Bad Sex At FAO Schwartz
Beyond The Unsanitary Into The Criminally Unsanitary
(WARNING: Hang onto your breakfast, this entry may function as a powerful emetic.)
I have, in the past, pointed out to loud public cell phoners that restaurant patrons somehow manage to find their way to the restroom despite the absence of signs reading “Please Don’t Take A Big Dump In The Middle Of The Establishment.” I can say this no longer.
In fact, if you shout into your cell phone while seated next to me I may even see it as an act of civility -- compared to what went on Sunday morning at my local hippie haus of coffee.
The smell came first. I’ll describe it as delicately as I can: “Explosive diarrhea. With a side of Xyklon B."
I looked around. None of the half rat/half man creatures that frequent the place were in the vicinity. Nobody much was there at all…just a couple of parents with their baby and their friend; the two women seated on the bench that runs along the wall (where I was seated as well), and the husband of one of the women seated across from them in a chair.
One of the women passed something to the husband. I had to be seeing things. It was…a dirty diaper! These vile curs were changing their baby on the bench where people eat breakfast! (Be still my raging bile duct!)
Hubbo gingerly folded up the offending item and took it to the bathroom. It was locked. Naturally, he was too damn lazy to inquire as to the whereabouts of the key. Nope…he simply marched over to the trash can where people put their coffee stirrers and other accoutrements…and dropped his little S-bomb in there.
You know, it doesn’t happen to me often. But, I was speechless. (Or was it that I thought I’d heave for sure if I so much as opened my mouth?)
When A Cowboy Goes To War
The military goes to pot. Krugman writes that we have too few, yet too many, troops in Iraq:
...Our all-volunteer military is based on an implicit promise that those who serve their country in times of danger will also be able to get on with their lives. Full-time soldiers expect to spend enough time at home base to keep their marriages alive and see their children growing up. Reservists expect to be called up infrequently enough, and for short enough tours of duty, that they can hold on to their civilian jobs.To keep that promise, the Army has learned that it needs to follow certain rules, such as not deploying more than a third of the full-time forces overseas except during emergencies. The budget office analysis was based on those rules.
But the Bush administration, which was ready neither to look for a way out of Iraq nor to admit that staying there would require a much bigger army, simply threw out the rulebook. Regular soldiers are spending a lot more than a third of their time overseas, and many reservists are finding their civilian lives destroyed by repeated, long-term call-ups.
Two things make the burden of repeated deployments even harder to bear. One is the intensity of the conflict. In Slate, Phillip Carter and Owen West, who adjusted casualty figures to take account of force size and improvements in battlefield medicine (which allow more of the severely wounded to survive), concluded that "infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966."
The other is the way in which the administration cuts corners when it comes to supporting the troops. From their foot-dragging on armoring Humvees to their apparent policy of denying long-term disability payments to as many of the wounded as possible, officials seem almost pathologically determined to nickel-and-dime those who put their lives on the line for their country.
Now, predictably, the supply of volunteers is drying up.
Sorry, why are we in Iraq?
Sorry, Which Weird, Irrational Beliefs Are Okay, Your Honor?
I just love the ruling that bars a pair of divorced parents from educating their child in Wicca, grouping it in a category called "non-mainstream religious beliefs" -- as if the mainstream ones make so much sense. Also, as Richard Dawkins noted at a recent atheists' alliance, the indoctrination of children into a religion is barbaric and wrong. Sure, secular ethics should be taught. Thinking and reasoning should be taught.
Imagine if all the money that went into recreating Notre Dame in
Newark instead went into teaching people to use their capacity for
reason, and to take full responsibility for how their lives turn out?
It makes no more sense to indoctrinate children in the belief that there is a god than it does to indoctrinate them in the belief that orange aliens with a flying saucer will replace the school bus and driver that takes them to school. Or, as Dawkins says in the link above:
Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of God.
There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.
So why do we insist on believing in God?
From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.
What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.
Here's an excerpt from the story (first link above) about the parents prohibited from raising a Wiccan child, written by Kevin Corcoran, in the Indy Star:
Indiana law allows the custodial parent to determine a child's religious practices unless a child's physical health would be endangered or a child's emotional health would be impaired.She said courts typically take the child's wishes into account when determining custody for those at least 14. In this case, a temporary guardian or special advocate could have been appointed while the court investigated the effects of the boy's exposure to Wicca.
Jones brought the case to the Indiana Court of Appeals in January, with help from the ICLU. They requested the appeals court strike the one-paragraph clause.
The parents' Wiccan beliefs came to Bradford's attention in a confidential report by the Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which provides recommendations to the court on child custody and visitation rights.
The Indianapolis residents married in February 1995, and their divorce was final in February 2004. Bristol and Jones have joint custody, and the boy lives with the father on the Northside.
The parents believe in nature-based deities and engage in worship rituals that include guided meditation. Jones said he is not trying to force religious beliefs on his 9-year-old son, who attends a local Catholic elementary school and a Unitarian church.
"He's going to make his own path, in his own time," Jones said.
Which is how it should be with all children, instead of this brainwashing that tells them not to think or reason, "just do it": believe, utterly without evidence, in the existence of god, heaven, and hell. Ridiculous. Embarrassing, even...at least for those of us who wake up thinking, as opposed to waking up and going to church in order to swallow all the hoohah in the bible without a thought crossing our minds. Oh, but the bible is such a source of morality! Oh, is it? I would venture you'd get better morality and guides for life out of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Epictetus. For a guide to some of the most outrageous biblical "morality," check out Ben Akerley's The X-Rated Bible, An Irreverent Survey Of Sex In The Scriptures.
Imagine Half The Traffic
Drive half the car...but half in size only.
Check out the Tango.
Every commuter knows that the current system of driving alone to and from work in heavy traffic is crazy, yet there hasn't been any real alternative. Until Commuter Cars came along, no one could buy their way out of a traffic jam without climbing on a motorcycle. We're changing all that with the introduction of the two-seat Tango.The Tango is a glimpse into the future of commuting. Lane doubling, lane splitting, and perpendicular parking will become commonplace. Traffic-induced headaches and lost time will fade into the past. No more worries about safety as you're ballasted for flat-out cornering stability and protected by a racing-certified roll cage designed to protect you and your passenger. Park in places you wouldn't even dream of in a Mini Cooper. Emission-free and exciting, the electric Tango T600 is designed to beat most sports cars in the quarter mile with acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in just 4 seconds and a top speed of 150 mph!
Get Your Fundamentalism Out Of My Government!
Our fundamentalist-in-chief should do a little more listening to the words of Thomas Jefferson and a little less to those of James Dobson. A New York Times editorial concurs:
President George W. Bush seems determined to thwart any loosening of the restrictions he has imposed on federal financing of embryonic stem cell research, despite rising sentiment in Congress and the United States at large for greater federal support of this fast-emerging field. His actions are based on strong religious beliefs on the part of some conservative Christians, and presumably the president himself. Such convictions deserve respect, but it is wrong to impose them on a pluralistic nation.
Be All That You Can Fake
Army recruiters in Golden, CO, encouraged a kid named David McSwane to manufacture a high school diploma and escorted him to a head shop to buy a drug detox kit, writes John Aguilar in the Rocky Mountain News:
"I told him not to do it," said his mother, Shelly Hansen. "I thought he might get arrested."Her son, who had read about military enlistment challenges and had seen recruiters working the grounds of Arvada West, wanted to know "just how far will Army recruiters go to get one more."
McSwane had been inspired by the 1961 book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, who darkened his skin and documented what it was like to live as a black man in the segregated South.
But McSwane had another motivation when he began his investigation in January.
"I wanted to do something cool, go undercover and do something unusual," he said this week.
The premise was simple: McSwane would try to join the Army as a high school dropout with an insatiable fondness for marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms. No matter how stoned and stupid McSwane acted, a pair of recruiters wouldn't wouldn't let him go.
McSwane insisted to the recruiters that he couldn't lick his drug habit, but one recruiter told him to take some "stuff" that would "clean you out." It turned out to be a detoxification kit the recruiter said had worked with other applicants. McSwane said the recruiter even offered to pay half the cost of the kit.
McSwane's claim of being a dropout didn't discourage his recruiters either. He was encouraged to take a high school equivalency diploma exam, which McSwane deliberately failed. That's when he said one recruiter introduced him to the "home-school option."
McSwane was told to order a phony diploma and transcripts from an online diploma mill.
"It can be like Faith Hill Baptist School or something - whatever you choose," one of the recruiters can be heard saying in a taped phone call.
Several days and $200 later, McSwane became a proud graduate of Faith Hill Baptist High School in Longmont.
"I ordered my four years of high school sweat with a few clicks," he later wrote.
But McSwane knew that if his story was going to hold up, he would need proof. So he enlisted his sister, Victoria, to pretend that she was keeping a photo album of her big brother's military accomplishments. She took pictures of McSwane shaking hands with his recruiters.
McSwane convinced a high school friend to operate a video camera across the street from a head shop while one of the recruiters drove him to the store to buy a drug detox kit. He even got his mother to covertly slip him some cash during the episode after the head shop refused to accept her credit card.
Since McSwane didn't wear a wire on most of his visits to the recruiting office, he parlayed his natural forgetfulness as a supposed druggie into an opportunity to tape his recruiters' during phone calls.
"I'm a drug addict, so I acted confused and asked him to explain things over again," he said.
McSwane stopped reporting the story in March when one of the recruiters asked him to strip down for a weigh-in and sign several legally binding documents.
Why are we at war in Iraq? Well, for one thing, because we don't have a draft -- or, for that matter, a draft that the rich young George Bushes of America can't get out of...or a war where women, not just men, are drafted. No, we have a war because the army is disproportionately made up of "other people's kids" -- perhaps, more than we realize, those kids who can't even pass their GED tests.
What One Million Dollars Might Buy You In Santa Monica, California
I only suggest that because this little shack on 11th and Alta went for two million.
And the paint is peeling! For two million dollars, you don't even get a fresh coat of paint!
Going With God Is Big Business
William C. Symonds, with Brian Grow in Atlanta and John Cady in New York write on BusinessWeek Online about how profitable the god business can be:
Osteen's flourishing Lakewood enterprise brought in $55 million in contributions last year, four times the 1999 amount, church officials say. Flush with success, Osteen is laying out $90 million to transform the massive Compaq Center in downtown Houston -- former home of the NBA's Houston Rockets -- into a church that will seat 16,000, complete with a high-tech stage for his TV shows and Sunday School for 5,000 children. After it opens in July, he predicts weekend attendance will rocket to 100,000. Says Osteen: "Other churches have not kept up, and they lose people by not changing with the times."Pastor Joel is one of a new generation of evangelical entrepreneurs transforming their branch of Protestantism into one of the fastest-growing and most influential religious groups in America. Their runaway success is modeled unabashedly on business. They borrow tools ranging from niche marketing to MBA hiring to lift their share of U.S. churchgoers. Like Osteen, many evangelical pastors focus intently on a huge potential market -- the millions of Americans who have drifted away from mainline Protestant denominations or simply never joined a church in the first place.
