13-Year-Old Girl Being Turned Into A Baby Pod Against Her Will
A 13-year-old foster child in Florida got pregnant, and reportedly wants an abortion, writes Kathleen Chapman in the Palm Beach Post, but the head of the state Department of Children and Families is trying to put the right to choose in a judge's hands:
DCF Secretary Lucy Hadi reviewed the case and felt she could not allow the girl to end the pregnancy before notifying a juvenile court judge, Marilyn Munoz, spokeswoman for the agency in Palm Beach County, said Friday."The judge had no knowledge of the young girl's condition, so Secretary Hadi requested that we... inform the judge and ask for an injunction to request time for him to review the case," Munoz said.
Many legal experts believe that the case of the foster child identified as L.G. may be the first of its kind in Florida. At issue is whether the state agency or the court has the right to consider whether the abortion is in her best interest — or whether the girl's constitutional right to choose bans both from getting involved.
A Florida law on the books for years says the state agency cannot consent to an abortion in any case.
But attorneys who work with foster children say DCF has rarely used that law to block an abortion sought by a child in foster care. Hadi's decision goes against state Supreme Court rulings that girls do not need parents' permission to get an abortion, some said.
Attorney Carolyn Salisbury, who represents children in foster care through the University of Miami's Children and Youth Law Clinic, said girls have been having abortions for decades without interference.
Normally, state caseworkers aren't involved, Salisbury said. A foster parent, attorney or friend drives the girl to the appointment. A private organization in Miami-Dade County donates money for the abortions so the state doesn't have to pay. In some cases, she said, the state never even knows.
"There's no reason for the state to know. It's a private decision," she said.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County agree, contending the state's action to block the abortion violates the girl's constitutional right to choose.
Her biological parents lost their rights for abusing and neglecting her, so the state serves as her legal custodian. But the state can't intervene because of L.G.'s right to privacy and individual choice, the organizations argue.
The Punks Running Our Country
We've handed over the power to make laws to the likes of the sleazebag James Sensenbrenner, who did a few rewrites to the Democrats' suggested amendments to the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act. This bill makes it illegal for anyone to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion to get around laws requiring parental notification in the state where the minor lives. Here are the originals and the Sleazenbrenner rewrites, from ObsidianWings:
DEMS: a Nadler amendment allows an adult who could be prosecuted under the bill to go to a Federal district court and seek a waiver to the state’s parental notice laws if this remedy is not available in the state court. (no 11-16)
GOP REWRITE:. Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have created an additional layer of Federal court review that could be used by sexual predators to escape conviction under the bill. By a roll call vote of 11 yeas to 16 nays, the amendment was defeated.DEMS: a Nadler amendment to exempt a grandparent or adult sibling from the criminal and civil provisions in the bill (no 12-19)
GOP REWRITE: . Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were grandparents or adult siblings of a minor. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 19 nays, the amendment was defeated.DEMS: a Scott amendment to exempt cab drivers, bus drivers and others in the business transportation profession from the criminal provisions in the bill (no 13-17):
GOP REWRITE. Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution if they are taxicab drivers, bus drivers, or others in the business of professional transport. By a roll call vote of 13 yeas to 17 nays, the amendment was defeated.DEMS: a Scott amendment that would have limited criminal liability to the person committing the offense in the first degree (no 12-18)
GOP REWRITE:. Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted from prosecution under the bill those who aid and abet criminals who could be prosecuted under the bill. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 18 nays, the amendment was defeated.DEMS: a Jackson-Lee amendment to exempt clergy, godparents, aunts, uncles or first cousins from the penalties in the bill (no 13-20)
GOP REWRITE. Ms. Jackson-Lee offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were clergy, godparents, aunts, uncles, or first cousins of a minor, and would require a study by the Government Accounting Office. By a roll call vote of 13 yeas to 20 nays, the amendment was defeated.
Oh, and what a surprise, it seems Sensenbrenner has racked up more expenses for travel covered by private groups than any other member of Congress -- $168,000 -- writes Brian Tumulty in the Post-Gazette:
The nonpartisan analysis by Political Money Line showed Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, took 19 privately financed trips to locales ranging from Taiwan to Guatemala and Germany between January 2000 and earlier this year.
Not Another Tiffany's Tea Strainer
I have to get two wedding presents this month, and as I sift through the letters of people in miserable marriages, it occurs to me what both of these couples need; in fact, what every marrying or married couple needs:
This is a boxed set of two huge volumes of Gary Larson's cartoons -- a gift from me to myself about a year ago -- complete with background about his career, and reprints of angry reader mail from people who think he should have been sent to psychiatrists, not printed in the paper. (Those letters are always my most fun letters to read.) My recent personal favorite (addressed to me, not Gary Larson, who is no longer cartooning), went something like:
"Dear Amy, We usually think you're very smart, but after reading your latest column, we have to ask: Have you been drinking bong water?"
Microsoft Hates Fags
Well, they might not align themselves with the hateful Fred Phelps, but they withdrew their support for a bill to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Washington State. There's a link here to an email -- allegedly from Steve Ballmer, and allegedly leaked -- that included language like this:
"We are thinking hard about what is the right balance to strike - when should a public company take a position on a broader social issue, and when should it not? What message does the company taking a position send to its employees who have strongly-held beliefs on the opposite side of the issue?...."
What message does it send? How about the fair one, the rational one, the one not kowtowing to primitivism?
In other words, buy Apple.
UPDATED: Forgot to mention that Microsoft's climbed in bed with Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, whom they're bribing, uh, paying $20,000 a month for advice on "trade and competition" issues. (Don't tell me: Trade gay rights away or you're going to have some competition...when the fundies start telling their flock [always the most appropriate word for their followers] to turn away from the homo-loving Gates and Co. in the name of god.) Microsoft disputes that he influenced their decision to turn their back on gay rights, but Charles Pope writes in the Seattle P-I:
Public interest groups that track business influence and lobbying in Washington, D.C., said it isn't surprising that Microsoft -- or any major company -- would sign up a Republican operative.Republican leaders, most notably House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, have told companies that they need to shift business to Republican-leaning firms or lobbyists if they want a reception on Capitol Hill. The initiative is called the K Street Project, after the street in Washington, D.C., where many lobbyists have offices.
What is this, Godfather IV: The Mob Takes The Capital?
UPDATED, May 7, 2005: Microsoft will now back gay rights, writes Elizabeth M. Gillespie for the AP:
After being criticized for quietly dropping support for a state gay rights bill, Microsoft Corp. chief executive Steve Ballmer told employees Friday that management would publicly back such legislation in the future.Ballmer's commitment came two weeks after activists accused the company of caving to pressure from an evangelical pastor who had threatened to launch a nationwide boycott of the software company.
"After looking at the question from all sides, I've concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda," Ballmer wrote in an e-mail.
In late April, Lorri L. Jean, CEO of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, asked Microsoft to return a civil rights award the group had given the company four years ago. On Friday she said Microsoft should keep the honor.
"Few of us have not made a misstep. This was a misstep. It was a big one. But Microsoft has done the right thing, and we would be proud to have them keep our award," Jean told The Associated Press.
Ballmer said he would not discuss what prompted Microsoft to take a neutral stance this year on a bill it had actively supported in the past.
Microsoft, one of the first companies to extend domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples, claimed that its decision came before a meeting with Ken Hutcherson, pastor of a local church who has organized anti-gay-marriage rallies in Seattle and Washington, D.C.
Hutcherson could not immediately be reached for comment Friday. He has said he pressured Microsoft after hearing two employees testify in favor of a bill before the state Legislature that would have banned discrimination against gays in housing, employment and insurance.
The bill died by a single vote in the state Senate April 21.
Too Ugly To Sexually Harrass?
Queens Democratic councilman Allan Jennings, on trial for sexual harrassment, brought out photos of his three female accusers in hopes of showing that they were to haggy to have interested him! Bryan Virasami reports in Newsday:
...Later when asked to define attractive, Jennings noted that Brooklyn Democrat Diana Reyna was the only female councilmember overseeing his trial who fit his idea of beauty."People were just like 'Give me a break. This is ridiculous.' It's totally irrelevant," said Councilman David Weprin, (D-Hollis).
The photos were not allowed into evidence, but the move nearly forced some members of the Standards and Ethics Committee out of their chairs.
Helen Thomas, "Working Girl"
John Sugg has the details, and surprise, surprise...the breadcrumbs once again lead straight back to our favorite press pass-toting call girl, Jeff Gannon, uh, Guckert, uh...oh, you know who I mean!
Gannon takes a whack at one of Thomas' sources, Ed Wasserman, a journalism professor at Washington & Lee. Wasserman is also much more (and Jeff, these are what you call credentials) -- he's the former executive business editor at The Miami Herald, and was editor and CEO of the Daily Business Review in Miami, which was a great investigative paper during his tenure (still is, too). He also has real academic credits -- degrees from Yale, the University of Paris and the London School of Economics. I seem to recall that Gannon's academic achievements included a few days at a bogus broadcasting school.(Disclosure: I [this is Sugg talking] was an associate editor for Wasserman at the Business Review. He was a son of a bitch to work for, and I loved it.)
Thomas, in her column, wrote that:
Wasserman "defines a journalist as someone who 'is professionally dedicated to truth seeking.' He (Wasserman) conceded that although the whole job description 'has gotten muddied,' Gannon shouldn't be considered a journalist."Gannon was a propagandist, a flack for the White House. Thus, he fails to meet the requirement -- as Wasserman wrote in the Miami Herald last September -- that "anybody who enters the (journalism) profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth."
Gannon apparently wasn't amused. He wrote Wasserman:
From: "Jeff Gannon" To: Subject: Jeff Gannon, Propagandist Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 16:07:31 -0400 Mr. Wasserman: I read your comments about me in the latest column by my former colleague, Helen Thomas. Your criticism of me and your blather about the Bush administration reflects the fact that you are merely one of the liberal elites desperately trying to hold on to an exclusive franchise on journalism.
Wasserman is anything but afraid of combat. He forwarded to me his reply to Gannon/Guckert:Mr Gannon, You really are a piece of work, aren't you. Now you're proposing that your contemptible behavior was actually an expression of political principle. Here I thought you were just another opportunist who was making a career, literally and figuratively, from sucking up. How wrong I was. You really should work on your writing though. I would not be "one of the liberal elites." I think you mean to accuse me of being "a member of the liberal elite." The difference is correct usage. So Helen Thomas is "a former colleague" of yours? I didn't know she had been in the trade. Bye. EW
P.S. I was an intern with Helen Thomas at the White House for a short time when I was in college. A pro and a tough cookie, yet fair and kind to me. It was a thrill.
No Child Left Unrecruited
The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, has a clause in it guaranteeing the military access to public school kids. In fact, kids have to "opt out" to not have their personal information released to the military -- an option some schools don't even give them. Here's a transcript from Alternet about this -- an interview with Justin Sane of the punk band Anti-Flag. Okay, this idiot supported the "Free Mumia" movement. But there's some good information in here about the military portion of the No Child Left Behind Act and its effects:
There is a provision that is buried in the No Child Left Behind Act. If you attend a public high school, your school system is required to turn over your private information to the U.S. military unless you opt out. 'Opt out' means that you need to turn in a form, signed by a guardian or a parent, stating that you do not want the military to have your private information. It is basically the exact opposite of the age-old school permission slip, where if you wanted to go on a school field trip or if you wanted the school to give out your private information, you had to turn in a form signed by your parent saying that it was OK. Instead, the school is going to give away your private information to the military, specifically for recruitment targeting, unless you hand in a form telling them not to do so.Of course, 99 percent of the population really knows nothing about this provision in the No Child Left Behind Act. Most public schools haven't bothered to tell their students and they're simply giving their students' information out. When we heard about that, obviously, we were dumbfounded. It is just another example of the arrogance of this Bush administration. And the arrogance of the people who drafted this ridiculous piece of legislation that is supposedly going to be something that is good for children's education.
NOTE: Part of this entry, now edited out, turns out to have been an April Fools piece by Pointblank, a respected Des Moines alt weekly now taken over by Cityview, saying the military was paying off 14-year-olds to enlist. I thought it could be trusted because of where it ran, but I didn't know the date, and another site reprinted it in its entirety without noting (or probably knowing) that it was a spoof. Still, I'm not quite sure why papers (usually alt weeklies) do these spoofs, which aren't always obviously spoofs to some or many who read them. It seems like a kind of Three Stooges "nyuh-uh" that eats away at the credibility of the rest of their work. Yes, this one apparently had an "April Fools!" at the bottom of the original. But, of course, that got dropped (by accident or on purpose) as it got reprinted and linked around the Internet. I think that' something more editors need to think about.
