The Church Of Shoes
My place of worship; in this case, the storefront adjoining Christian Leboutin's workshop, a few doors down from our apartment.
My form of fundamentalism: The War On Thongs.
This is the foot of an American seated next to me at the café across the street. Ick. Too much information!
French Family Values
Krugman compares living to work with working to live:
It's true that France's G.D.P. per person is well below that of the United States. But that's because French workers spend more time with their families.O.K., I'm oversimplifying a bit. There are several reasons why the French put in fewer hours of work per capita than we do. One is that some of the French would like to work, but can't: France's unemployment rate, which tends to run about four percentage points higher than the U.S. rate, is a real problem. Another is that many French citizens retire early. But the main story is that full-time French workers work shorter weeks and take more vacations than full-time American workers.
The point is that to the extent that the French have less income than we do, it's mainly a matter of choice. And to see the consequences of that choice, let's ask how the situation of a typical middle-class family in France compares with that of its American counterpart.
The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.
But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption. Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn't have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.
Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four.
So which society has made the better choice?
I do have to say, I'm a capitalist, and a libertarian, mainly, and not in favor of the insane amount of regulation and welfare state-ism they have in France. An American friend who lives here used to brag that he got free health care. Well, true, he doesn't have to shell out at the doctor's office. But, he does pay, I believe 65% of his income in taxes. Hmmm, maybe that's not free health care, but exceptionally pricey health care.
Getting back to the topic of the article, while I have a job I love, which consumes a lot of my time, I do take care to take time to live and have balance, best I can. But, for somebody whose job is just a job -- a way to eat and feed the kids -- maybe slaving away all year with only a week or two for vacation is a living, but not much of a way to live.
Lock Them All In The Bastille
New art in Paris leaves something to be desired. Usually it's hopelessly seventies or desperate overthink and masochism. Well, I was not surprised Thursday night. It was the opening of a show called Homo Precarious, by Artistes à la Bastille.
Here we have some bad performance art. (Then again, has anyone, anywhere, ever seen good performance art?)
Lady, wash your face and go to the Watteau show.
This piece had some quaint, Joseph Cornell-esque appeal.
This piece didn't.
Oh...no...
Didn't I see this on somebody's divorced dad's couch in suburban Detroit, circa 1972?
Oh, look! It's Barbra Streisand's rose garden! (Yes, I've been to the unpleasant and ill-mannered actress/singer/director's house for dinner. You'd think she'd have some wild, French rose garden. Nope. Every species of rose ever grown, I'd imagine, all in ugly dirt rows, all with little plastic plaques below. Tackeeee!)
These, bien sur, had little phrases like "Globalization" and "Multinational Lobbies" on the plaques. My, how...unexpected!
And, this one? No idea. You tell me.
Luckily, as far as modern art in Paris goes, you can always count on photography. I highly recommend the Martin Parr show at the Musée Européen de la Photographie.
Yeah, Unilever Really Cares About How You Feel About Your Ass
If you want me to hurl, speak admiringly of those wunnnnnnderful Dove ads that use "real" women (ie, of the "wide load" variety):
"It is our belief that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes and ages," said Philippe Harousseau, Dove's marketing director on the "Campaign for Real Beauty." "Our mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by broadening the definition of beauty."
Oh, please. It is your belief that you'll keep your job a whole lot longer if you move product -- or, for starters, get a bunch of free PR by putting a bunch of overweight women in your ads. And guess what: If you thought Satan would move soap, he'd be in your ads, too, with his draggy ass hanging out of his skivvies for all the world to see. You know, if I want to see a herd of young women who are out of shape, all I have to do is fly home to America and open my eyes. If I'm buying a magazine or staring at your dumb billboard, I'd like to be rewarded with a look at the extraordinarly beautiful ones, 'kay?
Oops, but, gotta love the irony, it seems the campaign isn't selling soap...
The ads are designed to sell products from Dove's firming collection lotions and creams meant to reduce the appearance of cellulite with slogans like, "Let's face it, firming the thighs of a size 2 supermodel is no challenge."
If you want a real challenge, just try telling the truth to people who'd give anything not to hear it:
The ads can be a touchy subject as witnessed by a Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper after he characterized the women as "chunky." He was bombarded with hate mail from about a thousand readers. Some called Roeper an "idiot," "Neanderthal," and "sexist loser" quotes he included in a follow-up column explaining his original comments.
The women are chunky. Saying so doesn't make you sexist. It makes you a person who states the obvious. It's sad, too, because being a heavy women diminishes your opportunities in jobs, life, and love. You can say it "shouldn't" be that way until you turn green -- but that won't change a simple fact: it is that way.
Just Say No...To Sunblock?
I know, I've written about this before, but I was doing a little research on sunblock and I saw this from the Detroit Free Press -- an article noting that the FDA has stopped people from buying and selling French sunblocks on eBay. Oh, do they need to spend 10 years testing it? What a pity, considering Mexoryl is the best sun product out there -- and nobody's died from using it in France. This Washington Post article explains the whole story very well. Meanwhile, I'm going out to buy some Anthelios 60 XL Pour Visage -- outlaw that I am, protecting my skin from skin cancer and preventing it from resembling an alligator handbag.
Police Intimidation
Well, I'm sure it happens here in Paris...it just seems a little hard to imagine, considering the tools of the trade. Imagine this car bearing down on yours, lights blaring. It almost seems like incentive to floor it and pop off to rob a bank on your way out of town.
Of course, the police at the station across from us are prone to simply standing on the corner three steps from the station door, waving cars to stop and then checking drivers' papers. Maybe the cops are too embarrassed to get behind the wheel. Or maybe they think police cars have better uses.
Right, Yet Wrong
Paul Sperry is right that we should be "profiling" potential terrorists in the NYC subway. But he's wrong in the sense that we could get a little too comfy about exactly what a terrorist looks like. How long before the homocidal nutwads start recruiting disenfranchised blond girls from Des Moines? Here's an excerpt from Sperry's piece in the IHT:
In response to the serial subway bombings in London, the police in New York were prudently ordered to start searching the bags of the city's subway riders. But there will be absolutely no profiling, Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed: The police will select one out of every five passengers to search, and they will do so at random, without regard for race or religion.
In that case, the security move is doomed to fail.
Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked New York with planes in 2001. From everything we know about the terrorists who may be taking aim at our transportation system, they are most likely to be young Muslim men.
Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won't be profiled.
Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies in a procedure that has more to do with demonstrating tolerance than with protecting citizens from terrorism.
Critics protest that profiling is prejudicial. In fact, it's based on statistics. Insurance companies profile policyholders based on probability of risk. That's just smart business. Likewise, profiling passengers based on proven security risk is just smart law enforcement.
Besides, done properly, profiling would subject relatively few Muslims to searches. Elderly Muslim women don't fit the terrorist profile. Young Muslim men of Arab or South Asian origin do. But rather than acknowledge this obvious fact, the New York Police Department has advised subway riders to be alert for "people" in bulky clothes who sweat or fiddle nervously with bags.
Well, a lot of people wear bulky clothes. A lot of people fiddle with their bags. And for that matter, a lot of people sweat. Could the Police Department be any more general in describing the traits of an Islamic suicide bomber? Could its advice be more useless? Truth be told, commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. Law enforcement knows this, and so should you.
According to a January 2004 handout, the Department of Homeland Security advises U.S. border authorities to look out for certain "suicide bomber indicators." They include a "shaved head or short haircut. A short haircut or recently shaved beard or moustache may be evident by differences in skin complexion on the head or face. May smell of herbal or flower water (most likely flower water), as they may have sprayed perfume on themselves, their clothing, and weapons to prepare for Paradise."
Let's prepare them for life in a maximum security hellhole instead. I'm all for idealism -- right up to the point I'm hopping the #2 or #3 train downtown.
See A Damn Doctor
Don't take medical advice from your friend with dred locks and Birkenstocks or some gray-skinned person at your local health food store. Oh, but everybody knows (insert name of trendy herb here) is highly effective, and the medical establishment and big pharma is in a conspiracy to keep it from being studied. Well, no, it's just not financially beneficial to them to study stuff anybody can mix into a vitamin pill. But, guess what: somebody studied echinacea recently, and found it does...absolutely nothing...for your cold. Gina Kolata has the story in The New York Times:
Echinacea, the herbal supplement made from purple coneflower and used by millions of Americans to prevent or treat colds, neither prevented colds nor eased cold symptoms in a large and rigorous study.The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved 437 people who volunteered to have cold viruses dripped into their noses. Some swallowed echinacea for a week beforehand, others a placebo. Still others took echinacea or a placebo at the time they were infected.
Then the subjects were secluded in hotel rooms for five days while scientists examined them for symptoms and took nasal washings to look for the virus and for an immune system protein, interleukin-8. Some had hypothesized that interleukin-8 was stimulated by echinacea, enabling the herb to stop colds.
