If You Steal From Me, Don't Be Dumb Enough To Send Me The URL!
Last week, this woman, Jane Langdon, of http://www.sew-beautiful.us, sent me a press release crowing about how she knocks off Chanel and other designers. It may be legal, as long as she doesn't try to pass them off as actual Chanels, etc., but it certainly isn't moral to profit from the fruits of others' labors, so I wrote up a blog item criticizing her:
...I especially love your argument that your customers like it. I'm sure the guy who gets a stolen TV really cheaply from a fence is thrilled as well. DOES Chanel really know what you're doing? I doubt it. Let's see the letter from them about how THRILLED they are you're knocking off their goods, under their name, on your site.
On Langdon's site, I found many photos which appeared to be runway photos from the shows of the very designers she is knocking off. For example, she had a photo of a wedding dress, in which the model was clearly visible, with the words "Carmela Sutera" behind her. This same photo was in the current collection photos on Carmela Sutera's site!
Langdon also had photos up of Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, and Reese Witherspoon, faces and all, and what looked to be some other pretty famous models, and no photo credits near any of these pictures or any written grant of rights on the specific pages where they were used (like those little cutlines you see in magazines, crediting "Sygma," etc).
Still, Langdon insisted, most stridently, over and over, that she had the rights to all the photos on her site:
"EVERYTHING ON ALL OUR SITES IS LEGAL...All parties have been paid. There are NO copyright, trademark or patent infringments. PERIOD!"
She even said she'd consulted a lawyer about photo rights and permissions. (I sure hope she isn't paying over 20 cents an hour in legal fees!) Now, I know a little something about talent payments and photo usage, because, right out of college, I worked producing TV commercials for Ogilvy & Mather, a big New York ad agency. (I quit shortly after I nearly killed Eartha Kitt, who I was recording in Manchester, England, for a Hardees voiceover, by temporarily driving on the wrong side of the road with her in the car.)
There's this little thingie called the Lanham Act, which gives public figures a "right of publicity," meaning that you can't just post a news photo of Tom Cruise to sell your beer; you have to get permission. That's what allowed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to sue Sephora for over 15 million dollars for unauthorized use of their photos in a Sephora promotion. Likewise, Langdon isn't permitted by law to stick photos of stars on her site to sell knockoffs of what they're wearing.
Because I value and protect my own copyrights, I consider ignoring the apparent violation of others' akin to watching somebody's house get robbed and doing nothing. Or, actually, closer to home, it's like the woman on the tape I have from Whole Foods, of the guy doing a hit-and-run on my Honda Insight. A woman walking to her blithely watched the whole incident, but didn't do or say a thing, or leave a note. Creepy! I just wish her face were bigger on the tape! (More on that soon -- the slimebag who tried to get away with it, getting out of his car, looking at the damage on my car, looking to see if anybody was looking, and walking into the store, will be prosecuted in Santa Monica court in April.) I'm also trying to take him on Judge Judy, although I'm going to donate all talent payments to charity, so it doesn't seem I'm motivated by greed. My message: If you are unethical, think twice about being unethical, because you might be unethical to SOME JUSTICE FREAK LIKE ME!
Getting back to Langdon, I contacted a few of the people (or their representatives) whose photos were easily traceable; for example, Carmela Sutera's company. They were quite distressed at the use of the photo, thanked me profusely, and said they'd have their lawyer get in touch with her. Later, they told me they'd emailed her and gave her a week to take the photos down. She has -- theirs and the Angel Sanchez photo, apparently from one of Sanchez' runway shows.
Langdon has also removed the heads from the Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, and Kate Winslet photos -- which still does not necessarily mean she's within her rights to use them. If photographers have not been paid for use, and permission has not been granted by the stars, it's STEALING to post them. I emailed somebody I know who does some PR for Halle Berry, whom I'll probably see at dinner tomorrow night -- let's see what he says!
Most hilariously, I got home late last night after a little Reason magazine drinks night out with Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Brian Doherty, and others, at Boardners, to find an email from Jane Langdon. In the subject line was the word "Disabled," which I guess is supposed to refer to me. I dunno, Jane, my fingers are working just fine on the keyboard, and they seem real tempted at the moment to type the word "Chanel" and the word "lawyer" into the keyboard, and fire off a little email. Something tells me they'd be keenly interested in discovering whether any of those photos on your suit page that appear to be from their runway shows are being used without rights being granted and proper payments being made!
In the body of Langdon's email was a link: It's ALL About Amy
At this link, Langdon, whose lawyer must work out of a barn in Wisconsin, posts this weak little diatribe about me, which I actually find quite hilarious. On a vitriol scale, it ranks right up there with being licked my by my 2.5 lb. dog. Quite frankly, this page is good for my ego. I'd always been a little envious of Cathy Seipp for having Troll Dolls and Onanism as her hardworking stalkers, and felt embarrassed that I'd been left out of the whole "I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU" stalker thing. I guess I'm in the big leagues now!
Moreover, I'm a huge free speech advocate, so I support all constitutionally protected speech, including any site anybody wants to put up to talk about what a buttwad I am. Democracy in action! Go to it, Jane! And, again, it kind of swells my head.
Of course, in this case, I'm especially amused by the accusation of libel. Langdon only knows to use the word libel because I explained that slander, which she first accused me of, refers to the spoken word, and libel pertains to the printed one. I also explained, several times, that you can't libel somebody with an opinion, but she seems a bit tenderheaded, and it appears she has yet to comprehend this intellectually weighty concept.
Finally, the legal i$$ue at hand: Langdon (and WHAT AN IDIOT!) posted copyrighted photos of me on her site; most of which were taken from my site, and some of which were taken from an anthropology site, of me presenting my paper on "How To Build A Better Meme," at the Human Behavior & Evolution Society Conference a few years ago at Rutgers. Outside of that one, these are mostly photos I own. Lots of them. Including a photo of my dog, which I took. Great respecter of rights that Langdon claims to be, she also posted a photo of part of Edvard Munch's "Scream," and a photo of one of those silly signs that says "Forget the dog...beware of the owner." Hmm, something tells me she didn't get rights to use those, either!
Luckily, my entertainment lawyer does not work out of a barn, but for a pretty huge Hollywood entertainment firm, and is in charge of the legal work for a TV network. Is she smart? Well, she went to college at age 16, and we're not talking community college, either, and she hasn't exactly been slouching around the house since then. When I spoke to her this morning, she called use of these photos "a slam-dunk copyright violation." I can sue this woman, according to a page she pointed me to from Cornell, and for MEGABUCKS!
...the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just.
(Hmm, maybe I'll own that apartment in Paris a little sooner than I'd been predicting!)
Moreover, as a public figure, by using these Langdon has infringed on my "right of publicity." Again, this is spelled out in the Lanham Act. Further, Langdon has posted a story by Duncan Campbell, owned by the Guardian. Hmm, something tells me our Janey didn't get rights to that either. "Disabled," huh? My fingers are getting all itchy to email again...something along the lines of L-E-G-A-L@G-U-A-R-D-I-A-N.U-K.
Jane, why don't we settle out of court? So much cheaper, and if your site reflects the quality of legal work you have available to you, I don't think it would behoove you to go to court against me. Propose an amount you'll pay for use of each photo, and I'll get back to you and let you know if I accept.
It seems Langdon isn't that smart, but really, how much of a brain do you need to see that I'm kind of a bad candidate to "play the dozens" with?
UPDATE, April 2, 2005: Comments are being closed on this entry to prevent Miss Langdon from commenting under the assumed names of real people (Allan from Ain't It Cool News was one, posted from Langdon's IP address). Sigh. It's so hard to get some people to behave ethically without constantly policing them!
Excuse Me, But It Seems I'm Lost
I thought I was a US citizen, living in Los Angeles, but apparently, my entire existence has been particle beamed to The Vatican...or somewhere. I'm just not sure where I am anymore, but it isn't the United States I grew up with and read about in the history books, where church and state are separate. Check out this amendment a couple of creeps (fundamentalists in senator suits) are trying to stick into the Constitution:
`Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.'. (italics, mine)
The Yurica report explains this nifty paragraph as part of the "plan of the far right Dominionists who control Congress to reconstruct our constitution and “restore” it to subservience to a theocratic religion under God and under biblical law. It is the first step in a series of steps to take over and control the government of the United States of America as outlined in “The Despoiling of America.” This article, by Katherine Yurica, quotes Pat Robertson:
“God’s plan is for His people, ladies and gentlemen to take dominion…to reign and rule…There’ll be a reformation….We are not going to stand for those coercive utopians in the Supreme Court and in Washington ruling over us any more. We’re not gonna stand for it. We are going to say, ‘We want freedom in this country, and we want power…’”
Yurica explains Dominionism:
Dominionism is a natural if unintended extension of Social Darwinism and is frequently called “Christian Reconstructionism.” Its doctrines are shocking to ordinary Christian believers and to most Americans. Journalist Frederick Clarkson, who has written extensively on the subject, warned in 1994 that Dominionism “seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’” He described the ulterior motive of Dominionism is to eliminate “…labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools.” Clarkson then describes the creation of new classes of citizens:“Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this theocracy that it would extend capital punishment [to] blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality.”[10]Today, Dominionists hide their agenda and have resorted to stealth; one investigator who has engaged in internet exchanges with people who identify themselves as religious conservatives said, “They cut and run if I mention the word ‘Dominionism.’”[11] Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University wrote, “In March 1986, I was on a speaking tour in Iowa and received a copy of the following memo [Pat] Robertson had distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus titled, “How to Participate in a Political Party.” It read:“Rule the world for God.“Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
“Hide your strength.
“Don’t flaunt your Christianity.
“Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.”[12]
And these people are different from the Taliban, how? Nicer "tents"? Shinier "camels"?
We're All Getting Neoconned
Former UN weapons inspector calls the neocons parasites "that latch onto democracy until it is no longer convenient." Here's an excerpt from a chilling interview he gave to Larisa Alexandrovna, up on Alternet. Click on the link, read the whole thing:
So you believe the neocons are elitist parasites?Yes, elitism is the perfect term.
Do you consider it localized or global elitism?
The neocons believe in what they think is a noble truth, power of the few, the select few. These are godless people who want power, nothing more. They do not have a country or an allegiance, they have an agenda. These people might hold American passports, but they are not Americans because they do not believe in the Constitution. They believe in the power of the few, not a government for or by the people. They are a few and their agenda is global.
You suggest the Republican Party is simply an organizational host. Is there any vestige left of the host or has the entire party been devoured?
The Republicans have been neutered by the neocons.
Your concept of neocons seems confusing because, using your host/parasite paradigm, they cannot tell between the host and the parasite which invades it.
I know people who have worked for George H. W. Bush, both when he was vice president and president. Bush Sr. called the neocons the 'crazies in the basement.' I think it is dangerous to confuse the two, because there are Americans who love their country and are conservatives who do not support what is going on. Until the host rejects the parasite, it is difficult to separate the two. Brent Scowcroft for example is not a neocon, yet people call him one. Scowcroft worked hard to reign in the 'crazies in the basement,' as did Reagan.
Wave Bye-Bye To Democracy!
Paul Krugman writes of the dire straits democracy is in in this country, and I don't think he's crying wolf:
Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous.
But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence.
...Everyone knows about the attempt to circumvent the courts through "Terri's law." But there has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge's order that she remain there.
And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law.
Click on the link and read the whole piece.
Propping Up A Corpse
People don't understand the costs of believing in irrational crap. I would venture that, if the poor parents of Terri Schiavo were rationalists instead of fundamentalists, they wouldn't continue to insist that she has any chance of popping out of her hospital bed and recovering. CNN reports that they've just been granted the right to file another emergency petition with the Georgia appeals court. (The request for a rehearing was later denied by the federal appeals court.) Meanwhile, here's science speaking over on MSNBC:
The overwhelming majority in the medical community say Terri Schiavo has close to no brain activity and has no chance of regaining awareness. Dr. Ronald Cranford, who actually examined Terri Schiavo in 2002 and testified to her condition, joined "The Abrams Report" on Monday. Cranford is the assistant chief of neurology at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis as well as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics.Below is the transcript of their conversation.
DAN ABRAMS, HOST: You're one of the few people who has actually examined Terri Schiavo and you're hearing all of these people who are coming on from the sidelines saying, "She's has been misdiagnosed," et cetera. How confident are you in your diagnosis and why?
DR. RONALD CRANFORD, UNIV. OF MN NEUROLOGIST: I'm extremely confident. I think at the time of the trial in 2002 there had been eight neurologists who examined her. And of those eight neurologists total, seven of them said beyond any doubt whatsoever Terri is in a vegetative state. Her CT scan shows severe atrophy or shrinkage of the brain. Her EEG is flat and there's absolutely no doubt that she's been in a permanent vegetative state ever since 1990. There's no doubt whatsoever, Dan.
But what about all the religious nutters' doctors who say otherwise?
ABRAMS: Doctor, let me read you this from Dr. Cheshire. I know you've heard about him. He's from the Mayo Clinic and he is the reason that they appealed to the federal courts saying, look we've got a doctor who is saying the following.“There remain huge uncertainties in regard to Terri's true neurological status. I believe that, within a reasonable degree of medical certainty there is a great likelihood that Terri is in a minimally conscious state rather than a persistent vegetative state.”Your response.
CRANFORD: Well actually if you read his report, he says she has no visual tracking and she has no conscious awareness which are the cardinal signs of the vegetative state, so I don't think there's any doubt she's in a vegetative state. He never examined her.
He did an interview with her for 90 minutes, observing her. He never viewed her CT scans. He makes no mention of her EEG, so while he's a reputable neurologist, perhaps, at the Mayo Clinic, his report means absolutely nothing. It's a desperation, last minute move by the governor who just doesn't know what else to do, so he brings in a Christian fundamentalist neurologist. It's just not true.
Defender Of The "Wide-Eyed Pamphleteers"
That would be the First Amendment, a document apparently unknown to the LA Times' David Shaw. Shaw, writes Jack Shafer, typed out "1300 gassy words" informing bloggers that they don't deserved the "same constitutional protections as traditional print and broadcast journalists."
In yesterday's (March 27) Los Angeles Times, media reporter and critic David Shaw demonstrates Oscar Wilde's maxim that modern journalism is important—if only because it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.Giving every indication that he's read a lot of stories about bloggers but not that many actual blogs, Shaw disparages the form as the error-filled rants of amateurs in his piece, "Do Bloggers Deserve Basic Journalistic Protections?" It's a "solipsistic, self-aggrandizing journalist-wannabe genre," Shaw writes.
...Shaw puts great stock in the fact that mainstream journalism, unlike blog entries, goes "through several filters before a reader sees it." He boasts of how his columns benefit from the vetting of at "least four experienced Times editors," who check it for "accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel."
Four editors, none of whom seem schooled in the First Amendment. Lovely!
Shaw seems to believe that the First Amendment and its subsidiary protections belong to the credentialed employees of the established corporate press and not to the great unwashed. I suggest that he—or one of the four experienced editors who touched his copy—research the history of the First Amendment. They'll learn that the Founders wrote it precisely to protect Tom, Dick, and Matt and the wide-eyed pamphleteers and the partisan press of the time. The professional press, which Shaw believes so essential in protecting society, didn't even exist until the late 19th century.If blogs err, Shaw has my permission to shame them. If they libel him, he has my blessing to sue. I suspect that the more he treats blogs like the press the more he will come to realize that they are the press, and that the petty attempt he's made with his column to commandeer the First Amendment for the corporate media will only wreak the damage to society and the press that he so fears.