The Man Is A Brand
Luke Y. Thompson is too smart to wear some designer's name across his chest. (As I always say, I'll wear a shirt with "Calvin Klein" on it the day I see Calvin Klein in an "Amy Alkon" tee.)
My Letter In Today's Detroit Free Press
They printed my letter complaining that they aren't firiing that one-man sap factory, Mitch Albom, for sleazery on a story; omitting the fact that I'm syndicated columnist (which seems relevant to me, and which I specifically included as the signature of the letter to be printed).
Disappointing choiceI grew up in Detroit, loving the Free Press, reading it every day, from about age 8 on, and I'm terribly disappointed at your decision. Maybe, just maybe, the golden goose is not Mitch Albom's popularity and fame, but the Free Press' credibility?
Amy Alkon
Santa Monica, Calif.
Welfare For Porsche Drivers
If you are rich, Uncle Sam wants to lend you a helping hand paying for your wheels. Scott Burns writes on MSN.com:
Not everyone is eligible, of course. But if you use a vehicle 100% for business and purchase it, new or used, from a select list of big-time gas-guzzlers, Uncle Sam is ready to help you out.Yes, I'm talking about the well-publicized special tax break for vehicles with a gross weight of at least 6,000 pounds. Gross weight is the weight of the vehicle including fuel, passengers and payload. Because of this, gross weight can be a good deal more than the empty weight of the vehicle.
Forty-one domestic and 15 foreign SUVs qualify for this tax break. The Porsche Cayenne, a notably business-like vehicle, is among them. (Amy notes: 13 mpg in the city, 18 mpg on the highway, according to US Dept. of Energy stats.) As a consequence, while the depreciation write-off for any passenger car used for business is limited to only $2,960 in 2005, down from $10,610 in 2004, those claiming 100% business use of these SUVs could deduct 100% of the $89,665 price of the Porsche Cayenne Turbo during 2003 and until late October 2004. For those who bought in time, the write-off represented an immediate income tax savings of $31,383, provided the buyer was in the 35% tax bracket. Think of it as a bagatelle for the non-indigent from the Jobs and Growth Act of 2003.
One of the particularly compelling uses I've seen of this tax break was a bright parrot-green Hummer2 parked at a luxury marina in Burnt Store, Fla. A sign on the driver's door advertised a dress shop.
...Tax savings for guzzler buyers reduce government revenue, increase the federal deficit, increase our trade deficit, and send yet more money to the Middle East. If we were going to devise a formula for wrecking the country, it would be difficult to improve on this one. We might as well call this portion of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 the Osama Bin Laden Support Fund.
To be fair, I got a tax break on my car, too -- the 1900lb, Super Ultra Low Emission Honda Insight hybrid, averaging 670 miles to the tank. My reward was a one-time deduction of $2,000. Wooweee. Do we have our priorities in the wrong place, or what?
Car Talk
Citroën, Santa Monica. I believe the rainbow comes factory standard.
No Soldier Left Behind
Oops! We forgot to adequately armor their Humvees, and our soldiers fighting in Iraq weren't able to jury-rig scrap metal they'd collected to go high enough to save their lives on this particular vehicle, reports Michael Moss in The New York Times:
The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top."The steel was not high enough," said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit's commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. "Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads."
"Two years into the Iraq war," reads a caption on a photograph shown with the story, "the armoring program is yet to be completed."
In returning home, the leaders and Marine infantrymen have chosen to break an institutional code of silence and tell their story, one they say was punctuated not only by a lack of armor, but also by a shortage of men and planning that further hampered their efforts in battle, destroyed morale and ruined the careers of some of their fiercest warriors.The saga of Company E, part of a lionized battalion nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards, is also one of fortitude and ingenuity. The marines, based at Camp Pendleton in southern California, had been asked to rid the provincial capital of one of the most persistent insurgencies, and in enduring 26 firefights, 90 mortar attacks and more than 90 homemade bombs, they shipped their dead home and powered on. Their tour has become legendary among other Marine units now serving in Iraq and facing some of the same problems.
"As marines, we are always taught that we do more with less," said Sgt. James S. King, a platoon sergeant who lost his left leg when he was blown out of the Humvee that Saturday afternoon last May. "And get the job done no matter what it takes."
The experiences of Company E's marines, pieced together through interviews at Camp Pendleton and by phone, company records and dozens of photographs taken by the marines, show they often did just that. The unit had less than half the troops who are now doing its job in Ramadi, and resorted to making dummy marines from cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to place in observation posts on the highway when it ran out of men. During one of its deadliest firefights, it came up short on both vehicles and troops. Marines who were stranded at their camp tried in vain to hot-wire a dump truck to help rescue their falling brothers. That day, 10 men in the unit died.
Sergeant Valerio and others had to scrounge for metal scraps to strengthen the Humvees they inherited from the National Guard, which occupied Ramadi before the marines arrived. Among other problems, the armor the marines slapped together included heavier doors that could not be latched, so they "chicken winged it" by holding them shut with their arms as they traveled.
"We were sitting out in the open, an easy target for everybody," Cpl. Toby G. Winn of Centerville, Tex., said of the shortages. "We complained about it every day, to anybody we could. They told us they were listening, but we didn't see it."
I believe they are listening, but only to polls and the religious "right," Corporal Winn.
Not His Kid, But Paying Child Support Anyway
Geoffrey Fisher had been paying child support for a child who wasn't his. He only found this out when the kid went into foster care and he tried to get custody and had a paternity test for that purpose, says an AP story. A judge ruled that the child isn't his, but that hasn't stopped the state from going after Fisher for child support payments -- revoking his driver's license and coming after him for thousands he "owes" in back payments:
Fisher, 35, said he's flabbergasted the state sent him a letter this month seeking $11,450 in child support, even though officials know that DNA tests have proven he isn't the father of the child in question.The state's action "is crazy," said Fisher, of Auburn. "A man doesn't have much power in a situation like this."
Fisher's attorney, James Howaniec, said he and Fisher thought the matter was resolved in January 2002, when a judge ruled Fisher no longer had to pay support.
"It's ridiculous that the state is going after men proved not to be the fathers of particular children," Howaniec said.
...But earlier this month, the Maine attorney general's office wrote a letter to Howaniec saying Fisher owed support payments for the time from the child's birth until she reached 3 years old, when tests proved Fisher was not the father.
State officials said that Fisher's problems have resurfaced because he failed to file a court motion three years ago that would have relieved him or any financial responsibilities for the child.
Because of that, Fisher is regarded as the legal father and responsible for child support, said Michael Norton, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
I'm sorry, but why is the burden of proof still on this man? I don't care if he used the court papers to clean the windows. He isn't the father and he shouldn't be paying. At all. Period. Where are all those feminists looking for fairness and equality? (Probably out protesting municipalities that want to spruce up ugly traffic circles with a classic nude sculpture of a woman!)
Ce N'est Pas Un Signe
Photographed in the lobby of the cigar bar we went to after Jackie's friend's movie, Blowing Smoke.
Get Your Daily Lena!
In this morning's mail from Lena:
“Pope Benedict Installed, Urges World to Find God”But we can’t even find Bin Laden…
When Theocrats Attack
Sunday night is the night of a nationally broadcast judge-bashing rally from a megachurch in Louisville, writes Frank Rich in The New York Times:
It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry." These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher, "was born to be a senator," we now have senators who are born to be Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched plans to be beamed into tonight's festivities by videotape, a stunt that in itself imbues "Justice Sunday" with a touch of all-American spectacle worthy of "The Wizard of Oz."Like the wizard himself, "Justice Sunday" is a humbug, albeit one with real potential consequences. It brings mass-media firepower to a campaign against so-called activist judges whose virulence increasingly echoes the rhetoric of George Wallace and other segregationists in the 1960's. Back then, Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up security, a cross was burned on Johnson's lawn and his mother's house was bombed.
The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.
The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.
Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of "people of faith." But "people of faith," as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity.
Bill Frist and the rest of his ilk are not forces for democracy, but theocracy, and must be stopped. I think the Democrats are disorganized dimwits, they're nowhere near as dangerous as the Republicans. And I say that as a fiscal conservative who doesn't believe our tax dollars should pay for NPR or the children of people who aren't poor to go to school. In other words, I'm no lefty -- but I guess you could call me a "let's protect our democracy while we still have some of it left"y.
I'll Take Mine With Onion's
Headline from The Onion, spotted on Reason's blog:
Drugs Win Drug War
Yep, that's pretty much it. (Make mine a Ritalin!)
And what's next, a war on e-mail? Because, it seems, e-mails "hurt IQ more than pot," according to a British study.
The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard.
On a positive note, there seems to be no correlation with a jonesing for an extra-large bag of Doritos and an entire sheet of brownies.
Gay Marriage Battles Rage Across The U.S.
And the comments fly on the BBC. Here's one from the article, from a lesbian woman who married in Oregon, then had her marriage struck down:
Li said: "I am a mixed race person - and my parents married before the courts across America had struck down all the remaining barriers to mixed race couples. Today, no-one would deny mixed race couples the right to marry."Same sex marriage is the civil rights issue of our time."
And it seems (western) voices outside the Theocratic States Of America are much more reasonable. Here are a few of the reader comments below the BBC piece:
People who reject same sex marriage fear an erosion of heterosexual relationships. However, insecurity is not a valid reason to prevent couples gaining the rights that heterosexual people enjoy. There is no moral issue here; mankind has and continues to put words into God's mouth to voice their insecurities, and it is time they accepted other humans' civil rights, ie where everyone can enjoy the benefits in which others currently hold a monopoly. We live in the real world, not in their belief system. Mark, SouthamptonOnly people who are truly insecure with their own faith and beliefs feel threatened by others believing or doing differently. I have my own faith and ideas, I feel very secure with them, and so why should I care what others do, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone?
Anje, Cologne GermanyAs a male, twice divorced; for all the religous overtone cast upon it, marriage and the civil rights attached to it have more to do with property rights then with the moral fabric of society. If two people love, create a household, contribute to society, and succeed at a life long commitment - more power to them. We are all God's creatures for those who live a spiritual life and we are all equal for those who live a secular life.
Peter, Edmonton, Alberta CanadaThere are two separate questions here. The first is should the state allow same sex couple to marry. The second is should the church allow same sex couples to marry. I don't think that the church should have any say in the state's decision nor the state in the church's. Especially not in America where they claim to have a separation of church and state. I think that a civil marriage between any two people should be allowed regardless of race, gender etc. On a civil level it is a question of equal rights. The church however should have every right to say that it won't marry same sex couples in a religious ceremony and the state should have no say in the matter.
Roz, Munich, Germany (British ex-pat)
This calls to mind a piece by Michael Kinsley I read a while back, suggesting that the state shouldn't be in the marriage business at all -- which is my contention as well. Kinsley writes:
That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, Dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I've got it: Privatize marriage. These slogans all mean the same thing. Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let 'em. If you and your government aren't implicated, what do you care?
Crying Rape Instead Of "Need More Toiletpaper!"
Perhaps Desiree Nall, the president of the Brevard, Florida, chapter of the National Organization Of Women thought she was being helpful by reporting that she was raped in a campus bathrum when she really wasn't. (Or maybe she was just looking for attention.) Wendy McElroy writes:
Instead of publicizing sexual violence against women, Nall has spotlighted the problem of false accusations against men. Her case also raises the question of whether NOW-style feminists encourage false accusations when they flatly insist that women must be believed.In the '60s, feminists fought to have rape taken seriously. But taking an accusation seriously is not the same as granting it automatic validity. Rather, it means investigating the facts and weighing them in an unbiased manner that favors no one and nothing but the truth.
A lot of ugly truth may surface in the coming months. The state of Florida seems determined to pursue its case against Nall, who seems determined to fight back.
Winter Park Sgt. Pam Marcum explained to the Orlando Sentinel that bringing charges against Nall had taken so long because the police department sought a second opinion from the State Attorney's office. It is rare for those who file false reports of sexual abuse to be prosecuted. In short, the prosecution is carefully constructing a case; the defense is loudly crying 'political persecution!' In the process, the definition and legal status of rape within our society continues to evolve.
