they're there if you click on comments.
Bush Lies To Blacks
The GOP is playing the race card on Social Security, writes Farhad Manjoo on Salon (short but irritating commercial must be screened to read story), pushing the old lie that blacks collect fewer Social Security benefits because they don't live as long as whites:
Here's the trouble with the emotional, race-based appeal: It has no basis in fact. Or, as Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, puts it, "It's wrong in just about every single respect."To begin with, there is no evidence that blacks, as a group, are cheated by Social Security. Yes, whites do live longer than blacks, which means that the average white woman will collect more benefit checks than the average black man. But, Baker points out, blacks also generally make less money than whites, which means that they get a higher rate of return on their contributions to the system. And because African-Americans suffer higher rates of disability than whites, they draw more from Social Security's disability benefits than whites. Meanwhile, spouses and minor children of African-Americans heavily depend on the system's survivor benefits. When economists have studied all that blacks put into the system compared with all they get out of it, Baker says, blacks, as a group, aren't being treated unfairly -- and they may even be doing better than whites.
Anti-Social Security agitators such as Stephen Moore, who heads the Free Enterprise Fund, have taken to calling Social Security a "massive income redistribution program" that sucks money out of African-Americans' pockets and spits it out to whites. But in truth, says Hillary Shelton of the NAACP, African-Americans would be absolutely destitute without Social Security. "African-American children are almost four times as likely to be lifted out of poverty by Social Security benefits than our white counterparts," Shelton says.
In a Social Security briefing paper, Shelton declares that "almost 80 percent of African Americans over age 65 depend on Social Security for more than half of their income, and more than half rely on it for 90 percent or more of their income." Basically, he writes, "without the guaranteed Social Security benefits they receive today, the poverty rate among older African Americans would more than double, pushing most African American seniors into squalor and poverty during their most vulnerable years."
But the main problem with the Republicans' argument that private accounts would be better for blacks than the current system is not that it's economically wrong. It's that it's gravely pessimistic. As the president took pains to point out in his State of the Union address, Social Security reform won't affect today's generation of retirees; it will benefit today's young people, who will retire 30 or 40 years from now. By that reasoning, conservatives are conceding that blacks will die young not only now but 40 years from now. Apparently, they aren't concerned about working to ensure that young African-Americans live as long and healthy lives as today's young white people.
The conservative argument, Baker points out, is based on the idea that inequality is persistent. But why should we accept that it is? According to national mortality statistics (PDF), African-Americans suffer a higher death rate than whites for a number of plausibly preventable causes -- AIDS and homicide, for instance. Innumerable such inequalities are responsible for blacks' shorter lives. "Maybe those inequalities won't disappear over the next 40 or so years," Baker says. "But can't we assume that they will get smaller and smaller?"
It's pretty scary that they can't sell this on the facts, and instead resort to Anne Coulter-style facts. If you remove Social Security as is, and let people manage their accounts, who takes care of them if they make bad investments and have nothing when they're 80? Are we going to have a massive public dole, complete with warehouse/poorhouses for the elderly, or are we just going to leave them out on the curb to starve? Then again, maybe Mr. Bush is so convinced "The Rapture" is upon us that he feels it's silly to worry about such things. (Don't pooh-pooh it so fast. We've got a fundamentalist puppet of other fundamentalists in The White House. There is actually a pretty good chance that he's running our economic system on the belief that "believers" will be airlifted to heaven in their jammies, and screw the rest of the heathens!) Modernity anyone? Rationality anyone? Remember I asked when you're 98 and scrimping to afford cat food, and not for the cat, either.
Welcome To Movable Type Hell
Comments still don't look like they're registering (all the counters below the posts read zero, and you'll get 500 errors when you comment), but comments are going in, and they're there if you click on "Comments."
Should be fixed soon!
The Fundamentalist-In-Chief Speaks
Wednesday night, during the State Of The Union Address, I heard Bush use the word "sacred" in reference to "the institution of marriage."
Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be re-defined by activist judges. For the good of families, children, and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage.
Excuse me, but how does a guy get to be president in this country without comprehension of the concept of separation of church and state? There's no reason, in a country with this doctrine, that any two -- or three, or five -- people, of any sexes, shouldn't be allowed to make a state-recognized legal commitment to each other. Unless, of course, their personal, primitive, fundamentalist religion gives it the thumbs down, and they choose to go along with its nixing. Of course, while I don't care if you get married to your goat by your guru, making a lifelong commitment to anyone makes no sense vis a vis how long we live and how much we change. Then again, as I've said before, if straight people are allowed this right to make no sense -- gay people should be allowed it, too.