*******
If I were in the business of licensing journalists, which I'm not, I'd give Shaw a two-week suspension without pay and force him to blog his way back into his readers' good graces. Send your alternative sentence for Shaw to (Jack Shafer) -- pressbox@hotmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Tom DeLay Pulls Daddy's Plug
Hip, hip, hip-ocracy, whaddya know, in the US Senate again. It's Tom DeLay, of course, the man who was quick to agree to pull the plug on his daddy -- probably because daddy was a man, not a cause, to him. William Saletan draws on the story pieced together from by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek for the LA Times:
Physically, Charles DeLay was in far worse shape than Terri Schiavo. He needed dialysis, not just nutrition. He was 65, not 41. His body, unlike hers, was failing. But mentally, his condition was similar. According to his sister-in-law, doctors told the family that Charles DeLay would "basically be a vegetable." A neighbor who had visited him in the hospital said he "did a bit of moaning and groaning, I guess, but you could see there was no way he was coming back." Tom DeLay's mother told the Times that her husband seemed unconscious except that "whenever Randy [his son] walked into the room, his heart, his pulse rate, would go up a little bit."Friends and relatives considered Charles DeLay's quality of life and concluded he'd be better off dead. "He was all but gone," said the neighbor. "He would have been better off if he'd died right there and then." According to Charles' sister-in-law, his brother "prayed that, if [Charles] couldn't have quality of life, that God would take him—and that is exactly what [H]e did."
God may have taken Charles, but his family held the door open. They inferred, without written evidence, that Charles wouldn't have wanted to go on living in this condition. "Daddy did not want to be a vegetable," said Vi Skogen, who at the time was Charles' daughter-in-law. Tom DeLay's mother told the Times, "There was no point to even really talking about it. There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew—we all knew—his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."
That was then. This is now. At a press conference on March 18, Tom DeLay denied that quality of life could be valid grounds for withdrawing Schiavo's feeding tube. "It's not for any one of us to decide what her quality of life should be," he said. "It's not any one of us to decide whether she should live or die." Congress, DeLay explained, was intervening against Schiavo's husband "to protect her constitutional right to live."
...Why the difference between then and now? Maybe because DeLay saw his father as a human being. He speaks of Schiavo as something more—and less. "It's more than just Terri Schiavo," DeLay told the Family Research Council on March 18. "It is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."
The Right To Suppress Free Speech
Betcha hadn't heard of that one. It's a new right, available only to Republicans. Daily Kos just posted the story:
Very rarely does the everyday public get a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes in a normally-secret Bush Administration.But Monday, March 28, the Secret Service called three everyday people into their offices to discuss why we were kicked out of a presidential event in Denver last week where Bush promoted his plan to privatize Social Security. What they revealed to us and our lawyer was fascinating.
There we were - three people who had personally picked up tickets from Republican Congressman Bob Beauprez's office and went to a presidential event. But as we entered, we were told that we had been "ID'ed" and were warned that any disruption would get us arrested.
After being seated in the audience we were forcibly removed before the President arrived, even though we had not been disruptive. We were shocked when told that this presidential event was a "private event" and were commanded to leave.
More astonishingly, when the Secret Service was contacted the next day they agreed to meet with us this Monday, March 28 to discuss the circumstances surrounding our removal. We had two big questions going into this meeting:
1. How is the Bush Administration "ID'ing" citizens before presidential events?
2. Why was an official taxpayer-funded event called a "private event" - leading to citizens being kicked out?
Most shocking of all, we got answers to both questions.
The Secret Service revealed that we were "ID'ed" when local Republican staffers saw a bumper sticker on the car we drove which said "No More Blood For Oil." Evidently, the free speech expressed on one bumper sticker is cause enough to eject three citizens from a presidential event. (Similarly, someone was ejected from Bush's Social Security privatization event in Arizona the same day simply for wearing a Democratic t-shirt.)
The Secret Service also revealed that ticket distribution and staffing of the Social Security event was run by the local Republican Party. They wanted us to be clear that it was a Republican staffer - not the Secret Service - who kicked us out of the presidential event. But this revealed something else that should be startling to all Americans.
After allowing taxpayers to finance his privatization events (let's call them what they really are after all,) and after using the White House communications apparatus to set them up, Bush is privatizing the ticket distribution and security staffing at his events to the Republican Party. The losers are not just taxpayers, but anyone who values the First Amendment. Under the banner of a "private event" the Republican Party is excluding citizens from seeing their president because of the lone sin of expressing the wrong idea on a bumper sticker or t-shirt. The question for Americans is - will we allow our freedom to be privatized?
Karen Bauer, Leslie Weise. Alexander Young
Denver residents
Kos lays out the big issue:
So to emphasize -- the White House uses taxpayer dollars to finance these propaganda events. THEN, in order to keep out anyone who might be critical, they "outsource" ticketing and security. That way they can label the events "private" and kick out anyone they want in violation of the First Amendment.Who in Congress will step up and call for an investigation?
Wow...it gets scarier and scarier in these United (Christian) States every day. I'm seriously afraid about the future for the first time in my life, and in a Fahrenheit 451/Kafka kind of way. If, a decade ago, I'd seen a movie about life in 2005 America, I would have dismissed it as patently unrealistic.
How Green Is My President?
Thomas Friedman writes of George Bush's misplaced priorities -- going all out to privatize Social Security while ignoring the energy crisis. Many people who voted for Bush said they thought he would be better on terrorism than Kerry, but look where we are now:
By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases. The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela, which is becoming Castro's Cuba with oil. By doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are also setting up a global competition with China for energy resources, including right on our doorstep in Canada and Venezuela. Don't kid yourself: China's foreign policy today is very simple - holding on to Taiwan and looking for oil.Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only hastening the climate change crisis, and the Bush officials who scoff at the science around this should hang their heads in shame. And it is only going to get worse the longer we do nothing. Wired magazine did an excellent piece in its April issue about hybrid cars, which get 40 to 50 miles to the gallon with very low emissions. One paragraph jumped out at me: "Right now, there are about 800 million cars in active use. By 2050, as cars become ubiquitous in China and India, it'll be 3.25 billion. That increase represents an almost unimaginable threat to our environment. Quadruple the cars means quadruple the carbon dioxide emissions - unless cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles become the norm."
Friedman wisely calls for a gas tax, an investment in alternate energy sources, and a recommitment to nuclear power. Before all you knee-jerk anti-nuke people start kicking and screaming, from what I've read, the data on nuclear power says the pluses far outweigh the minuses in terms of safety and environmental impact. Wanna breathe? Think the North Pole should remain snowy, not filled with sandy beaches and people drinking Mai Tais? Something's gotta give.
It's smart geopolitics. It's smart fiscal policy. It is smart climate policy. Most of all - it's smart politics. Even evangelicals are speaking out about our need to protect God's green earth. "The Republican Party is much greener than George Bush or Dick Cheney," remarked Schwartz. "There is now a near convergence of support on the environmental issue. Look at how popular Arnold Schwarzenegger, a green Republican, is becoming because of what he has done on the environment in California."Imagine if Bush declared that he was getting rid of his limousine for an armor-plated Ford Escape hybrid, adopting a geo-green strategy and building an alliance of neocons, evangelicals and greens to sustain it. His popularity at home - and abroad - would soar. The country is dying to be led on this. Instead, he prefers to squander his personal energy trying to take apart the New Deal and throwing red meat to right-to-life fanatics. What a waste of a presidency. How will future historians explain it?
Dead Like Me
A certified minority firm in Chicago is led by a dead woman. For what it's worth, she was black while still alive.
The Presidential Pulpit
George Bush did his bit this week to subtly suggest conversion to the infidels marring the face of these United Christian States. (Don't forget one of the explicit goals of Christianity is converting the unbelievers. Of course, "converting" is putting it rather quaintly, considering the Spanish Inquisition was one of the better armed and organized conversion attempts.)
Yes, horrifyingly, the leader of what is supposed to be a secularly run country, put out this message encouraging conversion to Christianity with the wacky and entirely unproven notion that people who accept its preferred imaginary friend as their "savior" will be rewarded with "eternal life." Is there a shred of evidence of any such thing? Of course not. But this concept goes over real big with the tenderheaded, who shrink from autonomy and free will, which require an engaged mind and personal responsibility -- as opposed to the ability to follow directions without question.
Here are a few words about Easter from the primitive thinker also known as the president of the most powerful nation on the planet:
President's Easter Message
Easter 2005For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
I send greetings to all those celebrating Easter, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through His sacrifice and triumph over death, Christ lifted the sights of humanity forever. In His teachings, the poor have heard hope, the proud have been challenged, and the weak and dying have found assurance. Today, the words of Jesus continue to comfort and strengthen Christians around the world.
During this holy season, we thank God for His blessings and ask for His wisdom and guidance. We also keep in our thoughts and prayers the men and women of our Armed Forces -- especially those far from home, separated from family and friends by the call of duty. May the joy of Easter fill our hearts with gratitude for our freedom, love for our neighbors, and hope for peace.
Laura and I wish you a Happy Easter.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Excuse me, but it is ENTIRELY INAPPROPRIATE for the president of this country to put out an Easter message like this. I wasn't alive when Kennedy was elected, but I remember reading about how worried people were that he would run the country according to his (Catholic) religion. Hello? Today, the president thinks nothing of turning the presidency into a pulpit -- when he isn't busy trying to get the country to conform to the dictates of the religious "right," and few seem to care.
Again, since there is zero evidence there is a god (and no, "jeezopeet, how do we explain all this then?" doesn't count as evidence), it is no more appropriate (or reasonable) for the president to thank "God" for "His blessings" than it is for him to thank a giant purple imaginary turkey for not crapping on the White House rose garden. Isn't anybody but me horrified by this? Extremely troubled? Ticked off a little?
Helloooo? Anybody awake out there?
"The New PC: Crybaby Conservatives"
Russell Jacoby writes of the hue and cry that all the universities are overrun by "liberals" (a term which I dislike since it has become code for something along the lines of "turds").
...Conservatives command the presidency, Congress, the courts, major news outlets and the majority of corporations; they appear to have the country comfortably in their pocket. What fuels their rage, then? What fuels the persistent charges that professors are misleading the young?...The new conservative critics seem driven by an ethos that they have adopted from liberalism: affirmative action and a sense of victimhood, which they officially detest.
...Conservatives complain relentlessly that they do not get a fair shake in the university, and they want parity--that is, more conservatives on faculties. Conservatives are lonely on American campuses as well as beleaguered and misunderstood.
...More leftists undoubtedly inhabit institutions of higher education than they do the FBI or the Pentagon or local police and fire departments, about which conservatives seem little concerned, but who or what says every corner of society should reflect the composition of the nation at large? Nothing has shown that higher education discriminates against conservatives, who probably apply in smaller numbers than liberals. Conservatives who pursue higher degrees may prefer to slog away as junior partners in law offices rather than as assistant professors in English departments. Does an "overrepresentation" of Democratic anthropologists mean Republican anthropologists have been shunted aside? Does an "overrepresentation" of Jewish lawyers and doctors mean non-Jews have been excluded?
It's All About Tom
Ed, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, noticed this bit from a speech DeLay gave to a fundamentalist group on Friday:
"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State."This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.
Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in."
Ed has it just right, commenting:
Such moral myopia. Such narcissism. Yeah, Tom, it's all about you and your political beliefs. God was so concerned about the future of your political movement that he decided to strike this woman down in the prime of her life, beginning a decade and a half of anguish for everyone who cared about her. He planted the thoughts in the minds of her husband and her parents to start a big legal battle over it so it would blow up into a political issue just so that you and your pals could fight back against your political enemies. Because after all, it's all about you. And God loves you so much he's willing to necrotize the brain of an innocent victim just to help you score some political points later on.
Sew Not Her Designs
The woman knocking off Chanel and others responds to my email criticizing her. Check out all the photos on her site that appear to be from the very people she's knocking off -- runway shows, catalogs. Surely, all of those were used with explicit permission and compensation to the companies, models, and photographers!
Greetings Amy,I am the owner of Sew Beautiful By Natasha and Jane LLC. Dresses can not be trademarked, patented or copyrighted. I am within full legal rights for what we do. ABS (Alan B Schwartz) has done it for years. Our customers say our quality is better than CHANEL. See testimonials from clients from eBay on our site at www.sew-beautiful.us. Is it moral for Chanel to charge $12,000 for a suit that costs them $400? I think it is moral to offer women affordable couture clothing as we do. In addition, Chanel has no problem with selling us their fabrics.
All the major yarn manufacturers are using the Martha Stewart name in their patterns for ponchos as well as many home crocheters selling them on eBay. Are you writing to all of them to complain? I am the ONLY one giving Ms Hernandez any money. (% is gross profits). I have contacted Martha Stewart about how we are using her name. She has no problem with our doing this.
Most of our profits go into our non-profit Medication Compliance Research Inc at http://sew-beautiful.us/medicationcompliance to help save the lives of over 125,000 people who die each year as a result of not taking their medication properly.
Best Regards, Jane Langdon
I love when people sign stuff at the end of their letter that they clearly don't mean. Not a surprise here that this woman is sending me her "best regards." I got an even bigger laugh from the guy who wrote me a full page of nasty, low blows, then signed, "Respectfully." "Respectfully"? Where? Anyway, here's my response to this woman's letter. Note that I don't call her a lady:
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but there's much you're doing that's illegal, especially use of all those photos you surely didn't pay for. Even if it is legal to do something, it certainly isn't moral. And people can charge whatever they wish for their work; it is their work, the fruits of their labor. Your rationalization of it is absolutely disgusting. I especially love your argument that your customers like it. I'm sure the guy who gets a stolen TV really cheaply from a fence is thrilled as well. DOES Chanel really know what you're doing? I doubt it. Let's see the letter from them about how THRILLED they are you're knocking off their goods, under their name, on your site.Did you take all those photos down? Perhaps I'm making an outrageous assumption, but from the photographic evidence I see on your blog -- pictures of movie stars without credit to the photographers and pictures from runway shows and apparently, catalogs paid for by the very people whose work you're profiting from...it seems quite likely to me that you're a thief...and many times over. You don't say you paid for those photos. Did you? Clearly, you are utterly unconcerned with much but making a profit. ("Most" go to to that foundation? Really? What percentage would you call "most"? Gross or net?) How much of it you give to charity still doesn't justify what you're doing. Would you let a heroin kingpin work your streets if he gave some of the profits to the local soup kitchen? -Amy Alkon
PS Let's see the letter from Martha Stewart giving you the go-ahead to use her name. I'm loath to believe anything you say since you have no compunction putting up all those photos without credits showing you paid the rightful owners for their use. Come on, justify that.