Where it comes to rest depends largely upon the honesty -- not the NOW-like silence -- with which women confront the problem of false accusations.
And then there's the date rape arena. What some would call "date rape," I call bad judgment. Kate Roiphe writes eloquently on the "one-in-four" statistic; the notion that one in every four women has been raped. Come on, isn't that an outrageous statistic, just if you think about it in terms of the women you know? There are four women in my family. So, statistically, one of us should have been sexually assaulted? You see a restaurant filled with a few tables where there are four women out to lunch. One of them has been raped? Come on. In Roiphe's words:
Is there a rape crisis on campus? Measuring rape is not as straightforward as it might seem. Neil Gilbert, professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, questions the validity of the one-in-four statistic. Gilbert points out that in a 1985 survey undertaken by Ms. magazine and financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, 73 percent of the women categorized as rape victims did not initially define their experience as rape; it was Mary Koss, the psychologist conducting the study, who did.One of the questions used to define rape was: "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs." The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman's "judgment is impaired" and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape.
As Gilbert delves further into the numbers, he does not necessarily disprove the one-in-four statistic, but he does clarify what it means-- the so-called rape epidemic on campuses is more a way of interpreting, a way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon. It is more about a change in sexual politics than a change in sexual behavior. Whether or not one in four college women has been raped, then. is a matter of opinion, not a matter of mathematical fact.
That rape is a fact in some women's lives is not in question. It's hard to watch the solemn faces of young Bosnian girls, their words haltingly translated, as they tell of brutal rapes; or to read accounts of a suburban teen-ager raped and beaten while walking home from a shopping mall. We all agree that rape is a terrible thing, but we no longer agree on what rape is. Today's definition has stretched beyond bruises and knives, threats of death or violence to include emotional pressure and the influence of alcohol. The lines between rape and sex begin to blur. The one-in-four statistic on those purple posters is measuring something elusive. It is measuring her word against his in a realm where words barely exist. There is a gray area in which one person's rape may be another's bad night. Definitions become entangled in passionate ideological battles. There hasn't been a remarkable change in the number of women being raped; just a change in how receptive the political climate is to those numbers.
The next question, then, is who is identifying this epidemic and why. Somebody is "finding" this rape crisis, and finding it for a reason. Asserting the prevalence of rape lends urgency, authority to a broader critique of culture.
In a dramatic description of the rape crisis, Naomi Wolf writes in "The Beauty Myth" that "cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events." The italics are hers ["as..." in italics in original]. Whether or not Wolf really believes rape is a part of the "normal course of events" these days, she is making a larger point. Wolf's rhetorical excess serves her larger polemic about sexual politics. Her dramatic prose is a call to arms. She is really trying to rally the feminist troops. Wolf uses rape as a red flag, an undeniable sign that things are falling apart.
But, things are falling apart -- but not because of some imaginary increase in rape, but because of feminist propaganda about what horrible creatures men are. Why do some women need to feel like victims to feel good about themselves? In my line of work, I get letter after letter from these poor, dateless men and women in their 20s and 30s, and even in their 40s, who are really hedgy on their gender roles, and can't begin to fathom that this might be having an effect on their being able to get a partner or even a date.
While it's tempting to laugh off radical feminists as shrill nuts, there was a trickle-down from the radical feminists, that sick, pathetic, evil Andrea Dworkin (ding-dong the witch is dead!) and Dworkin's evil twin sister in victimism, Catherine MacKinnon, to the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. I wrote about that here, recently, in my article, "Victims Gone Wild: How Feminism Has Messed Up Relationships."
In reality, what they were fighting wasn't male oppression, but maleness of any kind—based on the erroneous feminist notion that equality means sameness.In their eyes, male sexuality isn't just different. It's WRONG. Penetration is a form of rape, don'tcha know? Ultimately, these femi-fascists sought to re-create men in their own image and to reshape sexual expression into something kinder, gentler and more "egalitarian." (Personally, I have no idea what more "egalitarian" sex is—and I hope I never find out.)
Fundamentalism And Femininny Extremism Hit Venice Beach
The church ladies and the ladies with mustaches have joined hands to howl about public nudity -- in the form of a nude statue by sculptor Robert Graham that was slated to be put up on Windward Circle (I'd assume, in the middle of the traffic turnaround at the end of Main Street).
If you have dinner at The Globe (in the old 72 Market Street location, oyster happy hour, 5-7pm), totter down to the end of the block and peer through the gates of Graham's studio (north side of Market Street, corner of Speedway). You'll see he's not exactly the Andres Serrano of Venice. If anything, Graham's sculptures, which I find kind of a yawn, are reminiscent of Degas'.
Nevertheless, it appears that the "concerned citizens" above are all atwitter about this shocking proposal of artistic exposure. Apparently, they don't spend much time on the boardwalk on the weekends, where they should be protesting all the nudity by all the last people you'd ever want to see naked. Diane Haithman reports in the LA Times:
Real estate agent Sylviane Dungan is among those seeking to block the sculpture."I have owned my house in Venice, a block from the Windward Circle, for 24 years, and I lived in it for 14 years," Dungan writes in her appeal to the city. "I deplore the representation of a woman as a headless bust, a shiny sexual object."
Hey, Sylviane, do you really think all the bazillions of headless busts created throughout history are a plot against women? Is this one a plot against men?
Next, the Times' Haithman discovers furrowed brows all around:
The petition drew enough community concern that the March 12 sushi restaurant meeting was schedule,
"Was schedule"?
I seem to remember the LA Times' David Shaw huffing something about his pieces getting vetted by at least four experienced editors before getting turned into birdcage liner, uh, going into print. Were all four of Haithman's experienced editors asleep at the time?
Haithman digs into a few of the mixed nuts in attendance:
The meeting included some of the town's most colorful regulars: homeless activist "Dr. John" Michel with his long white beard and a hatband printed with marijuana leaves;
Haithman forgets to mention his omnipresent wooden staff; a tall (6 ft?), log-like pole, complete with American flag attached at one end; besides his beard, the most noticeable thing about him. Perhaps she saw him while seated, because in my unfortunate experience, the guy doesn't go to the bathroom without it. Worse, he spends a great deal of time marching back and forth through the local hippie haus of coffee and slamming it on the floor repeatedly -- as if we wouldn't notice a guy who looks like Father Time at a Vietnam War protest without the sound effects.
But, enough local color. By now, you must be in the mood for a little more shrieking from the feminists. (Ladies, shouldn't you be home shaving your legs or something?)
Several vocal objectors complained that the proposed headless, armless woman represented a misogynistic symbol of anonymity, as well as violence against women.The objectors are not the first to charge Graham with degrading women. In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker was awarded a Graham-designed statuette of a nude female torso for being a California "state treasure."
Walker, who had just completed a book and a film about female genital mutilation, was outraged. "Imagine my horror when … I was presented with a decapitated, armless, legless woman on which my name hung from a chain," she told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Regina Weller, Venice Foursquare Church administrator and the pastor's wife, complained that from the office window of the church on Riviera Avenue "we would see her backside. I work with women in recovery, and no matter what, it's a naked torso of a woman."
And we all know, one look at a naked torso of a woman can cause crack use, blindness, and death!
How come nobody's ever in recovery from being a really big idiot?
UPDATE: More at this Independent Women's Forum link, by Charlotte Allen.
Hate-Based Legislation
The medievalists in Texas are trying to pass a law to keep gays from becoming foster parents, writes Natalie Gott for AP:
Legislators voted 81-58 Tuesday to approve the ban in an amendment tacked on to a bill that would revamp the state's Child Protective Services agency. The full bill was tentatively approved 126-16. Final approval was expected Wednesday."It is our responsibility to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable children and I don't think we are doing that if we allow a foster parent that is homosexual or bisexual," said Rep. Robert Talton, a Republican, who introduced the amendment.
The state Senate has passed its own version of Child Protective Services reform that does not include the ban on gay foster parents.
Randall Ellis, executive director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, said the House measure would mean the exclusion of people who could be good foster parents to children who need of them.
"Mr. Talton has taken aim at the (gay and lesbian) community of Texas and thousands of children are now caught in the cross hairs," he said.
The stats about kids with gay parents? A few of them are here:
* As of 1990, 6 million to 14 million children in the United States were living with a gay or lesbian parent. (National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, a service of the U.S. Administration for Children and Families.)* There is absolutely no evidence that children are psychologically or physically harmed in any way by having LGBT parents. There is, however, much evidence that shows that they are not.
* People with LGBT parents have the same incidence of homosexuality as the general population, about 10%. No research has ever shown that LGBT parents have any affect on the sexuality of their children. (Patterson, Charlotte J. 1992)
* Research claims that children with LGBT parents are exposed to more people of the opposite sex than many kids of straight parents. (Rofes, E.E., 1983, Herdt, 1989)
* Studies have shown that people with LGBT parents are more open-minded about a wide variety of things than people with straight parents. (Harris and Turner, 1985/86)
* Daughters of lesbians have higher self-esteem than daughters of straight women. Sons are more caring and less aggressive. (Hoeffer, 1981)
* On measures of psychosocial well-being, school functioning, and romantic relationships and behaviors, teens with same-sex parents are as well adjusted as their peers with opposite-sex parents. A more important predictor of teens' psychological and social adjustment is the quality of the relationships they have with their parents. (National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 2004)
* Most "problems" that kids of LGBT parents face actually stem from the challenges of dealing with divorce and the homophobia and transphobia in society rather then the sexual orientation or gender identity of their parents.
No Belgian Waffling Here
The right to die with dignity. No, we don't have it here in America, where the religious freaks rule. Belgium is the modern nation that legally grants people autonomy over their own lives -- and facilitates their right as well. In Belgium, according to this TF1 article (unfortunately, only in French), doctors can get a kit, available in 250 pharmacies across the country, to help a patient with "constant and unbearable physical or psychic suffering" to end their life in their own home.
The kit costs 45 euros ("not reimbursed by Belgian social security," the article mentions!), and includes the anaesthetics Pentothal and Norcuron. According to a pharmacist interviewed by the newspaper, the first drug "quickly causes death" in 90 percent of the cases, and the second finalizes it. The doctor brings surplus drugs back to the pharmacy.
What a civilized procedure. What a shame that we, in the US, seem to be going backward, not forward, in civilization.
It Looks Like A Vagina To Me
Idiots in Chicago see "the Virgin Mary" in an expressway underpass stain.
The Homo-Hater-In-Chief
That would be the Rat they picked for Pope. Here's how Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, puts it:
"Today, the princes of the Roman Catholic Church elected as Pope a man whose record has been one of unrelenting, venomous hatred for gay people, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. In fact, during the reign of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger was the driving force behind a long string of pronouncements using the term 'evil' to describe gay people, homosexuality, and marriage equality. As a long-time Catholic from a staunchly Catholic family, I know that the history of the church is full of shameful, centuries-long chapters involving vilification, persecution, and violence against others. Someday, the church will apologize to gay people as it has to others it has oppressed in the past. I very much doubt that this day will come during this Pope's reign. In fact, it seems inevitable that this Pope will cause even more pain and give his successors even more for which to seek atonement."
Let's hope the creep has a successor very soon.
Watching The Watchers
Very interesting article by Kim Zetter, in Wired, about wearable computing guru Steve Mann. Mann's made it his mission to make people more aware of surveillance cameras around them by engaging in what he calls "equiveillance through sousveillance":
The opposite of surveillance -- French for watching from above -- sousveillance refers to watching from below, essentially from beneath the eye in the sky. It's the equivalent of keeping an eye on the eye.With that in mind, Mann conducted his tour with conference participants to see how those conducting surveillance would respond to being monitored.
Mann sported his signature camera eyewear, while some of the other participants wore CFP conference bags around their necks. The bags had a dark plastic dome stitched on one side -- modeled after store surveillance domes -- which they pointed randomly at passersby, unnerving them. Conference organizers had outfitted a handful of the bag domes with wireless webcams -- they wouldn't say which bags contained cameras -- which transmitted and recorded live streaming video to monitors in the conference lobby.