But the investigators found that those who took echinacea fared no differently from those who took a placebo: they were just as likely to catch a cold, their symptoms were just as severe, they had just as much virus in their nasal secretions, and they made no more interleukin-8.
Some researchers say still further investigation is needed, with stronger doses and with echinacea species and preparations different from those used in this study. But Dr. Stephen E. Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the government agency that sponsored the new research, says he for one is satisfied that echinacea is not an effective cold remedy.
"This paper says it will not pre-empt a common cold, and it stands on top of prior studies saying it doesn't treat an established cold," he said, adding, "We've got to stop attributing any efficacy to echinacea."
For more info on other health food store and medical myths, check out Quackwatch.org.
Well, Not Quite A Free Society
No, you aren't free to be the Salvation Army for terrorism from within our borders. A Federal judge just sentenced a scumbag cleric to 75 years -- the maximum -- for funding terrorist organizations:
Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, 57, was convicted in March of attempting to funnel millions of dollars to Palestinian-backed Hamas and to al Qaeda, the radical Islamic group behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.Hamas is an Islamic fundamentalist group that the U.S. State Department labels a terrorist organization.
U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson also fined al-Moayad $1.2 million for his role in attempting to fund terrorist organizations, said Bob Nardoza, a spokesman in the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York.
"This defendant is truly beloved in Yemen by millions of people for a lifetime of charitable work on behalf of poor people," said Al-Moayad's lawyer during the trial, Bill Goodman.
"This sentence will be seen in Yemen and throughout the Arab world as evidence of American hatred of Muslims and not as evidence of American justice."
U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, based in Brooklyn, called al-Moayad a "master terrorist financier" and said he "richly deserves the maximum sentence imposed."
"Those who finance terrorist attacks, and rejoice in the murder of innocent victims, are no different from those who plant the bombs or carry the backpacks," Mauskopf said news release. "Money is the lifeblood of terrorism."
It's time to see more of this -- here and in Britain. Let them all kill themselves -- and nobody else -- in the clink!
Somewhat Barefoot In The Park
Barbarians, Barbaric Societies
That's what the terrorists seek to turn ours into -- a mirror of their fundamentalist sickness. In Iran, two gay teenagers -- one 18, the other thought to be 16 or 17 -- were executed by hanging this week, reported the Iranian Student News Agency. Their report was translated from Farsi into English by Outrage!, a British gay rights group -- and includes so unbelievably chilling photos of the two boys, just prior to execution (more at the Doug Ireland link above, excerpted below):
Consensual gay sex in any form is punishable by death in the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to the website Age of Consent, which monitors such laws around the world, in Iran "Homosexuality is illegal, those charged with love-making are given a choice of four deathstyles: being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword, or dropped from the highest perch....In the case of the two teens hanged in Mashhad, "They admitted having gay sex (probably under torture) but claimed in their defense that most young boys had sex with each other and tdhat they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death," according to the ISNA report as translated by OutRage. "Prior to their execution, the gay teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes. The length of their detention suggests that they committed the so-called offenses more than a year earlier, when they were possibly around the age of 16."
"Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer of the younger of the two boys, had appealed that he was too young to be executed and that the court should take into account his tender age (believed to be 16 or 17). But the Supreme Court in Tehran Ordered him to be hanged." As a state party to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Iran has undertaken not to execute anyone for an offence committed when they were under the age of 18 -- which means that by hanging the two youths Iran is in violation of international law.The Iranian authorities are putting out a cover story that the two boys had participated in the rape of a 13-year-old, but OutRage affirms from its sources that this accusation is a smokescreen for inhuman conduct and is without foundation. However, the Murdoch press (e.g., the Times of London) is putting about the Iranian government's story as a virtual statement of fact. But there is no mention of this Iranian government accusation in the original ISNA report, otherwise quite detailed.-- which rather suggests it's a recent invention. Furthermore, it is hardly surprising that, at the very moment at which Iran is engaged in the most delicate negotiation with the Western powers over nuclear materials -- the outcome of which will have a profound impact on the Iranian economy --the Iranian government, when caught in a heinous act of barbarity that is also a violation of Iran's commitments under international law -- should try to find a new excuse for the inexcusable.
Left-click on the third photo above and look at the enlarged version, which shows the younger of the two adolescents weeping as he's carried off in a police van to the end of his young life. Then, if you would like to protest the barbaric hanging of these two lads to whom nature gave same-sex hearts, follow the suggestion of the Human Rights Campaign which -- citing this blog -- has written to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice demanding that she formally protest these executions, which you should do as well. If you want to protest directly to the Iranian government, be aware that, while the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, there is an Iranian embassy in Canada. You may write, telephone, or fax the Iranian ambassador in Canada:Ambassador Seyed Mouhammad Ali Moosavi, Embassy of Iran, 245 Metcalfe St., Ottawa, Ontario .K2P 2K2 Canada Telephone (OO1-613- 235-4726, 233-4726; Fax, 233-5712
What War In Iraq?
Fuel economy? Who needs fuel economy? After all, we're in Iraq for...um...humanitarian reasons (Darfur?)? Because we didn't feel like going full-speed ahead after Osama? Because Iraq supposedly had WMD (N. Korea?)?
The EPA has held back a report on fuel economy -- right when Congress is poised for a final vote on the energy bill, writes Danny Hakim, in The New York Times -- and for good reason, it seems.
But a copy of the report, embargoed for publication Wednesday, was sent to The New York Times by a member of the E.P.A. communications staff just minutes before the decision was made to delay it until next week. The contents of the report show that loopholes in American fuel economy regulations have allowed automakers to produce cars and trucks that are significantly less fuel-efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980's.Releasing the report this week would have been inopportune for the Bush administration, its critics said, because it would have come on the eve of a final vote in Congress on energy legislation six years in the making. The bill, as it stands, largely ignores auto mileage regulations.
The executive summary of the copy of the report obtained by The Times acknowledges that "fuel economy is directly related to energy security," because consumer cars and trucks account for about 40 percent of the nation's oil consumption. But trends highlighted in the report show that carmakers are not making progress in improving fuel economy, and environmentalists say the energy bill will do little to prod them.
"Something's fishy when the Bush administration delays a report showing no improvement in fuel economy until after passage of their energy bill, which fails to improve fuel economy," said Daniel Becker, the Sierra Club's top global warming strategist. "It's disturbing that despite high gas prices, an oil war and growing concern about global warming pollution, most automakers are failing to improve fuel economy."
Eryn Witcher, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said the timing of the release of the report had nothing to do with the energy bill deliberations.
"We are committed to sharing our scientific studies with the public in the most comprehensive and understandable format possible," she said. "Issue experts are reviewing the fuel economy data and we look forward to providing a summary of the information next week."
Some of what the report says reaffirms what has long been known. Leaps in engine technology over the last couple of decades have been mostly used to make cars faster, not more fuel-efficient, and the rise of sport utility vehicles and S.U.V.-like pickup trucks has actually sapped efficiency. The average 2004 model car or truck got 20.8 miles per gallon, about 6 percent less than the 22.1 m.p.g. of the average new vehicle sold in the late 1980's, according to the report.
Yoohoo, Detroit...my Honda Insight gets 66mpg hwy, 45-50 city (I could get even better mileage if I drove more). Cute, too. Here's an article about what a great car it is from the London Observer, by Martin Love:
The Insight is (officially) the nicest, cleanest car you can buy. The £17,100 vehicle is an electro-petrol hybrid which uses Honda's Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) system. This is an electric motor which boosts the power and efficiency of what's essentially a fairly weedy petrol engine by capturing energy normally wasted as heat in the brakes and re-using it. This coupled with an aerodynamic shape and feather-light construction means it can do up to 90 miles on a single gallon. It also produces less CO2 than any other car on the road. It's so clean, even Max Clifford would struggle to find any dirt on it.However, decreasing our fuel consumption is just one prong in the battle to reduce the impact our cars have on the environment. The average age of a car on Britain's roads is eight years old, yet they're built to last twice that. Modern engines also are capable of vast distances, yet many of us believe once a car breaks the 100,000 barrier it is well on its way to the great landfill in the sky. This is rubbish, of course, in more ways than one. Mercedes recently tracked down a Greek taxi driver with 3m miles on the clock of his 1976 diesel.
To help prove the point, the Insight I'm driving this week has already done 109,000 miles. Usually, test cars turn up with a mileometer barely into double figures, so to have a six-figure sum on the dash shows real confidence from Honda.
The car's green credentials mean that in that time, 13 tonnes of CO2 have not been released into the atmosphere when compared with that produced by a standard hatchback. That's equal to 17 times the car's weight. The driver will also have saved about £4,500 in fuel costs, so it isn't all eco-altruism.
Oh yeah, I forgot...global warming doesn't exist, and even if it did exist, it wouldn't be caused by humans -- well, that is, if you're a member of the Bush Administration.