To reach these untapped masses, savvy leaders are creating Sunday Schools that look like Disney World (NYSE: DIS - News ) and church cafés with the appeal of Starbucks (NasdaqNM: SBUX - News). Although most hold strict religious views, they scrap staid hymns in favor of multimedia worship and tailor a panoply of services to meet all kinds of consumer needs, from divorce counseling to help for parents of autistic kids. Like Osteen, many offer an upbeat message intertwined with a religious one. To make newcomers feel at home, some do away with standard religious symbolism -- even basics like crosses and pews -- and design churches to look more like modern entertainment halls than traditional places of worship.
Silly Richard Dawkins. He got ticked at me when he was speaking at an Atheist Alliance conference (where the crowd wasn't exactly filled with leggy young blondes) for standing up and saying "the right wing has all the babes." I didn't know the half of it.
Thanks, Goddyss, for the link.
Why There Are So Few Women Op-Ed Columnists
Um, because they don't want the job? Sheelah Kolhatkar lays it out in the New York Observer:
How hard is it, Katha Pollitt asked in The Nation last month, to hire female columnists? "How hard can it be to ‘find’ Barbara Ehrenreich … Dahlia Lithwick … Sharon Lerner … Debra Dickerson?"
Debra Dickerson was my favorite example in Kolhatkar's piece:
"Here’s the monkey wrench," said Ms. Dickerson, author of The End of Blackness. "The New York Times had me in contention for a spot on the editorial board, and The Washington Post offered me a column a couple of years ago that I turned down. And I turned it down for typically ‘female’ reasons."..."I’m amazed at the way people list me—‘Why don’t they talk to Debra Dickerson?’ Well, they did! Everybody’s offered me a job," said Ms. Dickerson, who has written freelance opinion pieces for The Washington Post and The New York Times. "But I was sort of hiding my light under a bushel basket, waiting for my husband to catch up. But I think nowadays, if you’ve got the stuff, you can write your own ticket."
The problem is, "the stuff" includes having the guts to weather letters from people who loathe you, your writing, and everything you stand for. My feeling? "Bring it on!" My hate mail is my most entertaining. For example, from today's mail slurry:
Bore vs. the bad guy
First time I have ever read your column. What a crock. True she should have someone more interesting in her life but you went over the top Trying to be funny in the first few advice paragraphs. The girl was looking for help not your attempt to entertain. It was just plain ridiculous.
My response:
My column is both an advice column and a humor column. I think it's rude to give unsolicited advice...don't you? I take advice on writing from people whose minds I respect.1. My boyfriend
2. My best friend
3. Elmore Leonard
4. My assistant
5. My editorSee your name on that list?
She writes back:
now thats funny
LauraMae
Observer link via Romenesko
How To Bring Christianity Into The Public Schools
Great piece by Andrew Gumbel in City Beat, where he explains why the local fight over getting "intelligent design" into schools is actually a national fight. First, it's actually not just Kansas, and second, the battle to mess with textbooks in Texas -- a major market, the second biggest after California, which affects a textbook's financial viability -- was almost won:
The ID-ers have a phrase that they are fond of, “irreducible complexity,” which they use to describe phenomena they believe too intricate to be plausible by means of natural evolution alone. This, though, is a profoundly anti-scientific notion – that just because we don’t know how something works we have to conclude that we will never know. It took a while for humankind to figure out that the Earth was round, and a lot of people, especially influential church leaders, found the notion utterly ridiculous even once the proof was thrust under their noses.Another manifestation of the misdirection of the ID movement is the ludicrous notion that high schools are the appropriate venue for intricate debate about the finer points of evolutionary science. Any public school science teacher will tell you it’s already a minor miracle if a 16-year-old can accurately summarize The Origin of Species, or pinpoint the Galapagos Islands on an atlas. Raising questions about the cellular structure of the flagellum is unlikely to exercise most students until grad school.
The only reason for raising such questions before state education authorities is not to deepen the scientific understanding of teenagers but rather to sow deliberate confusion. It is about denigrating mainstream science as biased against religion – which it is not; it merely regards questions of the supernatural to be outside the realm of scientific inquiry – and by extension bringing God and open avowals of faith into the public school system.
The hearings in Kansas made that abundantly clear. The state school board members who sat in on the witness testimony – Christian fundamentalists all – were so ignorant of the subject matter it was laughable. Board member Connie Morris talked about the Darwinian notion of a prebiotic soup like a patron in a restaurant who decides to launch an irrational boycott campaign against mulligatawny. “There was a speck that landed in the soup?” she asked one witness. “What was that? Was it a cell?” Her colleague Kathy Martin admitted on day two she hadn’t even read through the competing science standards documents before her.
The interest of such elected officials is not Darwin so much as what he represents – the ultimate wedge issue in the culture wars pitting what they see as decent, hard-working, god-fearing heartland Americans against snobbish heathen elitist big-city liberals. This, though, is not a war about the tastefulness of Hollywood movies, or even the morality of abortion, on which reasonable people can disagree. It is, much more seriously, an attack on rational thought itself, an insane attempt to promote the political ambitions of biblical literalists and their sympathizers over and above the advance of world civilization.
More on "intelligent design" in the New Yorker, by H. Allen Orr: "Why Intelligent Design Isn't."
The Underparented Child Goes To Starbucks
This little girl in the photo has just finished a screaming tantrum on the floor: "Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy! Waaaaaaah! Waaaaah! Etcetera." (Mommy is busy talking to her friend, it seems.) The rest of us are busy having our ears blown out. Unfortunately, while it takes a license to cut hair, it takes only working ovaries to have a child.
Here's a little peek into the little darling's future -- and ours: a great piece by Seinfield writer/producer Peter Mehlman, from the LA Times Opinion page, on a couple who talked nonstop during a movie.
The Right Kind Of Affirmative Action
I find race-based affirmative action deplorable, racist, and insulting to people I know who are accomplished and smart but happen to have dark skin -- and unfair to those who don't, but lack the economic means of, say, suburban blacks...for example, a smart, achieving, black guy I went to high school with, with a career as a newscaster in a major market, who no more needed "minority" programs than I did. (In fact, his family was probably financially better off than mine.) Finally, it seems like the right kind of college assistance might be around the corner -- that based on economic need, not skin color. Here's an excerpt from a piece by David Leonhardt in The New York Times:
Like Virginia, a handful of other colleges are not only increasing financial aid but also promising to give weight to economic class in granting admissions. With several populous states having already banned race-based preferences and the U.S. Supreme Court suggesting that it may outlaw such programs in a couple of decades, the future of affirmative action may well revolve around economics. But now, on average, high-income students get slightly more financial aid from colleges than low-income students.
Sure, minorities are still discriminated against. But, you know, many people are -- because they didn't go to Yale, or they're ugly, or for any number of reasons. That's life. The way I see it, if you can't get in one door, you build one of your own. I know, that thinking is so lacking in coddling. But maybe if more people were self-helping instead of expecting the govern-nanny to be there at every turn, they might actually get further.
Pink Elephants And Pedophile Priests
Sex abuse by priests is just a media construction, says the new pope. Robert Scheer takes the Rat and the church to task:
Despite the horrific drumbeat of child molestation revelations, however, sensible Catholics hoping for a more transparent and less sexually repressed church shouldn't hold their breath. The new pope is not only a longtime leader of vicious church attacks on "evil" gays, he also has shamefully blamed the molestation scandal on the media."In the church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower," said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — in 2002 when he was the head man of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
...And, as is so often the case with the most severely judgmental and repressed, this stance is rife with moral hypocrisy.
How else to explain an institution that refuses to accept responsibility for the lives it has violated through sexual abuse, even as it incessantly condemns same-sex couples for wanting to form stable families? If you are gay and want to get married you are "deviant and a threat to society," according to the Vatican, and if you adopt a child — the irony is dark here — it is tantamount to abuse.
Pope Benedict himself exemplifies this contradiction. The same man who doesn't get the scale of the molestation cover-ups has written some of the Vatican's most anti-gay rhetoric, including a 1986 letter to bishops calling homosexuality "an intrinsic moral evil," as well as a 2003 battle plan telling Catholic politicians they have a "moral duty" to oppose gay marriage and adoptions.
"Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior … but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity," stated the church's "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons."
"Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development."
Tell that to the many happy children of loving and nurturing parents who happen to be gay. Such a common-sense solution to the tragedy of unwanted children is what the pope abhors as part of a "dictatorship of relativism," to quote from his pre-anointment speech April 18.
...Is it too much to ask that a religious institution sporting such an abysmal record in dealing with (the sick sexual proclivities of church leaders) stop dictating the bedroom behavior of its millions of followers?
Spano Smokes Out The Locals
Susan Spano, our favorite overemployed clueless American in Paris, is at it again! I'd stopped commenting publicly on her posts to her faux blog, as it was kind of like throwing grenades at fish in a barrel. I do sometimes send corrections directly to the LA Times...like when she wrote that France was thinking of instituting a 35-hour work week, when they were, if I recall correctly, in the midst of talks to abolish it (or they might have just abolished it when she wrote that...sorrry, mind like a steel sieve). Somebody at the LAT corrected her error, never crediting me or anyone else who might have written in.
Anyway, Spano this week was perplexed as to why she couldn't find a charcoal grill anywhere in Paris. I have no idea whether the French use charcoal barbeques at all, but Spano is so intent on having an American experience in Paris, rather than a French one, that she has to buy one from Amazon in the US and have it shipped to the LA Times so she can cart it thousands of miles to Paris to repeat her life in LA. Hey, Susan, do us all a favor and stay home BBQ'ing in LA and leave the blogging on Paris to people who actually do a good job of it -- for example, Auntie M and La Coquette.
But, there's more to the story. Spano writes:
But I couldn't find anything right for my terrace that was charcoal burning. Lots of gas and electric, but who needs that?
Umm, somebody who doesn't want to asphyxiate her neighbors? What kind of rude moron buys a charcoal grill to use in close quarters, in a city?
Am I being unfair? I checked with a French friend in Los Angeles, born and raised in Paris:
Of course it would be terribly rude!!!! In-croyable!
I asked another friend living in Paris what she thought the law might be. She didn't know, but said:
Some situations should not need to have a law attached because of their logic, both on safety & rudeness.