Johnnie Cochran Wipes His Feet On The First Amendment
Some people are all for free speech and all the other rights granted us by our Constitution and Bill Of Rights...until those rights start negatively affecting them. Cochran is, apparently, one of those people. Here's an exerpt from a New York Times editorial:
Cochran persuaded a California court to order Ulysses Tory, a longtime critic, never to talk about him again. That is brilliant lawyering, but terrible First Amendment law. The Supreme Court should restore Tory's free speech rights.Tory hired Cochran's firm to bring a civil rights lawsuit on his behalf after he was fired on by law enforcement officers while leaving a fish market. He had numerous complaints about the firm's work, and eventually began standing outside Cochran's Los Angeles offices with disparaging signs, including "You've been a BAD BOY, Johnnie L. Cochran."
Cochran sued Tory for defamation. He didn't ask for damages. Instead, he asked that Tory be stopped from speaking in the future. Cochran prevailed, and got a court order that Tory could not say anything about him in any public forum. Tory appealed, arguing that this sweeping prohibition violated his free speech rights. Incredibly, two appeals courts refused to overturn it.
Assclown Of The Day
A rude, "look, Ma, no hands!" driver meets the PO-lice.
via LAObserved
Bill Frist Needs To See Your Boogers
He spoke to the Senate about the Schiavo case, "more as a physician than a senator," reports DriveDemocracy.org:
Frist said he believed there was “insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state."He didn’t even need to examine the tragic Florida woman who has been fed artificially since she was brain damaged in 1990 -- he just looked at her on videotape.
Now, the LA Times reports that "critics say the majority leader...overstepped in giving an opinion on Terri Schiavo’s condition." Apparently it’s a bio-ethical no-no to diagnosis a patient you’ve never seen. And some people say it’s arrogant for Dr. Frist to involve the U.S. Congress in the personal medical decisions of one family just to suck up to the religious right before the 2008 presidential primaries.
But we say, think of the opportunity!
Take a digital picture or video of your medical problem – tennis elbow, acne, runny nose, gout, or whatever ails you – and send it to the Doctor in charge of the US Senate and your health care.
Tell Dr. Frist you want him to diagnose it and get Congress to pass a law prescribing treatment.
Email and snail mail addresses to send your achy breaky photographic evidence to at the link above.
Quackwatch In The Schiavo Case!
That brilliant, "Nobel Prize-nominated" doctor, William Hammesfahr, who testified for the Schiavos, was indeed nominated for a Nobel Prize. Daily Howler even says so:
Here’s what we found when we ran a search: Three years ago, David Sommer of the St. Petersburg Times reported that Hammesfahr “advertises himself as a nominee for a Nobel Prize based on a letter his congressman wrote to the Nobel committee.” Yes, Hammesfahr was “nominated” for the Nobel Prize by his Republican congressman, Peter Bilirakis, back in 1999!
Oh, and there's a lovely piece on him on the web...on Quackwatch.com. And yes, the name says it all. To get the real picture -- literally -- turn to Amptoons again. Here's an exerpt of what Cerebrocat, a recent behavioral neuroscience PhD, says about the image of her brain compared to a healthy brain:
There is no way any qualified brain doctor or scientist could look at this image and suggest that significant recovery of function is possible. The fact that we could have all this discussion on the subject is a triumph of politics over science. Tragic for Terri Schiavo, and really for us all.
About his qualifications, he says:
I am not the most qualified person to evaluate Terri Schiavo’s status from one small CAT picture on the web; that would be someone who evaluates scans professionally (or at least, regularly). But part of the point of my post was that I don’t have to be - I know how brains work (I mean, up to a point, obviously), I know what healthy ones and sick ones look like, and I know what I’m looking at when I look at a brain image. Schiavo’s damage is so severe that it doesn’t take an *expert’s* eye, but merely an *educated* eye, to understand the basics of her status. That’s why I’m so amazed that her prognosis is being discussed as if it were controversial.
"A Fitting Business"
That's what this knock-off queen below calls profiting from the work of others. I call it something else. Here's the press release I got via email last night. (I'm not making the links live, because the last thing I want to do is advertise for this woman.)
Have you always wanted a Chanel suit, Escada dress or Vera Wang wedding gown. but didn't want to pay the high prices? Or couldn't find it in your size? Jane Langdon wanted a Chanel suit for a 2002 New York city trade show and found one on eBay in a size 8 for $800. She was a size 12 and was unable to loose the weight as the time drew near. She found a wonderful seamstress to copy it and received many compliments at the show. As a result, she started a custom couture business with Natasha, her seamstress, named SEW BEAUTIFUL By Natasha and Jane at www.sew-beautiful.us.Jane already had successsful internet businesses. House of Rose at www.houseofrose.com which makes long lasting, alcohol free perfumes, Martha Stewart Ponchos at www.sew-beautiful.us/marthestewartponcho, Pill Proof at www.sew-beautiful.us/pillproof which makes medication reminder kits and Your Net Store at www.sew-beautiful.us/yournetstore that helps people build websites. They got orders from around the world. Some women were concerned about how well the clothing would fit and Jane explained that men have been oderering suits this way for many generations from tailors in Hong Kong. Their measurement chart is very extensive.
CHANEL fabrics and buttons are available as well as other top designer fabrics. The linings are top quality 100% silk. They can create exact copies of any designer outfit or work from your sketches or ideas. They make dresses, suits, evening gowns and bridal attire.The Halle Berry oscar dress has been popular and they have the maroon embroidered bodice fabric made in Italy. Other much requested items include are the spring Chanel suits with fringe details and the pink Jackie O suit in "Legally Blonde 2". So if you have a dream outfit you want created, your dream can come true.
CONTACT INFO:
Sew Beautiful LLC
Jane Langdon
5670 Pennwall Street
Madison, WI 53711
USA
Here's the response I sent back:
"Have you ever wanted a Chanel suit, Escada dress or Vera Wang wedding gown. but didn't want to pay the high prices?"Sure, but making and selling a copy of one would be stealing the fruits of somebody else's labors...right?
Jane: tell me why it isn't stealing to copy and profit from another person's work. Come on...tell me.
As a writer who holds a trademark and copyrights, I value other people's trademarks and copyrights, and thus, would not buy a knock-off. How do you have any right to use Martha Stewart's name as part of your product name? This woman spent years building a business and an image. How dare you try to profit from her work?
Oh, and how generous of you to say on your Web page that you'll give the lady who designed the poncho 10% of the profits. (Is that net or gross?) Perhaps she deserves at least 50% as the creator? Of course, she's in jail, she most likely has no lawyer negotiating for her; she has to just hope people she's doing business with will be fair. Oops!
By the way, that's a copyrighted photo of Reese Witherspoon on your suits page -- http://www.sew-beautiful.us/SBsuits.html -- I'm sure you got permission and paid to use it...right? And the same goes for the Chanel name...right? And for the photos on your suits page that seem to be from the runway from Chanel shows. Surely, you paid Chanel and the models for use, and the photographers, too...right? Surely, you paid the photographers for use of the photos of Halle Berry and Kate Winslet...right? And surely, all those photos that seem to be copied from catalogs are actually originals, bought fair and square from the photographers. Riiiight.
If you aren't clever enough to design profitable enough items of your own, perhaps you should be in business supporting people who have enough talent to create instead of merely copying and profiting from the work of others. --Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist
UPDATE: Apparently, Langdon, who insisted over and over that she had rights to all the photos on her site, did not. Brian Sutera, from Carmela Sutera, was most grateful for my intervention, and wrote Langdon giving her a week to take down the photo on her site of the Carmela Sutera wedding dress (which is in the current collections on Sutera's site)! More at the link below.
Here's the whole story, complete with a link to a site Langdon created about me, USING MY COPYRIGHTED PHOTOS SHE COPIED OFF MY SITE AND ONE OTHER! I spoke to my entertainment lawyer this morning, who told me that this was "a slam-dunk copyright violation." I mean, it's hard to believe this woman is that stupid. I posted the potential fines at the link above, but I offered to let her propose a settlement rather than take this to court!
I totally support her right to speak her opinion about me, as much as she wishes, as a supporter of free speech. What I will not allow is unpaid use of my intellectual property -- those photos.
Another Reality Check On The Schiavo Case
From the St. Petersburg Times:
"It's a big leap to go from seeing some evidence of brain function to a conclusion that the patient is aware," said Dr. Stephen Mernoff, a clinical assistant professor of neurology at Brown University. "In this case, it's way too big a leap."Lakoff compares the battle over Schiavo's life to the Scopes Monkey Trial, which played out in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 over the decision of high school teacher John Scopes to teach evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law. It was an era of struggle between traditionalists and modernists over values.
"What's changed?" said Lakoff. "This is a traditional clash between faith and science. Terri Schiavo is a dead body. She's not there anymore. But for many Christians, the concept of a soul is that it can think, perceive and feel, just like the person it inhabits. But that isn't possible without a brain. It is folk theory, and the antithesis of science."
The heart of the issue for some is whether Schiavo will suffer as she dies after the feeding tube is removed. Mernoff says she will not.
"People think that's a terrible way to go, but that's because they think of starvation as it would feel to them, people who are totally conscious and aware of their surroundings," he said. "In a case like this, however, the patient will feel nothing at first, then will experience renal failure, lapse quickly and painlessly into a coma and then expire. It is actually very peaceful."
Mernoff also said the hope of Schiavo's parents for a miracle recovery is in vain. "People waking up magically after 15 or 20 years - it just doesn't happen," he said. "If you look into these stories, there is always, always some factor that wasn't made public that is responsible."
Amy On Glenn Sacks' His Side Radio Show
Sunday, I debated male feminist Hugo Schwyzer about men's reproductive rights. (I'm for them; he's not.) If you missed the broadcast, you can listen here. You can read Glenn's work on the subject here. (He's for men's rights, too!) Here is the column I wrote, titled Fetal Attraction, responding to a guy who has sex with a woman who says she lied about being on the pill because she was desperate for a baby. Note to men: Latex wrap the heir shaft. At all times. And bring your own condom. At all times. One you're sure nobody's had the chance to work over with the sharp end of a pin. Cynical of me to say so? Perhaps. But I get the emails and letters from all the astonished-to-become-daddies who say otherwise.
Religious Conservatives First; Conservative Conservatives Second
A New York Times editorial criticizes the extraordinary measures taken after supporters of the religious right leaned on Congress and the White House to step in in the Schiavo case. A new law passed on Monday gives "any parent of Theresa Maria Schiavo" the standing to sue in federal court to prolong her life:
The new law tramples on the principle that the United States is "a nation of laws, not of men," and it guts the power of the states. When the commotion over this one woman's tragic story is over, Congress and the president will have done real damage to the founders' careful plan for American democracy....This narrow focus is offensive. The founders of the United States believed in a nation in which, as Justice Robert Jackson once wrote, we would "submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules." There is no place in such a system for a special law creating rights for only one family. The White House insists that the law will not be a precedent. But that means that the right to bring such claims in federal court is reserved for people with enough political pull to get a law passed that names them in the text.
Republicans have traditionally championed respect for the delicate balance the founders created. But in the Schiavo case, and in the battle to stop the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominations, Bush and his congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: The rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.
An abuse of power, plain and simple. Jeff A. Taylor at Reason Express explains that it was a much needed decoy:
First and foremost, the relative flop of George Bush's Social Security initiative put the GOP in a compassion deficit without gaining them anything in return. Republican members of Congress were already tacking away from George Bush, granny-kicker, before the Schiavo case. Now, on this issue, they get to come out swinging against "torturers" and other heartless unbelievers. This is familiar ground for them, and Bush can work it too.Then factor in deep dissatisfaction among conservatives with the continued GOP-led spending frenzy in D.C. and the need for a base-energizing issue is quite dire. With Democrats in Congress totally unified in their opposition to any cuts in entitlement spending, not just absolute cuts but mere reductions in the rate of increases as well, Republicans can afford no weakness. But with a handful of moderate Republicans still willing to define compassion in terms of spending money, that is not happening. Hence the need to find a compassion issue that is both off-budget and goes where Democrats dare not follow.
In other words, pro-life=pro-pawn. Suddenly, I find myself waxing nostalgic for the days of White House travel office scandals.
Fundamentalist Nutbags Come In All Flavors!
The ultra-orthodox rabbis are out to get Rabbi Slifkin, signing a letter denouncing him for, among other things, suggesting that the world is a mite older than 5,765 years. The New York Times' Alex Mindlin covers the controversy over the books written by Slifkin, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli scholar and science writer:
(Slifkin) gently debunked the claim, found in a medieval text, that geese grow on trees, explaining that it was "based on the peculiar anatomy of a certain seashell." And he examined the Talmudic doctrine that lice, alone of all animals, may be killed on the Sabbath because they do not sexually reproduce - a premise now known to be false.In "The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax," Rabbi Slifkin examined the difficult separation of animals into kosher and nonkosher, and discussed apparent exceptions and contradictions to the claims of Jewish law. (The aardvark and the rhinoceros, for example, meet one test for being kosher but not another.)
And in "The Science of Torah," he took a scientist's eye to the Torah. Evolution, he wrote, did not disprove God's existence and was consistent with Jewish thought. He suggested that the Big Bang theory paralleled the account of the universe's creation given by the medieval Spanish-Jewish sage Ramban. And Rabbi Slifkin wrote, to quote his own later paraphrase, that "tree-ring chronology, ice layers and sediment layers in riverbeds all show clear proof to the naked eye that the world is much more than 5,765 years old."
The latter statement was particularly galling to the rabbi's critics, who support a literal reading of Genesis that they say puts the earth's age at 5,765.
Child Molesters, Yes! Gay Bar Owners, No!
One more reason to hate the corrupt Catholic church, the people who brought you the game "Let's Look The Other Way!" during The Holocaust, and the more recent South American game, "Promote AIDS, Not Birth Control!" According to an AP story, the church, via San Diego's bishop, has denied a funeral to a 31-year-old man who owned a gay bar and a dance club popular with gays before he died of congestive heart failure:
In other cases across the country, some priests accused of sexual abuse have been granted Catholic funeral services, including John Geoghan, the Boston Archdiocese former priest whose sex-abuse case helped spark a nationwide Church scandal.McCusker owned Club Montage, a nightclub popular with gays, and ReBar, a gay bar.
Several gay community leaders said they planned to file a formal protest with the diocese and demand that Brom apologize to McCusker's family.
A memorial service for McCusker on Friday was moved to an Episcopal church in San Diego.
I'm reminded of the priest somebody told me about, who invited elementary school boys into his room to share his air-conditioning on hot summer days -- if only they'd join him in donning diapers (and do who knows what else behind clothes doors). Whaddya wanna bet he got a nice, big, flowery church funeral? Pedophiles, yes! A guy who was very likely a decent man who happened to like other decent men...NO, NO, NO!
Smells Like Christian Spirit!
In November, public school teacher in North Carolina taught her students about a special kind of smell apparently only the Christians have, writes Kristin Collins in the Raleigh News & Observer:
"God's word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have ...," the lesson read. "Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Him."Could someone find Christ by the scent trail you are leaving behind you?"
(No, but we'd know you anywhere by that cheap cologne.)
A suit was filed and the school system administrators pledged it wouldn't happen again. Naturally, it did. It took only until February:
Ashlee came home with a worksheet on which she was marked wrong for answering that "chance" was the reason many animals are colored to match their surroundings. The teacher indicated that the right answer was "God's master design," the suit says.