Sunday In The Park With Emily
Okay, so this was the Jardin du Luxembourg, not the island on the Seine where Seurat painted his famous dotty afternoon, La Grande Jatte. But it was colorful...
...as is so much of France. Even in the kitchen:
photo of me by Emily Tarr
Letter From Paris
Not from me, but to me, from an eloquent and informed friend who’s lived in Paris for many years. She writes of the bleak future she sees, in France, in Europe, and in the world, for all of us “infidels”:
Chère Amie,In the humble opinion of Mme Tout le monde (= Jane Q. Public) that I am, and at having seen the situation on both sides of the Atlantic & all the way up to Holland, Denmark & Sweden...it is not what anyone in the West does that will make a difference. These people are out to kill us all & they begin hitting us at our weak point, our Achilles' heel, or should I say the specific way in which democracy works in each country, to hurt us. It it interesting to watch how they use our democratic ways against us starting with freedom of speech, hence the hateful "prèches" (=imam's preachings). The most galling is their treatment of their women whom they force by either threat or brainwashing to wear the veil & that they turn into walking tents – these poor women who, for the most part - want to wear modern dresses, jeans & make-up. In their will to destroy us, most obvious are the symbols of US capitalism & might both inside & outside the US, and the freedom enjoyed in all Western countries, with its great corollary, freedom of speech.
Like said in one of the articles I sent you, they want to impose the dark ages back upon us, which is a difficult pill to swallow for us in the Occident, children of the Siècle des Lumières. Since the end of the 18h century, in aspiration of freedom & equality, most western countries, starting with the United States & France, went thru some type of revolution (rather violent in France). It has taken us over two centuries to attain all the rights for all citizens & as we seem to reach to point of accomplishment, these dark fanatic knights want to bring us back to the time of Inquisition.
I ask her about an article she sent me (laïcité is secularism):
Regarding the second piece, is there a difference in the way immigrants are dealt with here - vis a vis English "multi-culturalism" vs. French "integration"? Is there really integration? Or is there just an attempt at it -- with laïcité, the headscarves, etc. It seems immigrants who believe in killing the infidel and hating western civ are a real problem here. -AHer response:
You ask if there is a difference in the way immigrants are dealt with in France vis-à-vis English “multi-culturalism” vs French “integration”. The way I understand it, this is not the problem. Whether they are treated well or not, put in ghettos or not, are given equal opportunities or not, nothing will change the fact that they want to do away with our way of life. Period. France has been a land of immigration & integration for centuries. Refugees came to France for the same reasons tourists do. Its freedom, its way of life, its facility of assimilation after one generation, i.e. thru their children who attend French schools, l’école de la République. It is very much the same in the United States. On the other hand, the Muslims do not want to assimilate or to integrate, whichever way you want to say it. They do not want their children to be educated as petits Français. You should see how these kids disrupt classes, how they refuse to study certain subjects.My hair stands straight on my head when I hear Americans speak of the way Muslims in France live in “ghettos” & how they are treated by the French. It simply is not true. If in their quarters there is violence (knifing, gang rapes, beatings, delinquency, drug dealing etc.), it is not gangs of French kids going there to do it, it is the Muslims (or whatever they should be called) who are doing it. It is Muslim gang against Muslim gang. The many gang rapes are of their own young neighbor Arab girls! Then they go out & gang up against the French. When you hear of anti-Semitism in France, of vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, do you believe one minute French people do it? No, it is the delinquent Arabs in France. But nobody is saying it because these “Arab kids” are second or third generation, thus French nationals. And also because stupid "political correctness" is a must. So, who destroyed graves in a Jewish cemetery? “French” people!
Amy, I have lived in France a long time -- over thirty years -- and for a quite a long time, I have foreseen what’s going on in France now. In fact, in the 1980s, I was telling a very dear American friend of mine (we are like sisters) in California my fears for the future of France. She could not believe me & said “You are racist.” Racist I was not, I just was picking on things that were shocking me. Like a conversation I had with an Arab man – rich, handsome, de culture Européenne as the French like to say. That man told me, “Do you know why we come here to study & work? Simply to learn your ways, know you, understand you & eventually do away with you.” I was flabbergasted by the turn the conversation had taken. That guy could not have been clearer.
Nowadays, I still talk to Arabs whenever the occasion arises, never to those of “quartiers difficiles”, but to well-to-do ones who live in the better parts of Paris or suburb. I wish you would try it sometimes! Within ten minutes at the most, the conversation turns into a litany of our ills, then pure hatred of the Occident comes out. I am yet to hear one of these men (or women, as they are as vicious) have a word of compassion for 9/11 or any terrorist act perpetrated in Europe, because Europe already got its share of bombings, which many Americans in the U.S. do not seem to be aware of. Ask the Parisians about les attentats du métro Saint-Michel ou de la Rue de Rennes (bombing attacks in Paris, about ten years ago), to mention only these two !
In the opinion of most French people, it is only a matter of time for terrorism to hit again. And it is my opinion also. What will be hit in France beside public transportation, department stores & markets? I see the Louvre, Notre Dame cathedral, Versailles, nuclear power plants, schools, hospitals…I also think that Arabs will be killing Arabs in France, Arabs such as the rector of the Mosquée de Paris. They’ll slit his throat right in the Mosquée because he shows no hatred for the French.
Amy, forgive me for sounding so pessimistic, but that is the way I see the future in Europe. With these people, there is no talk possible, no common grounds, only escalation of the hatred & killing of the Infidel. It is going to be a bloody war of religion. And yes, it is going to be WWIII.
Capitalism, It Ain't
Where are all the common-sense moderates these days? I get so tired of the politics of certain friends of mine, left and right, who will fight to the death to tell you everything their party stands for is correct and good and smart. For example, there's the penchant for people on the right to defend big business at all cost.
I'm a libertarian, a capitalist (I teethed on The Fountainhead, I believe), and fiscally conservative -- moreso than many right-wing friends of mine who believe in taxpayer-funded public education for middle-class children. (I don't -- pay for your own damn brats to go to school...unless you're dirt poor, and then the rest of us should pick up the tab, so as to have an educated populace -- step one in maintaining a democracy.)
Hey, all you right wing-or-die types, how do you feel about picking up your neighbor's property taxes? Okay, so maybe that's a bit much to ask. How about their doctor bills? Well, if they work at Wal-Mart, you just might be doing that. And if you're running a newspaper, and somebody who works for you writes a complaint about that, you just might get your newspaper yanked out of the store because of that (the store's prerogative, of course). Note that Wal-Mart isn't complaining about inaccuracy; namely, because the writer, Mark O'Brien, wasn't inaccurate:
"I like Wal-Mart prices the same as the next shopper, but there's a downside, too. Many Wal-Mart employees lack the fringe benefits and insurance that makes the difference between existence and a good quality of life. Yet, we customers pay a surcharge from a different pocket — subsidizing health care for Wal-Mart employees who can't afford it."Mark then described how Friedman's book pointed out that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees are in a Georgia health-care program, which costs the state's taxpayers nearly $10 million a year. Mark also pointed out that a New York Times report found that 31 percent of the patients at a North Carolina hospital were Wal-Mart employees on Medicaid.
Mark's column really wasn't about Mr. Walton's store, but about Pensacola and how we're becoming a Wal-Mart kind of town, "cheap and comfy on the surface, lots of unhappiness and hidden costs underneath."
Wal-mart should have a health care tip jar at the door so shoppers saving big there won't be doing it at the expense of the rest of us. Of course, we should send the balance of the bills to people on the right who think Wal-Mart is the greatest thing since toast, and should be allowed to perpetuate this de facto theft on the rest of us. Is that really what you'd call capitalism? Or...is it more like the welfare state dressed up in capitalist's clothing?
via Romenesko
Patti Gets Decorated
Patti Smith gets decorated by the French -- slightly old news -- but I just noticed that the photo of her getting medalized on the front of her site is by Sue Rynski, a very cool rock photog from Detroit who's living in Paris, doing art photography and shooting rock & roll from time to time. She's been called "a cult figure of the pre-punk/punk rock scene, which she documented during 1977-82 in Detroit" -- and she's a friend of Gregg's Detroit rock/punk scene friends, so we had breakfast with her while Gregg was still here. Here's a bit of bio on her:
Trained in Paris, at Rhode Island School of Design, and at University of Michigan, she found artistic inspiration in the re-emergence of powerful, original rock music. The transfer of energy from performer to photographer is evident in her work, which captures movement and emotion live and up close.Rynski was chief photographer for the legendary White Noise magazine, Paul Zimmerman and Jerry "Vile" Peterson's first Detroit publication. Her photos also appeared in the local, national, and international music and mainstream press, as well as being in demand by the bands. She was nominated for Best Photographer in the first Michigan Rock Awards. In 1983-84, she briefly took the stage herself as lead singer of psychedelic pop rock band Batteur Attaqué.