Luckily, the Europeans haven't thought to return the favor in kind. In fact, those over here seem to brighten up the place.
UPDATE: From yet another friend in France:
Chère Amie,The person I talked to at the Mairie du 7e did not have in mind the whole "réglementation sanitaire" which covers this type of situation. She gave me a number at the Préfecture de Paris. By the time I called, the office was closed. The lady assured me that utilisation of BBQ on balcony in Paris is forbidden, of course, it is not always obeyed. I hope the Préfecture will be able to give me a website we can check. In a nutshell, each city has its own rules & regulations, depending on weather, type of building, gardens etc. But I can tell you in advance that no one is allowed to light up a BBQ on a balcony in Paris...
A bientôt!
Bush Cooked The Books To Get To Iraq
Can we get one more big collective yawn from the media and right-wing bloggers? Robert Dreyfus writes about "the so-called Downing Street memo," implicating the Bush administration for falsifying intelligence in order to go to war:
What accounts for the media's refusal to hammer away at this story, to demand that Bush administration officials explain it, to dig deep into much more detailed British accounts surrounding it and to get British officials to comment, to ask Pentagon and CIA officials to explain it, and to put it in context? (In this case, the context is that in early 2002, the Bush administration was well on the way toward assembling a secretive team inside the Pentagon, supervised by outgoing Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, to cherry-pick facts and rumors that were used to promote war.)First, most distressingly, the media is following the lead of the Democrats. True, John Conyers and 88 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives wrote a letter asking the White House about the memo, but by and large the Democrats took a pass. That's in keeping with the party's decision in 2004, during the election campaign, not to raise the issue of the Pentagon's Feith-based Office of Special Plans and the widespread reports that the intelligence on Iraq was falsified. During the campaign, John Kerry barely touched on the issue, and in the Senate, West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller--the ranking Dem on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence--decided not to make a fuss over it. Rockefeller agreed to postpone an investigation into the political use of Iraq intelligence--a code word for an inquiry into whether it was faked--until after the election in November 2004. Then, inexplicably, Rocky let Sen. Pat Roberts get away with a decision to renege on the promised investigation. So the Senate plans to do nothing.
Second, my impression is that the media have collectively gotten fatigued with the whole issue. Always sensitive to conventional wisdom, the media seems to have concluded the story of fake intelligence on Iraq is "old news." It's as if they've concluded they they've done their job, and that those Americans who choose to believe the first catechism have all the ammunition they really need, and that those who choose to believe the second don't want to hear anything more. It's a slam-dunk story: We went to war, there weren't any WMD to be found, and so let the public draw its own conclusions, the media seems to think. Not only that, but it's exhausting to dig into an old story like that, they must believe. The fact that no WMD were found in Iraq is widely known, and Americans pretty much know that the WMD rationale for war was a cover story, so why bother with the details? Why bother with trying to sort all that out? Who has the time or the energy to rehash all that now?
Third, the media have pretty much allowed their investigative skills to atrophy. The Bush administration has stone-walled inquires on the WMD fakery, the seemingly endless parade of Iraq- and 9/11-linked commissions have all avoided the topic, and the Senate Republicans have blocked any inquiry. So the media doesn't know where to go: it's as if they've forgotten how to investigate something--as if they've forgotten how to find second- and third-level folks to help assemble the story, how to background key players in the OSP and the U.S. intelligence community. And doing that gets the administration mad at you. You get snubbed by "sources." Access dries up. The administration closes ranks against you. Do we really want all that grief?
The clearest proof that this is all true is the stunning lack of editorial comment on the Downing Street memo. Where are the thundering editorials demanding that the White House explain itself? That Congress investigate? That a team of senators flies to London to look into this?
Helloooooo? Anybody out there? As one commenter, probably a Brit, writes on the Alternet site (below the article at the above link):
What mystifies me about Americans is that they do absolutely nothing. But, if Bush had lied about having received oral sex from a White House intern with bad laundry habits you would consider impeachment. There is something seriously wrong with priorities. No, for a war criminal you do absolutely nothing. You even elect him back into his job. The man running against him never suggests the war is anything but "righteous".... something to take pride in.... Abu Graibh, uncle Dick Chenny's Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, and allAnd we, little minions in the rest of the world, are supposed to feel confident that thousands of nuclear warheads and a military force equal in cost anyway, if not in brain power, to all the forces of the rest of the world combined... and some... are in the safe hands of a "man like that" in an administration like that. They trash treaties, try repeatedly to trash the UN, and the entire world if you let them. Leadership, Yaaa thanks.
The Great Hatsby
One lifelong hat addict...
...sends another to her favorite local hat store, Fedora Primo, run by the extremely friendly and helpful Frank. (Many more hats available than on his site at the Pier and Main/Santa Monica store.)
I'm All For "Vile Sex Practices"!
Come on, how many kids are really reading health publications put out by the state? Aren't they a little too consumed by their X-Boxes?
PARENTAL WARNING: Little Black Book Exposes Kids To Vile Sex PracticesBy Rev. Louis P. Sheldon
Chairman, Traditional Values Coalition
For Publication On Or After May 17, 2005Washington, DC – If any parent needs a strong argument for opposing the legalization of homosexual marriage in their state, what’s happening in Massachusetts should be enough.
The pro-family Article 8 Alliance, headed by Brian Camenker has just released the contents of the pro-homosexual “Little Black Book” on his web site. The “Little Black Book” was produced by the Boston-based AIDS Action Committee with the help of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Boston Public Health Commission.
“The Little Black” book was distributed to teenagers at Brookline High School on April 30 as part of a Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) event.
WARNING to parents: What’s in “The Little Black Book” are some of the most pornographic descriptions of homosexual sex I’ve ever read. Yet this is what happens in a state that is forced by the courts to legalize same-sex marriage. Children are now primary targets for homosexual recruitment into a depraved and sexually dangerous lifestyle.
If same-sex marriage is legalized in your state, expect your public school children to be exposed to the following sexual practices as described in “The Little Black Book.”
* “Your Sexual Rights & Responsibilities: You have the right to enjoy sex without shame or stigma? You have the right to safer sex materials that speak to your desires! You have the right to take action for your community! Be heard, you are the expert!”
* “FISTING: What makes fisting risky when it comes to diseases is that the blood vessels in the rectum are close to the surface which means damage can occur easily and go unnoticed.”
*”WATERSPORTS: There is little risk of STD infection and no risk of HIV infection from playing with pee.”
The booklet also describes oral and anal sex practices, mutual sexual stimulation, and dealing with various bodily fluids in the most foul language imaginable. I’ve not quoted the most explicit sections of this booklet.
This is the future your children face if homosexuals succeed in getting same-sex marriage legalized in your state. Massachusetts is just a grim picture of the future for the entire nation.
This book is thinly disguised as an HIV prevention effort, but it is actually a how-to manual for engaging in deviant sex. In my home state of California, this phony prevention book would undoubtedly be handed out to students as part of the educational guidelines on teaching HIV prevention.
Surely, children deserve better than to be turned into barnyard animals who will be encouraged to engage in unrestrained anal intercourse. Is sodomy really a “family value” that should be promoted in public schools? The answer should be obvious—except to the most perverted in our culture.
Brian Camenker is to be commended for his courage in fighting the homosexual agenda in the public schools and for his efforts to overturn same-sex marriage in that state. The exposure of “The Little Black Book” should serve as a wake up call to millions of parents who think that homosexual marriage will make little difference in their lives. Children are the target of homosexuals—and children will die from AIDS and suffer from life-threatening venereal diseases if homosexual activists are not aggressively opposed at every point.
No, children aren't "the target" of homosexuals. You can no more convert somebody to being homo than you can convert them to being hetero, despite the claims of the morons on the religious right. But they're clearly targeting idiots with this message -- a population apparently in plentiful supply around these United States. If there is a "gay agenda," I believe it's getting (gasp!) equal rights. Shocking, simply shocking.
Bed And Dinner
This is our room in at the lovely Stewart House in the Catskills. Turns out, we weren't in the Berkshires, I'm just geographically retarded. We've had great gourmet dinners here two nights in a row, but there was no breakfast yet early this morning when Gregg went down, so he's gone off into the tiny town to forage for coffee and my daily donut. Flying home today. More blog items later (new one up now -- see below). In the mean time, here are a few photos:
Apparently, this is a red-state patch in blue-state territory.
Pheasant are plentiful here.
Well, not if you make like a city girl and chase them when you want to photograph them. There was a pheasant here initially -- one you could see in the foreground of the photo. He or she is now somewhere in the middle of this nice green field.
But never you mind. There's still plenty of good, clean family fun to be had.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, part of Spielberg's upcoming movie, H.G Wells' War Of The Worlds, was shot right around Stewart House, where we're staying. The cast and crew ate here, too, and left one of the top-secret drawings of the tripod'y war machines (which sound like they're quite true to Wells original vision), but the drawing is nowhere to be found. You can see the hotel in Trailer #3 on the WOTW site. It's the old red building on a corner that a thousand screaming extras run past.
What War Looks Like, Soldier-Side
An excerpt from War is Real, the blog of a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder, who's soon heading back to Iraq for more:
part two: how i stopped learning to kill and take the pillshe says to take one of the blue pills in the morning and another in mid afternoon and oh whenever i feel severe depression coming on take on then too. i'm wondering what all these chemicals will do for me and i'm feeling very much like a lab rat. the army has one treatment for PTSD, and that drug of choice is Zoloft. despite the fact that i can barely even exist on zoloft, i started taking it and oh also the other stuff that's supposed to help with nightmares i've been having. body parts flying apart and landing all over my shoes, my face, the blood mixing with the rain and soaking my hair red, eventhough my stitches are holding up pretty well so they can't be from me.
she says, go ahead and take these little white pills. they supposedly stop nightmares before they happen, which is complete and utter bullshit just like every other time something is supposed to prevent something from happening before it begins. they don't work, Major, and so what am i left with?
she says to me, you could always go back out there, man up and be a true soldier. bitch, i was there once and i need some FUCKING HELP before i can go back and see those things again. are you not comprehending this? do i need to spell it out for you? i fucking hate the fact that i'm required to kill evil people who are only evil because our president wills them to be.
yeah, i'm going back to iraq. if i get shot at or placed in danger, i'm going to kill everything that moves on the other site. i won't enjoy doing it, but it's my job, and my battle buddies are more important to me than life itself, and THEY are the reason i'm going. screw iraq, screw bush, screw the army -- just remember that it's me and my battle buddies out there, and we are the ones fighting a sham war just so we can come home and get a nice welcome reception for being heroes, and then six months later nothing changes and we're back to being grunts.
change the cycle.