Or maybe a giant purple dinosaur popped down with an extra big box of Crayolas!
...Do I see any hands for natural selection?
Sometimes Being Pro-Life Means Being Pro-Death
While our fundamentalist-in-chief rushes in to do his duty as head of the largest church in the world, formerly known as the United States of America, a Dutch doctor euthanizes children out of suffering. The New York Times' Gregory Crouch tells the story of Holland's Dr. Eduard Verhagen:
A father of three who spent years tending to sick children in underdeveloped countries, Verhagen became a pediatrician with the sole intention of saving lives, not ending them. And that is exactly what he did until Sanne was born on his ward four years ago with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin condition.In the best-case scenario, she would live until her 9th or 10th birthday and then die of skin cancer.
Her skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place.
The top layers of mucous membranes inside her mouth and esophagus fell away any time she was fed, which was done by tube.
Verhagen tried to evoke the kind of pain he says Sanne was in. He clenched his fists and mimicked the way she balled her tiny hands. Her cry was not that of a normal, healthy baby but the shriek of an extraordinarily sick one.
And her vital signs - heartbeat, blood pressure and respiration - reflected those of a child in extreme stress, Verhagen said.
Pain relievers seemed to be useless.
Making matters worse, Verhagen and his colleagues had to bandage Sanne's scar tissue knowing they were contributing to a vicious circle: Every time they replaced the bandages, a little more skin fell off. Before long, Verhagen said, Sanne resembled a mummy.
Her parents demanded an end to her suffering, which moved Verhagen to consider euthanasia.
Fearing criminal prosecution, Verhagen and hospital officials refused and eventually sent Sanne home, where she died of pneumonia half a year later.
Verhagen felt he had failed Sanne and her parents, believing all three had suffered longer than necessary. "We were very unhappy," he said.
He and his colleagues started familiarizing prosecutors with difficult cases, even including them on daily rounds.
And they developed a protocol, published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, that is both a checklist and a how-to-guide for Dutch doctors who are considering ending a baby's life and still want to stay out of jail.
Now, he is suddenly in demand as an expert in the medical and ethical issues surrounding infant euthanasia and not exactly sure what to make of all the fuss. "It's weird," he said. "I want to be a normal pediatrician, not Dr. Death."
The decision to end a child's life is obviously an emotional one, Verhagen said, and not just for the parents.
Once everyone - doctors, parents and social workers - agrees there is nothing more to be done for a child medically, a time is fixed to start administering a deadly intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam, a sleeping agent.
Horrible, huh? So much less humane than letting a child shriek in pain every day until death naturally comes! Most obscenely, Jack Kevorkian is rotting in jail, and the Bush brothers are well-place on the outside, wielding their Christianity over all of us. Oh yeah, and as Bush did recently, don't let me forget to wish the country "Happy Easter."
People in America make fun of the French (America's favorite punching bag lately), and but I sat next to a very interesting man in a café last month, who told me how outrageous it would be in France if some head of state were sworn in on a Bible. Hah! That's only the beginning for us. And ironically, many people in this country seem to have a sense of superiority over the religious fanatics in the Middle East. So, you live in a tract home instead of a clay-brick hut. A fundamentalist is a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist. Primitives, all.
Schiavo Review
What seems to me to be a pretty unbiased review of the case is here, by a Florida lawyer.
Funny, That's Not What He Said In All Those Death Penalty Cases
Carl Hulse and David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times quote a statement by George Bush explaining why he signed the measure that would allow a federal court to intervene in the Schiavo case:
"In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life."
Really?
Anthony Lewis reviews Bush's record as executioner-in-chief in the state of Texas, a man who Alexander Cockburn says has "signed more death warrants than any other elected official alive today in America":
In answer to questions about that record, Governor Bush has repeatedly said that he has no qualms. "I'm confident," he said last February, "that every person that has been put to death in Texas under my watch has been guilty of the crime charged, and has had full access to the courts."That defense of the record ignores many notorious examples of unfairness in Texas death penalty cases. Lawyers have been under the influence of cocaine during the trial, or been drunk or asleep. One court dismissed a complaint about a lawyer who slept through a trial with the comment that courts are not "obligated to either constantly monitor trial counsel's wakefulness or endeavor to wake counsel should he fall asleep."
This past week The Chicago Tribune published a compelling report on an investigation of all 131 death cases in Governor Bush's time. It made chilling reading.
In one-third of those cases, the report showed, the lawyer who represented the death penalty defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. In 40 cases the lawyers presented no evidence at all or only one witness at the sentencing phase of the trial.
In 29 cases, the prosecution used testimony from a psychiatrist who -- based on a hypothetical question about the defendant's past -- predicted he would commit future violence. Most of those psychiatrists testified without having examined the defendant: a practice condemned professionally as unethical.
Other witnesses included one who was temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to testify, a pathologist who had admitted faking autopsies and a judge who had been reprimanded for lying about his credentials.
Asked about the Tribune study, Governor Bush said, "We've adequately answered innocence or guilt" in every case. The defendants, he said, "had full access to a fair trial."
There are two ways of understanding that comment. Either Governor Bush was contemptuous of the facts or, on a matter of life and death, he did not care.
Oops, but those cases had nothing to do with overturning Roe v. Wade, now did they?
"Turning Casual Sex Into Cash Flow Sex"
That's what I called it, in the column I'll be discussing tonight (at 5pm, PST) on Glenn Sacks radio show about choice for men: whether men should have some reproductive rights. At the moment, a guy who gets drunk and has sex with some stranger in a bar is likely to go right to the "Do not pass Go, do pay through the nose in court-ordered child support." Here's an excerpt from this column -- my response to a guy who had sex with a woman who told him she lied about being on The Pill because she wanted a baby:
In no other arena is a swindler rewarded with a court-ordered monthly cash settlement paid to them by the person they bilked. While you don't mention being forced at gunpoint to have sex without a condom, potentially getting socked with two decades of hefty fines for being a careless idiot seems a bit like being sentenced to 100 years hard labor for stealing a muffin. The law is not on men's side. Matt Welch reported in Reason magazine (2/04) that welfare reform legislation forces some men to pay child support for kids who aren't theirs -- sometimes, kids of women they've never even met -- unless they protest, in writing, within 30 days, that they're victims of a daddy-scam.While the law allows women to turn casual sex into cash flow sex, Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: "Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?" A child shouldn't have to survive on peanut butter sandwiches sans peanut butter because he was conceived by two selfish, irresponsible jerks. Still, there's a lot more to being a father than forking over sperm and child support, yet the law, as written, encourages unscrupulous women to lure sex-dumbed men into checkbook daddyhood.
This isn't 1522. If a woman really doesn't want a kid, she can take advantage of modern advances in birth control like Depo-Provera or the IUD, combine them with backup methods (as recommended by her doctor), add an ovulation detection kit, plus insist that doofuses like you latex up. Since it's the woman who gets a belly full of baby, maybe a woman who has casual sex and is unprepared, emotionally, financially, and logistically, to raise a child on her own, should be prepared to avail herself of the unpleasant alternatives. It's one thing if two partners in a relationship agree to make moppets, but should a guy really get hit up for daddy fees when he's, say, one of two drunk strangers who has sex after meeting in a bar? Yes, he is biologically responsible. But, is it really "in the child's best interest" to be the product of a broken home before there's even a home to break up?
I'll be debating a guy Glenn called "a male feminist" named Hugo Schwyzer. On his blog, he calls himself
a progressive, consistent-life ethic Anabaptist/Episcopalian Democrat (but with a sense of humor), a community college history and gender studies professor, an avid marathoner, aspiring ultra-runner, die-hard political junkie, and proud father of a small chinchilla.
I'm all for the running and the chinchilla. Here's what he says about the Choice For Men movement on his blog.
The "Choice for Men" movement seeks to give unmarried fathers the right to relinquish their parental rights and responsibilities within a month of learning of a pregnancy, just as mothers do when they choose to give their children up for adoption.Feminist Gender Studies professor Dr. Hugo Schwyzer, Ph.D calls Choice for Men "profoundly offensive," noting that it "seeks to give men the right to evade responsibility for the children they help to conceive."
I've been very clear on this issue, especially in this post during last summer's Amy Richards controversy. I said then, and still believe now, the following:
Every man who ejaculates inside a woman, whether or not contraception is used, is signalling his willingness to become a father. If men are not ready and willing to raise a child conceived through an act of sex, they are morally responsible for refraining from sex...
I'm not familiar with Alkon. I've been reading through the material on her site today, and she seems like a fairly standard "libertarian feminist". I can't say we'll disagree on everything, but on this issue, we will. This will mean that in some very real sense, I may be taking her on from the right, at least in my insistence that the only real choice that a man deserves in this situation is whether or not to have sex in the first place. After that decision has been made, I am adamant that he, jointly with the woman with whom he briefly partnered -- is morally (and financially) responsible for any and all outcomes from that initial decision. Even if those outcomes last a lifetime.
Here's what Glenn Sacks writes about the Choice For Men movement:
The "Choice for Men" movement seeks to give fathers the right to relinquish their parental rights and responsibilities within a month of learning of a pregnancy, just as mothers do when they choose to give their children up for adoption. These men would be obligated to provide legitimate financial compensation to cover pregnancy-related medical expenses and the mother's loss of income during pregnancy. The right would only apply to pregnancies which occurred outside of marriage, and women would still be free to exercise all of the reproductive choices they now have.Advocates of Choice for Men note that over 1.5 million American women legally walk away from motherhood every year by either adoption, abortion, or abandonment, and demand that men, like women, be given reproductive options. They point out that, unlike women, men have no reliable contraception available to them, since the failure rate of condoms is substantial, and vasectomies are impractical for young men who plan on becoming fathers later in life.
Since there are long backlogs of stable, two-parent families looking for babies to adopt, there is no reason why any child born out of wedlock to unwilling parents would be without a good home. In addition, if women knew that they could not compel men to pay to support children they do not want, the number of unwed births (and the social problems associated with them) would be reduced.
What do you think? Let me know below, or call in to Glenn's radio show tonight. His Side with Glenn Sacks can be heard on WSNR 620 AM in New York City, KTIE 590 AM in E. Los Angeles/Inland Empire, and WWZN 1510 AM in Boston, 5 PM PST/8 PM EST. For those who are outside of these radio stations' coverage ranges, you can listen to the show live via Glenn's station's Internet stream at Listen Live.
Please Discriminate!
Paul Howard, district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, likes to pretend that women and men come up even in the brute strength department. "Jack Dunphy," an LA cop writing under an assumed name, explores "the consequences of ignoring the obvious":
Facing reporters after Brian Nichols’s homicidal rampage and escape from the Fulton County Courthouse, Howard was asked about the wisdom in having a lone female deputy sheriff escorting a large man accused of a violent sex crime. A sensible question, certainly, what with three people freshly murdered (a fourth soon would follow) and a madman now running loose on the streets of Atlanta. The gathered reporters and anyone watching on television might have anticipated a reasoned, thoughtful response, perhaps to include a call for the reevaluation of the relevant courthouse policies. Alas, no such response was forthcoming.“I think that women are capable of doing anything that men are capable of doing,” Howard said. “And I don’t think it’s the weight, I think it’s the heart, the training, and the ability. I don’t think the weight has a whole lot to do with it.” In other words, if it were up to Mr. Howard, men accused of violent crimes would continue to be escorted through the courthouse hallways by female deputies half their size and twice their age. This is what passes for enlightened thinking in downtown Atlanta, where results, no matter how disastrous, count for less than one’s lofty intentions. Let the gutters run with blood, but we dare not show a lack of faith in our diminutive female police officers.
I'm not saying that I'm incapable of kicking some male ass if need be. Let's just hope the male ass in question isn't a kid over 10 who tips the scale at over 80 pounds. If I encounter a more formidable opponent, maybe I could sic my vicious dog on them.
Fundamentalist Barbarians At The Gate
Sicko religious fanatics in Congress plan to issue subpoenas Friday to stop doctors from removing the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo. Schiavo's delusional parents who, according to a CNN story, "believe she can get better with rehabilitation," have, tragically, become pawns of the religious "right." The New York Times reports that the religious fanatics who have taken over the Senate have pulled a crafty little move:
Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and the Senate majority leader, issued a statement saying that the woman, Terri Schiavo, and her husband, Michael, were being invited to testify in a Congressional inquiry into the matter later this month.The statement pointed out that Federal law protects witnesses called before Congress "from anyone who may obstruct or impede a witness's attendance or testimony."
The maneuver is the latest step by lawmakers determined to keep Ms. Schiavo alive to prevent her feeding tube from being disconnected, scheduled for 1 p.m. today.
In the CNN piece, even the religious fanatic-in-chief is urging "a presumption in favor of life" -- ie, the one advocated by Christianity (oops, we are a Christian country aren't we? I mean, except for that annoying little blurb about separation of church and state)?
If the religious "right"'s support for keeping alive a woman whose brain has turned into a milkshake (in order to serve their campaign to turn women into baby pods) is "pro life," I'm a viable candidate for center for the Knicks. What's scary is that I don't see the major news outlets reporting more than the surface stuff of the case -- what appears to be, thanks to the parents' propaganda machine.
Blogger Majikthise has the actual facts on the case -- and here's Amptoons on the ridiculous excuses for medical experts Schiavo's parents have called in -- along with an essential point about Schiavo's brain:
The conclusion the court came to is that, based on medical testimony and Terri’s CAT scan, her cerebral cortex has basically turned to liquid. The cerebral cortex is the seat of all our higher brain functions. Without a cerebral cortex, it is impossible for a human being to experience thought, emotions, consciousness, pain, pleasure, or anything at all; nor, barring a miracle, is it possible for a patient lacking a cerebral cortex to recover.There are only two logical responses to that argument, that I can think of.
A) An expert could argue that someone can experience consciousness without a cerebral cortex.
B) An expert could argue that Terri’s CAT scan was faulty, or was not read correctly.
Not one of the 17 experts clearly made either of the above arguments. Nor did they make some other argument I didn’t think of. In fact, none of them mentioned the term “cerebral cortex” at all. None of them even referred directly to Terri’s CAT scan.
Oh yeah...and don't forget the video clips. Amptoons exposes the fraud there, too:
So if none of the 17 experts address the cerebral cortex issue, what do they talk about? None of these experts have examined Terri, and only one claims to have looked at her medical records. What they discuss is the famous videos of Terri apparently tracking a balloon’s movement with her eyes, smiling at her mother, and so forth.The court ruling addressed those videos. Although the out-of-context video snips featured on the terrisfight.org website, and on TV newscasts, seem to show Terri reacting to things around her, the full, uncut video shows Terri smiling and moving her eyes at random. In one instance, her eyes appear to track a balloon; that short sequence has been shown over and over. What they don’t show is the many failed attempts made to get Terri to follow the balloon. With clever editing, even random motions and reflexes - such as smiling and eye movements - can seem conscious. The intelligence and cognition on display isn’t Terri’s, but the film editor’s.
And finally, don't forget to "follow the money." The Bioethics.net blog:
In the Schiavo case, the money leads to a consortium of conservative foundations, with $2 billion in total assets, that are funding a legal and public relations war of attrition intended to prolong Terri's life indefinitely in order to further their own faith-based cultural agendas.