In the stores, as conference attendees snapped pictures of three smoked domes in the ceiling of a Mont Blanc pen shop, an employee inside waved his arms overhead. The intruders interpreted his gesture as happy excitement at being photographed until a summoned security guard halted the photography.
Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras. But the philosophical question, asked again at Nordstrom and the Gap, was beyond the comprehension of store managers who were more concerned with the practical issues of prohibiting store photography.
At the Gap, photographers were told they couldn't take pictures because the Gap didn't want competitors to study and copy its clothing displays. At Nordstrom, an undercover security guard who looked like Baby Spice and sported a badge identifying her as Agent No. 1, summoned a manager who told Mann that customers would be disturbed by the handheld cameras.
Illogically, she didn't have a problem with participants pointing their conference bag domes around the store to take photos, just with the handheld cameras.
Mann said that duplicity is often necessary in order to mirror the Kafkaesque nature of surveillance.
He has designed a wallet that requires someone to show ID in order to see his ID. The device consists of a wallet with a card reader on it. His driver's license can be seen only partially through a display. And in order for someone to see the rest of his ID, they have to swipe their own ID through the card reader to open the wallet.
He also made a briefcase that has a fingerprint scan that requires the fingerprint of someone else to open it.
Mann quoted Simon Davies of Privacy International, a London-based nonprofit that monitors civil liberties issues: "The totalitarian regime is the regime that would like to know everything about everyone but reveal nothing about itself," Mann said.
He considered such a government an "inequiveillant regime" and likened it to signing a contract with another party without being allowed to keep a copy of the contract.
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record ... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Globalization Is Good, Says Friedman
Thomas Friedman, author of the new book The World Is Flat, is a lefty for globalization, writes Robert Wright on Slate.
Friedman persuasively updates his Lexus-and-the-Olive-Tree argument that economic interdependence makes war costlier for nations and hence less likely. He's heard the counterargument—"That's what they said before World War I!"—and he concedes that a big war could happen. But he shows that the pre-World War I era didn't have this kind of interdependence—the fine-grained and far-flung division of labor orchestrated by Toyota, Wal-Mart, et al. This is "supply chaining"—"collaborating horizontally—among suppliers, retailers, and customers—to create value."For example: The hardware in a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop comes from factories in the Philippines, Costa Rica, Malaysia, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, India, and Israel; the software is designed in America and elsewhere. The corporations that own or operate these factories are based in the United States, China, Taiwan, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Ireland, Thailand, Israel, and Great Britain. And Michael Dell personally knows their CEOs—a kind of relationship that, multiplied across the global web of supply chains, couldn't hurt when tensions rise between, say, China and the United States.
Friedman argues plausibly that global capitalism dampened the India-Pakistan crisis of 2002, when a nuclear exchange was so thinkable that the United States urged Americans to leave India. Among the corporate feedback the Indian government got in midcrisis was a message from United Technologies saying that it had started looking for more stable countries in which to house mission-critical operations. The government toned down its rhetoric.
Also plausibly, Friedman argues that Globalization 3.0 rewards inter-ethnic tolerance and punishes tribalism. "If you want to have a modern complex division of labor, you have to be able to put more trust in strangers." Certainly nations famous for fundamentalist intolerance—e.g., Saudi Arabia—tend not to be organically integrated into the global economy.
Peace and universal brotherhood—it almost makes globalization sound like a leftist's dream come true. But enough embracing—it's time to extend! Time to use the logic of globalization to attack Bush's foreign policy.
Like Friedman, I accept Bush's premise that spreading political freedom is both morally good and good for America's long-term national security. But is Bush's instinctive means to that end—invading countries that aren't yet free—really the best approach? Friedman's book fortified my belief that the answer is no.
Friedman, unlike many liberals, has long appreciated that, more than ever, economic liberty encourages political liberty. As statist economies have liberalized, this linkage has worked faster in some cases (South Korea, Taiwan) than in others (China), but it works at some speed just about everywhere.
And consider the counterexamples, the increasingly few nations that have escaped fine-grained penetration by market forces. They not only tend to be authoritarian; they often flout international norms, partly because their lack of economic engagement makes their relationship to the world relatively zero-sum, leaving them little incentive to play nicely. Friedman writes, "Since Iraq, Syria, south Lebanon, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran are not part of any major global supply chains, all of them remain hot spots that could explode at any time."
That list includes the last country Bush invaded and the two countries atop his prospective invasions list. It makes you wonder: With all due respect for carnage, mightn't it be easier to draw these nations into the globalized world and let capitalism work its magic (while supplementing that magic by using nonmilitary policy levers to encourage democratic reform)?
This is one paradox of "neoconservative" foreign policy: It lacks the conservative's faith in the politically redeeming power of markets. Indeed, Bush, far from trying to lure authoritarians into the insidiously antiauthoritarian logic of capitalism, has tried to exclude them from it. Economically, he's all stick and no carrot. (Of Iran he said, "We've sanctioned ourselves out of influence," oblivious to the fact that removing sanctions can be an incentive.)
Genocide In Sudan
Here's an issue that's neither left nor right; simply humanitarian. We must do something about the terrible continuing genocide in Sudan -- the systematic killing of the black Sudanese of Darfur by Arab militias. According to the "clock" on a Web site about the killings (linked below), there have been over 300,000 people murdered since December 11 (I'm assuming this is December 11, 2003; it doesn't say):
Over a million people, driven from their homes, now face death from starvation and disease as the Government and militias attempt to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching them. The same forces have destroyed the people of Darfur's villages and crops, and poisoned their water supplies, and they continue to murder, rape and terrorize....The situation in Darfur is dire. The choice we face simple. Act now to help save lives and stop the genocide, or watch as another chapter of injustice, cruelty and tragedy gets added to human history. Let’s learn the bloody lessons of Rwanda, the Holocaust, and Armenia. Lets make sure that 2005 is not a year that we remember and regret.
The quote above is from darfurgenocide.org, which details some of what can be done, including an email form you can fill out to beg President Bush to do something. Here's a statement by Kristen Geary, a UNICEF child protection officer in North Darfur.
It's time to put the heat on our government to put the heat on the government of Sudan. No, we won't get any oil out of the deal. Oh, I forgot...it was a humanitarian gesture that sent us in after Saddam. Well, whatever our excuse was for taking on the role of nation building and international policeman, we have no excuse -- short of utter inhumanity -- for not going in to take out the murderers in Sudan.
Let's Get Biblical
The religious nutwads go on about being true to the biblical pronouncements about marriage. The truth is, they're selectively true to it. Vaughn Roste posts the broader truth here. And here are a few of the high points:
12 Biblical Principles of Marriage 1. Marriage consists of one man and one or more women (Gen 4:19, 4:23, 26:34, 28:9, 29:26-30, 30:26, 31:17, 32:22, 36:2, 36:10, 37:2, Ex. 21:10, Judges 8:30, 1 Sam 1:2, 25:43, 27:3, 30:5, 30:18, 2 Sam 2:2, 3:2-5, 1 Chron 3:1-3, 4:5, 8:8, 14:3, 2 Chron 11:21, 13:21, 24:3).
2. Nothing prevents a man from taking on concubines in addition to the wife or wives he may already have (Gen 25:6, Judges 8:31, 2 Sam 5:13, 1 Kings 11:3, 1 Chron 3:9, 2 Chron 11:21, Dan 5:2-3).
3. A man might chose any woman he wants for his wife (Gen 6:2, Deut 21:11), provided only that she is not already another man’s wife (Lev 18:14-16, Deut. 22:30) or his [half-]sister (Lev 18:11, 20:17), nor the mother (Lev 20:14) or the sister (Lev 18:18) of a woman who is already his wife. The concept of a woman giving her consent to being married is foreign to the Biblical mindset.
4. If a woman cannot be proven to be a virgin at the time of marriage, she shall be stoned (Deut 22:13-21).
5. A rapist must marry his victim (Ex. 22:16, Deut. 22:28-29) - unless she was already a fiancé, in which case he should be put to death if he raped her in the country, but both of them killed if he raped her in town (Deut. 22:23-27).
6. If a man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow (Gen 38:6-10, Deut 25:5-10, Mark 12:19, Luke 20:28).
7. Women marry the man of their father’s choosing (Gen. 24:4, Josh.15:16-17, Judges 1:12-13, 12:9, 21:1, 1 Sam 17:25, 18:19, 1 Kings 2:21, 1 Chron 2:35, Jer 29:6, Dan 11:17).
8. Women are the property of their father until married and their husband after that (Ex. 20:17, 22:17, Deut. 22:24, Mat 22:25).
9. The value of a woman might be approximately seven years’ work (Gen 29:14-30).
10. Inter-faith marriages are prohibited (Gen 24:3, 28:1, 28:6, Num 25:1-9, Ezra 9:12, Neh 10:30, 2 Cor 6:14).
11. Divorce is forbidden (Deut 22:19, Matt 5:32, 19:9, Mark 10:9-12, Luke 16:18, Rom 7:2, 1 Cor 7:10-11, 7:39).
12. Better to not get married at all - although marriage is not a sin (Matt 19:10, I Cor 7:1, 7:27-28, 7:32-34, 7:38).
I particularly like "Marriage consists of one man and one or more women." Think Ralphie Reed'll go for that one?
A Girl Whose Parents Need A Very Public Spanking
You know, I like to remind people that you need a license to cut hair, and what a shame that you only need working ovaries to have a child. Here's a letter I got on Saturday afternoon:
I seriously need your help. Okay, I am 13 years old and i'm ready to have sex. There's just one problem. I'm scared to shave my vagina. I don't know why but i already don't like shaving that much. I tried it once and it hurt like crap. How should i shave it? PLEASE WRITE BACK TO ME. Thank You. --Scared
Hmm, that "culture of abstinence" really seems to be working!
More Of What Passes For Parenting
Another nitwit e-mails me. Most distressingly, she's a parent. Here's her e-mail, word-for-word, except for her daughter's name, which I've removed:
Dear Amy, My daughter (Name Withheld) e-mail you and another columnist in regard to interviewing a columnist for a project assignment for high school. If (Name Withheld) affended you by not putting your e-mail address or name we are sorry. But, the thing you wrote her was uncall for. She is a very good student and was asking for a interview. She did not ask you to do her homework all she was asking for was a little of your time and help in knowing some things that columinst like about there jobs and how you got started. It was a shame the way you responded back to her it should not matter whether she e-mail you or someone else. You are suppose to be professional in handleing your business. What she was asking should have been a honor for you. To hear that she or people are interested in you field of work. And, they wanted to know more aobut it. How can you give advice and not want to give advice to someone who is interested in you professional field of work. My daughter likes to write and she writes very well for a student who just started high school. Also, it should not have matter whether and like the next columist or not she did not need to know that.
Here's my reply. (I love using "Madam," which is a most Gore Vidal-ean way of calling somebody "asshole.")
Madam, I find it weird that you speak for your daughter instead of having her write and speak for herself, which would encourage her to learn to reason and fight her own battles (not that this actually is a battle; not to me, anyway).Regarding your ill-written complaint above, your daughter wrote me and I wrote her back, quite politely declining to participate. Immediately afterward, I noticed that she had not taken the time to write me directly; she'd merely forwarded me an email she'd written to another columnist, and I wrote her again, criticizing her for an apparent lack of thought and/or laziness.
Recently, I helped another girl on her class project (despite my policy of limiting myself to answering requests for advice) because she wrote me an exceptionally intelligent and polite letter, complete with salutation ("Dear Amy"). What you should have communicated to your daughter is not what an awful human being I am, but that writing politely and well increases one's chances of impressing a busy person into replying.
I suggest that the problem is not with me, but with you -- in the way you've raised your daughter, since it appears she is incapable of taking criticism (criticism which seems entirely valid to me), and must bring in mommy to do her writing and thinking for her. I was willing to put in my time for the other girl, again, despite my policy, because I saw effort and smarts in her, from the way she wrote. I saw none of that in your daughter; simply what I perceived to be laziness and a sense of entitlement.
I think so many kids in this country are terribly raised, by parents whose greatest concern seems to be being liked by their kids, and it makes me grateful for the way my parents raised me. (I describe them, fondly, as "loving fascists.")
I'll copy in the initial exchange below. Looking again at her initial letter, I see that it's sloppily written, missing a word, and with "i" instead of "I." Not surprisingly, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Your email to me indicates a poor command of English (understandable if it's your second language), laziness with grammar, spelling, and syntax, as well as "poor me" thinking, about what an "honor" it should be for me to communicate with your daughter after she put very little effort into her email to me.