Hmm, I wonder why Jenna and Barbara Bush haven't joined up yet to fight this righteous war. PTSD gets in the way of modeling jobs, perchance? Oh, and amputated limbs and missing eyes can't be big sellers either.
via Metafilter
The Back Door To God
Dr. David Hager is the neo-Puritan ob-gyn Bush appointed to Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the FDA . His ex-wife, Linda Carruth-Davis, says this supposed guardian of women's health had non-consensual anal sex with her many times. Here's an excerpt from Ayelish McGarvey's story in The Nation:
According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."...Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"
...For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims. "My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity," Davis surmises. Sometimes she fought Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to circle back later that same night; at other times, "the most expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of being available to him." At still other moments, she says, she attempted to avoid Hager's predatory advances in various ways--for example, by sleeping in other rooms in the house, or by struggling to stay awake until Hager was in a deep sleep himself. But, she says, nothing worked. One of Davis's lifelong confidantes remembers when Davis first told her about the abuse. "[Linda] was very angry and shaken," she recalled.
...Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the time were a fair settlement and minimal disruption for her sons. Nonetheless, she informed her lawyer of the abuse. Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in Lexington, asked Linda to draw up a working chronology of her marriage to Hager. "[It] included references to what I would call the sexual abuse," Wilson explained. "I had no reason not to believe her.... It was an explanation for some of the things that went on in the marriage, and it explained her reluctance to share that information with her sons--which had resulted in her sons' being very angry about the fact that she was insisting on the divorce."
...Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse throughout her marriage, but several of her longtime confidantes confirmed for this article that she had told them of the abuse at the time it was occurring. Wilson, the attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's close friend of twenty-five years. Several others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they did not contest her claims. Many attempts to interview nearly a dozen of Hager's friends and supporters in Lexington and around the country were unsuccessful.
...As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis's allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager's public role as a custodian of women's health. Some may argue that this is just a personal matter between a man and his former wife--a simple case of "he said, she said" with no public implications. That might be so--if there were no allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did not bear any relevance to the public responsibilities of the person in question, and if the allegations themselves were not credible and independently corroborated. But given that this case fails all of those tests, the public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis's charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women's health issues.
We're Traveling
Although, not in a Trucksicle...but more blog items late Friday.
A True Public Service For People Who Hate People And All The Noise They Make
I was in a store yesterday, listening to what had to be the most inane conversation I've ever heard somebody have on a cell phone. Shy, retiring, wilting violet that I am, I had to say something:
"Hey, thanks! I really enjoyed hearing about your life. Now, I think you need to listen to mine. You know I really have a hard time getting to the grocery store, so I never have any food in my house. Dinner, lately, is mustard with mustard sauce. I do have some lovely French mustards, but..."
The woman -- big gut, but that didn't stop her from wearing a long, tight t-shirt; very overly made-up (heavy foundation, red lipstick), bottle-blond, gamine haircut, about 55 -- interrupts me:
"I was talking to my dog."
She was dead serious. I apologized:
"I'm so sorry. If I had known you were a crazy person, I never would have said anything. Not nice to give crazy people a hard time."
For those not LA-experienced, don't mistake me for more cruel than I actually am. The woman didn't look the least bit clinically crazy; she probably just has far too much time on her hands. Probably recently widowed from some moneybags. At least you have to commend the lady for having a dog and not kids (we hope).
The other similar experience I recently had happened with Lena in our favorite hippie haus o' coffee. Some guy was arguing loudly and vigorously into his cell phone about the merits of Spaghetti Westerns. Very annoying. It went on for some time, too. I gave him a second look, and I noticed that he didn't have a cell phone earphone in, but cheap airline headphones...connected to a portable CD player. The guy was arguing with his portable CD player! Classic. (Sigh...business as usual, Venice, California.)
Which brings us to the public service portion of this post: the most comprehensive review of earplugs I could have imagined, by Ulrich Boser, on Slate, you will find at this link. Thank you, thank you, Ulrich!
We could all use a quiet little vacation from passive-aggressiveness from time to time, now, couldn't we?!
Blazing Paddles
Spanking is big business.
Where, Oh, Where...?
...is Orlando now?
Why Mascara Matters
Hillary Johnson, who just started a "beauty blog" called JackandHill with the fabulous London-based Jackie Danicki, has such a smart post up, commenting on Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker review of Steven Johnson's book, Everything Bad Is Good For You. Here's an excerpt of Hillary's piece:
We have a bad habit of ranking activities in the most staid, conventional terms: reading is good for you, as is playing a musical instrument. Playing with friends is a lesser form of good, as is building model airplanes or sewing barbie dresses. Hanging out at the mall and the arcade--why, that's as unhealthy as refined sugar. Something to be enjoyed in extreme moderation. To me, this wisdom seems so blatantly conventional that it simply must be false.Talking and thinking about beauty is fun, much the way playing a video game is, and I have a hunch that it's also good for you.
Part of the reason we think beauty is like sugar comes from our collective European history. The entire fashion world today operates exactly the same way Louis XVI's court did--then, beauty was associated with idleness, which in turn was a sign of privelege and wealth. Your shoes were designed so you couldn't run in them because never having to run gave you status. We've jetissoned that economic model, but we still cling to the idea that beauty is exquisitely desirable, yet somehow also morally distasteful and shallow to our liberated, protestant sensibility.
The mincing dandies and dandiettes who populate the style industry today are as ruthlessly invested in propping up this status quo as were the royals. A couple of years ago, I went on a travel junket with some other journalists, all from women's fashion magazines. While in the airport waiting for our flight, I pulled out a copy of the Economist and started reading it. One fashion editor actually gasped and exclaimed over how "intimidating" it was that I was reading that. She blurted this out, without the least bit of calculation, and I think she was genuinely apalled and flummoxed. And threatened. In her world, things like this just didn't happen. The ivory tower of fashion expertise depends, like the royal court, on maintaining a monolithic front of single-minded coolness. It wasn't exactly that she was threatened by my being smart, but that she was threatened by my being allowed to sneak into her exclusive, elite world of fashion when I wasn't a true believer.
Now think about this: These dumb, brutal Marie Antoinettes are the people who tell you who and what is beautiful and stylish. It's scary. I say, off with her head!
I sometimes refer to Hillary as "The Beauty Intellectual." She writes about makeup sometimes, for LA Times Magazine, and manages to fill her pieces with insights as interesting and trenchant as the ones in the blog link above. In between ruining my eyesight reading obscure anthropology journals, I'm a big fan of superficiality myself. Here are a few of my words on it, from a recent column, "Leave Dull Enough Alone":
Superficality gets a bum rap -- as if you can't gossip about some movie star's cold sore and still lead a meaningful life. (Take it from me: You can be both deep and deeply superficial.)
Some Clear Thinking On Koran Flushing
"The Story Of The Story Isn't The Story At All," writes Brian Montopoli in Columbia Journalism Review:
Consider another central issue: whether Newsweek's premature report actually spurred the riots. Thanks to the White House spin, and the media's lazy reporting, the conventional wisdom is now that it did. But the reality is that it probably did not, at least in any significant sense. According to a statement last Thursday by General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, after hearing from commanders on the scene in Afghanistan, the "rioting was related more to the ongoing political reconciliation process in Afghanistan than anything else." As we've noted, that makes sense, based on the Taliban's past patterns and the fact that previous reports about Koran desecration at Guantanamo spurred no such riots. But the press has repeatedly failed to make that clear. (One conspicuous exception to this mass sin of omission has been New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye, who for two days in a row now has taken pains to point out Myers' observation that his senior commander in Afghanistan "thought [the rioting] was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.")All this is particularly galling considering how much play the story is getting on the cable networks. It's not as if there isn't ample time to explain the facts to the viewers. Instead, Fox News, which we've had our eye on over the past couple days, has repeatedly stressed the fact that the White House feels that Newsweek's apology isn't enough, since, as White House press secretary Scott McClellan put it, "The report had real consequences. People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged."
It's easy to imagine why the White House is taking this approach. As a Newsweek journalist told the Los Angeles Times -- speaking, ironically, from a position of anonymity -- "The issue of how prisoners are treated at Guantanamo has not gone away. Now they want to deflect that by talking about how irresponsible Newsweek magazine was."
What's harder to explain is why reporters covering the story have swallowed this red herring. But let's try: Producers, it seems, would rather stir viewers' emotions that provide them with the truth. The story, in its oversimplified form, plays well into television news' longstanding bias towards conflict. It's Newsweek vs. the government, the liberal media vs. conservatives, and, for some, overeager advocacy journalists vs. America.
The reality is much muddier, of course, but also less likely to drive our emotions -- if viewers realize that the riots aren't necessarily Newsweek's fault, and that the desecration might actually have happened, it's harder for them to become fired up about the story. And producers fear that means lower ratings. So they keep the story simple, and they keep the story wrong. That is the reality of our journalistic environment today -- a serious examination of the truth simply isn't a priority for bottom-line oriented, unapologetic executives who would rather hook viewers via emotions than honest reports.
At least Newsweek has regrets.
UPDATE: A double standard on religious persecution: It doesn't get reported when it happens to the Jews.
Newsweek Makes Like George Bush
"Newsweek Lied, People Died," right-wing bloggers are screaming (all in unison, same headline).
Um, aren't we forgetting the basis of the war? And I have to say, I'm no dove. I thought we should have gone in there and flattened Afghanistan after 9-11. Right now, we have a permanent problem on our hands in Iraq. Even hairy-toed lefties are admitting that, now we're there, we have to stick around and clean up our mess.
I don't even read much of the day-to-day news about Iraq in the daily papers. It's always "somebody blew up a police station, and there's Omar, with the shredded body of his brother, or Jack Jones, with his dead lifelong best buddy."
And now, who do the right-wing bloggers want to see resign? The editors of Newsweek. Um, yoohoo, look a little higher.
The USA, Former Human Rights Leader
Now, we're the backward, third-world nation, denying rights to our citizens, while other leaders speak out for them. Deb Price has a column in the Detroit News about all the nations "pointing the way to racial equality":
Our country's fitful, centuries-long struggle to create a nation in which all citizens truly are equal has been our greatest gift to the world. And, luckily, when the United States has stumbled badly -- as it long did on the road to racial equality, as it does today in its treatment of those of us who're gay -- there have always been other countries able to point us, by their example, toward the fairness that we taught them to strive for.So what does leadership, 21st-century-style, sound like? To my ears, not like President George W. Bush telling Congress that writing anti-gay prejudice into the U.S. Constitution would somehow be good for marriage, would somehow "defend the sanctity of marriage."
Rather, real leadership sounds like Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin speaking to their parliaments about the importance of equal marriage rights for all couples.