This is sick beyond belief.
TV Tell-All Saturday Night
There's still room for a few more people, says Cathy.
The American Cinema Foundation and the L.A. Press Club (along with L.A. Press Club hostesses Amy Alkon, Emmanuelle Richard and Cathy Seipp) invite you to:TV WRITERS TELL ALL (MASS MARKET, SMART CONTENT): A panel discussion, moderated by L.A. journalist and media critic Cathy Seipp, about how some successful writers manage to keep their distinct viewpoints even while writing for the mass market medium of TV. There will be a Q&A with the audience, followed by a reception with cocktails and canapes.
Panelists:
Paul Feig (creator and executive producer: "Freaks & Geeks;" director: "Arrested Development;" director and writer, the feature film "I Am David;" author: "Kick Me: Adventures In Adolescence.")
Scott Kaufer (executive producer: "Boston Legal;" writer: "Gilmore Girls," "Chris Isaak Show," "Beggars & Choosers;" editor-in-chief: California magazine.)
Rob Long (co-creator and excecutive producer: "Men, Women & Dogs," "Love & Money," "George & Leo;" executive producer: "Cheers." Author: "Conversations With My Agent." Columnist: National Review. Radio commentator: KCRW.)
Tim Minear (executive produer: "The Inside," "Wonderfalls," "Angel," "Firefly")
DETAILS: Saturday, Mar. 19, 7 p.m. at the American Film Institute's Mark Goodson Screening Room (2021 N. Western Ave. in Los Feliz).
Admission and parking are free (drive w-a-a-y to the top of the AFI hill) but seating is limited, so please RSVP to acinema@cinemafoundation.com, or call (310) 286-9420.
Morality vs. God
Yaron Brook of Ayn Rand Institute challenges the idiocy:
The idea that morality is impossible without faith in God is an endlessly-repeated theme of several Fox News Channel talk show hosts. “This idea must be challenged,” said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
“It implies that man has no reason or purpose to be moral; it implies that no rational standard of morality is possible; it implies that in questions of morality man must suspend reason and blindly submit to faith or blindly obey some authority’s ‘revelations’ or ‘mystical insights.’ To imply that we have no earthly reason to be moral is profoundly immoral.
“The purpose of morality,” said Dr. Brook, “is to discover and teach the principles that lead to life, achievement, happiness, success, joy. There is only one means to discover and understand these principles: reason. A proper morality, one for living on earth, requires rationality and independence of soul, not faith and obedience to self-appointed interpreters of an alleged omnipotent being. A proper morality looks not to the supernatural but at man’s nature and the reason why he needs values--and then defines the values he must reach and the virtues he must practice to reach them.
Dr. Brook concluded: “Properly understood, not only does morality not require faith in God--morality is incompatible with faith in God. The moral is the rationally accepted and chosen, not the mindlessly believed and followed.”
Evolutionary psychology explains pretty well how it's actually in our SELF INTEREST to be moral, as members of a group (vis a vis needing to be in a band in the Pleistocene, when our psychology developed, to avoid being eaten by wild animals, dying of starvation, or being killed by other humans).
I'm reminded of a TV show I appeared on, Faith Under Fire, where I debated the boorish former pitcher, Frank Pastore, who talked over me every time I spoke, yet, ironically, argues that religion is necessary for morality. Clearly, it doesn't do anything for one's manners. My atheist "religion": Be kind, live ethically, live rationally, and "leave the campground better than you found it."
Susan Estrich As Bubbles The Hippo
Cathy Seipp takes on the LA Times' lame coverage of the Estrich/Kinsley affair, relating it to "how the late, great old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner spun out the saga of Bubbles the Hippo, who escaped from the L.A. Zoo in the '80s and eluded captors for weeks":
Take the paper's March 11 feature about the whole dust-up, almost a month after the fact. This is my hometown paper at its worst: bland, misleading, weak and late. (And also badly punctuated, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Media reporter James Rainey did a yeomanlike job summarizing the whole affair for the dozen or so readers who hadn't yet heard of it -- presumably these are the same innocents who still need to have the Drudge Report explained; thus Rainey's helpful but not quite accurate description of the Internet juggernaut as "the online journalism tipsheet," as if Drudge were merely some sort of media insiders site.At least Rainey didn't mention mimeograph machines. Yet he was peculiarly miserly about sharing information that actually might be useful. Those still awake halfway through Rainey's piece, for instance, might have liked to know they could read the Estrich/Kinsley email exchange for themselves at the Washington, D.C. Examiner. But Rainey made no mention of that, referring only to "a Washington-based newspaper reporter" copied on Estrich's email.
Nor did he ask any hard questions. Buried under Estrich's histrionics is a legitimate point: Kinsley, who took over the paper's opinion pages last year, really does seem like the epitiome of the L.A.-hating wonk from Harvard, with an obvious preference for sticking to his coterie of East Coast friends. I still think he's improved his section, because at least by hiring Joel Stein and Michael Lewis he's raised the caliber of writing on Spring Street, although I almost always find Margaret Carlson's columns too tedious to finish. But why not call him on it?
Then there's Estrich's transparently insincere claim that, really, all she wants is to see more L.A. women writers in the Times op-ed pages, right or left, she doesn't care that the Times doesn't run her column in particular, or more columns generally by women fellow travelers. OK, so then why not ask her to name a few L.A. rightwing female bylines she'd like to see in the paper? She's never come up with even one example. But of course, Rainey didn't bother Estrich or Kinsley with any of that.
You'd also have no idea, reading Rainey's piece, of the wonderfully nutty, "I will not be IGNORED!" behavior that's characterized practically every move by Estrich so far. To the average Times reader encountering this article, it must seem like just another dreary, inside-baseball matter of interest only to journalists. Not exactly what you want from a media reporter. Then there's this peculiar graph, about Times opinion editors trying to find more women writers:
They noted the hiring in the last year of Margaret Carlson, a familiar voice from Time magazine and television, as a regular columnist. Kinsley added that he tried but was unable to make Barbara Ehrenreich a regular commentator. Her last book on the struggles of the middle class received wide critical acclaim.
Never mind that leaden clunk you hear at this point, the sound of Rainey dropping the ball yet again when it comes to asking the obvious question: Why are Kinsley and his team only going after East Coast names for the West Coast's biggest paper? The alarm bell here is that incorrectly punctuated last sentence, which makes it factually wrong on two levels. Ehrenreich sounds like someone who has written (a) a series of books on the middle class, the last of which received wide critical acclaim, and (b) any book on the middle class at all. Uh, no. Her most recent book, "Nickeled and Dimed," is about the problems of the working class, but I guess to describe a class as anything but "middle" is too impolite for the reflexively genteel L.A. Times. Well, there's a long tradition out here of that, but enough's enough. Memo to L.A. Times editors: Wake up.
More on the topic on Cathy's blog -- and about the lame Deborah Tannen's piece in today's LA Times, and what Cathy calls Tannen's "hearts-and-flowers notion that women are kinder and gentler and that's why we need more of them on the op-ed pages." And Cathy brings up exactly the right point -- right out of evolutionary biology, that women fight wars of words, not wars with fists and weapons:
Actually, as anyone who's been around children knows, boys may be more aggressive physically but girls can be quite vicious verbally -- exactly the sort of trait you'd think would predispose them to opinion writing.
I'm certainly no shrinking violet -- which is why I get a pile of hate mail and angry letters every week. Just last night, this postcard in from Sheridan, WY, where I run in Mary Grossman's Planet Jackson Hole:
What's pretty ironic about this card is the fact that I just spent the better part of a week researching and writing about men's reproductive rights. I don't usually post columns until after papers have run them, but I'll be talking about this issue on Glenn Sacks' His Side radio show on Sunday, March 20, 5pm, so it's posted for his listeners. (Show airs in NYC, LA, and Boston on the radio, and on the Web, so listen and call in!)
Spy Vs. Spy
Now that we're living in the new dark ages, a MAD Magazine comic becomes a reality -- except adapted into "Nutbag Vs. Nutbag," as Muslim clerics in Spain issue a death warrant for Bin Ladin while the country marks the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings:
They accused him of abandoning his religion and urged others of their faith to denounce the al Qaeda leader, who is believed to be hiding out near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.The ruling was issued by the Islamic Commission of Spain, the main body representing the country's 1 million-member Muslim community. The commission invited imams to condemn terrorism at Friday prayers.
The fatwa said that according to the Koran "the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and his organization al Qaeda ... are totally banned and must be roundly condemned as part of Islam."
Finally. Too few Muslims have spoken out. Now, how about a few "moderates" show their heads -- and maybe even open their lips and say something...not so positive...about Osama?
An Easy DeLay
Government by the take, and for the take, or so it seems, according to this round-up of highlights from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's "illustrious career."
Delay Raises Corporate Cash for TRMPAC: DeLay is embroiled in a scandal in Texas for his active participation in illegally funneling corporate funds to assist state political campaigns. DeLay's political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), is under criminal investigation for using corporate money to finance Texas campaigns. DeLay has tried to distance himself from the group, but documents show DeLay "personally forwarded at least one large check" to the group and was "in direct contact with lobbyists for some of the nation's largest companies" on TRMPAC's behalf. [Source: NYT, 3/10/05; Salon, 10/04/04]Delay Bribes Congressman to Vote for Medicare: DeLay has admitted offering to endorse Sen. Nick Smith's (R-Mich.) son Brad, who was running for Congress at the time, in exchange for Smith's "yea" vote on the Medicare bill. His actions violated House rules and earned DeLay a "public admonishment" from the Ethics Committee. Smith originally alleged – and then retracted after pressure from House leaders – that DeLay also offered a $100,000 bribe for his vote. DeLay extended the role call on the Medicare bill for nearly three hours in order "to avoid an embarrassing loss." [Slate, 10/1/04; WP, 10/1/04]
Delay Uses Taxpayer Money for Partisan Stunt: The House ethics panel rebuked DeLay for using government resources to help locate a private plane he thought was carrying Texas Democratic legislators. DeLay was trying to force the legislators back to the capitol so he could push through his "bitterly disputed congressional redistricting." The ethics report cited House rules that bar members from taking "any official action on the basis of the partisan affiliation...of the individuals involved" and said DeLay's behavior raised "serious concerns under such "standards of conduct." [WP, 10/7/04]
Delay Pays for Golf Tournaments with Cash Meant for Kids: DeLay used a children's charity, Celebrations for Children Inc., as cover for collecting soft money from anonymous interest groups, some of which was used for "dinners, a golf tournament, a rock concert, Broadway tickets and other fundraising events" at the Republican convention in New York. Because the money was supposedly for charity, companies wishing to curry favor with DeLay were able to do so without revealing themselves as campaign donors. Federal laws governing tax-exempt charities allow no more than an insubstantial portion of a group's revenue to be spent on activities other than the charity's main stated purpose. [CBS, 11/14/03; WP, 3/24/04]
Here's a more detailed picture of the ethically ugly head Republican in Congress:
If you think that Bob Barr was as low as it got in the US House of Representative, you're doing a great injustice to Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Tom Delay, the House's Majority Whip is considered by some to be one of the most reviled thugs to hold public office in American history. Tom DeLay has literally reduced debate on the House floor to a shoving match. DeLay is a 52-year-old Houston millionaire and former owner of a pest-control company. Squashing bugs seems to have convinced Tom DeLay that he is a superior being in God's grand scheme. He is the religious right's most reliable culture warrior in the House.His mission is so stereotypically ultra-right-wing, it sounds like a liberal joke: repeal environmental protection laws. Dismantle the EPA. Teach creationism in public schools. Have the ten commandments tattooed on every citizens ass. Abolish separation of church and state. Outlaw abortion. Pass the flag burning amendment. Spend billions on SDI. Shut down the federal government. Crucify Clinton.
But DeLays' moral impairment doesn't stop there. It finds its logical extension in the realm of campaign finance. DeLay is a master of extortion, and his shadowy fundraising operations, which raise unknown amounts of soft money for the GOP are legendary. Not surprisingly, DeLay is vigorously opposed to anything even remotely resembling a campaign finance reform. Money, according to DeLay, is "not the root of all evil in politics. In fact, money is the lifeblood of politics."
In 1984, DeLay was elected to the lower House of Congress. He represents Sugar Land, a deceptively saccharine name for Texas's 22nd Congressional District, home to several of the worst industrial polluters in the country. DeLay has branded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the "gestapo of government." His love for America is exemplified by his attempt to repeal the Clean Air Act, by his fight to cut the EPA's budget by one-third and by his cooperation with lobbyists to write legislation exempting their industries from environmental laws.
Tom DeLay practically invented the "do-nothing Congress." He was a chief architect of the 1995 government shutdown, a ploy by which Republicans halted all productive business of our democratically elected governing bodies in a failed attempt to weaken President Clinton's resolve. DeLay remains hardheaded about that scorched-earth tactic: "Our biggest mistake was backing off from the government shutdown."
On Capitol Hill, DeLay's nickname is the Hammer, acquired from his knack for pounding money out of political-action committees (PACs). According to DeLay's figures, he nailed $2 million for GOP candidates in 1994. "I worked harder than anybody else," he boasts. "I was smarter than anybody else."
Impressed by DeLay's relentless humility, House Republicans elected the Hammer to be their Majority Whip. Every time the GOP caucus votes to defile the face of public debate, DeLay is there to toss the initial smear.
Tom DeLay was the first national politician to call for Bill Clinton's resignation after the President admitted to fooling around with Monica Lewinsky. "Clinton does not have the moral authority to be President," pronounced DeLay. "I believe in the Constitution and the Bible."
DeLay has not always been immaculate. In a rare confessional lapse the Hammer admitted that "like many young, ambitious males, I had pushed God aside. What a jerk I was." DeLay assures a believing world that he has "rededicated my life to Christ."
The Hammer's dedication to the religious Right is beyond question. Randy Tate, executive director of the Christian Coalition, thinks of DeLay as "a Domino's Pizza delivery guy. It's there in 30 minutes, or it's free."
Charming.
The High Price Of Love
In England, writes Claire Dyer in the Guardian, the Labour party wants to make merely sharing love reason enough to grab half your partner's stuff:
Unmarried partners who split up are likely to win new rights to make divorce-style claims for financial support and a share of the other partner's property if Labour is re-elected.Reform of the law to provide new legal protection for the four million people living together outside marriage - one in six of all couples - is not yet formal government policy. But ministers are concerned about the lack of safeguards for the growing numbers who choose not to formalise their relationship, and the effects on their children.
The lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, has asked the Law Commission to produce proposals for legislation and a draft bill, which would apply to England and Wales. The two-year project is expected to get under way in July, with initial proposals for consultation the following spring and final recommendations and draft bill by summer 2007.
According to figures last week from the Government Actuary's Department, the numbers of married men and women are predicted to fall below 50% of the population within six years. By 2031 the number of couples living together outside marriage is expected to nearly double, from 2 million to 3.8 million.
Later this year gay partners will be able to register their unions as civil partnerships, giving them many of the rights conferred by marriage. But heterosexual couples who fail to tie the marital knot are left with virtually no legal redress when the relationship ends.
Legal redress! Scary. How about love doesn't get to be a cash cow for anybody, and leave with what you came in with and earned yourself, while in the relationship? What could be wrong with that?