She believes that music is a precious cultural and artistic heritage, especially Detroit's original music. Her photo archives preserve a highly creative era in rock history. Artists photographed include Detroit's own as well as the other well known U.S. and British bands of the period. A selection from Sue Rynski's archives is exhibited at Detroit's cpop gallery.
See her vintage Detroit rock/punk photos here. And an interview with her here.
Your Cooter!
Now in fruit flavors! Brought to you by the idiots at Tampax. And brought to my attention by Jackie Danicki, who found this bit below on the fabulously named blog, Lipstick Is My Crack:
So I was leafing through the August issue of Lucky when I came upon a scent-strip insert. The name of the fragrance wasn't readily apparent because the front of the insert featured only a woman in a flowing dress and some sort of water imagery, along with the words, "Beguile your senses. Succumb to the freshness." Intrigued, I opened the strip and took a sniff. Whoa! It was a very strong floral-peach scent with a strong basenote of toilet paper. Figuring it was some cheap new drugstore body spray or something, I flipped the insert over and DUDES! Do you know what it was I was huffing there? Tampax. As in tampons. They have scented ones now, apparently, and are so darn proud of it that they want you to rub the scent of tampons on your wrist and walk about in public, or something.
AdviceGoddess.com -- always your source for the latest in vaginal fashion!
The War On People In Pain
John Tierney writes in The New York Times that the DEA is taking the easy way out -- at the expense of pain sufferers:
During the war on drugs in the 1980's and 1990's, federal and local agents risked their lives going after drug gangs on the streets. As their budgets for drug enforcement soared, they arrested hundreds of thousands of people annually and filled a quarter of American prison cells with drug offenders.But what did they have to show for it? Drugs remained as available as ever on the streets - and actually got a lot cheaper. The street price of heroin and cocaine dropped by more than half in the last two decades. Dealers just went on dealing, not only lowering their prices but also selling stronger, purer versions of heroin, cocaine and marijuana.
Given this record, and the pressure from Congress to show results, it's understandable that the Drug Enforcement Administration and local police departments hit on a new strategy: defining deviancy up. Federal and local authorities shifted their focus to doctors and the new scourge of OxyContin and similar painkillers, known generally as opioids.
As quarry for D.E.A. agents, doctors offered several advantages over crack dealers. They were not armed. They were listed in the phone book. They kept office hours and records of their transactions. And unlike the typical crack dealer living with his mother, they had valuable assets that could be seized and shared by the federal, state and local agencies fighting the drug war.
I don't mean to suggest that the doctors were all blameless, or that OxyContin wasn't being diverted to the black market and being abused. But the problem wasn't nearly as bad as federal and local authorities made it out to be.
You gotta feel for those DEA guys. I mean, imagine how terrifying it must be, knowing that any minute, your quarry is sure to double-park their Mercedes.
Tour De Lance
Woke up at 5am and got out of the house by 6am to run along the Seine and then along the end of the Tour de France, and up the Champs Elysées. Huge red official transport trucks everywhere and workers laying barricades, some of whom looked on smiling as I zipped past on foot, bonjour-ing all. (Those Americans, always in such a hurry!) Yeah, that's right. Bring it home, Lance!
The French, they are not exactly...sportif. Besides the fact that the national form of exercise seems to be lifting one's cigarette to one's lips (although day-to-day life takes much more exertion than it does in the States), they just don't seem to be a people at home with "working out" à l'Américain -- publicly or at the gym.
Then, there is the French diet -- small portions of high-fat, high-nutrient, un-processed, un-chemically or hormonally infused food -- which, if you read neurophysiologist Will Clower's The Fat Fallacy, is the way to stay trim...and avoid heart attacks. French people, despite their smoking and their burying their faces in plates of cream sauce, have, population percentage-wise, a third of the heart attacks Americans do. So, maybe they don't need to partake of the manic forms of workout Americans do. And, a good thing that is, because they aren't even able to dress the part. Witness La Coquette's experience at the gym:
A French girl sauces onto the bike in front of me at the gym today. She is very svelte and alluring, but I am worried about her outfit. Striped brown socks, Petit Bateau camisole, droopy cotton shorts. It kills me how these French girls will arrive in something perfect, like ballet flats and a trench coat, and then change into this. She looks like she is going to a twelve-year-old's slumber party.Later, a man gets onto the treadmill in a polo shirt and shorts with, belt loops? He looks eerily like my father. Similar sartorial philosophies, for sportswear at least--untroubled by the advancements in moisture-wicking technology or elastic, but preferring to remain very 1970's tennis player. He's adorable. You just want to slip on some aviators and roller-skate with him to Simon and Garfunkel.
Yes...the antipathy to exercise...perhaps, at heart, it's a fashion issue?
Rebels Looking For A Cause
With the various and sundry proposed explanations I've posted here, written by various and sundry pundits and experts, the why behind the terrorism seems to become clearer. It's Che Guevara with middle-eastern headgear -- a bunch of murderers all dressed up in the "revolution." That's basically professor Olivier Roy's take on it, and the more I hear and read explanations like his, the more I tend to agree:
"Born again" or converts, they are rebels looking for a cause. They find it in the dream of a virtual, universal ummah, the same way the ultraleftists of the 1970's (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades) cast their terrorist actions in the name of the "world proletariat" and "Revolution" without really caring about what would happen after.It is also interesting to note that none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools. They do not have a rational strategy to push for the interests of the Iraqi or Palestinian people.
Even their calls for the withdrawal of the European troops from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces. Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes.
The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.
On a Che Guevera fashion note, I saw some American twit with a Mike Tyson shirt on strolling with a girl across my Louvre cut-through. Yeah, moron...why not just wear a shirt that says "A Big Thumbs Up To Rapists!"?
That Wacky Cafe de Flore
That pretty much described it yesterday afternoon while I was sitting out front working on my column. A performance artist came by -- Tagh L'Explorateur was his name, and these are his wheels:
To my surprise, he was actually funny -- a rarity, in my book...as a jaded former New Yorker and current Lost Angeleno.
He ran after pedestrians, mimicking them, pretended to chase or hit them with his large grass broom, and played with patrons and waiters.
The rather serious and fancy Parisian lady next to me, une femme d'une certaine age (ladies I love seeing in Paris because they're so put together, not resigned to their age like so many of their American peers), laughed and laughed out loud, and kept commenting to me about how hilarious he was. Certainly beats the faux Egyptian guys who wear metallic sheets and face paint and stand perfectly still in urban areas around the globe!
Oh yeah...when I gave him some coin after his performance, he gave me his card, which he pretended to stamp, passport-style. This animateur unique -- real name Noël Hamann, noelhamann@hotmail.com -- is available for tous vos événements, for all your events: birthday parties, anniversaries, all of it, I'd assume.
Using Our Free And Open Society Against Us
Souad Mekhennet and Don Van Natta Jr. write in The New York Times about a London-based Muslim extremist sheik:
On the eve of four attempted bombings here on Thursday, Sheik Omar Bakri, one of Britain's most outspoken militant clerics, predicted that another terrorist attack would hit London.
In a wide-ranging telephone interview late Wednesday night, Bakri also blamed the British government for the July 7 terror attacks that killed at least 56 people, including the four bombers, on three London Underground trains and a double-decker bus.
Bakri said that "hundreds" of young, disaffected British-born Muslims now felt compelled to take action in Britain to protest Prime Minister Tony Blair's foreign policy, especially the support of the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq, which they perceive as anti-Muslim.
"Unless British foreign policy is changed and they withdraw forces from Iraq, I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of attacks, just the way it happened in Madrid and the way it happened in London," he said, a reference to the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004.
His preaching is heard or seen by hundreds of people in central London halls and on his Web site, where he has urged young men to fight jihad-style against "occupiers" in Iraq, Israel and Chechnya. He routinely refers to the Sept. 11 hijackers as "the magnificent 19."
A Syrian-born, 47-year-old father of seven who has lived in North London for 19 years, Bakri was granted asylum in 1986 and receives public assistance of £300, or $545, each month. On the cover of The Sun newspaper on Wednesday, his photograph was accompanied with three bold words: "SEND HIM BAK."
One thing that's noteworthy, that's not spoken of much during the post-tragedy coverage, is how international Londoners are. The list of the origins of the dead, wounded, and the lucky reads like The United Nations. And, yes, they even let in the scumbag sheik.
Hah! I can just see myself in Syria, as a woman, of Jewish extraction, running around in my western clothes and advocating for free speech and against fundamentalism. How fast would I be hung, stoned, or beheaded? I mean, if they even let me into the country.
Is There Such A Thing As A "Moderate Muslim"?
Or is it the equivalent of a "lapsed Catholic"? Here's a press release from the Ayn Rand Institute:
The continued attacks by Islamic terrorists against the West--most recently, the horrific suicide bombings in London--have led many to ask, what is the motivation of the terrorists?The answer, according to Dr. Edwin Locke, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, "is not poverty or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as Tony Blair, George Bush and the other leaders of the G8 contend in showering aid on Africa and Palestine--but the motive the terrorists openly proclaim: their religion. If we want to identify the fundamental cause of the terrorists' actions, we must understand at least two fundamental premises of the religion they kill for.