Here's Zapatero, as quoted this month by Reuters: "We cannot deny a right to our compatriots when the exercise of that right does not harm anyone else."
And here's Martin urging his national government to follow the lead of seven of Canada's 10 provinces: "I rise in support of ... the Civil Marriage Act. I rise in support of a Canada in which liberties are safeguarded, rights are protected and the people of this land are treated as equal under the law."
Already, under Zapatero's leadership, one house of the Spanish parliament has voted to open marriage to same-sex couples. And final passage is expected in time for the weddings to begin early this fall. Two-thirds of Spaniards welcome the advance, according to polling by the government's Centre for Sociological Investigations.
Zapatero took office last year vowing to rid his predominantly Catholic homeland of the stifling oppressiveness that has held it back. He has refused to wilt under a blowtorch of criticism from the Vatican for his embrace of gay rights.
"I will never understand," he told his parliament, "those who proclaim love as the foundation of life while denying so radically protection, understanding and affection to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our colleagues.
"What kind of love is this that excludes those who experience their sexuality in a different way?"
Canadian Prime Minister Martin didn't talk of love. Yet his February address, reprinted by the Canadian news agency CanWest, eloquently wove together all the reasons his nation has nothing to lose but much to gain by standing up for its gay people: "When we as a nation protect minority rights, we are protecting our multicultural nature....We are saying, proudly and unflinchingly, that defending rights -- not just those that happen to apply to us, not just (those) that everyone approves of -- is at the very soul of what it means to be a Canadian."
The guy sounds almost Jeffersonian. Bush, on the other hand, sounds more like a mouthpiece for Jerry Fallwell and the rest of the religious nuts. I'm sorry, can somebody please tell me how gay couples getting married are going to get dull suburban married couples swinging and doing meth -- any more than they already are?
Beverly Hills High
As in, I think somebody dropped a little too much acid before they designed their landscaping.
Stopping Osama At The DMV
Jacob Sullum, always a pleasure to read in Reason, shows why The Real ID Act, approved by the Senate in early May, was a real dumb idea. (Like a terrorist couldn't find a work-around if they really wanted one...say, bribing a low-paid worker at the DMV?!)
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that terrorists will be unable to forge the ID cards and are not motivated enough to become legal U.S. residents, thereby obtaining the cards fair and square. The system still depends on the ability of state DMV employees to verify legal residency, addresses, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.Tennessee, which issues special driver's licenses to people who can't prove they're legal residents, is already having trouble with this sort of thing. "We're just doing the best we can with the documents," a state official told The New York Times in early May. "If [the Real ID Act] passes, we're going to have to look at sending all our employees to classes that teach all the different documents."
Given my recent experience with the U.S. State Department, which ought to know a thing or two about distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens, I am not optimistic about the ability of state bureaucrats with less training and experience to solve this paperwork puzzle.
His story, about getting a passport for his adopted Chinese infant daughter continues at the Reason link above.
Darryl Frears has the skinny on the documentation requirements in the WaPo:
The Real ID Act, which the Senate approved yesterday, would make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to obtain identification that the federal government will recognize when they try to board an airplane, fill out tax forms or open a bank account. But the measure would affect U.S. citizens as well.Americans would need an authentic copy of their birth certificate to apply for a new driver's license or renew an old one. The certificates must be verified at the counter by a Department of Motor Vehicles agent, along with other identification, such as Social Security numbers and utility bills. Governors, legislatures and officials in motor vehicle departments oppose the act, saying it would lead to agonizingly long lines at DMV offices.
I dunno about you, but when I go to the DMV, as nice as a few of the employees there may be (and I say this more out of optimism than experience), I do sometimes get the impression that I'm dealing with somebody whose brain cells are largely off duty.
"Expecting Rain?"
...some Henny Youngman wanna-be in a late-model BMW convertible yelled to me as he drove past. (A lucky thing I wasn't expecting wit.)
Go ahead, make fun of me for carrying an umbrella on a bright, sunny, southern California day. There's one of us that won't look like an Hermes handbag when she hits fifty, and that would be me.
I credit my umbrella collection and my tendency to forgo Yves St. Laurent shoes in favor of buying over a hundred dollars worth of Anthelios XL 60/visage sunblock whenever I go to Paris. And I'll soon get the windows on the Insight tinted (clear, that is) with LLumar UV Shield.
I must admit, sometimes I do feel a little silly walking around with an umbrella in the blazing light of day. Luckily, this feeling usually passes as soon as I see somebody who has what I call "car face." This condition, as of yet unrecognized in dermatology journals, typically affects longtime southern California residents. It's when one side of the face -- the side closest the driver's window -- looks like it they borrowed it from a Shar-Pei.
George "No Nation-Building" Bush
Check out this handy counter of how much the war in Iraq is costing us, at National Priorities Project. The thing is zipping along by the moment.
What If Shakespeare Was Bi?
Great post by Mark Ganek, on Alabama's attempts to keep books out of its schools:
Alabama has once again seized the educational initiative, despite being ranked 50th in the country in per pupil spending. A state representative recently introduced a bill that would have taken a decisive and innovative step toward helping the beleaguered students: fewer books. Because if you don't know you don't know it, it's pretty much the same as knowing it.The bill would have prohibited public schools from buying any books with gay characters, gay themes, or gay authors. To an ordinary person, determining whether the author of a book on, say, the history of chemistry is gay is quite difficult, so I have developed a fool-proof questionnaire that can be sent to all authors before buying their books.
Question 1: Are you gay?
Question 2: No, really. Are you?
Question 3: C'mon. Seriously.
Sadly, the bill failed, perhaps because the Alabama legislature is busy with the three anti-evolution bills that have been introduced this year alone. I think it is important to note that open debate thrives in Alabama classrooms, and students are encouraged to develop their own opinions about whether evolution or homosexuality is worse.
Further obscenity follows at the above link. And no, sorry, not the titillating kind.
Morons, Morons Everywhere
Misquoted scientists respond, correcting the way the intellectually sleazy creationist idiots have twisted their words on evolution. Here's Richard Lewontin's statement:
Several examples of falsification can be found in a recent issue of Acts & Facts, published by the Institute for Creation Research, in an article written by Gary E. Parker, a member of the Institute and a teacher at Christian Heritage College in El Cajon, California. On page two we read that "As Harvard's Richard Lewontin recently summarized it, organisms '. . . appear to have been carefully and artfully designed.' He calls the 'perfection of organisms' both a challenge to Darwinism and, on a more positive note, 'the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer.'"But the point of my article, "Adaptation" in Scientific American, from which these snippets were lifted, was precisely that the "perfection of organisms" is often illusory and that any attempt to describe organisms as perfectly adapted is destined for serious contradictions. Moreover, the appearance of careful and artful design was taken in the nineteenth century before Darwin as "the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer." The past tense of my article ("It was the marvelous fit of organisms to the environment . . . that was the chief evidence of 'Supreme Designer' ") has been conveniently dropped by creationist Parker in his attempt to pass off this ancient doctrine as modern science.
...Because of errors and misquotations of this nature, scientists and educators must clear away a great deal of confusion in the public mind about the true nature of evolutionary science. Confusion that wouldn't be there if it hadn't been created by creationists.
More from Lewontin and other scientists at the link above. Here's the conclusion:
The foregoing statements should lay to rest some of the claims that leading "authorities" in science are lending support to antievolutionary arguments or that evolution is no longer accepted by the scientific community. There is no "club secret" that evolution is "bankrupt" or that the theory is "crumbling," as many creationists have charged.It is easy to see how, with effort and a single-minded search through scientific literature, one can locate sentences and passages in anyone's work that can be interpreted out of context to mean whatever one desires. By this same method, some people read into the Bible proof that "ancient astronauts" visited earth.
Instead of searching for quotations, creationists should test their ideas against empirical evidence. The results of such tests, if carefully performed, can then be submitted to the peer review of the scientific journals. Scientists reading the results can duplicate the experiments or recheck the data. If they disagree, their positions will also appear in the journals. Scientists normally disagree with and test each other's ideas. This is the nature of science. But when the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell promises that students at his Liberty Baptist College will never find differences of opinion among faculty members and that "anytime they start teaching something we don't like, we cut the money off" (Fitzgerald), he promises the opposite of science.
Still, it is easy to see how anyone wedded to such a dogmatic view would find the dynamics of scientific argument and counter argument a kind of proof that scientists now dispute evolution. Absolutist searchers for chinks in the evolutionists' armor miss the point of science and project their either-or values onto it. They therefore see certain scientists as "authorities" who can be used to champion their views.
Arguments from authority are logically weak. A position does not stand or fall depending upon who endorses it. It is the evidence and its logical interpretation that tell the tale. Even if creationists quote an individual more or less correctly, this does not support their position.
Roger Ebert Is Not Qualified To Review Movies About Black People!
Haasim Mahanaim explains the idiocy:
Some weeks ago, I had attempted to watch the trailer for The Diaries of a Mad Black Woman, but I quickly got the impression that it would be a rambling, disjointed, self-important mess. Roger Ebert (and many other critics) agreed. But it would seem that his opinion in this instance is all but worthless because he is white and this film is about “black people” therefore he is incapable of properly assessing the merits of this film–unless he loved it, which he did not. Even though he has given ecstatic reviews for: Boys N’ The Hood, Malcolm X, and more recently Ray and Hotel Rwanda.It saddens me that Mr. Ebert has been inundated with letters from Angry Black People™ claiming that he is a racist for having an opinion that differs from a target audience that made “black movies” a genre unto itself providing plenty of prime time fodder for the B.E.T. network.
After re-visiting his official website, a page containing a sampling of angry (and some positive) letters is suspiciously inaccessible. So I’ll paraphrase one of the standout comments from memory.
“When I watch white people movies, I see a bunch of white people acting like white people and I don’t get. I want to see movies about my people.”Though, there were some African Americans who were just as disgusted as I, and they made sure to send some words of encouragement to Mr. Ebert in his defense.
A day after the Academy Awards, Ebert was a guest on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and noted that two African Americans won Oscars for best supporting actor and best actor; Leno added: “So why should that matter?” To which Ebert responded, “‘Exactly,’ had this happened ten years ago, this would have been a big deal, but last night it was just a perfectly normal thing to happen. We’ve really come a long way.”
There you have it folks, the words of an unabashed racist.