It was an honor and a pleasure to communicate with the other girl. Getting this e-mail from you now just makes me depressed. Poor girl, your daughter, that she doesn't have parents like mine -- a major reason I'm now a newspaper columnist, not a McDonald's counter person. I'm going to call my parents right now and thank them for not being indulgent jerks. --Amy Alkon
Here's your daughter's original email, which I noticed, too late, that she'd written to another advice columnist (naturally, one whose mind I do not respect) and forwarded to me:
Hello,My name is (Name Withheld). I'm doing a report on the career of advice columnist and i was wondering if you have the time to maybe answer some questions that i have about the career and yourself. I would really appreciate it if you wouldn't mind taking the time to help me out. I would also appreciate it if you could get back to me as soon as possible. Thank You
Name Withheld
Here's my initial reply:
Sorry, but I answer letters for free, and that's my priority; don't have time, unfortunately, to help with homework. Best, -Amy
Squeegee Economics
Steven D. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago with the new book, Freakonomics (second in popularity on Amazon only to Harry Potter), calls into question the commonly held wisdom from 1990s New York City that you take back the streets from squeegee men and drug dealers, and you curb violent crime:
Professor Levitt considers the New York crime story to be an urban legend. Yes, he acknowledges, there are tipping points when people suddenly start acting differently, but why did crime drop in so many other cities that weren't using New York's policing techniques? His new book, written with Stephen J. Dubner, concludes that one big reason was simply the longer prison sentences that kept criminals off the streets of New York and other cities.The prison terms don't explain why crime fell sooner and more sharply in New York than elsewhere, but Professor Levitt accounts for that, too. One reason he cites is that the crack epidemic eased earlier in New York than in other cities. Another, more important, reason is that New York added lots of cops in the early 90's.
But the single most important cause, he says, was an event two decades earlier: the legalization of abortion in New York State in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court.
The result, he maintains, was a huge reduction in the number of children who would have been at greater than average risk of becoming criminals during the 1990's. Growing up as an unwanted child is itself a risk factor, he says, and the women who had abortions were disproportionately likely to be unmarried teenagers with low incomes and poor education -- factors that also increase the risk.
Again, if the "pro-life" people were truly pro-life, they'd all be out adopting crack babies. But, it really isn't about life, is it? It's about forcing their ideology on the rest of us. Thanks, but no thanks.
Rod Is In The Details
Yeah, this has got to get about 2mpg, but if you want to be intimidating, get behind the wheel of this thing, and get up close behind my doll-sized Honda Insight. I will pull over and let you pass. Pull up close behind me in a Hummer and I will merely be irritated.
A Religious War Being Fought From The Floor Of The U.S. Senate
Was Bill Frist elected to uphold the Constitution or Christianity? A New York Times editorial calls Frist's declaration of religious war over the selection of federal court judges "shameful":
Senator Frist is to appear on a telecast sponsored by the Family Research Council, which styles itself a religious organization but is really just another Washington lobbying concern. The message is that the Democrats who oppose a tiny handful of President Bush's judicial nominations are conducting an assault "against people of faith." By that, Senator Frist and his allies do not mean people of all faiths, only those of their faith.It is one thing when private groups foment this kind of intolerance. It is another thing entirely when it's done by the highest-ranking member of the United States Senate, who swore on the Bible to uphold a Constitution that forbids the imposition of religious views on Americans. Unfortunately, Senator Frist and his allies are willing to break down the rules to push through their agenda - in this case, by creating what the senator knows is a false connection between religion and the debate about judges.
Senator Frist and his backers want to take away the sole tool Democrats have for resisting the appointment of unqualified judges: the filibuster. This is not about a majority or even a significant number of Bush nominees; it's about a handful with fringe views or shaky qualifications. But Senator Frist is determined to get judges on the federal bench who are loyal to the Republican fringe and, he hopes, would accept a theocratic test on decisions.
Senator Frist has an even bigger game in mind than the current nominees: the next appointments to the Supreme Court, which the Republican conservatives view as their best chance to outlaw abortion and impose their moral code on the country.
We fully understand that a powerful branch of the Republican Party believes that the last election was won on "moral values." Even if that were true, that's a far cry from voting for one religion to dominate the entire country. President Bush owes it to Americans to stand up and say so.
This Old Mansion
There's that House Of Representatives again, standing up for the downtrodden exceedingly wealthy by passing a bill (for the fourth time in four years) calling for the permanent repeal of the estate tax. A New York Times editorial (in the IHT) shows no pity for the very, very, very rich:
The House proposal would cost the federal government a whopping $290 billion through 2015, according to estimates by Congress' own budget agency. And that's just a start; the costs after that would be explosive. And for what? Repeal would shield the estates of the very wealthiest Americans from the tax. That's the same group that already benefits the most from Bush's tax breaks for dividends and capital gains.Repeal of the estate tax was deemed too expensive in 2001, when the government was still enjoying the Clinton-era budget surplus. So it stands to reason that it's out of the question today, as America's enormous deficits weaken the domestic economy and the country's international economic leadership. But to its proponents, estate-tax repeal is the holy grail of the Republican anti-tax crusade.
The most commonly heard argument against the estate tax - that it represents unfair double taxation - is specious. First, the estate tax does not even kick in until the assets left at death exceed $1.5 million, or $3 million per married couple - and those exemption amounts will more than double by 2009. So most Americans never even have to think about the estate tax, let alone worry about it coming on top of some other tax.
Second, much of the wealth transferred at death has never been taxed. That's because capital gains on assets like houses, stocks and bonds are not taxed until the asset is sold. Obviously, if you inherit, say, a house, its owner didn't sell it, so never paid any capital gains tax on it.
Another popular argument against the estate tax - that the rate is so high the government is basically confiscating your property - is also a sham. Estate tax rates currently top out at 47 percent. But those rates don't even start to apply until an estate tops the multimillion-dollar exemption.
Poor dears, will you be eating your cat food portions out of diamond and platinum encrusted dishes? Sniff, sniff. Now, don't get me wrong -- I think we're overtaxed, and pay for lots of really dumb stuff, but the way to solve our immediate tax burden isn't to rush in to help the exceedingly wealthy.
A Day For People With Engaged Brains
Yes, it's the National Day Of Reason:
Why a "National Day of Reason?"Many who value the separation of church and state have sought an appropriate response to the federally-funded National Day of Prayer, an annual abuse of the constitution. Nontheistic Americans (including freethinkers, humanists, atheists and agnostics), along with many traditionally religious allies, view such government-sanctioned sectarianism as unduly exclusionary.
A consortium of leaders from within the community of reason endorsed the idea of a National Day of Reason. This observance is held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the first Thursday in May (5 May 2005). The goal of this effort is to celebrate reason - a concept all Americans can support - and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.
I'm disappointed to report that my governator, for whom I voted, despite his dumbass choice of vehicles, endorsed the National Day Of Irrationality.
Cell Phonies
An increasing number of people are reaching out and touching no one, writes Amy Harmon in The New York Times:
THE cashier had already rung up Keri Wooster's items when Ms. Wooster realized she didn't have her wallet. She dashed to her car and returned empty-handed to face the line of fidgeting customers she had kept waiting, a cellphone pressed to her ear. "Jordan, did you take my wallet out of my purse?" she asked in parental exasperation, as she made her way back to the checkout counter. "I'm holding up this line! You need to put things back where you find them."Ms. Wooster, who has no children, was not actually talking to a Jordan, or indeed to anyone at all. But her monologue served its purpose, eliciting sympathetic looks from the frustrated crowd at her local Wal-Mart.
"My instincts just took over," Ms Wooster, 28, who lives in Houston, said later. "Everyone was like, 'Oh, kids.' "
Ms. Wooster is by no means alone in the practice of cellphone subterfuge. As cellular phone conversations have permeated public space, so, it seems, have fake cellular phone conversations.
How many? It is hard to say. But James E. Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University, says his classroom research suggests that plenty of the people talking on the phone around you are really faking it. In one survey Dr. Katz conducted, more than a quarter of his students said they made fake calls. He found the number hard to believe. Then in another class 27 of 29 students said they did it.
"People are turning the technology on its head," Dr. Katz said. "They are taking a device that was designed to talk to people who are far away and using it to communicate with people who are directly around them."
In case you are wondering, in between your shouting, for faux or real, into your cell phone, my hostility is entirely genuine.
Felony Pain Relief
Montel Williams is a talk-show host -- and a criminal in 40 states:
My crime? Using the medicine that has allowed me to lead a normal life, despite having multiple sclerosis: medical marijuana.Being diagnosed with MS in 1999 felt like a death sentence. I doubted my ability to function as a father, son, brother, friend, talk-show host and producer. I honestly couldn't see a future. I had always taken excellent care of my body; I'd worked out, followed a healthy diet and looked the picture of health. What no one could see was the mind-numbing pain that seared through my legs, as if I were being stabbed with hot pokers.
My doctors wrote me prescriptions for some of the strongest painkillers available. I took Percocet, Vicodin and Oxycontin on a regular basis, two at a time, every three or four hours. I was knowingly risking overdose just trying to make the pain bearable. In my desperation, I even tried morphine. Yet these powerful, expensive drugs brought no relief.
I couldn't sleep. I was agitated; my legs kicked involuntarily in bed, and the pain was so bad I found myself crying in the middle of the night. And all these heavy-duty narcotics made me nearly incoherent; I couldn't take them when I had to work because they turned me into a zombie. Worse, these drugs are all highly addictive. I did not want to become a junkie, wasted and out of control. I spiraled deeper into a black hole of depression.
In Climbing Higher, my book on living with MS, I write in detail about the severe mental and physical pain that I experienced. It was so bad that I twice attempted suicide.
Finally, someone suggested that I try smoking a little marijuana before going to bed, saying that it might help me fall asleep. Skeptical but desperate, I tried it. Three puffs and within minutes the excruciating pain in my legs subsided. I had my first restful sleep in months. The effect was miraculous.
But the federal government classifies marijuana in the same category as LSD, PCP and heroin -- considered unsafe to use even under medical supervision. Physicians are allowed to prescribe cocaine, morphine and methamphetamine, but not marijuana.
Outrageous. Where are all those pro-life legislators? Shouldn't they be falling all over themselves proposing pot legalization -- at the very least, for suffering people in medical need?
P.S. Sorry so late posting today -- went to the court date for the guy who did the hit-and-run on my car, but the prosecutor said his lawyer couldn't make it, so they're postponing. More news on that to come!
Cory Doctorow's Dangerous Friends
Cory Doctorow is a novelist, a visiting lecturer at Yale, a fellow at Stanhope Center in London, a Contributing Writer to Wired Magazine, a columnist for Popular Science, co-editor of the vastly popular blog, BoingBoing, and the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He jets around the globe often enough to be a Platinum frequent flyer on American Airlines. That didn't stop him from having an American Airlines security guard at London Gatwick demand he produce a dossier of his friends' names and addresses before he'd be allowed to fly. The whole disturbing story, still awaiting a reply of actual substance from American Airlines, is posted here .
The Forged Documents That Really Matter
Dan Rather? Yawwwwn. How about the documents that justified getting into the Iraq war? My pal Ian Masters had Vincent Cannistraro, the former Director of National Security Council Intelligence under Ronald Reagan (’84-’87) and the former Chief of Operations of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, on his show yesterday. Here's the bit from the show excerpted by the Yurica Report:
In the interview, Mr. Cannistraro made a number of withering observations on the Bush administration and the process failures that led to war.In perhaps the interview's most startling moment, Cannistraro asserts that the famous forged "Niger documents," cited by President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address as proof of Saddam Hussein's intention to develop nuclear-weapons, "were fabricated in the United States." This charge has not been previously made publicly by a person of Cannistraro's standing, authority and stature.
When interviewer Ian Masters asked if he would name the person or persons involved in the forgery, Cannistraro declined. Masters pressed, asking Cannistraro if he would respond to the proffered name of a well-known national security operative, who had previously been fired from the Reagan National Security Council and was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Cannistraro responded by saying "you're very close." The person about whom Mr. Cannistraro made that comment was cited by the BBC as an "ultra neo-conservative." This individual has strong ties to the Vice President's office and to the Pentagon.