A Right Hook To The Religious Wrong
A California judge ruled Monday that California's ban on gay marriage is (duh!) unconstitutional, and added that the state could no longer justify limiting marriage to a man and a woman:
In the eagerly awaited opinion likely to be appealed to the state's highest court, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer said that withholding marriage licenses from gays and lesbians is unconstitutional."It appears that no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners," Kramer wrote.
The judge wrote that the state's historical definition of marriage, by itself, cannot justify the denial of equal protection for gays and lesbians.
"The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional," Kramer wrote.
I'm so sorry if you think it's weird that gays would marry. I think it's weird that people believe in god, but I don't try to stop churches, do I?
The Summers Of The Feminists' Discontent
Everybody wants to pooh-pooh the biological differences between men and women. It seems so much nicer to say men and women are not only equal, but the same. Well, biology says that's simply not true.
Unfortunately, it seems a very career-risking idea to even suggest studying such a thing if women are within earshot. For example, here are excerpts from a few of my columns that have enraged female readers into trying to get me fired -- not because I didn't prove my points, but because they weren't very nice, and because the world "should" be different:
Swelling Herself Short
"Male sexuality is all about the visuals. That's why men's magazines are filled with pictures of naked women with freakishly large breasts while women's magazines are filled with pictures of lip gloss."The Taming Of The Spew
"Expecting the average man to be as emotionally articulate as a woman makes about as much sense as expecting your 4-year-old to get work as a tax accountant, or your goldfish to play fetch."
Getting back to Summers...I'd forgotten about the study I'd read for the "Swelling" column about how girls born with bodies that produce too much androgen behave more like boys. This Helena Cronin piece reminded me of that and other reasons why Harvard's Summers was right in wondering whether there might be innate differences that keep women out of the sciences...despite all the lady scientist hysterics meant to cover up the possibility (including, most ironically, warnings of impending attacks of the vapors from merely hearing his words). Cronin writes in the Guardian:
...As evolutionary science shows, Summers was right - for three reasons.First, men, on average, have an advantage in certain quantitative and spatial abilities - particularly intuitive mechanics and "3-D thinking" (mental rotation of three-dimensional objects) - that are key for engineering and maths.
Second, there are, on average, sex differences in dispositions, interests, values. Men are far more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious and single-minded; and they'd rather work with abstract ideas or objects than with humans. Women are more focused on family and other relationships; they have wider interests and prefer not to work in people-free zones. When women leave high-powered jobs to "spend more time with the family", it's truth, not euphemism. In the US, even in the top 1% of mathematical ability, only one woman to eight men makes a career in maths, engineering or science; the other seven choose medicine, biology, law or even the humanities - typically, to work with, and help, people.
Third, sex differences exhibit greater male than female variance. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But among males, the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst, can be vast. So, when it comes to science, more men than women will be dunces but more will be geniuses - although the means are close. The maths averages of American teenage boys and girls are not dramatically different; but among the most mathematically gifted there are 13 boys for every girl. Sex differences are crucially about variance as well as means.
Now combine these three factors. Isn't it unlikely that the distribution of men and women working in science will be identical? And the higher the echelon, the greater will be the preponderance of men - with obvious outcomes for elite institutions such as Harvard.
These differences are not recent or artificial or arbitrary. They have deep evolutionary reasons, which are well understood. Sexual reproduction as we know it began with one sex specialising slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly more in caring for offspring. This divergence became self-reinforcing, widening over evolutionary time, with natural selection proliferating and amplifying variations on the differences, down the generations, in every sexually reproducing species that has ever existed. Thus, from this slight but fundamental initial asymmetry, flow all the characteristic differences between males and females throughout the living world. Now, 800 million years later, in our species as in all others, these differences pervade what constitutes being male or female, from brains to bodies to behaviour.
A wealth of evidence backs up this view of our evolutionary endowment, ranging from newborns (even at one day old, girls prefer a human face, boys a mechanical mobile) to pathology (females exposed to "male" hormones in the womb are typically "tomboyish" and surpass the female average in spatial skills - and vice versa for males) and children's play (boys' games are competitive, big on rules and establishing a winner, girls' are more cooperative and end in consensus). These and other predictable sex differences are robust across cultures, and throughout history.
...Or consider the cognitive differences that disadvantage girls in maths. Shouldn't we be drawing more - not less - attention to them? How else will interventions be devised that don't treat girls as default males? Bear in mind that mathematical ability itself is not an evolved ability; maths is far too recent for that. Rather, mathematical talent borrows eclectically from abilities evolved for other purposes. Much of the mathematical advantage of boys lies in spatial abilities for navigation - an area in which females are notoriously weaker; in particular, boys are better than girls at using these innate capacities to turn quantitative relations into diagrams. So why not help girls improve their skills? When males and females (both adults and children) are helped with translating word problems into diagrams, the performance of females improves more than that of males - thus closing some of the gap between the sexes. By contrast, self-confidence in maths, which also favours boys, makes some impact; but it is relatively small. So forget classes in "self-esteem" or "empowerment". Go for evolutionarily informed teaching in maths classes. Admittedly, more female-friendly maths won't guarantee more female Nobel prize-winners. But it should enable more girls to realise their potential. And isn't that what fairness is about?
Because women are not necessarily biologically favored to be scientists does not mean they cannot be scientists. It does, however, explain why there might not be so many lady scientists. Too many women are on the thought police force. As a woman, I find it insulting that they are so threatened, on all our behalf, by the mere expression of ideas -- in this case, by the expression of a very good idea ("let's study the possibility of innate differences and see if we might make up for some of them!") which was lost in the embarrassing vagina monologue that followed.
Vote-Rigging In Florida?
The story goes:
On December 6th, 2004, The BRAD BLOG (www.bradblog.com) published a sworn affidavit by Florida software programmer Clint Curtis. In his affidavit and videotaped sworn testimony presented before members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee, Curtis claims to have been asked by U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) to design a "vote-rigging software prototype." This request took place in October 2000 during meeting at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a computer consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida.Curtis, a life-long Republican up until then, had been a programmer at YEI, which had several top-secret clearance contracts with the state, NASA and other government agencies. Curtis' understanding at the time was that the prototype he was being asked to create (built to the very precise specifications of Feeney) was to address Feeney’s concerns that the Democrats might attempt to electronically rig the election and Feeney wanted to know what to look out for in that event After informing YEI CEO Mrs. Li-Woan Yang that he would not be able to hide the vote-flipping routines in the software source-code as Feeney had requested, Curtis testified that Mrs. Yang informed him that the program was needed to "rig the vote in South Florida."
At the time of the alleged meeting, Feeney was the incoming Speaker of the Florida House, and also a registered lobbyist and the general corporate counsel for YEI. Previously, he had been the running mate of Jeb Bush during his 1994 unsuccessful first bid for Florida Governor. In November 2000, Feeney gained national notoriety after declaring open defiance of the Florida Supreme Court by vowing to choose Presidential electors for George W. Bush regardless of whether a court-ordered recount showed that Gore won Florida . He eventually ascended to the U.S. Congress and today sits on the House Judiciary Committee. Although he was outspent two to one by his Democratic opponent in 2002, Feeney beat him handily at the polls and then ran unopposed for the same seat in 2004.
Che Chic
Luke Y. Thompson reminded me how annoyed I always am when I see those twits running around in Che Guevara t-shirts, clueless that the image has a little more, um...negativity...behind it than, say, Warhol's Marilyn. Jay Nordlinger explains the man behind the fashion legend:
The fog of time and the strength of anti-anti-Communism have obscured the real Che. Who was he? He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as Castro's primary thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over summary executions at La Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir. He liked to administer the coup de grâce, the bullet to the back of the neck. And he loved to parade people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed. Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens — dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. A Cuban-American writer, Humberto Fontova, described Guevara as "a combination of Beria and Himmler." Anthony Daniels once quipped, "The difference between [Guevara] and Pol Pot was that [the former] never studied in Paris."
Paul Berman likewise undresses myth:
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
The Governator Gets Constitutional
Arnold sure talks my kinda talk:
During an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged his Catholic beliefs, but said they would not and should not control his political actions.In his Feb. 27 "This Week" segment, Stephanopolous prodded the action-movie mega-star-turned-governor on a host of national and California issues, such as the state's fiscal situation, President Bush's proposed overhaul of Social Security and the governor's support of gay rights.
Schwarzenegger revealed in several responses positions that differ sharply from those of far-right social conservatives who appear to hold sway in Congress.
The ABC anchor then moved to religion noting that Schwarzenegger is a Catholic and asking, "How do you reconcile your political positions on abortion, on gay rights, on the death penalty? They're opposed to the positions of the Catholic Church, the pronouncements of the pope. How do you reconcile that?"
Schwarzenegger said it was "easy" and that he never experienced a "sleepless night" over supposed conflicts between religious dogma he professes to and his political actions.
"I'm representing the people of California," Schwarzenegger explained. "The people of California, all of them are not Catholics so, therefore, I do not bring in my religion into this whole thing. As a matter of fact, religion should have no effect on politics."
No effect at all, Stephanopoulos asked.
"I think it should not," the governor continued. "I mean, if you make a decision, it should not be based on your religious beliefs. It should be based on what is it how can you represent the people of California the best possible way? And we have a combination. We have Jews, we have Christians and we have Hindus. We have Buddhists. We have all kinds of different religions here and there's 140 some religions in this state."
Seemingly surprised or somewhat dubious, Stephanopoulos continued, "So your faith plays no role in the forming of your political philosophy?"
"Not for me," Schwarzenegger said.
Moreover, the governor proclaimed that he was a staunch supporter of the First Amendment principle of keeping church and government separate.
"Absolutely," the governor declared. "I'm a big believer in separation of church and state, and I think that's what also, you know, the law is. It's what we all ought to do."
They Should Call It A Dummer
Returning From War Is Hell
Matt Welch, who wrote this fantastic piece about men who are victims of paternity fraud -- accusations that they've fathered children of women they have sometimes never even met, let alone had sex with -- linked to this Phyllis Schlafly piece about the injustice being visited upon divorced dads serving in Iraq:
Most of the reservists called up to serve in the Iraq war have paid a big price: a significant reduction of their wages as they transferred from civilian to military jobs, separation from their loved ones, and of course the risk of battle wounds or death. Regrettably, on their return home, those who are divorced fathers could face another grievous penalty: loss of their children, financial ruin, prosecution as "deadbeat dads," and even jail.Reservists' child-support orders were based on their civilian wages, and when they are called up to active duty, that burden doesn't decrease. Few can get court modification before they leave, modifications are seldom granted anyway, and even if a father applied for modification before deployment the debt continues to grow until the case is decided much later.
These servicemen fathers cannot get relief when they return because federal law forbids a court to reduce the debt retroactively. Once the arrearage reaches $5,000, the father becomes a felon subject to imprisonment plus the loss of his driver's and professional licenses and passport.
Likewise, there is no forgiving of the interest and penalties on the child-support debt even though it is sometimes incurred because of human or computer errors. States have a financial incentive to refuse to reduce obligations because the federal government rewards the states with cash for the "deadbeat dad" dollars they collect.
Laws granting deployed service personnel protection against legal actions at home date back decades, but they are ignored in the family courts. Child kidnapping laws do not protect military personnel on active duty from their ex-wives relocating their children.
This injustice to our reservists serving in Iraq should be remedied by Congress and state legislatures before more fathers meet the fate of Bobby Sherrill, a father of two from North Carolina, who worked for Lockheed in Kuwait before being captured and held hostage by Iraq for five terrible months. The night he returned from the Persian Gulf he was arrested for failing to pay $1,425 in child support while he was a captive.
Just last week, a Wilkes Barre, PA judge sentenced 28 to jail for failure to pay small amounts of child support, one as little as $322. One of the most common punishments for falling behind in family-court-ordered payments is to take away a father's driver's license, costing him his job, then demand that he make his child-support payments anyway, and throw him in jail when that proves impossible.
Matt's link on Reason's blog via Radley Balko
Why Do Psychologists So Often Sound Nuts?
In this article about the growth of Whole Foods, there's a quote from a USC psych prof, who seems to think lunching on a bit of brie on toasted bread with a glass of Chardonnay falls just this side of eating chocolate-dipped boiled babies:
“Whole Foods offers a psychological absolution of our excesses,” says Jerald Jellison, psychology professor at University of Southern California. “After filling your cart with sinful wine, beer, cheese and breads, you rationalize it's healthy, so that cancels out the negatives.”
Quick! Somebody call an exorcist!
The Department Of Christian Corrections
There might not be any evidence for god; nevertheless, thanks to the Bush administration, god is everywhere these days. The latest place the faith-based initiatives have snuck in is in prison, where prisoners are tempted with an alternative to solitary confinement -- somewhat less solitary confinement with the god squadders, writes Silja J.A. Talvi in the Santa Fe Reporter:
...There is one area of the prison that stands in particularly sharp contrast to the bleak desperation of the segregation pods: the God pod.Officially this is the Life Principles Community/Crossings Program. It's a program officials consider the real "success story" within the confines of NMWCF. As a housing pod, Crossings has been around for four years with the enthusiastic support of the prison administration and Chaplain Shirley Compton. More recently, CCA picked Crossings as one of eight sites nationwide to pioneer a new partnership with a fundamentalist Christian ministry named the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).
Although it is not the only religious activity at the prison it is, by far, the most institutionalized and structured. In many ways, it also is the most problematic from a First Amendment point of view. It is in this unit that the blurring of the line between church and state is most evident, harkening a new turn in corrections toward Christian-based programming that has begun to truly influence (or, depending on one's perspective, to infiltrate) the nation's prisons.
Religious programming for prisoners has been around for years. At NMWCF, volunteers from churches of various denominations come in to lead Catholic mass, baptisms, Bible studies and other activities, and an Albuquerque-based ministry named Wings has gained particular preference to conduct its large-scale, Christian-based family reunification program/pizza party events inside Grants (and, soon, many other prisons across the state). The Kairos Prison Ministry, the mission of which is to "bring Christ's love and forgiveness to all incarcerated individuals" also has a presence.
But an increased emphasis on religion from the federal government has impacted the scope – and amount of money – available for such programs.
In fact, two adult prisons in the Florida corrections system are now entirely faith-based, while Florida's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has launched the nation's first Faith and Community Based Delinquency Treatment Initiative. (Funding from the federal government has placed such an emphasis on the faith element of juvenile programming that many previously secular treatment and residential facilities for youth have made the decision in the past year to center their programs on "faith" in order to keep receiving money.)
Oh, to hell with the First Amendment. It's good for the prisoners, huh?
Here's a good test for whether a faith-based initiative works from a constitutional perspective: If the god-squadders would scream if an atheism-based initiative were put into place instead -- teaching rationality, secular ethics, and personal responsibility, a la the Josephson Institute -- their funda-nutter-based program is probably a big constitutional no-no!