Roger Ebert's mail page is working now. There are a few intelligent commenters. And then there are the commenters like this idiot:
I just wanted to educate you on the man Tyler Perry. Mr. Perry has been around for a long time. It's no one's fault that you feel like you can't have an open mind about different things such as Black plays and movie. Mr. Perry has written and directed many plays and all have been successful, including the new installment "Madea Goes to Jail" that will make millions. Mr. Perry teaches you about life in a way everybody can relate. So before you try to criticize all his hard work, why don't you try attending one of his plays. In case you don't know "Madea Goes to Jail" starts March 8th at the Arie Crown Theatre. If you're not scared of all us black folks.Stefanie Kellom
Chicago, IL
I don't know about you, but I'm terrified of stupid people, regardless of their race, creed, color, or sexual orientation. Does that make me...stupidist?
Feynman By Me
Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was a voracious writer -- of letters to strangers. His daughter published an edited selection in the Guardian. Here's one of the letters, to author Tina Levitan, who wrote Feynman requesting a biographical sketch for a book she was writing, The Laureates: Jewish winners of the Nobel prize:
To Tina Levitan, February 7, 1967In your letter you express the theory that people of Jewish origin have inherited their valuable hereditary elements from their people. It is quite certain that many things are inherited but it is evil and dangerous to maintain, in these days of little knowledge of these matters, that there is a true Jewish race or specific Jewish hereditary character ...
At almost 13 I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvellous and talented people surrounded by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth.The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all, but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general. Most non-Jewish people in America today have understood that.The error of pro-Semitism is not that the Jewish people or Jewish heritage is not really good, but rather the error is that intelligence, good will, and kindness is not, thank God, a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Therefore, you see at 13 I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way "the chosen people".
This reminded me of something I wrote in an email to a church-going reader today:
I don't believe in god, because it's irrational to do so, so I don't go to services. Religion is the cause of much misery in the world. My religion: Be kind, be ethical, live rationally, and "leave the campground better than you found it." Best of all, I don't send any 16-year-olds to blow themselves up in the name of religion, don't tell little Jewish girls that they killed Jesus or that they'll burn in hell because they don't believe in him, nor do I wander around calling myself "one of the chosen people." (How does anybody say that and not think, "Jeez, I sound like SUCH an asshole!") --Amy Alkon
Hell
The place I'm in right now, because I'm going through assistants like socks this month. Will post stuff later today. Right now, I must evacuate my house so hazmat teams can get it livable again.
The Little Strip Wasn't Pink
From FishbowlLA, an excerpt from a Vanity Fair interview with ex-superagent Sue Mengers, with whom I identify, at least in one department:
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Not having children.
Well, maybe that's not my greatest accomplishment, but at least I've given what it means to have kids some thought -- from the part that's like passing a Ford Escort out a nostril, to the part where you have to put them through college, rehab, and rehab.
Pinker Shears Spelke
From Edge.org, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, author of the brilliant book, The Blank Slate, data-slaps psychologist Elizabeth Spelke on the nature vs. nurture argument. She pulls out data, too -- weak examples. Here's the intro to the debate from Pinker:
For those of you who just arrived from Mars, there has been a certain amount of discussion here at Harvard on a particular datum, namely the under-representation of women among tenure-track faculty in elite universities in physical science, math, and engineering. Here are some recent numbers:As with many issues in psychology, there are three broad ways to explain this phenomenon. One can imagine an extreme "nature" position: that males but not females have the talents and temperaments necessary for science. Needless to say, only a madman could take that view. The extreme nature position has no serious proponents.
There is an extreme "nurture" position: that males and females are biologically indistinguishable, and all relevant sex differences are products of socialization and bias.
Then there are various intermediate positions: that the difference is explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias.
Liz has embraced the extreme nurture position. There is an irony here, because in most discussions in cognitive science she and I are put in the same camp, namely the "innatists," when it comes to explaining the mind. But in this case Liz has said that there is "not a shred of evidence" for the biological factor, that "the evidence against there being an advantage for males in intrinsic aptitude is so overwhelming that it is hard for me to see how one can make a case at this point on the other side," and that "it seems to me as conclusive as any finding I know of in science."
Well we certainly aren't seeing the stereotypical gender difference in confidence here! Now, I'm a controversial guy. I've taken many controversial positions over the years, and, as a member of Homo sapiens, I think I am right on all of them. But I don't think that in any of them I would say there is "not a shred of evidence" for the other side, even if I think that the evidence favors one side. I would not say that the other side "can't even make a case" for their position, even if I think that their case is not as good as the one I favor. And as for saying that a position is "as conclusive as any finding in science" — well, we're talking about social science here! This statement would imply that the extreme nurture position on gender differences is more conclusive than, say the evidence that the sun is at the center of the solar system, for the laws of thermodynamics, for the theory of evolution, for plate tectonics, and so on.
These are extreme statements — especially in light of the fact that an enormous amount of research, summarized in these and many other literature reviews, in fact points to a very different conclusion. I'll quote from one of them, a book called Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability by Diane Halpern. She is a respected psychologist, recently elected as president of the American Psychological Association, and someone with no theoretical axe to grind. She does not subscribe to any particular theory, and has been a critic, for example, of evolutionary psychology. And here what she wrote in the preface to her book:
"At the time I started writing this book it seemed clear to me that any between sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high, and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind. The literature on sex differences in cognitive abilities is filled with inconsistent findings, contradictory theories, and emotional claims that are unsupported by the research. Yet despite all the noise in the data, clear and consistent messages could be heard. There are real and in some cases sizable sex differences with respect to some cognitive abilities. Socialization practices are undoubtedly important, but there is also good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences, a conclusion I wasn't prepared to make when I began reviewing the relevant literature."This captures my assessment perfectly.
Again for the benefit of the Martians in this room: This isn't just any old issue in empirical psychology. There are obvious political colorings to it, and I want to begin with a confession of my own politics. I am a feminist. I believe that women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and harassed for thousands of years. I believe that the two waves of the feminist movement in the 20th century are among the proudest achievements of our species, and I am proud to have lived through one of them, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences.
But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, "I guess sex discrimination wasn't so bad after all," or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.
It's a long piece, but it's worth reading.
The Church Is Evil
Here's a little example, from an LA Times article by Jean Guccione, of how they treated pedophile priests:
(Oliver O'Grady's) first assignment as a priest was to the Stockton Diocese in 1971. Five years later, O'Grady testified in an earlier deposition, he fondled an 11-year-old girl he had met at a summer camp and invited to sleep over at the rectory."I remember going into her bed, and I tried to caress her and fondle her, and I sensed her objections to that, nonverbally, and I stayed for a little while more and then decided not to continue. So I left and went back to my own bed," he told lawyers during the March deposition, estimating that he had spent no more than 20 minutes in the girl's bed.
The girl's parents complained to then-Bishop Merlin Guilfoyle, who preceded Mahony in Stockton. O'Grady testified that the bishop, who is now deceased, confronted him and he confessed.
O'Grady wrote the family a letter of apology, angering Guilfoyle, O'Grady said. The letter was in O'Grady's personnel file when Mahony assumed the bishopric, according to court records.
O'Grady said he suffered no repercussions for his transgression.
"Life just continued," he testified.
Court records show that in 1984, four years after Mahony became bishop of Stockton, O'Grady told his therapist he had fondled a 9-year-old boy. The therapist alerted child welfare officials, and police opened an investigation.
O'Grady took the 5th Amendment when asked during the deposition what he told his therapist. But he testified that Mahony was out of town at the time, so he told the bishop's second-in-command about the investigation. He said the official sent him to talk to the diocese's lawyer.
The child, who had been asleep during the alleged molestation, said he was unaware of any abuse, and police declined to file charges. Court records show, however, that police said an attorney for the diocese promised that O'Grady would be transferred to a job where he would not have contact with children, and that he would be sent to therapy.
O'Grady testified that Mahony sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, which the cardinal has acknowledged was the church's standard operating procedure at the time for handling pedophile priests. Almost immediately thereafter, O'Grady said, Mahony transferred him to a parish in San Andreas, about an hour outside Stockton. Mahony later promoted him to pastor.
There was no school at his new assignment, but O'Grady testified that he supervised hundreds of students who came in on weekends and after school to study Catechism.
La-dee-dah-dee-dah...let's be on our merry, molestin' way! (Are we ready for our wrist slaps?) And to think of all the time the church wastes railing against the beliefs of heathen atheists like me.
The Rest Of The LA Press Club Awards Announced
I'm a finalist in four categories:
B5. SIGNED COMMENTARY (papers over 100,000 circ)
Amy Alkon, Creators Syndicate
Howard Blume, LA Weekly
Thomas D Elias, Southern California Focus Syndicated Column
Michael Kinsley, Los Angeles Times
Chris Weinkopf, Daily News of Los Angeles
C5. SIGNED COMMENTARY (papers under 100,000 circ)
Amy Alkon, Creators Syndicate; The Advice Goddess
John Boston, The Signal; Decline and Fall of Western Civilization
Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles; This Week
Andrew Gumbel, Los Angeles City Beat; American Babylon
Marc Lacter, Los Angeles Business Journal; CommentC6. COLUMNIST (papers under 100,000 circ)
Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist
John Bogert, Daily Breeze
John Boston, The Signal
Teresa Strasser, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
Joe Woodward, Claremont-Upland VoiceC13.HEADLINE (papers under 100,000 circ)
Shoshana Lewin and Adam Wills, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist
It Must Be Sweeps
ABC News is doing stories on S&M:
And despite the early belief that smacks in the sack led to mental illness, psychologists say that S&M practitioners are just as well-adjusted as the average person.
The average person is well-adjusted?
While stretching to legit this story up with therapist quotes into the garden-variety "how to manage your hemmhroids" piece, ABC neglected to mention that Dossie Easton, a "licensed marriage therapist"/(also an S&M practitioner!) they quote is also the author of a terrific book, The Ethical Slut.
Susan Spano Has Company
The LA Times' Mary McNamara will be assisting people with sleep disorders by "blogging" from Cannes.
As the friend who emailed me the link wrote: "What is it about France that inspires such gob-smacking banality??"
The Other Sex Scandal In The Church
It's the Vatican's hostility to condoms, writes Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times:
The Vatican has horribly undercut the war against AIDS in two ways. First, it has tried to prevent Catholic clinics, charities and churches from giving out condoms or encouraging their use. Second, it argues loudly that condoms don't protect against HIV, thus discouraging their use.
In El Salvador, the church helped push through a law requiring condom packages to carry a warning label that they do not protect against AIDS. Since fewer than 4 percent of Salvadoran couples use condoms the first time they have sex, the result will be more funerals.
Fortunately, the Vatican's policies are routinely breached by those charged with carrying them out. In rural Guatemala, I've met Maryknoll sisters who counsel prostitutes to use condoms. In El Salvador, I talked to doctors in a Catholic clinic who explain to patients how condoms can protect against AIDS. In Zimbabwe, I visited a Catholic charity that gave out condoms - until the bishop found out.