The forged "Niger documents" are significant, because they justified, in part, America's "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq. The Iraq war--two-years on--has cost over 1,500 American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, well over a hundred billion dollars and, many journalists and commentators believe, unprecedented loss of U.S. prestige worldwide and the nation's immersion in a hopeless Iraqi quagmire--all of which define the worst foreign-policy debacle in American history.
Some quotes by Vincent Cannistraro from the Ian Masters interview transcript:
"So, yes, the NIE, which as we know now was corrupted by false intelligence and in some cases fabricated—deliberately fabricated—information, it played a critical role in getting the US Senate to vote in favor of war with Iraq."
"This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet, either from this report, or from any other report, who fabricated the documents. The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of mass destruction. "
"The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians."
"That’s why we were misled into saying what we did say, and doing what we did do . . . The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the US government adopted. It was a policy-based decision that drove the intelligence, and not the other way around. And that’s, of course, the reverse of the process. You had a lot of people who played along to get along."
The full transcript is here.
And God Annointed Them With Shell, And Exxon, And Texaco...
Now, have you ever met an atheist this dim?
A Texas oilman is using his Bible as a guide to finding oil in the Holy Land.John Brown, a born-again Christian and founder of Zion Oil & Gas of Dallas, can quote chapter and verse about his latest drilling venture in Israel, where his company has an oil and gas exploration license covering 96,000 acres.
“Most blessed of sons be Asher. Let him be favored by his brothers and let him dip his foot in oil,” Brown quotes from Moses’s blessing to one of the 12 Tribes of Israel in Deuteronomy 33:24.
Ed Brayton straightens him out:
How absurd. The men who wrote the bible would not even have known what oil (petroleum, that is) was, nor, one would think, would they even have had a word for it. The Hebrew word in this passage is shemen. Strong's Concordance defines this word as "grease, especially liquid (as from the olive, often perfumed)", which is consistent with biblical notions of annointing and a culture in which washing and annointing one's feet was a sign of wealth. It has precisely nothing to do with petroleum. Proof yet again that PT Barnum was an optimist. Then again, I've always found it amusing that God allegedly led his "chosen people" to a "promised land" that just happened to be practically the only spot in the Middle East without any oil.
All together now for John Brown: DUH!
No, George, Let's Pick The Worst Person For The Job!
Condoleezza Rice probably still had jet lag from giving speeches around Europe about how we'd make an effort to be a little less...unilateral...when George Bush hauled off and nominated John Bolton as our ambassador to the U.N. Now, there's credibility for you! The New York Times editorial board lays out a few reasons why Bolton's the wrong man for the job:
Mr. Bolton stands out because he is not only bad in a policy sense, but also unqualified for the post to which he's been named. At a minimum, the United States representative to the United Nations should be a person who believes it is a good idea. Mr. Bolton has never made secret his disdain for the United Nations, for multilateralism and for consensus-seeking diplomacy in general.When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins taking testimony on Mr. Bolton's nomination next week, it is also expected to hear other charges about his fitness, like allegations that when he was under secretary of state for arms control, he tried to distort intelligence reports by intimidating analysts who disagreed with him. After the invasion of Iraq, complaints that top advisers to the president had attempted to make intelligence reports conform to a preconceived conclusion about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were often aimed in Mr. Bolton's direction.
All of this is very much to the point. When the country chooses an ambassador to the United Nations, it ought to avoid picking someone whose bullying style of leadership symbolizes everything that created the current estrangement between the United States and most of the world. One of the goals of Mr. Bush's second term was supposed to be rapprochement with other nations, whose assistance the United States desperately needs to curb the proliferation of the real weapons of mass destruction.
You know, if George Bush were an eighth grader instead of president, he'd be flunking like mad. Unfortunately, in the political world, stupidity, irrationality, and incompetence usually lead one to flunk upward.
Poor, Persecuted Campus Conservatives
In Florida, and across the country, writes Joe Follick in the Lakeland Ledger, right-wingers are trying to pass a bill like the one approved by a House committee in Florida, to guarantee "free inquiry and free speech" in college classes. Passage should mean the end of intellectual persecution on campus like that endured by the Florida bill's sponsor, Ocala Republican Rep. Dennis Baxley:
Baxley recalled his first day in an anthropology class at Florida State University when the professor said, "Evolution is a fact. There's no missing link. I don't want to hear any talk about intelligent design and if you don't like that, there's the door.
Heard Of "Peak Oil"?
Simply put, it's when the oil wells start running dry:
Peak Oil is the point in time when extraction of oil from the earth reaches its highest point and then begins to decline. We won't be able to say with certainty when we have reached peak oil until after the fact. Many experts say we have already reached the peak. Others say not yet, but within the next few years.What does Peak Oil herald? It heralds the end of cheap energy.
A shame we have a president who gets driven around in a gigantic, black SUV instead of one with the sense to get behind alternative energy in a big way.
Even Butt Ugly Goes For Way Above List Price
People are going nuts for the Prius, which, unlike my darling, Tom Swiftian hybrid Honda Insight, is shaped like a tin can somebody stepped on, but does carry four passengers. My car, the perfect transportation for a misanthrope, only carries one (and weighs in at an exceptionally svelte 1,900 pounds -- slightly more than a gold-hubcapped tire on a gas-sucking SUV). Here's a report on Prius sales from CNN/Money Magazine:
Demand for the gas-electric hybrid Prius is so great that some used Priuses are selling for more than the list price for a new one, according to a published report.USA Today reported Monday that buyers who want to avoid the typical two-month waiting period for the hot Toyota model are willing to pay the premium. Waits at some dealerships can be considerably longer. The market for the used Prius is so strong that some owners are trying to sell them for more than they paid for them.
The paper said that record gasoline prices is one reason for the strong demand. The Prius, which uses an electric motor in addition to a gasoline engine, gets an average of 51 miles per gallon on the highway and 60 mpg in the city, reversing the mileage of the typical gasoline-only vehicle that gets better mileage on the highway.
The paper said that 2005 Prius also has the highest owner satisfaction of any 2005 model, according to an owner survey by Consumer Reports magazine, meaning that relatively few of the cars are available on the market.
The buyers of new Priuses are also paying above the list price for the cars, which is helping to support the price of the used cars. The new car lists for $20,975 to $26,640, Toyota says.
My car is a SULEV -- a Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle -- and the highest mileage (commercially available) car on the road. My other car is a pair of running shoes. (Seriously, I run errands while running.) What's yours?
Jesse Helms' Go-To Guy Ties The Knot
But not to whom you'd think. Ace GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein married his boyfriend in a civil ceremony in Massachusetts this December. Surprise, surprise, according to The New York Times' Adam Nagourney, he did it to make sure he and his partner had the same benefits available to hetero couples:
"I believe that visitation rights, health care benefits and other human relationship contracts that are taken for granted by all married people should be available to partners," he said.
If I feel the same way, does that make me a Republican consultant?
Decomposing The Question
When I walked in the door, some talking face on TV made the idiotic remark that now, Grace Kelly and the much more recently-dead Prince Ranier will be "reunited." Really? Reunited where? At Saks Fifth Avenue? At a Black Eyed Peas' concert? In a cheap nail salon? There's no more evidence that they'll be in that made-up place called "heaven" than any of those places.
She Just Likes 'Em Better Naked
Lena pointed out this fantastic story, by Alex Witchel, about Jane Juska, now 70, who advertised for a man in the New York Review of Books:
"Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."...Over the course of a month, she received 63 responses and spent the better part of a year following them up, an experience she recounts in her first book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance" (Villard). It turns out that Ms. Juska did indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of men she liked, and still does, having seen one of them as recently as that morning. He's 35. Which might explain the lower-back problem.
"I didn't want to think, `What if I never had sex with a man again?' " Ms. Juska recalled of her decision to place the ad. "I didn't want to just sit there and think, `Wouldn't it be nice, if?' "
...it has been women, not men, whose responses to Ms. Juska's adventure have been the most harsh. "I did a reading in Berkeley for mostly women," Ms. Juska said. "I said that the age range of the men in the book went from 84 to 32. And one woman said about the 32-year-old, `He must have been short and ugly.' I said, `Actually, he's tall and handsome.' Another said, `Then what would he want with you?' She shrugged. "When women in particular hear about what I've done, the question which unbidden comes to them is, `What have I done with my life?' " she continued. "And lots of people at my age don't want to go back and look at it. That's why they're so nuts about their grandchildren. It keeps the focus off them."
Ms. Juska said she knows other women her age or older who have tried their luck online, at match.com. "One woman I know is just infuriated because she met this very nice man online who turned out to be 84 and he hadn't told her. I said she was ageist and she said she was only mad that he lied. And I said, `Come on now.' But most of the women insist on asking me, `Didn't you really do this because you wanted to get married?' Ms. Juska shook her head. "The institution of marriage does not interest me," she said firmly. "I did get a marriage proposal, but I said no. I'd have to give up the others, then. I'd have to give up too much."
..."I had no hope of it turning out to be anything like this," she said. "I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least. But I never expected to have intimate friendships with extraordinary men. True, I've met some men who are not kind or thoughtful, but I've also met men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true." Her smile was wry. "Which is to say, I guess I found out that men are people."
She leaned over then to pick up her napkin and said something that was muffled. What was that? She sat up straight and spoke quite clearly. "They're just the kind of people I like better naked," she said.
So Varicose But Yet So Far
They say 50 is the new 40. Apparently, for some, 80 is the new 22:
was wondering if you could help me? I really want to have sex with an old granny but don't no how to find and meet these grannies in my area? I live in norwich, england and I'm 20 years old. really i want to meet women over 60 for sex! can you help me?thank you john x
Help John out. With advice, I mean. Nobody wants to see you shake your wattle.
Let's Go Nuclear
So says a surprising advocate, Whole Earth Catalog and the Well founder Stewart Brand, in technologyreview.com:
Can climate change be slowed and catastrophe avoided? They can to the degree that humanity influences climate dynamics. The primary cause of global climate change is our burning of fossil fuels for energy.So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.
Nuclear certainly has problems—accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a “hydrogen economy,” combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.
The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see “A New Vision for Nuclear Waste,” December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That’s the kind of idea that can go from “Impractical!” to “Necessary!” in a season, depending on world events.
The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its favor—Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore—have been privately anathematized by other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public debate, which so far has not been welcome.
A Judge For Dr. Kevorkian
The guy who helped his cancer-stricken friend kill himself gets granted a special probation in which his conviction can be wiped from state records after a year, says an AP report:
"Mr. Williams, I can only say to you, I'm glad it wasn't me put in your position that day," Litchfield Superior Court Judge Robert C. Brunetti said.Williams, of Cornwall, was charged with second-degree manslaughter after helping his friend, John T. Welles, 66, commit suicide in June. Welles, a former Marine who had not seen a doctor in decades, was dying of prostate cancer.
Williams, 74, cleaned a gun, carried it outside and discussed with Welles the most effective spot to aim the weapon, authorities said.
Relatives of Welles were among those in court to support Williams.
"I was holding my breath," Barbara Bartlett, Welles' sister, told The Hartford Courant. "I wish it had never happened but it did and it came out for the best. I think Huntington is a wonderful, wonderful man and he did a wonderful favor for my brother."
How come you can do or dispose of, as you wish, with your house, car, or your TV, but the most fundamental thing you possess -- your life, of course -- is the one thing you don't "own"? It's sick that Dr. Kevorkian is in jail, and probably will be for the rest of his life, when he should be busy, busy, busy helping people off themselves.
Stunt Economics
When Bush took a little tour of the office of the federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he gave a report on what he saw. The New York Times called it "a shameless photo-op," meant to persuade the American people to back his Social Security plan:
Imagine this: On his next trip to Japan, President George W. Bush visits the vault at the Bank of Japan, where that country's $712 billion in U.S. government bonds is stored. There, as the cameras roll, he announces that the bonds, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, are, in fact, worthless IOUs. He does the same thing when he visits China and so on around the world, until he has personally repudiated the entire $2 trillion of U.S. debt held by foreigners.Bush rehearsed just that act on Tuesday, when he visited the office of the federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He posed next to a file cabinet that holds the $1.7 trillion in Treasury securities that make up the Social Security trust fund. He tossed off a comment to the effect that the bonds were not "real assets." Later, in a speech at a nearby university, he said: "There is no trust fund. Just IOUs that I saw firsthand."