"First, Islam, like all religions, rejects reason as a means of gaining knowledge and guiding action. The individual is not supposed to think independently but to selflessly subordinate himself to the dictates of his religion and its theocratic representatives.
"Second, as with any religion that seeks subjects and converts, a derivative tenet of Islam is that it should be imposed by force (you can't persuade someone of the non-rational). The Koran is replete with calls to take up arms in its name.
"These ideas easily lead to fanaticism and terrorism. The terrorists are not 'un-Islamic' bandits who have 'hijacked a great religion'; they are consistent and serious followers of their religion.
"And our inability or unwillingness to grasp this fact has dire consequences.
"Our soldiers die daily in Iraq in an attempt to win over "moderates" in the Middle East. But such a strategy cannot work, since insofar as these "moderates" accept Islam, they cannot convincingly oppose violence in its name. And all the while, we leave untouched the main source of the enemy's ideology and the greatest threat against us: Iran."
Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam Today, is honest about the role of Islam in terrorism, writing in the LA Times:
Even now, the Muslim Council of Britain adamantly insists that Islam has nothing to do with the London attacks. It cites other motives — "segregation" and "alienation," for instance. Although I don't deny that living on the margins can make a vulnerable lad gravitate to radical messages of instant belonging, it takes more than that to make him detonate himself and innocent others. To blow yourself up, you need conviction. Secular society doesn't compete well on this score. Who gets deathly passionate over tuition subsidies and a summer job?Which is why I don't understand how moderate Muslim leaders can reject, flat-out, the notion that religion may also play a part in these bombings. What makes them so sure that Islam is an innocent bystander?
What makes them sound so sure is literalism. That's the trouble with Islam today. We Muslims, including moderates living here in the West, are routinely raised to believe that the Koran is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God's will, untouched and immutable.
This is a supremacy complex. It's dangerous because it inhibits moderates from asking hard questions about what happens when faith becomes dogma. To avoid the discomfort, we sanitize.
And so it was, one week after the first wave of bombings. A high-profile gathering of 22 clerics and scholars at the London Cultural Center produced a statement, later echoed by a meeting of 500 Muslim leaders. It contained this line: "The Koran clearly declares that killing an innocent person [is] tantamount to killing all mankind." I wish. In fact, the full verse reads, "Whoever kills a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all humankind." Militant Muslims easily deploy the clause beginning with "except" to justify their rampages.
Chic Ou Idiotique?
Okay, so this is almost the outfit. I'm not wearing the jacket in this picture, unfortunately (a fab, short, double-breasted, moto-ish number, in black, white stitching) SEE BELOW TO IMAGINE IT ON ME ABOVE
But...
At dusk, as I crossed the Pont des Arts (a bridge over the Seine), which was packed with picnickers and people just hanging around, a news photographer spotted me, got up, and ran to get in front of me, way down the bridge, to take my photo.
I think he might have thought I was "quelqu'un" -- "somebody" (in France, I mean) -- or...quel horreur!...what if he's the guy who takes the photos for the French version of the Glamour Magazine "Dos and Don'ts" -- and I'm the star victime de la mode for next month?! Eeek! Then again, maybe he just had the photographic hots for Lucy, being carried by me under one arm.
Well, in case somebody thinks my outfit worked, I'll toss out the list, like they do for stars' couture in fashion magazines -- but not to brag about how much I paid, but how little. (I couldn't imagine walking into a department store in America and paying the real price for anything. Typically, my "couture" is Loehmann's, Daffy's, designer resale...or just resale!)
Silk Skirt: Probably some famous Italian designer. I don't know which one, because I got it on sale at Daffy's in New York, and they cut the label out. But I will tell you that it cost me $16.99 (discounted from $200-something) and I bought it three years ago -- long before long peasant skirts came in, thank you! (I was going to temporarily retire it this year, so I wouldn't look like I follow fashion, but it's one of my favorite pieces of clothing, so it snuck into my suitcase.)
Shirt: Michael Stars, purchased on eBay, $15 plus shipping...maybe $18? (Regular price, about $45. I might consider paying that if I were high on crack.)
Jacket: Armani Exchange, $120. They have fab jackets there from time to time. One of the few things I pay full price for. Worth every penny.
Scarf: It's really an evening shawl, but I like to wear dressy stuff as ordinary-wear. $13.99 on sale (I believe it was originally priced over $100), Loehmann's.
Boots: CaféNoir, $70. Spanish brand, purchased at a clearance shoe sale at Nordstrom's after a writergirl breakfast at The Farmer's Market. Hillary Johnson, shoe coach. Resoled by Alex of Santa Monica. Call Alex before you go; they're probably not ready.
Hat: San Diego Hat Company, $35, Fedora Primo, Santa Monica. That's Frank in the photo. He will help you very patiently, no matter how lame your questions.
Bra: Empreinte, bought at Le Bon Marché three years ago, and still holding strong. Priceless. PS Victoria's Secret? Their bras are at their most functional at a photo shoot on a model with fake breasts who is standijng perfectly still.
Dog's Pink Jester Collar: H&M, Paris, about $1.50
TOTAL: $275.48 (for which I don't think you can get even a slightly used Kleenex at Hermes)
--Amy Alkon, Bargain Hoor
Low Self-Esteem
...can be a real killer. Roger Cohen explores the reasons behind murderous fanaticism:
In his inaugural speech for his second term, President George W. Bush summed up the idea: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in the world. America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." Those phrases have the beautiful simplicity of an Einstein equation. All is reconciled. All has meaning as we in the West understand meaning.
But the problem is that Leeds is no stranger to liberty. Nor is Hamburg, where Atta lived for a decade, along with the suicide pilots of two of the other 9/11 flights, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi. In these cities, Western values - including some measure of the "respect for others" of which Blair spoke - were on daily display.
That such experience should turn these Muslims into suicide bombers suggests a different conclusion: perhaps it is the very onerous nature of Western freedom, with its multiplicity of choices and absence of moral absolutism, that led them to seek refuge in a fanatical faith. This strain of Islam hates the West. It finds ammunition for its hatred in Iraq and Afghanistan, but its roots go much deeper.
Those roots lie in a sense of humiliation, a conviction that a great Islamic civilization was destroyed by outsiders' imperial power - French and British colonialists, Zionist intruders or American imperialists. In Al Qaeda's call to restore the caliphate, they see a way out of humiliation, and in certain Koranic verses they find its justification.
I Like Dean Baquet
(For those of you who aren't in the habit of keeping up on the journalism news, he's the new head ed of the LA Times.)
Enough already with the dull adult airs the LA Times has been putting on. NYTimes editor Bill Keller complains that Baquet doesn't fight fair in trying to lure journos from NY to LA:
"He has this habit of telling recruits there's something in the New York water that makes your penis fall off."
via Romenesko
Antonio Knows
I didn't blog about Susan Spano's absurd piece about Paris, Vegas, because I was too overwhelmed, having just gotten to the real Paris, but Antonio here, who writes in to the LAT Travel section, has it right about our favorite left-bank sniveler:
Paris, France, pales next to imitation
LET me understand. Susan Spano flew from France to Las Vegas so she could embed her many complaints about Paris, France, and praise a Las Vegas hotel in her column ["A Little Paris With a Great Big Pool," Her World, July 3]. In a previous column, she told us Parisian coffee was no good; this time we find that neither French bread nor onion soup is any good. Spano's implicit advice: Don't waste your money on France, just go to Las Vegas for the best of everything.Antonio San Marco
We only wish she'd take her own advice; preferably while taking early retirement to gambling-ville so somebody a little less weary and tiresome might take her place. Je propose La Coquette, who's not only not weary or tiresome, but is wry, bubbly and entertaining. And Michelle Collins, while neither in Paris nor a travel writer, is a scream on many a topic.
Our Favorite Clueless American In Paris
Facts are such pesky things. When you, LA Times travel writer and "blogger" Susan Spano, frequently fail to include the facts in your "blog" items, and readers write in, filling the comments page with corrections, the answer is...eliminate the comments page, bien sur!
That's what they seem to have done in Spanoland -- home of weary-dreary remarks about Paris on LATimes.com...where France is merely thinking about establishing a 35-hour work-week (not getting rid of it, like in real life), and there are myriad other errors. (I wrote in about the 35-hour work week thing, which I believe they corrected.) While it is possible some Web maestro forgot to put in the link to comments, you'll see that if you hit the comments link (in "Heh heh" bit below), there's no July 20 comment to go with her July 20 Postcard.
Heh heh...they may have removed the link to the comments on her "Postcards" page, but I have the link to them here! I'll yank a few choice reader corrections from last week's comments, just in case the LA Times wises up and pulls comments altogether.