Wednesday's Cell Phone Shouter
It's a quiet, Santa Monica coffee shop where every table but one is filled with readers and writers and people chatting softly. Suddenly, we're on the docks and the foreman is barking orders to the longshoremen. Oops, no...it turns out we're still in the coffee shop, and it's just a sweatshirted, 40-something mother with a frizzy, 80s blow-out barking the mundane details of her life into her cell. Tempted as I am to turn around and bark back, "Lady...just because you have a self doesn't mean you should express it!" I opt for a more mature, less immediately toxic approach, and merely shush her. Several times. Adding a turn and a look in my final shush. She eventually lowers the decibel level slightly. She eventually gets off.
SHOUTER: (sneering and aggressive) Is this a library?ME: Nooo, it's disturbing to hear one very loud side of a conversation. I politely explain further.
She cuts me off.
SHOUTER: (angrily) You made your point. You made your point. Thank you.
Why is it that rude people never say, "Jeez, I'm so sorry, I didn't realize I was being rude." Oh. I get it: Because they aren't being rude, they are rude.
New Lows In Book Promotion
Excerpts from a press release I got late last night, and the replies I emailed back:
The author is currently seeking sponsors and translators that will enable him to donate thousands of the little books to tsunami survivors.
Awww, the search for sponsors always puts a tear in my eye. (I think those Tsunami survivors are just dying to hear a story about waves personified.) Apparently, there's no limit to the ends people will go to to sell their wares. I think I need a shower.
Any editorial comment or mention that you may give this press release would be greatly appreciated.
Lucky for you, I'll just post the above on my blog as an example of the crassest attempt to sell stuff I've seen in a long time, and not the name of the author or the book.
Eeeeuw. Double eeeuw.
UPDATE: The author writes back:
Not having the wherewithal to fund the printing of 1000s of copies, I thought I would look for help to do this, but make no profit myself from royalties.If you would send me your snailmail address, I'd like to send you a copy of the (title ommitted by me) book so you could see for yourself what the tenor of this project is.
Best,
JB
No thanks. I'm trying to save water and I already need a shower. Something tells me the kids whose lives just got destroyed by a giant wave don't want to read about a wave personified. Hmm, imagine that.
Oh, and how wonderful that you'll make no profit from the royalties of these books. You couldn't possibly be looking for a little free international attention, now could you? Do you know how disgusting this is? Sigh. Apparently not.
Gatsby Envy
Great column by Nikki Finke on New York TImes entertainment beat journalist Bernie Weinraub's sign-off piece:
It was as if narrator Nick Carraway were given space in The Paper of Record to write honestly about the swell set, only this time he surprises us by revealing that he longed for the green light of status and money as much as Jay Gatsby did. Yet, as an ink-stained wretch and damned proud of it, I’ve got to say, Huh?First, let me fully disclose that I won’t be attacking my pal Bernie personally over what is a beautifully written, though emotionally befuddled, look back at his 14 years inside and outside the entertainment business. (I’m especially sad that he revealed that incident in which he fell asleep during an interview with Jim Carrey, because I used it to blackmail him almost daily.) But for days now, my answering machine and e-mail have been filled with “What did you think of it?” messages, so I feel compelled to publicly examine Bernie’s 2,800-word tale of his Hollywood-style seduction.
And what oozes from it is the gunky notion that a journalist wanted to live like the people he covered here. And he isn’t alone. The studio and network parking lots are filled with the Porsches and BMWs of reporters and critics who jumped the fence (though, to Bernie’s credit, marrying a mogulette instead of writing your way into The Good Life remains a novel route, nonetheless). How abnormal I must be then. Because, clearly, I’m missing what appear to be the essential chromosomes composing the entertainment-biz reporters’ DNA: the Hollywood Envy gene.
As Weinraub writes, when he arrived here to start the gig, “I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of money, and the crazy economic gap between journalists and the people they covered. It was like dropping into Marie Antoinette’s France.” But doesn’t anyone remember that Ol’ Mary was decapitated in the end? And that Gatsby got a bullet in the back as well? That’s exactly why I don’t lust after the trappings of Tinseltown: Everybody’s success and the conspicuous consumption that accompanies it bear too high a psychic price tag.
A Crack In The Glass House
Mark Stevens writes in The New York Times of the late modernist architect Phillip Johnson's creepy past:
Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20s and early 30s - years when an artist's imagination usually begins to jell - consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938, and after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis.He approved of what he saw. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he wrote in a letter. "There were not many Jews to be seen." As late as 1940, Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the FBI - and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war - led him to withdraw completely from politics.
Today, any debate over an important figure with a fascist or communist background easily becomes an occasion for blame games between right and left. Johnson is no exception. Morally serious people can have different views of his personal culpability.