...Fortunately, the governments, institutions and individuals who hold U.S. debt can tell a publicity stunt from a policy statement. Still, casting aspersions on a basic obligation of the U.S. government is insulting and irresponsible.
Perhaps governments, insitutions, and individuals holding U.S. debt can tell, but Bush's base, best represented by the lying, rabble-rousing Sean Hannity's audience, has to be pretty well fooled.
Ladies Having Litters For The Lord
As long as we're all mewling about the Pope's death, let's take a moment to read an excerpt from this Reuters story and remember some of his work:
Rosa Maria Domingos Soares, a 52-year-old Brazilian housemaid and passionate Catholic, fondly remembers her grandparents' family.They had 12 children and never used contraception, she said. But that is out of the question nowadays.
"A big family is beautiful, but today one must use some sort of contraception due to the high costs of education and food, as well as violence. I have three children, but now I think I should not have had that many," Soares said.
From Latin America to Asia and Africa, Catholics struggling to care for large families amid grinding poverty and an AIDS pandemic faced a dilemma over Pope John Paul II's opposition to contraception. Some hope that will change under his successor.
...Veronica Schiappacasse, a researcher with Chile's Reproductive Health Institute, said church attacks on sex education in schools and making birth control available to young people have contributed to a jump in teen pregnancies.
As activists await the views of a new pope on contraception, Rosario Ramirez, a 54-year-old woman who sells potato chips in hot sauce outside the Mexico City Cathedral, looks at it simply.
"It's one's own decision. I have nine children because I never used any birth control. God gives them to us, he decides, and we do our part," she said.
Starve ya little fuckers, starve!
Amen.
Reddd Is The New Blacklisted
I got the message, via e-mail, that the Chinese government has, apparently, taken an interest in my work!
Hi Amy...guess what? Your site has made the "censored list" in China! I found this out from a friend of mine, an American who's working over there for a year. He read your blog periodically while living in the States, but can't access your site much of the time in China. Congratulations!
Amy Alkon. Proud to be blacklisted by the government of China!
Now, there is a tagline!
Who Owns Your Privacy?
Well, here's a novel concept!...quoted from an article by Kevin J. O'Brien, in the IHT:
"In Europe, data is owned by the person to whom it relates. In the United States, data becomes the property of the company which collects it," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a London-based lobbying group.
Last month, during the ChoicePoint scandal, where 145,000 people had their personal data stolen by hackers, I was worried I might be one of the many Californians among that number. So far, so good. But, hey, how is it -- and more important, why is it -- that so many people and companies are granted the rights to publish and disseminate our personal details?
Felony Pottymouth
A Republican congressman, F. James Sensenbrenner, wants to start throwing people in jail for broadcast "decency" violations. He calls this "a more efficient way to enforce the indency regulations." My idea of indecency regulation would involve voting nanny-state morons like this out of government as soon as possible.
Your Moral Leader
Should it really be your pharmacist? Here's yet another story, this time, by Jake Tapper and Avery Miller at ABC, about pharmacists who believe life begins at conception bullying women:
Pharmacy counters are emerging as the latest battleground in the culture wars. Anecdotally, an increasing number of pharmacists have been refusing to fill prescriptions for the "morning-after" pill and other birth control medication they oppose on moral or religious grounds.In November, Karen Romano's doctor wrote her a prescription after she suffered complications from a miscarriage. But her Los Angeles pharmacist only agreed to give her the medicine after he made sure it was not going to be used to induce an abortion.
"I was absolutely mortified that this man was trying to delve into my most intimate and painful affairs to impose his own moral agenda," Romano told ABC News.
Charlie Green owns two pharmacies in Stockton, Calif., that do not carry emergency contraception — a high dosage of the birth control pill that is also known as the "morning-after pill" — because those medications can remove a fertilized egg.
"Life begins in my point of view when the sperm and the egg come together, and anything that stops that continued growth or the implantation — as far as I'm concerned — takes the life of that potential human being," Green said.
Luckily, there are a few voices of reason out there:
Last week, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich issued a temporary order requiring pharmacists to fill every prescription."We are not going to allow people to make political statements at the expense of the access to health care that women deserve," Blagojevich told ABC News.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's an excerpt from a Reuters story:
Easy access to a "morning after pill" for contraception does not influence the degree to which women have unprotected sex, according to a study published on Tuesday."While many policymakers and even some health care providers are worried that young women will abuse emergency contraception if they have easy access, our study shows they actually don't use it as much as we would hope," said Tina Raine, a physician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who headed the research.
"Sadly, these data show us we are still not influencing young women to take fewer risks in their sexual behavior," she added. "Given that only a fraction of the women (in the study) having unprotected sex used emergency contraception, it seems we need to spend our energy trying to make it easier for these women to get contraception, not harder."
Emergency contraception is available without a prescription at some drug stores in six states — Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, New Mexico, and Washington. Last year, U.S. regulators refused to allow Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. to sell its emergency contraceptive, Plan B, without a prescription.
Well, they say it's available in these states "without a prescription," but it's not available without a major hassle. You actually have to go to some location, usually outside the pharmacy, I believe, and get a pregnancy test before they'll give you the pills. Again, constrast this to France, where women are not infantilized, and you can just march into a pharmacy and ask for a box. (You have to ask for aspirin, too, there -- pills and medicine tend to be behind the counter.) But, no pharmacist there is going to start injecting his religious beliefs into your personal, medical affairs. Which is as it should be!
What would happen if we eased up on the regulation here -- or maybe even passed them out like candy? Well check out this data from the Reuters story linked above:
... Women given the morning after pill in advance were almost twice as likely to use it as those who were told to obtain the drug from a clinic, the report said.Experts have estimated that half of the 3.5 million unintended pregnancies that occur each year in the United States could be averted if emergency contraception were readily available, the study said.
Clearly, the "right-to-life" people aren't correctly named. It's "right-to-meddle-in-your-life" that they're really interested in, not stopping unwanted pregnancies.
What's Wrong With Knocking Off Somebody Else's Design?
Ask handbag designer Kathrine Baumann. Glen Beres interviewed her on the topic for Idex Magazine:
“Any time someone buys something that’s not authentic, they are damaging the original creator’s business and future,” Baumann said. “The financial toll on companies and their employees can be devastating. When you invest thousands of dollars into researching and developing a piece, and counterfeiters come along with low-cost imitations a few weeks later, you never recoup your original investment. It literally takes food off the table for your employees and compromises the security of their families. Some legitimate designers have been forced to lay off employees or file for bankruptcy because they’ve been victims of counterfeiting.”Baumann’s campaign against infringers started after a collector came up to her during a trunk show at Henri Bendel in New York City to report seeing numerous knockoffs of her designs in local stores near Bendel’s Fifth Avenue location.
At first, Baumann didn’t believe it. Because her designs were handmade originals that were copyrighted, she thought she was protected. But the collector insisted, so a curious Baumann set out with her sister-in-law in tow to visit some of the stores in question. What she found completely horrified her.
“At first I felt devastated; I had never encountered anything like this in my life,” she recalled. “But then I got angry and decided to fight back.”
Designers and manufacturers need to be even more aggressive and vigilant in protecting their original designs than in the past, Baumann learned, because infringers have become more brazen and more technologically proficient in knocking them off. For instance, counterfeiters can snap a photo of a product at a trade show, upload and transmit the image to their overseas factory, and have it appear in a catalog before the original even makes it into stores. The Internet is another vehicle that has helped counterfeiters because it’s fast, cheap and easy to use. Baumann noted that counterfeiters can log onto a designer’s site, download images of the designer’s product, e-mail those images directly to their own factory, and have the design copied and on the street in a matter of weeks.
She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not!
I'm starting to feel like a movie star.
After turning increasingly green while Cathy Seipp accumulated not one, but two nutwad sites about her, I finally have one of my own. Well, I had it a few days ago, actually, but the woman who put it up ripped off a bunch of photos I own (including my copyrighted masthead photos, a photo Lena took of me holding up soup, another photo my boyfriend took of me in this green dress, and a photo I took of my wee dog), so she was forced to take it down after I used verrrry comprehensible language to make her understand that one can't just copy photos one doesn't own and put them up on one's site.
It turns out that she also has some difficulty with the definition of libel (for about the 20th time, you can't libel somebody with an opinion, dear), but I seem incapable of communicating to her that opinions are neither true nor false; merely what somebody thinks. Anyway, check out her site complaining about me complaining that she's unethical for knocking off dresses; it's quite funny. Here's a post about what led to it.
Photo by Gregg Sutter. Rights to run it are available, but a note to the unscrupulous: Please, no thieving!
"Will Work To End Poverty Poetry"
That's how I defaced a sign at our local hippie haus of coffee, in protest. Slate has the good taste to celebrate "Poetry Month" by "publishing each week a poem that derogates poetry itself or kvetches about bad poetry or denounces public taste in poetry." The first is A FIT OF RIME AGAINST RIME, by Ben Jonson, at the link above.
It's not that I have anything against good poetry, it's just that there's so little of it around.
Desperately Out-Of-It Housewives
In The New York Times, Mike McIntyre reveals that a lot of the biggest contributors for New York City mayoral candidates had no idea that they "gave at the office":
The most generous campaign contributors - the ones who write the fattest checks to candidates for mayor of New York City - are not chief executives, doctors or lawyers. They are not even lobbyists.They are women who call themselves homemakers, and some of them apparently do not realize just how generous they have been.
It turns out that many of them - some of whom live outside the city and may not be terribly invested in the outcome of races here - made their $4,950 contributions, the legal maximum, at the behest of deep-pocketed spouses with business interests in the city.
They are people like Helaine Gould of Long Island, who, when asked last week why she contributed $4,950 to Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker and a Democratic candidate for mayor, referred questions to her spouse's real estate investment firm.
"That was handled through my husband's office," she said. "I'm not familiar with it."
Hortense said about the same. So did Anna:
Hortense Schur, reached by telephone in Boca Raton, Fla., said her $4,950 contribution to Fernando Ferrer, a Democratic mayoral candidate, "was really not mine, it's my husband's. I don't know much about it." She was one of nine members of the Schur family, some of whom are involved in manufacturing and real estate in New York, who each wrote $4,950 checks to the Ferrer campaign.Another Ferrer contributor, Anna Cuneo of West Harrison, N.Y., whose husband is one of two executives at a Manhattan construction company who contributed to Mr. Ferrer, seemed unprepared for questions about her check.
"I'm going to have to get back to you," she said. "And this was a contribution to whom?"
Certainly, some contributors who describe themselves as homemakers choose to support a particular candidate for reasons other than their spouses' business or political interests. But instances of a woman joining her husband in writing big checks to his favored candidate - effectively doubling what he is able to contribute - are common and well documented.
Ladies, perhaps you hadn't heard, but a lot of women worked really hard to get us the vote, and allow us into the political process. Now's no time to move back to Stepford!
Eat The Poor!
George Bush's "culture of life" is a bit different from the late Pope's, writes Amy Sullivan on Salon:
You could be forgiven for thinking that "culture of life" was a concept created not by John Paul II but by George W. Bush. Few people have done have more to popularize the phrase -- if not its correct spirit -- than our current president, who used it even before his first presidential campaign in 2000. While the use of "culture of life" was almost always intended to communicate Bush's position on abortion, it was actually part of a larger strategy to reach out to Catholic voters.The phrase was a central part of what is arguably John Paul II's best-known encyclical, Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life"), which he released in 1995. Bush's savvy Catholic advisors -- including conservatives Deal Hudson and Tim Goeglein -- knew that the phrase would immediately resonate with Catholic voters while indicating nothing more than vague pro-life sentiments to non-Catholics. Bush's communications staff did the same thing with Protestant hymns and phrases, using code words that went over the heads of those who didn't recognize them while resonating deeply with those who did.
During Bush's tenure, the phrase has been employed in the service of opposing abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and -- most recently and publicly -- the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. When, in the third presidential debate, Bob Schieffer asked the candidates a question about abortion, the first words out of Bush's mouth were: "I think it's important to promote a culture of life." A quick Internet search for the words "John Kerry and culture of life" and then "Tom DeLay and culture of life" revealed that the phrase is most often used by conservatives to attack Democrats who "flout the culture of life" and by liberals to sneer at Republicans and their "culture-of-life cronies." The culture of life has become cemented in American conventional wisdom as equaling conservative social issues.