1. She gets the name of the mayor of Paris wrong.
Oh Susan! While I'm here, it's not "Bernard" but "Bertrand Delanoe".
What's the matter, don't they pay her enough at the LA Times for her to get Google?
2. Not a word from our Spano-on-the-case about a big deal here...the closing of the department store Samaritaine. No, we're reading about how she has to get a Weber BBQ grill from Amazon in the states so she can smoke out her neighbors.
Again, Susan, you are boring your readers to death with your rambling about overpriced antiques for the superrich and stories from the British muffin man.Could you please give us a more accurate portrayal of daily life in Paris?
3. Perish forbid she should feel some compulsion to speak to somebody in an attempt to be correct. I am going with the reader on this one...based on past experience that her readers are more likely to be correct than she is.
Just a little quibble on your latest "Postcards from Paris". "Napoleon at Bailly " is a 19th century artifact (probably around 1810), not a 17th century item.
Really, though, it's not just the constant errors that get me. I'm constantly offended by this lady's utterly banal thoughts and uninteresting writing -- for which she's paid, and probably relatively well, considering that she's been in the travel writing game for quite some time. It seems, as Janet Jackson and the late Luther Vandross advised, "The Best Things in Life Are Free." Some of my favorite unpaid bloggers on France: La Coquette and the now-in-SF Jason Stone.
Follow The Bouncing, Non-existent Uranium
Frank Rich gets to the point in the IHT:
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit is not Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11. That's why the stakes are so high: This scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a CIA operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
So put aside Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Bush done so when, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson.
In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A CIA assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."
As if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement made none of the three network evening newscasts. The administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.
Once we were locked into the war, and no WMDs could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity. The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the CIA's fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single op-ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.
Ferris Paris
How To Raise A Barbarian
Mohamed Atta's father praises the terror attacks in London, and calls for more in a CNN interview:
El-Amir said the attacks in the United States and the July 7 attacks in London were the beginning of what would be a 50-year religious war, in which there would be many more fighters like his son.He declared that terror cells around the world were a "nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking."
The man, who gave his age as "at least 70," said he had no sorrow for what happened in London, and said there was a double standard in the way the world viewed the victims in London and victims in the Islamic world.
Cursing in Arabic, el-Amir also denounced Arab leaders and Muslims who condemned the London attacks as being traitors and non-Muslims.
He passionately vowed that he would do anything within his power to encourage more attacks.
When asked if he would allow a CNN crew to videotape another interview with him, el-Amir said he would give his permission -- for a price of $5,000.
That money, he said, would not be kept for himself, but would be donated to someone to carry out another terror attack.
El-Amir said that $5,000 was about how much it would cost to finance another attack in London.
It is CNN policy not to pay people for interviews.
Yoohoo, where are all those moderate Muslims to tell us what a religion of peace and modernity they practice? Not that I like any religion, but this one takes the cake for primitivism. And sure, there's the occasional murderous Christian or Jewish fanatic -- Eric Rudolph or JDL nutsos -- but not to the extent Muslims come out as murderous barbarians.
Girls Dressed Like Farmhands
And beach bums, visiting The White House. Okay, so the French are a bunch of commies. Still, we have a lot to learn from them about how to get dressed in the morning. Here's Northwestern's women's lacrosse team, many of whom look overweight (already, at what, 20?) and some of whom went to The White House in flip-flops:
A front-page story in the Chicago Tribune included the headline "YOU WORE FLIP-FLOPS TO THE WHITE HOUSE?!" inspired by an e-mail sent to player Kate Darmody from her older brother after he saw the photo on the team's Web site.Family members of other players expressed similar dismay, insisting the summer footwear staple was too casual for a visit with the president.
"Don't even ask me about the flip-flops," said the mother of player Aly Josephs. "It mortified me."
During an appearance Monday on NBC's "Today," Darmody and teammate Shelby Chlopak said players planned to auction off the flip-flops they wore to the White House, with the proceeds to go toward a fund for a 10-year-old girl with a brain tumor.
The women have defended their attire, arguing they wore a dressier version of the casual sandal.
"Nobody was wearing old beach flip-flops," said Josephs, who wore a $16 brown pair with rhinestones.
Oh, slay me with your elegance.
I responded o a woman's question about having the confidence to go out to bars and restaurants alone for this week's deadline. One thing I couldn't fit in was about women in Paris -- the way they walk down the street, completely self-possessed, and how so many have their own unique style. Even a woman who isn't beautiful at least dresses like she's somebody (and not just like somebody who rolled out of bed and accidentally fell into a pair of sweatpants and a ratty old shirt).
What The Hell Happened To My Bra And Panties?
Jeez, that Cassis packs a punch.
Nannies Not Quite Gone Wild
Helaine Olen writes about her nanny's blog in The New York Times:
OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.How do I know these things? I read her blog.
She hadn't been with us long when we found out about her online diary. All she'd revealed previously about her private life were the bare-bones details of the occasional date or argument with her landlord and her hopes of attending graduate school in the fall.
Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn't want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I'd just as soon not have to face as well.
I hadn't exactly been a stranger to the sexual shenanigans of our previous baby sitters. One got pregnant accidentally by her longtime boyfriend and asked me for advice. Another was involved in a mostly off-again relationship with a fidelity-challenged college football player. Yet those were problems I could feel superior to and that made me grateful for the steady routine of marriage and children.
Her nanny blogs about Ms. Olen's New York Times piece:
If you have come to this little blog today looking for prurient details of a "nanny gone wild" and another "nanny diary" detailing the sordid life of a family she works for, I am very sorry to disappoint you. Contrary to an essay published in the Style section of the NYTIMES, I am not a pill popping alcoholic who has promiscuous sex and cares nothing for the children for whom she works with. Nope. If you look carefully through my archives, instead you will find a young woman in her mid-twenties who decided to work as a nanny for a year while she prepared to enter the next phase of her professional life; namely the life of an academic pursuing a PhD in English Literature specifically focusing on the Late Victorian novel. But for those of you who dont want to comb through the archives, I will offer a refutation of the salacious, malicious, and really quite silly essay written by Ms. Olen.Ms. Olen opens her essay with eye catching details designed to paint the picture of a prurient pill popper. She notes I mention biting my lovers, having sexual thoughts about Tucker Carlson, and taking sleeping pills. So, lets revisit those entries and see if they are really so titillating.
Inexcusable Crush Post
Yes, I mention that I want to do "dirty dirty" things to Tucker Carlson. I dont offer details. So, I am assuming that Ms. Olen's imagination ran away with her and she decided that it was very sordid. But on a closer reading of this post you will find I use Tucker Carlson, a noted conservative pundidt, as an example of how opposites attract. How intellectual tensions between two people can actually fuel romantic desire. And then I do something really really deviant. I compare my crush on him to the romantic tensions in Jane Austen's famous Pride and Prejudice. Yep, my version of the erotic has more to do with long walks and serious conversations. Of course, Ms. Olen does not point that out in her essay. My interest in literature and how I weave it through more common daily reflections would probably detract from her intent to show me as an irresponsible party girl. But there it is, on the blog she so strenuously objects to.
As for the sleeping pills. Yep, I take them. But before any addicts come banging down my door looking for prescription Ambien or the like, again, I am sorry to disappoint you. I do take over the counter, Target brand sleep aids. I have a sleeping disorder which causes me to wake up repeatedly through the night due to fluxes in my body temperature. I basically deal with this by making sure I actually go to bed early so I will get enough sleep. I havent had a cup of coffee in years, crack a window in the heart of winter, and blare an air conditioner in the summer. But sometimes, I take sleep aids as well, in case I need to ensure rest. Also, funny fact about me that I have blogged about, I cant even swallow pills. Yep, I have to crush them and put them in apple sauce or pudding. So, imagine me, in my sweats, before bed, crushing sleep aids and putting them in pudding. Its a lot less glamorous, isnt it?
Let's pretend this is a popularity contest. Who wins in your book? It seems Ms. Olen has learned an important lesson -- live by the blog, die by the blog. (Die of embarrassment, in her case -- or so one hopes -- and it wasn't even her blog.)
Mexifornia
I'm with Cathy Seipp -- an immigrant herself (from Canada...wooo!) for closing the borders. Smart piece about this up on her site:
I am generally pro-immigrant, and would be even if I weren't an immigrant myself. But Victor Davis Hanson's book "Mexifornia" was key to convincing me that we have to get serious about closing the borders and quitting our reliance on cheap illegal immigrant labor. As Hanson points out, besides the obvious problems we have in California (and other border states) with overcrowded schools and hospitals, etc., the situation is exploitative of the immigrants themselves.I'm not as unsympathic as many are, by the way, to employers who are less than scrupulous about hiring only legal workers, because I can't see how it's an individual's responsibility to enforce laws that the federal government ignores. Nor am I unsympathetic to illegal immigrants, any more than I'm unsympathetic to people trying to get on a crowded elevator. But at some point you've got to shut the door and those people are going to have to wait for the next one, or we're all going to be stuck on the ground floor.