No PR Flack Left Behind
There's no accountability in the for-government PR business. PR firms refuse to share any information that isn't publicly available about what they did with the money. Armstrong Williams' $240,000 to promote "No Child Left Behind," is just the tip of the iceberg, writes Diane Farsetta. In a recent House Committee on Government Reform investigation, Ketchum, the firm that hired Williams, was the largest recipient of recent government PR spending:
Ketchum has received a whopping $100.5 million in federal contracts since 1997. These deals included work for the Education Department; Internal Revenue Service; U.S. Army, to “reconnect the Army with the American people” and boost recruiting around its 225th birthday; and the Health and Human Services Department, to “change the face of Medicare,” promote long-term health care planning, encourage preventative care, and present home care information.Large increases in Ketchum’s federal work since 2003 mirror the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ PR spending boost, suggesting that their Medicare work may be more extensive than is currently known.
Apart from the scandal surrounding Armstrong Williams, the firm also produced a controversial VNR for the Education Department that promoted tutoring programs under “No Child Left Behind,” and included then-Education Secretary Rod Paige and PR flack Karen Ryan, who misrepresented herself as a reporter.
Ketchum representatives did not return repeated phone calls – making them among the least responsive of the firms contacted by PR Watch.
The History Of The Vibrator
Nathalie Angier reviews Rachel Maines' new book on an early and very important household appliance:
Electricity has given so much comfort to womankind, such surcease to her life of drudgery. It gave her the vacuum cleaner, the pop-up toaster and the automatic ice dispenser.And perhaps above all, it gave her the vibrator. In the annals of Victorian medicine, a time of "Goetze's device for producing dimples" and "Merrell's strengthening cordial, liver invigorator and purifier of the blood," the debut of the electromechanical vibrator in the early 1880s was one medical event that truly worked wonders -- safely, reliably, repeatedly.
As historian Rachel Maines describes in her exhaustively researched if decidedly offbeat work, The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), the vibrator was developed to perfect and automate a function that doctors had long performed for their female patients: the relief of physical, emotional and sexual tension through external pelvic massage, culminating in orgasm.
For doctors, the routine had usually been tedious, with about as much erotic content as a Kenneth Starr document. "Most of them did it because they felt it was their duty," Dr. Maines said in an interview. "It wasn't sexual at all."
The vibrator, she argues, made that job easy, quick and clean. With a vibrator in the office, a doctor could complete in seconds or minutes what had taken up to an hour through manual means. With a vibrator, a female patient suffering from any number of symptoms labeled "hysterical" or "neurasthenic" could be given relief -- or at least be pleased enough to guarantee her habitual patronage.
"I'm sure the women felt much better afterwards, slept better, smiled more," said Dr. Maines. Besides, she added, hysteria, as it was traditionally defined, was an incurable, chronic disease. "The patient had to go to the doctor regularly," Dr. Maines said. "She didn't die. She was a cash cow."
Nowadays, it is hard to fathom doctors giving their patients what Dr. Maines calls regular "vulvular" massage, either manually or electromechanically. But the 1899 edition of the Merck Manual, a reference guide for physicians, lists massage as a treatment for hysteria (as well as sulfuric acid for nymphomania). And in a 1903 commentary on treatments for hysterical patients, Dr. Samuel Howard Monell wrote that "pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results."
But he noted that many doctors had difficulty treating patients "with their own fingers," and hailed the vibrator as a godsend: "Special applicators (motor driven) give practical value and office convenience to what otherwise is impractical."
...Doctors used vibrators for many non-orgasmic purposes, including to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, inflammation laryngitis and tumors; and men as well as women were the recipients of vibratory physic. But that a big selling point for the devices was their particular usefulness in treating "female ailments" can be gleaned from catalog copy and medical textbooks at the time.
A text from 1883 called "Health For Women" recommended the new vibrators for treating "pelvic hyperemia," or congestion of the genitalia. Vibrators were also marketed directly to women, as home appliances. In fact, the vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron -- perhaps, Dr. Maines suggests, "reflecting consumer priorities."
Advertised in such respectable periodicals as Needlecraft, Woman's Home Companion, Modern Priscilla and the Sears, Roebuck catalog, vibrators were pitched as "aids that every woman appreciates," with the delicious promise that "all the pleasures of youth ... will throb within you."
You Have No Right To Die
Think your body is your own, to do with as you please? Think again. If you're terribly sick and want to kill yourself, you're in big trouble, thanks to the god squadders. Crispin Sartwell writes in the LA Times:
My wife assisted in the suicide of her first husband, who was in the last stages of AIDS. By writing about the experience, she found herself an emblem and a public advocate of the right to die and assisted suicide. Though she thought it possible that her confession would lead to prosecution, she was never contacted by law enforcement.In the clear cases, it's an extremely direct issue of who owns your body: you or the Department of Justice. Indeed, no freedom is more fundamental or profound. Any principle that justifies government control of your death would justify the government enslaving you or executing you arbitrarily.
As medical technology advances, most deaths in the developed world become at some point a matter of decision for families and doctors. That is why the issue becomes more pressing every year.
...There are two strands of conservative politics warring here. There is the evangelical Christian side that wants to impose its will to keep you alive at all costs, and then there's the side that wants to make every policy decision based on the concept of freedom. The first wants to tell you whom you can marry, what you can watch on television, what you can put in your pipe. The latter wants to free the whole world from tyranny, of which government control over the bodies and medical choices of its citizens is one example.
If the right to die is consistently denied, if doctors feel they cannot help patients and their families make this decision, if spouses and children feel that they will face publicity and perhaps even prosecution, then our hospitals will fill with people hanging on to the merest semblance of life, people who, if they could, would beg for release.
While, obviously, a question of humanity, it's also, quite frankly, a question of money. Would our health care costs be so outrageous if we weren't prolonging the lives of people who are little more than 90-year-old vegetables? If you, as a younger person, are vegetable-ized in a serious accident, and you don't have a living will, and you end up living, there's a good chance you'll spend years -- or decades -- as a prisoner of your own body in a nursing home (as a friend of mine most tragically was after a terrible accident that left her brain without oxygen for nearly 15 minutes).
A doctor friend of mine warned me to warn her family to put a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on her while she was in the hospital, because, he said, "nursing homes are for prolonging life -- that's how they make their money, and they will not stop her suffering." Unfortunately, the family didn't really get the seriousness of this (despite my warnings), and put a DNR on her too late, and she was brain stem activity only kept alive in a shriveled, twisted body in a bed for more than a year. (Some doctors projected that she would be kept alive like that for decades.) She never, never would have wanted to live that way -- but even if she had left an advanced directive...could we have legally pulled the plug?
We're Building Bridges In Iraq
But letting them erode in America, while Bush is spending like a wildman and pretending to be a fiscal conservative. Excuse me, but has he vetoed anything since he's been in office? Conservative, my jiggly white booty! Here's an excerpt from an AP article on our crumbling infrastructure:
Crowded schools, traffic-choked roads and transit cutbacks are eroding the quality of American life, according to an analysis by civil engineers that gave the nation's infrastructure an overall grade of D.A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers released Wednesday assessed the four-year trend in the condition of 12 categories of infrastructure, including roadways, bridges, drinking water systems, public parks, railroads and the power grid.
The overall grade slipped from the D-plus given to the infrastructure in 2001 and 2003.
"Americans are spending more time stuck in traffic and less time at home with their families," William Henry, the group's president, said in a statement.
The report said $1.6 trillion should be spent over the next five years to alleviate potential problems with the nation's infrastructure. Transportation alone requires $94 billion in annual spending, the report said.
Sorry about the potholes, America, and all the children left behind by "No Child Left Behind," we've got nation-building to do in the Middle East!
Free Speech And Stolen Speech
Somebody please tell Republican congressman Jim Gibbons that they aren't one and the same. Al Kamen notes in the WaPo that Gibbons "rallied the faithful" at a GOP dinner with "a blistering attack on liberals":
This was great fire-breathing stuff, surely one of Gibbons's greatest, most thoughtful addresses. Unfortunately, Free Press reporter Dave Woodson wrote Friday, it was lifted wholesale from a copyrighted speech by Alabama State Auditor Beth Chapman, given at a Stand Up for America rally in Alabama on Feb. 2, 2003.In fact, 15 paragraphs of Gibbons's speech were lifted from Chapman's 21-paragraph talk. But surely not his best line -- the one where he says: "I say we tell those liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else." Surely that's Gibbons's?
Alas, he lifted that one, too, along with his erudite observation that if antiwar folks lived in Iraq or Afghanistan, "ironically, they would be put to death at the hands of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden."
Chapman told the Free Press on Friday that Gibbons hadn't requested permission to use her speech but that she had spoken with him earlier Friday morning and he apologized.
Gibbons said he couldn't remember where he had gotten the speech, saying, "I had no idea it was copyrighted."
Otherwise it would have been okay? Well, at least he didn't do the usual and blame "sloppy staff work" for the problem, which could affect any gubernatorial run. (Of course, neither did Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) when he was knocked out of the 1988 presidential race after he cribbed that line from a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock: "Why am I the first Kinnock [Biden] in 1,000 years to be able to get to university?") After Gibbons's speech, outraged Nevada Democrats ripped into him, saying his statements were grossly over the top and so forth.
Thieves, thieves, they're all thieves. Who are the honest men and women in Washington...if any?
Orbitzing Hell
One man's story about a travel company, Orbitz, that allegedly was going to make him do the peasant schlep from San Jose to SFO to make his international flight -- in an impossible period of time:
I was booking a ticket a while ago and decided to try Orbitz instead of Travelocity or Expedia for a change. I was connecting in San Francisco for an international flight, and found two tickets that were almost identical, except one cost about $30 less and had a stop in San Jose. I figured that the extra stop wouldn't make a huge difference, so I might as well save some money.WRONG.
After I booked the ticket, I noticed something strange: there were no travel details on how I would get from San Jose to San Francisco. I called Orbitz and they told me that I would have to provide my own transportation from San Jose to San Francisco. What?
So I did some research and found the following:
9:35 AM - Flight arrives in San Jose, California
9:50 AM - It takes up to 15 minutes to exit the plane and collect luggage.
9:55 AM - Up to 5 minutes to hail a cab or shuttle.
10:45 AM - Up to 50 minutes to travel to San Francisco with heavy morning traffic.My flight departed San Francisco at 12:26 PM, so I should have had plenty of time, except for one major detail: YOU NEED TO CHECK IN AT LEAST 2 HOURS EARLY FOR INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS. This isn't even taking account the time it would take to get through long lines and security. Orbitz made a mistake: they sold me an impossible itinerary. Having a delayed flight was not an option because I was on a tight schedule. There was no way I was going to miss this plane.
So I called Orbitz back, they told me to call Delta and United. I did, and I spoke to managers at both Delta and United who confirmed that the itinerary was impossible to fulfill, and both of them referred me back to Orbitz. Before I called to tear Orbitz a new one, I checked the fine print of my itinerary to make sure it didn't mention anything about having to break the laws of physics for all or part of my trip. The email notification made no mention of this either.
...Orbitz flat-out refused to help me. So I ended up having to buy a one-way ticket to San Francisco for $144 just so I could make my flight on time. After numerous complaints to customer service, I finally got a response about a month later: Dear valued customer, blah blah blah, we don't really give a shit about your plight, so here's a slap in the face in the form of a coupon to save $50 off your next flight with Orbitz.
No. Not good enough. I shouldn't have to pay 1 cent extra for their mistake. I wrote back and told them that I wanted the full $144 refunded and they never responded.
His form of revenge? Printing the story on his Web site, along with all the emails of support he's gotten in response. Click on the above link. I don't know whether the story is true or not, but it sounds like it could be (I once had a similar experience where Cheap Tickets left me without enough time between my BMI connection from Paris and my Virgin Atlantic flight back to LA in London). Let's just say I'm such a big pain in the ass, I usually don't get stuck with the injustice end of the stick. I've sent the link to Chris Elliott, a syndicated travel columnist, in hopes he'll investigate.
Screw You, Spain!
All those centuries of culture that contributed to our own clearly aren't worth learning about since Spain refuses to continue to march in lockstep with our Iraq policy:
Two community colleges have ended their study-abroad program in Spain, citing the country's troop withdrawal from Iraq.Trustees of the South Orange County Community College District, comprising Irvine Valley College and Saddleback College, voted 5-2 last week to cancel the 14-year-old summer program.
"Spain has abandoned our fighting men and women, withdrawing their support," said trustee Tom Fuentes, a former head of the Republican Party in Orange County. "I see no reason to send students of our colleges to Spain at this moment in history."
Spain pulled its 1,300 troops after the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in March last year.
Yeah, that's it. Let's keep kids here in America, so they'll have no sense of other cultures, and how the world is filled with human beings, not the equivalent of fiercely competitive soccer teams. Personally, my whole perspective is so much broader, thanks to my experiences in France, England, Italy, Holland, Israel, and Germany. I don't agree with everything any of these countries do; far from it. But to shut the door to experience at exactly the time when the world is getting smaller and smaller thanks to ease of travel and Internet connections...well, does anybody know the Spanish words for "very fucking dumb"?
Spreading Propaganda And AIDS
Why stop at removing condom information from federal Web sites, and insisting (contrary to data) that abstinence-only sex ed makes sense? Apparently, the Bush administration is more concerned with spreading their "just say no (to data)" drug ideology than stopping the spread of AIDS:
Shown in dozens of studies in America and elsewhere to reduce transmission without increasing drug use, needle exchange is perhaps the most effective of all strategies to prevent the spread of HIV. Yet in a pattern familiar from debates over sex education, Washington conservatives seem eager to hold up distortions of science as a model for the rest of the world. At last year's meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Europeans and Australians watched in amazement as American delegates declared the evidence for needle exchange "unconvincing."U.S. representatives also blasted as a "counsel of despair" the harm-reduction approach, which recognizes that even drug users unable or unwilling to stop using drugs can be helped to avoid the AIDS virus and other problems. Backed by a coalition of prohibitionists that included Russia, Sweden and Japan, the United States ensured that the resolutions adopted by last year's commission were stripped of every mention of harm reduction. Any discussion of human rights of drug users was similarly excised.
This year the United States has not waited for a global gathering to force the UN to pledge allegiance to "zero tolerance." American officials have put significant back-channel pressure on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime - the current chair of the UN's joint program on HIV/AIDS - to retreat from needle exchange and other harm-reduction measures.
After a November meeting with Robert Charles, an assistant secretary of state in charge of the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, promised that he would review all of the office's printed and electronic statements to remove references to harm reduction. Costa also pledged that the office would be "even more vigilant in the future." As a start, a senior staffer directed subordinates to "ensure that references to harm reduction and needle/syringe exchange are avoided in UNODC documents, publications and statements."
More than semantic sanitation is at stake. In Russia, where estimated HIV cases now surpass those in all of North America and where 75 percent of new infections are attributable to intravenous drug use, officials have long pointed to the proceedings of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to justify misgivings about needle exchange and refusal to treat addicts with noninjectable opiate substitutes like methadone.
What America is doing is setting up a major international public health crisis -- one that's unlikely to affect only drug users in faraway places, thanks to the invention of the airplane. When people pooh-pooh the danger of putting fundamentalists in charge in our country, it's clear they don't understand the costs of electing people whose intellectual foundation is largely based on embracing emotionally held beliefs and a rejection of the value of proof and data. What shocks me lately is how unshocked I am at reading this story above, and so many others in the same vein.