But a fair look at John Paul II's use of the phrase and his political priorities must conclude that although he was undoubtedly concerned about abortion and stem-cell research and euthanasia, that list is far from complete. The pontiff also wrote about "the dignity and rights of those who work," and he spoke out against the widening gap between the world's rich and poor. He opposed both Gulf Wars in no uncertain terms and strongly communicated his outrage when the abuse at Abu Ghraib was revealed. During a 1999 visit to the United States, John Paul II spoke out against the death penalty, calling the punishment "cruel and unnecessary" and successfully petitioning for the commutation of a death sentence for a Missouri prisoner when he spoke in St. Louis.
Anti-death penalty, antiabortion, antiwar, anti-stem-cell, pro-worker, pro-poor, pro-sick. It's hard to think of any American politician whose positions reflect the entirety of John Paul II's "life" concerns. Even the American Catholic Church doesn't always reflect the pope's priorities. While John Paul II applied a fairly consistent ethic of life -- what the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin called the "seamless garment of life" -- the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a different stance. In 1998, the conference issued a letter called "Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics" in which the bishops asserted that failure to following church teaching on abortion was more serious than any other issue, implying that a Catholic politician could neglect all other "life" issues and still be considered a good Catholic as long as he opposed abortion; at the same time, no amount of work for the poor or imprisoned or sick could save a pro-choice Catholic.
Yesterday, I saw a guy who'd just parked his car, clearly frustrated by the lurking meter maid and his inability to find change anywhere on his body. He looked flustered, and in a hurry, so I came over and offered to put a quarter in his meter. I turned out he needed a dollar's worth of time. I put the money in, not expecting a dollar back. He then realized he had a dollar bill in his wallet, which he gave me. A woman who saw the whole exchange came over to me and said, smiling broadly, "God brought you to him!" When I told her, number one, I'm an atheist, and number two, god had nothing to do with it, she asked me, "Aren't you worried about going to hell?" "No," I said, "And astonishingly, I manage to be a nice person from time to time despite that."
Luckily, Literacy Is On Our Side
Hate, primitive thinking, and a second grade education seem to go together. Some nutbag just posted this little gem on my blog entry, The Asshole Of Evil, a blog item that challenges the late Pope's notion that gay marriage is part of "the ideology of evil," insidiously threatening society:
You'r websight should be shout down. Pope was tealing like it's of course bunch homesexsuals can take it, go ask revernd Billy Grahm how he feals about you Homesexuals he will say the same thing Pope it's mortal wrong, I hope enjoy hell when all die because God will not except Fags, Dikes in Haven, Enjoy your time in Hell
Lemme tell you, my best friend, who happens to be a man, is in love with another man, and the only threat to society I can see is collective sugar shock from watching them look into each other's eyes. Not that there is a hell, far as I can see, but if you're going to take bets on who earns entry, my money is on a guy pasting "I hate homos"-type messages on my Web site, not my best friend, who got a Ph.D. so he could help poor people get better medical care. PS Moreover, if there is a "mortal wrong," it was on the Pope's end, for not demoting Cardinal Mahony to toilet scrubber in some out-of-the-way monastery, as a reward for sweeping all those child-molesting priests under the rug.
A Man And His Hoggie
Here's the bike of a fellow you wouldn't want to run into in some dark corner of F.A.O. Schwartz.
Just Say Ass
Last night, Bill Maher did a hilarious monologue on the suprising successes of the abstinence only movement, the text of which I just stumbled onto on Salon:
New Rule: Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids.But that's not all -- taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school?
Seriously, when I was a teenager, the only kids having anal intercourse were the ones who missed. My idea of lubrication was oiling my bike chain. If I had known I could have been getting porn star sex the same year I took Algebra II, simply by joining up with the Christian right, I'd have been so down with Jesus they would have had to pry me out of the pew.
...Is there any greater irony than the fact that the Christian Right actually got their precious little adolescent daughters to say to their freshly scrubbed boyfriends: "Please, I want to remain pure for my wedding night, so only in the ass. Then I'll blow you." Well, at least these kids are really thinking outside the box.
Hugs, Not Drugs
Excellent editorial in the New York Times deriding the fundamentalist pharmacists who refuse to give women their "lawfully prescribed" birth control pills:
Scattered reports suggest that a growing number of pharmacists around the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or morning-after birth control pills because of moral or religious objections. Although the refusals are cast as important matters of conscience for self-described "pro-life" pharmacists, they have the pernicious effect of delaying, and sometimes even denying, a woman's access to medications that may be urgently needed. This is an intolerable abuse of power by pharmacists who have no business forcing their own moral or ethical views onto customers who may not share them. Any pharmacist who cannot dispense medicines lawfully prescribed by a doctor should find another line of work.
No biggie, some will say; women can just drag their asses from pharmacy to pharmacy to pharmacy until they find a pharmacist who isn't a wild-eyed religious nut:
In rural areas there may not be another pharmacy nearby, so customers who are turned away may go without the medication or waste time finding another pharmacy. In the case of the morning-after pills, which work best in the first 12 to 24 hours after a sexual encounter, delay could render the treatment ineffective. Indeed, pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for morning-after pills are inadvertently strengthening the case for providing them as nonprescription medicines on the open shelves. Such availability would allow women to get the pills promptly without going first to a doctor and then to a potentially obstructionist pharmacist.
...Which is exactly how birth control pills should be available. I mean, come on, why are they locked away like the crown jewels? Hmm, perhaps because we (and I mean, the "we" that includes excessive influence from people with irrational belief in god and all the trimmings) aren't really all that interested in preventing abortion? Because "we" really want to see women become the baby pods "god" meant them to be?
Whoopie! The Iraq "Intelligence" Report Is Out!
Too bad, says a New York Times editorial, that there was no Thomas Kean on the panel, like there was on the September 11 commission, to battle the White House's stonewalling:
Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue - how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: The panel was "not authorized" to look at this question, so it didn't bother. The report says the panel "interviewed a host of current and former policymakers" about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not "review how policymakers subsequently used that information." (We can just see it - an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: "Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We're not authorized to know what you did.")...The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were "dead wrong" because the intelligence was old or from dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Saddam was a threat. But we knew that.
The panel said timidly that "it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." But it utterly ignored the way Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
Lie Detector For Online Dating
Regina Lynn writes in Wired about a site called TrueDater.com, where people post reviews of people they've met through online dating sites:
It's like Amazon.com, only instead of books, you're reviewing people. More specifically, you are reviewing their ability to represent themselves online.The goal here is not to rate (or berate) the person, but to compare how he or she matched the profile that got your attention. Does she look like her pictures? Is he really 6 feet tall? Could she quote from every Monty Python skit you've ever seen, or is she trying to fake it with five snippets from The Holy Grail?
Currently, you can read and submit reviews for members of Match.com, JDate and AmericanSingles.com. To post a review, you indicate which dating site they belong to and enter their profile ID. Rate them with a "yes" (they tell the truth in their profiles) or a "no," and add a few words of explanation.
"Very open, fun and is really cute in all the right places," we learn about one woman who gets a "yes."
"Major baggage and no drive," opines a woman about a man she rated "no."
"His dog is most likely the best part of him," says another disenchanted woman. In fact, some of the reviews are scathing enough to make you wonder how the reviewer didn't catch a clue before the connection escalated into a date.
The site will let you browse a few without posting yourself. Here are a few that came up when I browsed:
February 20, 2005, glugglug... Great looks, not much else The objective parts of her profile are true, so I'd say she is a TrueDater as the more questionable things are more subjective, or could have been circumstantial with our date. She really is Firm & Toned, etc. The pics look nothing like her, but in this case that's totally ok -- IRL she looks like a model! However, when she says she is easygoing and fun to be around, as far as I can tell this is false. She was very uptight, goody-goody, and overly self concious, seems pretty high-maintenance to me, and had no detectable sense of humor. Really freaked out when she figured out I had spent the previous night with another jdate.January 23, 2005, truester... cute and cool
She's definitely a cool chick and very cute (real life actually better than pics). We weren't a "match" but I would recommend going out with her if you think the two of you might be.
February 5, 2005, hotjewishgoddess... what a complete freak - does not take no
Ok, I should have known this guy was a bit whack but I believe in giving everyone a try. He asked me to meet him in his neck of the woods because he had the perfect dinner spot (he claimed great atmosphere). I met him. He was dressed in clothing that probably fit him when he was 3 inches shorter and about 30lbs thinner. I think that was when he bought the outfit too because it was ragged. He then escorted me to his favorite fine dining experience...The Double Tree Bar & Lounge. He insisted on talking, endlessly and then tried to hold my hand. I have no idea what signal he read but it wasn't one I was sending. We finally leave the lovely bar & lounge when he again lunges for my hand (sorry, I say, I need it for balance). Finally he invites me into his apt. to watch tv. Amazingly I am not interested. But wait! He has another idea. How about we sit outside his apartment and talk some more. I was swept away by the awfulness of this date and did just that - sat there. Finally I came up with a brilliant get away...I have to go, I feel bad leaving my dog alone. He walked me to my car and went in for the kiss (I gave him the cheek). When he went in for another I said sorry bud, one is my limit. He called me later and asked me out again. When I said no he insisted on a reason - I went for our politics are too different. That isn't true he said. We have such chemistry. No, we don't I replied. Yes we do he categorically stated denying me and saying my reason for rejecting him was stupid. Ok, if you want to know...so I told him he should consider dressing for a date and perhaps investing in a visit to the barber. He hung up on me. But that wasn't the end. He wrote me 2 e-mails basically telling me I am shallow (perhaps I am) and that he knows how to dress. I wrote him back saying he basically missed the point. If you don't want to hear the answer don't ask the question 3 times. Recommendation: don't date this guy unless you really like bad dates and need a story to tell others at your next dinner party.March 12, 2005, sabrina... Dishonest
Two profiles on jdate with different names and different ages (with 13 years difference between the ages!) In one profile he's 48 and in the other he's 35! Just a slight disparity. Other profile is 42339405. If someone goes to the trouble of having 2 active profiles and lying about their age, they're probably not a truedater.
Free Speech Doesn't Mean Just Speech You Agree With
Some twit threw salad dressing on Pat Buchanan to protest his "conservative views," as an AP story puts it.
"Stop the bigotry!" the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.
Sorry, dude, but it's essential to a democracy that everybody be allowed to speak, no matter what you think of their views. Get a podium of your own if you want to spew about Buchanan, but keep the salad dressing on the greens, buttwad.
Arguing For Morons
Get a gander at the talking points for the creationists. For example:
How you, the creationist, can wage war against evolution:1) Interpret Any Uncertainty Anywhere In Science As Implying Total Uncertainty Everywhere In Science.
Science is by nature tentative. Anything on the cutting edge is going to have considerable uncertainty attached to it. Anything science is certain about now will be found to have had considerable uncertainty attached to it at some point in history. As soon as any evidence of any uncertainty is found, present it and claim that scientists therefore don't know what they're talking about.
2) Trumpet Any Mistakes Made By Any Scientist, And Ignore The Fact That These Mistakes Are Corrected.
Most people in your audience will not be well versed in the history of science. You can flood an audience with accounts of mistakes in science, and accounts of things scientists thought that are now known not to be true. With enough such accounts, you can build a superficially compelling picture of "Science Always Getting It Wrong". Even experts in the history of science will not be able to directly address all the examples you bring up. Anything left unaddressed can be waved in front of the audience as "not refuted". You can then use the fact that something has been left unrefuted to claim that everything has been left unrefuted.
3) Shift The Burden Of Proof To Your Critics Any Way You Can.
Remember, your position is indefensible. The only way you can present anything like a compelling argument is to make your opponents look ignorant. Force them to prove everything they say. If they refuse to accept the burden of proof, force them to prove they don't have to prove what they say.
Remember, creationists, "your position is indefensible." (Not that you care.)
Exporting Moronism
Nicholas Kristof attacks Bush's dumb obsession with abstinence and sexual fidelity in his campaign against AIDS in Africa, with condoms coming in "a distant third." People are dying needlessly because of it. As Kristof wisely puts it:
...Condoms don't cause sex any more than umbrellas cause rain.