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article today (unfortunately available only to subscribers, so I can't link) that's a useful reminder of why we have an illegal immigration problem: Mexican society continues to be remarkably regressive and unfair; the rich own practically everything, and the poor practically nothing, with little hope of rising to the middle class -- which basically doesn't exist anyway in our wonderful multicultural neighbors to the south. The typical L.A. busboy or cleaning lady is about 10 times better off than the typical Mexican peasant. It's hard to blame people for wanting to escape miserable circumstances.
Still, I think we've got to close the border. The alternative is to realize that an open border is no border, in which case we face facts and annex Mexico as part of the United States. Make it a territory, like Puerto Rico.
"Down These Mean Streets..."
Now, I thought that was a Raymond Chandler quote, from The Simple Art Of Murder. I only looked it up to make sure I got it right. But, when I did, I got an interesting Google hit on the author of the quote: Rebecca Harding Davis. Her bio is here:
1831–1910, American novelist, b. Washington, Pa.; mother of Richard Harding Davis. Her early nonfiction pieces, particularly those collected under the title Life in the Iron Mills (1861), and her first novel, Margaret Howth (1862), foreshadowed the naturalistic techniques of later 19th-century writers by showing how a dismal environment can warp character. See her autobiographical Bits of Gossip (1904); biography by G. Langford (1961).
For a side-by-side comparison, here's the thinkexist.com quote attributed to Rebecca Harding Davis:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
And here's the quote attributed to Chandler:
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
If the thinkexist quote I linked above is correctly attributed to Davis, it would seem the great Ray dabbled a bit in the simple art of plagiarism.
Get The Government Out Of The Belly Business
Sullum, over at Reason, has some reasonable thoughts on government meddling in the obesity arena:
The more fundamental question is whether the extra helping of meatloaf you had last night is the sort of thing the government should be worrying about. If the government's duty to protect "the public health" includes discouraging any behavior that might lead to disease or injury, it is self-evident that the government should try to stop us from overeating. But if that duty pertains only to external threats such as communicable diseases and contaminated water—risks imposed on us by others, rather than risks we voluntarily accept—there is no public health justification for a government-led war on fat.Krugman, who bemoans "an ideological landscape tilted in the direction of doing nothing," seems to recognize that most Americans are not quite prepared to accept the idea that every health issue is a public health issue. "One answer," he writes, "is to focus on the financial costs of obesity."
Krugman does not distinguish between the voluntary risk pooling of private health coverage and the compelled subsidies of Medicare and Medicaid. Yet private insurers are free to charge fat people more, and their customers are free to shop around for a better deal if they don't like the terms of their coverage.
By contrast, government-supported health care imposes the costs of fat-related illnesses on people who have not agreed to the arrangement and cannot opt out. But even here, the net financial impact is unclear. If overweight people tend to die earlier and therefore draw less on Medicare and Social Security in old age, fatness may save taxpayers as much as or more than it costs, as seems to be the case with smoking.
More important, the implications of the argument based on taxpayer-funded health care are just as alarmingly open-ended as the implications of the "public health" argument. Perhaps sensing this, Krugman assures his readers "nobody is proposing that adult Americans be prevented from eating whatever they want"—which, given the aims of anti-fat activists who support "junk food" taxes, simply isn't true. Nor is it reassuring that in a subsequent column Krugman says overeating is one of those "situations in which 'free to choose' is all wrong," since "even adults have clear problems with self-control."
The one encouraging sign is that Krugman describes himself as overweight even as he urges his fellow Americans, most of whom are also overweight, to support a government campaign against gluttony and sloth. People will be forced to consider how that effort might affect their own lives—and whether they want to live in a country where their unhealthy habits are everyone else's business.
The American Cemetery, Normandy
Gregg's uncle was killed at 21 in World War II, near Martinville (which is less a town than a rural street), in the invasion on Normandy by Allied forces. We rented a car and went to Normandy with our friends Mark and Chantal to see the American Cemetery and find the ridge where he died.
9,387 servicemen and women are buried at The American Cemetery; 307 of whom are Unknowns, as in this photo.
Most of the gravestones are crosses, but there are some Jewish stars as well.
The cemetery is on a palisade overlooking Omaha Beach, the American army name for the place, which has since stuck. (That's me, with Mark turning around to go back up to the cemetery behind me.)
Dogs were forbidden in the cemetery, so Lucy got stuffed into her ferret case (bought at the now-closed department store, Samaritaine), and carried in a giant orange bag I'd brought for the purpose of dog-hiding. She was decidedly unthrilled, but I hope, understood that the opportunity to eventually sniff other dogs' pee in Normandy after we toured solemn areas of human interest beat staying home with the neighbors in the USA.
The Guardian Takes "Diversity" A Bit Far
London Blogger Jackie Danicki reports that The Guardian has, on its staff, a trainee journalist, who's an "out and proud Islamist advocate of the murder of Jews."
See this, from The Independent:
The Guardian newspaper is refusing to sack one of its staff reporters despite confirming that he is a member of one of Britain's most extreme Islamist groups.Dilpazier Aslam, who has been allowed to report on the London bombings from Leeds and was also given space to write a column in last Wednesday's edition of The Guardian, is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical world organisation which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law.
Apparently, The Guardian is willing to overlook such stuff:
One source said: "There was a feeling that we genuinely wanted more diversity, and like all national newspapers we were still a bit 'pale and male' so we were keen to recruit from different backgrounds."Independent link via HurryUpHarry
Hmm, Maybe You Don't Cut Teenage Drinking By Making Kids Go Underground?
21 years after a majority of idiots voted to make the drinking age 21, American kids are getting shitfaced -- while French kids, who experience an attitude of permissiveness verging on the blasé, typically don't follow suit. Hmm, maybe this current American prohibition -- just like Prohibition -- is a really dumb idea? Jon Cohen writes for ABCNews.com about attitudes of Americans on drinking restrictions for teens:
Twenty-one years after federal legislation made 21 the national minimum drinking age, Americans by a wide margin continue to support the restriction — and three-quarters see underage drinking as a serious problem in their communities.Nearly eight in 10 Americans oppose lowering the drinking age in all states to 18. Even among young adults, age 34 and under, 73 percent oppose allowing 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds to drink alcohol.
Part of the issue is that, although illegal, underage drinking is seen as a problem. Not only do 75 percent say it is a serious problem in their communities, but one-third call it "very" serious, rising to 44 percent of lower-income Americans.
The current age restriction was signed into law by President Reagan on July 17, 1984. Its support today is nearly identical to its level then — 79 percent in a Gallup poll in June '84.
Which proves, what, that voters still haven't gotten any smarter or more sensible? Drinking has never been a big deal for me -- not even in college -- because, like the French kids, I was offered wine or whatever liqueur my father was drinking at home. No prohibition? No drinking problem! At least, that's how it works in France. Getting blind drunk is considered boorish here -- not exciting or a marker of reaching "adulthood."
Le Petit Parisien
I loved this 1952 photo by Willy Ronis (title, Le petit Parisien). It's part of the free photo exhibition up around the Jardin du Luxembourg called 20 Photographes Pour Les 20 Ans De Reporters Sans Frontières -- i.e., 20 years of photos from reporters (news photographers, really) without borders. Amazing photos here, through the end of August, by a number of photographers, including James Nachtwey, who spoke at last year's LA Press Club awards about his experiences in Iraq.
Lesbians Reclaimed The Name
Dykes, that is. Dykes With Bikes, specifically, for the San Francisco lesbian motorcyle group -- "internationally known for riding in the lead position at San Francisco's pride parade every year for nearly three decades" -- writes Joe Garofoli, in the SF Chronicle. The trouble started when they tried to trademark it, and the trademark office govern-nannies threw it right back at them:
"The examining attorney found it to be offensive to a significant portion of the lesbian community," said Jessie Roberts, a trademark administrator with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "And we're also looking out for the sensitivities of the general public more than that of a specific applicant."The applicants, in this case, prefer to call themselves dykes.
"We self-identify as dykes on bikes," said Germany, a 48-year-old San Francisco environmental consultant. "To us, (the government's objection) is completely absurd."
The push to codify "Dykes on Bikes" started two years ago when members of the San Francisco organization heard that a Wisconsin woman wanted to start a for-profit venture that would include a clothing line -- leathers and such - - using "Dykes on Bikes" as its label.
"That's not what we're about," said Soni Wolf, 56, longtime secretary for the Dykes on Bikes and a pride parade participant since the late 1970s. "That word has been used for years to tear us down. And we said, 'OK, we're going to take it back.' "
The women call themselves "dykes" for the same reason many gays have laid claim to "queer" -- to defang a word that has long been a slur.