"What would Jesus do?" said Didier Francisco Pelaez, a seminarian in Sao Paulo. "He would save lives. If condoms will save lives, then he would encourage their use."
"Oh, what harm does religion do?" somebody asked me recently.
See above.
"People hold a variety of indefensible beliefs, Amy," somebody else commented on this blog. "Personally, I find Christianity in particular to be among the least threatening of them."
Clearly, this person doesn't represent the public health perspective.
The Huffington Post Launches
There's a Drudge-style screaming header; not a surprise since Andrew Breitbart (who formerly joked that he was "Matt Drudge's bitch") is under contract to do the heavy lifting for Arianna. I found the celebrity posts somewhat lukewarm, but Michael Isikoff offered this weird and interesting Nixon link:
After his secretary conveyed psychic Jeane Dixon’s prophecies about terrorism, President Nixon ordered Henry Kissinger and others to prepare for attacks
Laurie David, the environmentalist wife of Larry David, offered a blurb about hybrids that attracted my attention:
Headlines blare from every paper about Ford’s and GM’s record losses, that buyers are shunning gas thirsty SUV’s, that Toyota and Nissan are making record gains! And there in the middle of American Idol are ads for the Ford new hybrid Escape? No -- ads for the regular Ford Escape, with its puny gas mileage of 18 miles per gallon. Can you imagine?! Here they finally have the car (years after the Prius has taken off), Americans are crunched at the gas station, and there is Ford still pushing their low mileage SUV’s to the youth of America.
I do wonder if she and Arianna and their well-heeled friends have installed solar panels on their houses to go along with those hybrids (the environmental version of having your handbag match your shoes), and have taken other steps to save energy, like not flying on private jets and using reusablebags.com at the grocery store. (I live in a rented Craftsman shack with one gas heater, but I do have reusable bags' ACME Workhorse Reusable Shopping Bag Set, and while I do go to Paris, I never, ever go on a private jet. Or even in first class. Sigh.)
The Press Is Too Easily Impressed
At the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, Laura Bush gave an obviously canned speech, written by a professional speechwriter, yet the media fell all over themselves, congratulating her for "her" humor. Frank Rich is one of the few to get the real picture:
Yes, Mrs. Bush was funny, but the mere sight of her "interrupting" her husband in an obviously scripted routine prompted a ballroom full of reporters to leap to their feet and erupt in a roar of sycophancy like partisan hacks at a political convention. The same throng's morning-after rave reviews acknowledged that the entire exercise was at some level P.R. but nonetheless bought into the artifice. We were seeing the real Laura Bush, we kept being told. Maybe. While some acknowledged that her script was written by a speechwriter (the genuinely gifted Landon Parvin), very few noted that the routine's most humanizing populist riff, Mrs. Bush's proclaimed affection for the hit TV show "Desperate Housewives," was fiction; her press secretary told The New York Times's Elisabeth Bumiller that the first lady had yet to watch it.
Global Bullshit
Wolcott translates CNN "political analyst" Carlos Watson's naive prediction that Bush might do something about global warming:
George Bush will do fuck-all nothing about global warming.He may exercise his tonsils and make concerned noises, but he will dedicate himself no more vigorously to global warming than he has done for the last four pissed-away years. Like his party and the rightwing media that pimps for it (about which voice of sanity Molly Ivins has more to say), Dubya places religion over science, refuses to acknowledge that global warming even exists as a planetary peril, and has never shown the slightest interest in conservation, mass transport, or anything else that might prevent the paving over of every inch of countryside. He would plant oil rigs in Arlington Cemetery and shovel straight through the bones of dead soldiers if reserves were discovered beneath the rows of white crosses, and chainsaw the last tree in the rainforest out of pure spite.
Last night, I was standing next to Emmanuelle while we were waiting for our cars outside Yamashiro, and the valet brought up some gargantuan SUV. I said, rather loudly, to Emmanuelle, "I wonder how many Marines had to die so they could drive that thing?" in earshot, I hoped, of the buttwad driving it. In fact, the couple in earshot got into a brand new Hummer. Hope I gave them something to talk about while getting 9mpg while driving home! Dude, get a Corolla, and slap on a bumper sticker, "My pants are giving a cocktail weiner a very good home," and let the rest of us breathe a little, huh?
UR L8er thn U thnk
Jennifer Guevin posts the news about a competition staged by an Australian museum, pitting a 93-year-old Morse code specialist against teenage text messagers:
Thnk ur gr8 @ txt msgng? You may think you're saving time cutting out all those pesky vowels when sending text messages to your buddies, but Gordon Hill, a 93-year-old Morse code specialist, just might prove you wrong....A sentence was chosen at random from a teen magazine, and both contestants had to transmit the message as quickly as possible.
The results might have some reconsidering the value of doing things the old way. Hill transmitted the complete message in 90 seconds, while Devlin used texting shorthand and finished sending her abbreviated message a full 18 seconds later. Hill then handedly defeated three other young foes armed with their mobile phones.
And what was the all-important message that was sent? "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing." That's enough to make anyone wish they could go back to pre-texting days.
Shoe Whore After My Own Heart
That would be La Coquette, who shops at one of my favorite Paris dépôt-ventes (resale stores), Réciproque, out in Passy. And I've been meaning to mention it (in the Franco-American blog department), that L'Amerloque has caught the disease, and started a blog of his own.
One might hear French men and women say les américains sont de grands enfants when they are exasperated with Americans, who seem in French eyes to reason like children: impulsively, with immediate personal gratification required. Americans should understand that France is a country is designed by adults for adults, not for children. Here, as an adult, it is one's responsibility to make oneself aware of the relevant law or custom before one acts, not afterwards. One shouldn't expect to be told how to act, either, unless one is under 13 or over 70, when "100% adult" behavior is not necessarily possible, desirable or expected. One shouldn't plan on finding a sign or a bulletin board briefing one about how to behave. This generally holds true throughout France.Comprehending this definition of "adult" - and accepting it by putting it into practice on a daily basis - can significantly reduce the disheartenment felt when things seem to spiral out of control and even a simple task appears to take far too much time and energy. For foreigners in France for the long term - and especially for Americans - familiarization with the French concept of adulthood is the key to a happy, productive life.
Scrubbing Troubles
The guy has the right idea, scrawling "Big Lie!" on the underpass salt stain that people saw as the "Virgin" Mary, but the dumbshit should have simply used a scrub brush and a bit of bleach, and he wouldn't have been arrested for "defacing city property." Naturally, morons "gathered at the site and expressed sorrow," according to this AP story. Yes, a salt stain now has magic marker on it. Bring on the Apocalypse!
Rational People Are People, Too!
The theocrat-in-chief, with his boundless gratitude to Christianity for replacing his addiction to drinking with an addiction to the irrational belief in god, found it politically expedient to come out for the unbelieving this week, writes George Will.
In last week's prime-time news conference, he said: "If you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship."So Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a long, luminous list of other skeptics can be spared the posthumous ignominy of being stricken from the rolls of exemplary Americans. And almost 30 million living Americans welcomed that presidential benediction.
...The president, whose political instincts, at least, are no longer so misunderestimated by his despisers, may have hoped his remarks about unbelievers would undo some of the damage done by the Terri Schiavo case. During that Florida controversy, he made a late-night flight from his Texas ranch to Washington to dramatize his signing of imprudent legislation that his party was primarily responsible for passing. He and his party seemed to have subcontracted governance to certain especially fervid religious supporters.
And last Sunday Pat Robertson, who is fervid but also shrewd, seemed to understand that religious conservatives should be a bit more meek if they want to inherit the Earth. Robertson was asked on ABC's "This Week" whether religious conservatives would be seriously disaffected if in 2008 the Republicans' presidential nominee were to be someone like Rudy Giuliani.
Although Giuliani's eight years as New York's mayor, measured by such achievements as reduction of crime and welfare rolls, constitute perhaps America's most transformative conservative governance in the past half-century, he supports abortion rights, gay rights and gun control. Still, Robertson's relaxed reply to the question was, essentially: What's a little heresy among friends? "Rudy's a very good friend of mine and he did a super job running the city of New York and I think he'd make a good president."
Some Christians should practice the magnanimity of the strong rather than cultivate the grievances of the weak. But many Christians are joining today's scramble for the status of victims. There is much lamentation about various "assaults" on "people of faith." Christians are indeed experiencing some petty insults and indignities concerning things such as restrictions on school Christmas observances. But their persecution complex is unbecoming because it is unrealistic.
And remember the good old days, when you didn't hear "god bless" this and that from our elected officials every 20 minutes?
John Kennedy finished his first report to the nation on the Soviet missiles in Cuba with these words: "Thank you and good night." It would be a rash president who today did not conclude a major address by saying, as President Ronald Reagan began the custom of doing, something very like "God bless America."Unbelievers should not cavil about this acknowledgment of majority sensibilities. But Republicans should not seem to require, de facto, what the Constitution forbids, de jure: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust."
LA Press Club Awards
All of the categories haven't been announced yet, but I'm a finalist in two, column and headlines, in papers under 100,000 circ. And I still don't run in my hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times.
I got a little ticked off about that earlier this morning, so I partially canceled my subscription -- rolling it back to just weekends so I can still have access to LA Times online to laugh at Susan Spano's dull Paris "blog" every week, and be entertained by all of Frania's Spano corrections in the comments section. (They don't seem interested in printing my corrections of Spano any more, they just make them without remark, like when she reported that France was considering abolishing the 40-hour work week. They had actually done so a few years back, and were, in fact, considering relaxing the 35-hour work week law enstated by the socialists.) For actually informative, entertaining columns on Paris, turn to La Coquette and Auntie M, and the archives of Jason Stone's Paris blog. How amazing that these people are so much better at doing Spano's job for free than she is at doing it for pay.
For those interested in reading my column, I do run in the Orange County Register every Monday morning, and in over 100 papers across the country, and I'm trying to be better about changing the column on the front of the site weekly. Who knows, maybe, someday, I'll think and write like one of the advice columnists the LA Times runs: Carolyn Hax, Dear Abby, and Amy Dickinson. Of course, if that day comes, I'll have to kill myself if I don't die of embarrassment first.
Ugly Children Get Stiffed
Nicolas Bakalar reports in The New York Times that parents take better care of pretty children than ugly ones:
Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents' attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child's physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.
The findings, not yet published, were presented at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.
When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition - in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.
Homely children were also more often out of sight of their parents, and they were more often allowed to wander more than 10 feet away.
Researchers squabbled about the reasons why this might be:
Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, executive director of the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and the leader of the research team, sees an evolutionary reason for the findings: pretty children, he says, represent the best genetic legacy, and therefore they get more care.Not all experts agree. Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University, said he was skeptical.