US Fundamentalism Holds Up International Rights For Women
Yep. They're at it again. At a UN conference to better the lives of women, the religious right is right in there, blackmailing for abortion rights language that fits the Christian agenda (i.e., no abortion rights):
The organizers had hoped to keep a tight focus on urgent challenges like sexual trafficking, educational inequities and the spread of AIDS.The first order of business was to be quick approval of a simple statement reaffirming the Beijing meeting's closing declaration. But on Monday, the Americans created turmoil by announcing that the United States would not join the otherwise universal consensus unless the document was amended to say that it did not create "any new international human rights" or "include the right to abortion."
This was shabby and mischievous. For one thing, the Beijing statement was nonbinding. For another, the Beijing negotiators had tried to anticipate controversy by recognizing unsafe abortions as a serious public health issue while leaving the question of legality up to each nation.
Specifically, the Beijing platform says that abortion should be safe where it is legal, and that criminal action should not be taken against any woman who has an abortion. All of this seemed clear enough, but the Bush team apparently could not resist an opportunity to press its anti-abortion agenda.
By Thursday evening, the American delegation had agreed to drop the explicit anti-abortion clause from its proposed amendment, and yesterday it finally withdrew the amendment entirely. But the damage had been done. An apology is due from the United States delegation for the weeklong disruption it caused. So is a fresh spirit of cooperation and a less rigid insistence on dictating global strategy.
Especially when the dictation violates our own separation of church and state mandate, huh guys?
Atheists On Parade!
The 2005 Atheists Alliance conference is taking place in Los Angeles, March 25-27. Some highlights:
* Penn & Teller will accept the Richard Dawkins award for outstanding work in the cause of atheism during Sunday's brunch.* Richard Dawkins, author of eight books, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University, and THE world's most renowned atheist.
* Julia Sweeney, writer-actress, on the reaction to her hit show Letting Go of God.
* Dr. Robert Price, member of the Jesus Seminar, author of The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.
* Andrew Bradley, Author of "What Would Betty Do? A Spiritual Guide to Qualifying for the '10 Sins or Less' Express Line at Judgment Day", Creator of bettybowers.com - America's Best Christian, and senior writer for Landover Baptist Church.
* Dr. Bruce Flamm was quoted in Time Magazine, as the man whose persistent inquiry proved the Korean-Columbia fertility study to be fatally flawed.
* Ben Akerly, Author of "The X-Rated Bible".
* Joel Pelletier, artist/activist will be displaying and discussing his modern update of James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels, an over 8x14 foot American Fundamentalists (Christ's Entry into Washington in 2008), which warns of the modern dangers to the Constitution and freedom of speech posed by modern American fundamentalists.
For information on attending, click on the link above. Posted by Amy Alkon, godless harlot. For more information on why you shouldn't believe in god, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, or giant winged purple bunnies, there's the-brights.net.
Yesterday In Phoenix
At the airport, a family welcomed their kid home from Iraq.
And at the hotel, you'd think they'd have cocktail piano in the bar for entertainment (it was an indoor outdoor bar at the Scottsdale Hyatt), but noooooo...
I was there, sadly, for the funeral of my close friend and former Advice Lady partner and partner in pranks, Marlowe Minnick. Here's a photo of the two of us. As far as I remember, some guy one of us didn't really like had invited one of us to dinner, and we both came, wearing a boa and a string of Xmas lights, and plugged ourselves in.
The Fun, Easy Jobs Pay Less
Maybe "the glass ceiling" has something to do with feeling compelled to sit behind a chic, glass desk. Claudia H. Deutsch comments, in the IHT, on Warren Farrell's new book on what women are paid:
Farrell accepts that women, as a group, are paid less than men. But women, he says, methodically engineer their own paltry pay.They choose psychically fulfilling jobs that attract enough applicants to depress pay. They avoid well-paid but presumably risky work and tend to put in fewer hours than men - no small point, he says, because people who work 44 hours a week make almost twice as much as those who work 34 hours and are more likely to be promoted.
In fact, Farrell points to subgroups - male and female college professors who have never married, or men and women in part-time jobs - in which women average higher pay than their male counterparts.
"Control for all these things, and the women make as much, or more," said Farrell, 61, whose new book on the shaky myths of pay disparity, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap - and What Women Can Do About It, arrived in bookstores in January.
"Let's face it: Men do a lot of things in the workplace that women just don't do."
...Men have long realized that jobs in manufacturing and sales - line jobs in business parlance - are better for their careers than staff support jobs in human resources and public relations. "CEOs are selected from among those assuming bottom-line responsibilities for a company," he said, "so these fields pave the way for women who want to break alleged glass ceilings."
Martha Stewart Prison Living
Yay, Martha! Martha's out of the slammer. Here's an excerpt from Laurie P. Cohen's WSJ story about her yesterday:
Ms. Stewart, who will be released to home confinement as soon as tomorrow, has given inmates guidance on sentencing, led yoga sessions and offered pointers to a prison weaving class. Last month, Ms. Stewart kicked off an eight-week seminar, organized by inmates, entitled "Empowerment for Women." Her lecture topic for the overflow crowd: "What's Hot and What's Not" in starting a business."She's been trying hard to keep up morale" for women who have little to look forward to, Ms. Spry says.
...Ms. Stewart's tenure at Alderson has coincided with budget constraints in the nation's federal prisons. Alderson, the first U.S. federal prison for women, was co-founded by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1927. The 95-acre facility, which houses nearly 1,000 inmates, has been hit in recent months with cutbacks. Milk, served three times a day until early last month, is now available only at breakfast.
Food has been cut "very insensitively," Ms. Stewart said in a recent letter, as have magazines that "can only help education."
During her stay, Ms. Stewart, perhaps the nation's most famous federal convict, has become interested in prison and sentencing reform. After a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in January that rendered mandatory sentencing guidelines unconstitutional, she wrote that she worried her fellow inmates would sink into a "severe depression" if courts fail to grant them shorter sentences.
[Mona Lisa Gaffney]Her empathy for the women she soon will leave has brought her into conflict with some of her corporate advisers, according to people involved: They want the public to forget she is a convicted felon and have counseled her to talk only about future plans.
Her time soon will be filled with business commitments, including a spinoff of the TV show, "The Apprentice."
A number of Alderson's inmates hope she will ignore advice to distance herself from the prison. "She gives credence to the injustices here, for if someone like her can say it, people will figure it must be true," says psychologist Denise Braxtonbrown-Smith, 47, who is serving a seven-year, three-month sentence for Medicaid fraud.
In a letter, Ms. Stewart says: "I am not an advocate of no punishment for serious crimes, but I am an advocate of short sentences for first-time offenders." Ms. Stewart says she has learned harsh sentences don't lead to "seeing the light."
Beyond Parody
Knickers in knots all around at Harvard, as Jada Pinkett Smith forgets to be inclusive of the trannies, et al, while giving "the story of her life." Naturally, words like "heteronormative" were tossed around:
Pinkett Smith was honored as the Foundation’s “Artist of the Year” at its 20th annual Cultural Rhythms show, which she also hosted.BGLTSA Co-Chair Jordan B. Woods ’06 said that, while many BGLTSA members thought Pinkett Smith’s speech was “motivational,” some were insulted because they thought she narrowly defined the roles of men and women in relationships.
“Some of the content was extremely heteronormative, and made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable,” he said.
Calling the comments heteronormative, according to Woods, means they implied that standard sexual relationships are only between males and females.
“Our position is that the comments weren’t homophobic, but the content was specific to male-female relationships,” Woods said.
Happily, in the wake of this incident, The Crimson reports that the "Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations have begun working together to increase sensitivity toward issues of sexuality at Harvard." Well, there's a relief. I'd hate to think of these people spending their time in class, which might lead them to graduate and assume positions of power in the real world.
Just Say No To Lies
The California state superintendent of schools urged schools to drop presentations to students by Narconon, Scientology's freaky anti-drug program for kids, after the SF Chronicle exposed exactly the kind of twaddle they're teaching. For example:
Some teachers reported that Narconon instructors told students that the body can sweat out drug residues in saunas, and that as drugs exit the body, they produce colored ooze, the Chronicle reported.Some other inaccuracies cited by the evaluation and the Chronicle -- including that drug residues stay in body fat, causing people to experience repeated flashbacks and cravings -- echo beliefs held by the Church of Scientology.
Narconon's president Clark Carr defended the program after the evaluation.
"Narconon is proud that throughout our nearly 40 years of service we have been able to help millions of youth worldwide to turn away from drug experimentation and a life on drugs," Carr said.
Among other findings, the panel determined that Narconon also incorrectly told students that the amount of a drug taken determines whether it acts as a stimulant or sedative, and that drugs "ruin creativity and dull senses."
Ever read Tom Robbins, ya yahoos?
(Excuse me if I don't say anything more on this issue, but I think it's time to take 12 Valium and go jogging.)
Way To Go, Weyco?
Weyco, a Michigan company intent on getting rid of employees who smoke, fires four employees for refusing to take a test to determine whether they smoke. The company's reasoning for getting rid of the butt-addicted: Smokers' health care costs are higher than non-smokers'. (Along with their absentee rates, I would venture: "Sorry, boss, I'm home having an emphysema attack this morning.") Drug Policy Alliance contends "What you do on your private time is none of your boss' business." Where do you stand?
Weak Democrats Make For A Weak Democracy
The Democrats' tendency to roll over and play dead every time the Republicans propose anything is putting some of our rights -- like those granted by The First Amendment -- in serious jeopardy, writes John Nichols:
Freedom of speech? Yes. When the House voted in mid-February on the so-called Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, only 36 Democrats took the side of the First Amendment. They were joined by one independent, Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders, and one Republican, Texas renegade Ron Paul.The vast majority of House Democratic Caucus members – they're the ones who are supposed to "get" the First Amendment at least a little bit better than their Republican colleagues – sided with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and his merry band of crusaders for censorship.
Don't let the bipartisan support for this measure cause you to think that this was an inconsequential measure. The draconian assault on the rights of artists and communicators to express controversial views was broadly opposed by unions representing the creative community. Under the provisions of the measure, an individual talk-show host, filmmaker, musician or on-air commentator could be fined as much as $500,000 for producing an image or expressing a point of view that is considered "indecent" by censors at the conservative-controlled Federal Communications Commission.
Additionally, broadcasters could be fined as much as $500,000 under the measure, a threat that assures that doors will be closed to controversial artists as a new era of self-censorship unfolds.
If the measure becomes law it will, in the words of U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech. We would see self – and actual – censorship rise to new and undesirable heights."
Oh, The Sad Facts I Stumble On While Writing My Column
No, no...no recent tragic truths about men and women. Those, I find fascinating. I'd always loved the story about JFK standing on a podium in Berlin and proclaiming his solidarity with the German people, "Ich Bin Ein Berliner," which supposedly didn't mean, "I am a Berliner," but "I am a jelly donut." Well, guess what? If you stand in Frankfurt and say, I am a Frankfurter, nobody will think you're calling yourself a hot dog. They all got it. It turns out some nitwit in Florida, probably, started the jelly donut rumor, which spread like...well, like an ass after too many jelly donuts. In other news, my brilliant and lifesaving editor, Karen, informed me that "Publishers Clearing House" is written like so (which she was rather chagrined to know)...yet again saving me from being an ass spread across newspapers across the land.
Today In Cranky-Tainment
It's always entertaining when Cathy Seipp gets cranky.
LA Bloggers Ask The Would-Be Mayors
LABlogs.com asked LA-based bloggers to pose questions to all the mayoral candidates, and they're asking each campaign to post their responses to those questions. Here's mine (naturally, eco-centric)!
I'm concerned with the continued reliance on cars as transportation around Los Angeles, and the pollution and congestion they cause. If there were a subway or train from the beach to downtown Los Angeles, I would be in the downtown library every other day. If others felt the same, it might revitalize downtown and bring increased business to various areas. Likewise, if I could take a train from Santa Monica or Venice to the airport, I would. What is your plan for connecting Los Angeles in a way that does not involve polluting, congesting passenger cars on the road?
More questions (and eventually, answers, one would hope) at the above link. So far, only Bill Wyatt has posted an answer to my question (or anyone's):
BILL WYATT: Cars and driving for work or convenience is nearly impossible, so the highest priority must be placed on fixing this problem, by any means necessary. Encouraging long distance high-speed trains and getting trucks off the road during the day would also reduce some of the demands on the roadways. Reducing the cost of mass transit travel would also encourage more people to use the bus system. Getting free/inexpensive wireless services throughout LA would encourage more people to work in their neighborhoods and reduce car travel. Most importantly, by reducing the dependence on vehicles for driving purposes we can reduce pollution and thereby increase our quality of life. We must deal with this problem and prove that we can lead the nation again.
MORE: Hahn responds.
Sperm Limits
I keep getting too busy to blog this one, but I'd better put it up before it gets too old. A Chicago doctor alleges his ex-fiancée blew him, saved the sperm, then stuck the turkey baster where the sun don't shine:
The ex-fiancee, Sharon Irons, also a doctor, says Phillips got her pregnant the old-fashioned way -- sexual intercourse -- and concocted the oral sex story as a novel excuse to get out of paying child support for their 5-year-old daughter."It's a pack of lies," said Irons, who says she and Phillips have dated off and on since they were students at the University of Illinois Medical School and rekindled their romance after she separated from her husband.
Experts say it's possible
Phillips already lost in paternity court and has been ordered to pay $800 a month because DNA tests show the girl is his. Under the law in Illinois and many states, Phillips has child support obligations whether or not he intended to procreate.
"If he ejaculated and had semen on her or near her through a sex act and somehow it got into her fallopian tubes, up through the ovaries, too bad -- he's got to be more careful what he does with his semen," said Chicago divorce lawyer Donald C. Schiller.
Appellate Justice Allan Hartman noted a 1997 Louisiana case which held a man who said a woman impregnated herself with sperm she got from him in oral sex had child support allegations because "he had some sort of sexual contact" with the woman.
Fertility experts say that even though saliva can break down sperm, Phillips' story theoretically is possible.
My contention? Since a woman is the one who gets pregnant, any woman who has casual sex with a man and is not prepared to pay, in full, to raise any resulting baby, should be prepared to get an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. Roping the guy in, yes, it's what's done. But, isn't that kind of like blaming Manischewitz if somebody gets tanked on the vile stuff and totals his car? And if, like me, you're "pro-choice," maybe it's only fair that you're pro-choice all around.
Don't Be Gross At The Grocery Store
Thanks to Ronen, who posted this link to reusablebags.com, I finally found non-hideous reusable bags, sans dumbass hippie-ish illustrations and messages, to take to and from the grocery store.
These bags fold down to change-purse size, and the set I bought comes with a bunch of reusable bags for your fruits and veggies. The whole schme-deal compresses into a packet the size of a grapefruit, which will fit quite neatly into the storage space on the other side of the battery in your Honda Insight. (Buy one of those to go with your grocery bags!)
P.S. Seriously, if you do want an Insight, put in your order today, before Be Cool opens, March 4, because the car is one of the stars of the show: "The Cadillac Of Hybrids," Travolta calls it. I call it a great way to forget how to get gas, because getting gas is something I do so rarely these days.
Regarding my review of Be Cool, I'll just say this: Read the book (or listen to it on CD) before you see the movie so you'll know what you're missing.