But what's essential is to let the shadow fall - to acknowledge that fascism touched something important in his sensibility.
Johnson's emphasis on the aesthetic as the only important value in art was remarkably cold-blooded. His main regret seems to be that contemporary republics have failed to create monuments that ravish the senses.
He never became a fascist architect. But he was probably one of those artists - among them many communists - whose philosophical sensibilities were gutted by the experience of the '30s and World War II. Afterward, he lived more than ever for the stylish surface, appearing uncomfortable with large-minded ideas even when his buildings reached for the sky.
Philip Johnson now seems like an emblematic figure partly because he appears to have been happily, marvelously, provocatively, disturbingly hollow. Johnson's main flaws as an artist - his tastes for razzle-dazzle and overweening scale - are equally the weaknesses of American secular culture. His main strengths - his openness to change, playfulness and urbane rejection of the Miss Grundys of the world - are equally its strengths.
The beautiful Glass House will remain Johnson's signature work. It's a dream house, a stylish stage set. It floats upon the land, eliding boundaries between inside and outside. It seems full of emptiness. It's not really a place to live, but was still Johnson's essential home. That uneasy stylishness deserves emphasis. Philip Johnson lived in a glass house. He threw stones, too.
A Year In The Merde
It's the title of Stephen Clarke's hilarious-sounding new book on France.
Here's Clarke's mini "insiders guide to getting good service in France," published in the London Observer:
In France, when a girl says no she often means yes. So does a guy for that matter. Indeed, sometimes getting good service in France can feel a bit like non-consensual sex.Here is how the French 'no means yes' works.
I was in Reims to visit the champagne cellars and didn't want to leave the city without seeing the most spectacular of them, at the Pommery winery. Only trouble was, it was Sunday lunchtime, we were due to leave on the five o'clock train and you have to book a place on a guided tour.
I phoned Pommery and asked when the next tour was. 'Oh, we haven't got any vacancies till the 4.45 tour,' the hostess told me.
'You've got nothing at all before that?' 'No, sorry. We're completely booked up.'
At this point, the faint-hearted customer is supposed to ring off and leave the hostess in peace with her neat reservation list. But I've played the game before.
'But we've got a train at five,' I said, 'so 4.45 would be too late.' 'OK,' the hostess replied, 'how about 2.30?'
'Perfect,' I said, and reserved.
There was absolutely no point entering into an abstract moral discussion about why the hell she hadn't offered 2.30 in the first place. I'd got what I wanted, so who cared? Again, the vital thing is not to take it personally, a feat that becomes almost impossible when you reach...
Level three
Drive The Customer MadI don't think they do it deliberately. It is just their way of showing you that it's the service provider, not the customer, who is always right.
Bill Moyers On "The Rapture"
I've written about it before, but it's so little-known by the average (rational) person, it's worth repeating:
Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election -- 231 legislators in total and more since the election -- are backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that -- it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:
• That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.
• That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
• That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
• That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.
• That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million -- $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council -- to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
Dave Kopel derides Moyers, splitting hairs on Moyers' piece here. He doesn't discount the provisions to munch up the environment. Just some of Moyers contentions of the pervasiveness of the Religious "Right."
Pigs Without Spellcheck
In an I-5 gas station gift shop, on our way home from San Fran.
Conspiracy Against SUVS?...
Or sloppy newswriting? Naturally, Michelle Malkin takes the conspiracy theory and speeds away with it. Here's the bit from Michelle's blog (indented below, with the news bit she quoted further indented):
A WNBC headline: Man In Wheelchair Struck, Killed By SUV In BronxActually, he was killed by the driver of the SUV, wasn't he?
The story continues:
Police said 41-year-old Juan Jimenez was crossing Broadway near 230th Street at about 5:44 p.m. when a late model black Mitsubishi SUV hit him and pinned him under the vehicle with the wheelchair.The vehicle then fled the scene, leaving Jimenez in the street.
The vehicle fled the scene? This anti-SUV bias is getting a little ridiculous, isn't it?
As one who is, herself, a fan of breathing, among other bright spots in life, I can't say there's enough "anti-SUV bias" just yet -- but I'm working on it. Of course, I remain unconvinced that the brown LA air I struggle to suck down while jogging is a mere mirage created by the liberal media. (Feel free to take that one and run with it, Michelle.) PS When you do, please refer to me as a libertarian (hence my notion that your right to stuff smog down anyone else's lungs ends where their lungs begin).
If You Say It, It Is True
Ann Coulter and Canada and Vietnam. Ann gets clobbered by the CBC's Bob McKeown, but naturally, refuses to acknowledge it.