"The question," he said, "is whether ugly people have fewer offspring than handsome people. I doubt it very much. If the number of offspring are the same for these two categories, there's absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids."
It's possible that this might be a side-effect of evolved human sexual preferences -- even though there's no sex involved here. For example, even if a woman isn't a lesbian, she still judges beauty of another woman the same way a man would -- youth, clear skin, symmetry, and waist-to-hip ratio (hourglass figure). Researchers have discovered that even infants recognize what as beautiful and not in humans -- debunking the notions that beauty is determined by some evil cabal high in the offices of Condé-Nast.
What we find beautiful in a woman directly (i.e., medically) corresponds with fertility -- from the hourglass figure, to youth, to facial and bodily symmetry (a sign in the EEA -- Environment Of Evolutionary Adaptedness -- that you didn't have parasites and were probably free of illness). As Donald Symons wrote in Evolution Of Human Sexuality, "Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder."
The "I" Word
"Energy independence." It's everybody's favorite buzzword these days. It's a fantasy, points out Robert Bryce on Salon:
America is such a major energy user and the energy market is so complex that we can never be independent. America simply sucks up too much oil (25 percent of world production), too much natural gas, and too much coal to ever cut itself off from the global market. The price for these commodities is set by global market forces like booming economies in China and India, and by the ever-increasing energy needs of citizens everywhere to power their cars, fax machines, computers and air conditioners.In short, there's no silver bullet when it comes to energy. Pretending that there is only obscures the magnitude of the problem. And that problem is enormous. Hydrocarbons of all types are becoming harder to find and more expensive to produce. And more people are vying for the resources that remain. Domestic oil production has been falling since the early 1970s and no matter how large the subsidy or tax break to domestic drillers, that trend cannot be reversed. Given our current energy consumption, the idea that we can mine enough domestic crude to meet our demand is simply fallacious. You'd be hard-pressed to find any diner at the Houston Petroleum Club to say otherwise.
If we continue pretending that we can somehow be independent of these hard truths, it will be that much harder to make the difficult changes that must be made: a strong embrace of efficiency and conservation (particularly in the transportation sector) and a bolder, more comprehensive program to develop renewable and alternative sources of energy.
...We need renewable sources of energy like wind and solar for many reasons. First, they are environmentally friendly: no greenhouse gases or pollutants. Second, the cost of these technologies is falling, and they may soon become competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas). Third, they can reduce the amount of fossil fuels needed to produce electricity and reduce the need for building expensive new power plants.
Unfortunately, George W. Bush has shown no leadership on energy issues, even as big strides are being made in developing alternative sources. One new technology turns infrared light into electricity, dramatically improving the efficiency of existing photovoltaic cells. Wind power continues to grow rapidly, while getting only minor federal subsidies. Other more capital-intensive processes like coal gasification and gas-to-liquids are showing promise. If environmentalists are going to be realistic about America's energy future, they are going to have to get over their long-standing aversion to nuclear power. The Japanese conglomerate, Toshiba, has just introduced a prototype of a micro-nuclear power plant that produces 25 megawatts of power and does so at fairly low cost.
All of these technologies could have roles in America's energy future. But reducing America's energy consumption -- or at the very least, slowing the rate of growth of our fossil fuel consumption -- will take years, barrels of cash, and more than a little bravery in Congress and the White House.
It's time to get started.
Imagine if this (gak!) pretty popular, folksy-wolksy president used his persona to tell people, "Hey, ride a bike, buy a fuel efficient car...do your part." Naw, wouldn't work for the oil interests. "Energy independence," wink, wink. "And pick me up in a battleship-sized SUV."
Lucy Riccardo Takes The Plane
The New York Times' Joe Sharkey includes yours truly in a most entertaining column, "Beware of F.B.I. Agents Bearing Small Nail Files," about fun and frolic in "The TSA Follies." The best story was this one somebody emailed him:
"A friend who is an F.B.I. agent was permitted to carry her gun on board an airplane after showing proper identification," said Dr. Stephen J. Firestone from Minnesota. "Her nail file, on the other hand, was confiscated because it could be used as a weapon."
Here's mine:
Amy Alkon, also from the Los Angeles area, almost got her boyfriend busted on a business trip after she visited a flea market and bought a "Barbie-like pair of toy scissors," which she absently tucked into his carry-on bag. "They totally freaked at security," said Ms. Alkon, who writes a column, "The Advice Goddess," syndicated in 100 newspapers. Now, Ms. Alkon says, she is "totally paranoid" going through security because "I have such an imagination.""I think they're going to identify my four-inch heels as a potential weapon. I also have a slim glass nail file that I got in France, and I'm always worried that they will confiscate it and I will be carted away in leg irons."
Gregg was especially unappreciative, as he was putting his belt back on at the TSA search area, of my comment to the searcher man: "You know why we're all so inconvenienced? It's because people believe in god!" Gregg is fully supportive when his mouthy broad is dragged off to court, etc. He does have one rule: I can do whatever I want as long as he's not sitting or standing with me at the time. I did try to get him to make an exception when an old lady was driving next to us with a "Marriage is between a man and a woman!" bumper sticker, and let me yell out the window, "Lesbian!" Sigh. No dice.
photo by arch Parisian photographer Emily Tarr
Care, Not Cash
San Francisco gets it right with the homeless. San Francisco, when it rains, has tended to smell like a giant men's bathroom thanks to the enormous homelessness problem. Maybe this will change -- or has changed -- thanks to Mayor Gavin Newsom. I haven't been a fan of Newsom's in the past, thanks to his idiotic decision to break the law and marry gays and lesbians, instead of properly challenging the law in the courts; in fact, it's possible that this may have helped George Bush mobilize his theonut base and get elected. But, Newsom instituted a program a year ago to provide housing for the homeless that's exceeding expectations, reports Kevin Fagan in the SF Chron:
One year after the Care Not Cash welfare reform program debuted amid furious opposition and fervent hopes, nearly 800 street people have been moved into supportive housing and general assistance rolls for the homeless have been slashed by 73 percent -- developments that represent San Francisco's most significant transformation in years in the landscape of homelessness....The most important thing, the mayor argues, is that every homeless person who got a room is one less homeless person who has to scrape by outside, not knowing whether each day will bring a night shivering on the sidewalk or flopping at a shelter. Instead of blowing their welfare on drugs or alcohol, as many did before, they have a place to call their own with counseling services on site, the so-called support part of supportive housing, he notes.
"The best way to alleviate homelessness is by doing 'housing first' -- giving homeless people a place to live before they have addressed all their other issues, and then working on the other things once they're inside," Newsom said while touring newly opened housing for the homeless a week ago. "This has been proven to work here and nationwide, and this is our priority."
And, Newsom administration officials insist, the statistics in this case don't lie.
One year ago, there were 2,400 homeless people drawing welfare checks, but that caseload has plummeted 73 percent to 653 people today, all of whom are on the vastly reduced monthly grants.
The money saved by cutting welfare has been rolled into a $14.2 million fund that leased 793 clean, modernized rooms in 12 residential hotels. To date, 789 homeless people have been moved into those rooms and, from the critics to the residents, reviews of the housing conditions all year have been enthusiastic.
Evolution Is A Dirty Word
This is an Advice Goddess Blog exclusive!...insider information on the growing chill in Washington on science and reason:
The National Health Museum (press release in the following link) is seeking a "master planning partner for programs and exhibits." They're down to the final four bidders now.
According to my source, who says I cannot use his or her name, "somebody on high" at the museum "made it clear" that the world "evolution" should not appear in any program or exhibition text of any firm which wants the job. It seems the Museum doesn't want any "biological controversies." Here's an excerpt from the press release from the Museum, which "hopes to choose a planning partner" inoffensive enough for the theocrats and their flock by May:
The National Health Museum is a non-governmental, non-profit corporation led by leaders in health, medicine, and public service and funded by a mix of individual, corporate, foundation, and government contributors. It plans to build and operate a 300,000 square foot museum complex at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with a mission of inspiring Americans to live healthier lives through access to the knowledge and wonders of the health sciences. NHM’s complex will be the largest institution of its kind when it is completed about the end of the decade.
...Inspiring Americans to live healthier lives...perhaps through the kind of "science" that says man ran around with the dinosaurs, the earth was created in five days, and the Grand Canyon was an overnight deal, created by Noah's flood.
What is this we're in right now, a NASCAR race to primitivity?
Finally, A Wise Man Speaks
Mario Cuomo warns of the "tyranny of the majority":
If Republicans rewrite Senate rules to more easily end filibusters, the country will experience "exactly the kind of `tyranny of the majority' that James Madison had in mind," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo said Saturday.Cuomo, in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address, said Senate Republicans "are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they cannot get from the proper political bodies."
"How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate," Cuomo said.
"The Republicans say it would assure dominance by the majority in the Senate," he said. "That sounds democratic until you remember that the Bill of Rights was adopted, as James Madison pointed out, to protect all of Americans from what he called the `tyranny of the majority."'
...Under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed in the 100-member body to end a filibuster. Republicans are threatening to use their majority to change the rules and require only a simple majority vote to end a filibuster.
"The Republican senators should instead start working with the Democrats to address all the serious problems of this country in the proper forums -- in the Congress and in the presidency -- leaving the judges to be judges instead of a third political branch controlled by the whim of the politicians in power," Cuomo said.
Luke Lives!
Luke Y. Thompson, whose appendix burst, is okay...but will take some time to recover.
The Problem With Being Really, Really Full Of Yourself?
It's really hard to show real remorse when you don't really have any. Mitch Albom apologizes for writing the fiction instead of the news, as follows:
I assumed something would happen that didn't. That was wrong.
Can the guy be any less contrite while supposedly writing a column of contrition? Read on, as he piles on the self-serving sap, no surprise, since that's what makes him so popular.
Time passed. Lumps were taken. And people moved on. I have been slow to return to this column because a lot has been said and done, and a lot seems changed. The boundless joy I always felt for this newspaper business has been socked in the stomach.
Aww, poor dear. The guy shows all the self-knowledge of a hangnail. Here's my letter to the Free Press about it (my former hometown paper that I'd been reading since about age 8):
Mitch Albom claims have seen the error of his ways, yet excuses his lack of integrity yet again with "I assumed something would happen that didn't." Does a highly paid columnist for your paper really have so little understanding of what it means to be a reporter? No wonder the public has so little trust for newspapers these days. Moreover, perhaps I've missed something, but I have yet to see a definitive statement by the Free Press confirming that this is the first and only time Albom's shorted the readers on the truth. I'm still wondering...aren't you? --Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist, Santa Monica