"I cannot imagine a more ironic twist of thinking than to judge this reclaimed badge of honor as insulting to the very community who has created its power," Joan Nestle, co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, wrote in a declaration supporting the Dykes on Bikes' trademark request. "Lesbians do not need to be protected from their own cultural creations, their own transformations of stigmas."
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel told the patent office that her 22-year-old strip, Dykes to Watch Out For -- which has sold 300,000 copies in collections worldwide -- "has uprooted the word 'dyke' from its negative connotations and planted it in a new context where it has flourished as a signifier for lesbians who are confident and open about their identity."
The Dykes argue that they are succeeding in weaving the term into the cultural fabric. Roaring up Market Street on their motorcycles before thousands of onlookers at pride parades, San Francisco's Dykes on Bikes have paved the way for a dozen-plus similar groups elsewhere. There are Dykes Planning Tykes parents groups, a "Dyke TV" cable access show, and a site for "the Web-savvy dyke" called Technodyke.com.
The federal paper-shuffling might seem superfluous to any Bay Area resident who has heard the street chant, "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it." But "queer," a longtime slur for male homosexuals, is different -- at least in the eyes of the federal trademarkers.
Boy, am I lucky I never tried to get Amy Alkon, Opinionated Bitch, my pal Terry Rossio's suggestion of a name for my column. The Advice Goddess, luckily, got through without appearing to cause offense to any ancient Greeks or current Greek lit students -- or any bitches out there who'd rather be called "insolent young ladies" or something.
Laco$ste/Eurotrash Forever
My favorite French rap group (via Belgium and LA's Koreatown) is about to hit it big. They're touring like crazy -- perhaps at a club near you. And they're very amusing. Download two of their MP3s free here:
Who is Laco$te?We are Laco$te, DJ Felldown and X, French rap group from Los Angeles, wow! We are rap, short songs, sometime more electronic, sometime more old school beats, but first we are party music. We are 1/2 boy from Belgium, 1/2 girl from K-Town. We like play with many great noise and rock bands. Sometime we have slide projections, and many costume change in 20 minutes. So now I ask you, who is #1 French rap in L.A.?
What is Laco$te doing now?DJ FELLDOWN: We recording an EP for Apop Records! We taking a vacation from the bathroom party circuit. We like the acoustic in the bathrooms, even if everyone is crowd in there. I would like to play in the bar mitzvah or yacht party. Then I would know we have had a big success.
MISS X, what do you think about native French speakers who (with a characteristic Gallic pride) point out after shows that they can't understand anything you say in French?X: Some of us have to wake up to the fact that there is a long-held and respected tradition of Asian girls singing in whatever language they want without any effort at good pronunciation.
Don't you think it's rather stupid to be rapping in french since you are in California?
X: Well, if you'd done your homework son, you'd know that French rap has existed in America since the beginnings of hip hop (cf. Melle Mel). Transversal virtualities? Laco$te is all over it. As Godard says, Histoire avec un es, baby.
Since some of us don't have the dubious/bougie privilege of speaking French, why don't you tell us what your songs are about?DJ FELLDOWN: It's quite fun actually. We rap about historical eurotrash, like the Baron Von Gloeden, who partied with priests and took photos of half nude adolescents. Which is also Mlle's ambition. And we rap about universal theme like maternal love, filial love, milkmen, and K-town girls. The K-town girls (les filles coreenes) is actually very popular song for us; especially the lines "Elle roule sa benz sur Olympic Boulevard, Ca crache les dollars, Ca crache les dollars..." Everyone who go to Los Angeles understand that.
But don't you have a problem with audiences not understanding what you're saying?DJ FELLDOWN: No, everybody love French. An important part of Laco$te is educating people to say things like "la fete" and "ouais ouais."
All The Mirthly Delights
One thing I love about France is the sense of mirth French people bring to the most unexpected subjects...such as pest extermination. Here's the storefront of the exterminator near us:
And here's a closer look:
Boo Frigging Hoo
You want to have a child. And a career. You cannot "have it all" -- the rugrat, the income, the advancement, the mommy-friendly hours. Gasp! Shocking, isn't it? Here's a quote from a column by Jane Eisner I saw in the Detroit Free Press, who can't help but let her irrational resentment peek through:
There is an imbalance in the workplace: Women's career tracks are hampered by parenthood, while men's careers largely are not. This is why Marina Angel, author of the Bar Association's survey, believes women are so slow to advance in law firms. The time and commitment needed to make partner coincide with prime childbearing years.The sheer unfairness of that equation bothered me for years, and it still rankles when I feel forced to compete with male colleagues, or childless female ones, who seem to work 30 hours a day.
A very good friend of mine works long hours seven days a week, doing research AND teaching, AND pulling in big bucks in grants -- ie, doing the work of three or more people. This friend of mine is not interested in having a relationship with anyone, nor in having a child. Why should some other person who takes off at 4pm to pick up the kids, and spends the weekends running around with them, and has to duck out from work to take kids to the doctor or go to a ballet recital, make the same amount of money and get the same perks as my friend?
On the other hand, I believe parents who stay home raising children should get salaries (and pensions) from their partners. Plan to do a column on that soon.
All The Good News That's Fit To Print
Here's a moving letter posted on Romenesko, from Knight Ridder's Clark Hoyt, in response to a column by Mark Yost in the Pioneer Press:
Yost asks why you don't read about progress being made in the power grid, which the colonel oversaw. Maybe it's because there is no progress. Iraqis currently have electricity for an average of nine hours a day. A year ago, they averaged 10 hours of electricity. Iraq's oil production is still below pre-war levels. The unemployment rate is between 30 and 40 percent. New cases of hepatitis have doubled over the rate of 2002, largely because of problems with getting clean drinking water and disposing of sewage.The "unfiltered news" Yost gets from his military friends is in fact filtered by their isolation in the Green Zone and on American military bases from the Iraqi population, an isolation made necessary by the ferocity of the insurgency. To say that isn't to argue that their perspective is invalid. It's just limited and incomplete.
Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau chief, Hannah Allam, has read Mark Yost's column. Her response, from the front, says it far better than I could:
It saddens me to read Mark Yost's editorial in the Pioneer Press, the Knight Ridder paper that hired me as a rookie reporter and taught me valuable lessons in life and journalism during the four years I spent there before heading to Iraq.
I invite Mr. Yost to spend a week in our Baghdad bureau, where he can see our Iraqi staff members' toothbrushes lined up in the bathroom because they have no running water at home. I frequently find them camping out in the office overnight because electricity is still only sporadic in their sweltering neighborhoods, despite what I'm sure are the best-intentioned efforts of people like his Marine buddy working on the electrical grid.
Mr. Yost could have come with me today as I visited one of my own military buddies, who like most officers doesn't leave the protected Green Zone compound except by helicopter or massive convoy. The Army official picked me up in his air-conditioned Explorer, took me to Burger King for lunch and showed me photos of the family he misses so terribly. The official is a great guy, and like so many other soldiers, it's not politics that blind him from seeing the real Iraq. The compound's maze of tall blast wall and miles of concertina wire obscure the view, too.
Mr. Yost can listen to our bureau's morning planning meetings, where we orchestrate a trip to buy bottled water (the tap water is contaminated, when it works) as if we're plotting a military operation. I wonder whether he prefers riding in the first car -- the most exposed to shrapnel and bullets -- or the chase car, which is designed to act as a buffer between us and potential kidnappers.
...If Baghdad is too far for Mr. Yost to travel (and I don't blame him, given the treacherous airport road to reach our fortress-like hotel), why not just head to Oklahoma? There, he can meet my former Iraqi translator, Ban Adil, and her young son. They're rebuilding their lives under political asylum after insurgents in Baghdad followed Ban's family home one night and gunned down her 4-year-old daughter, her husband and her elderly mother in law.
Freshly painted schools and a new desalination plant might add up to "mission accomplished" for some people.
Too bad Ban's daughter never got to enjoy those fruits of her liberation.
Gonna Party Like It's 1789
It's Bastille Day here in Paris, and all the fire stations will be open to the public today (along with much craziness everywhere) as part of the citywide party. Here are a few girls from Sacramento getting a headstart on the fun.
Quag The Dog
In the LA Times, Robert Scheer deconstructs Bush's justification for the "deepening quagmire in Iraq" as the recycled version of the "dangerously dumb domino theory":
"Defeat them abroad before they attack us at home." If we didn't defeat communism in Vietnam, or even tiny Grenada, went the hoary defense of bloody proxy wars and covert brutality in the latter stages of the Cold War, San Diego might be the next to go Red.Now, the new version of this simplistic concept seems to say, "If we don't occupy a Muslim country, inciting terrorists to attack us in Baghdad, we'll suffer more terror attacks at home." The opposite is the case. Invading Iraq has, like the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan before, proved to be a massive recruiting tool for Muslim extremists everywhere. Even the embattled CIA, which the White House is struggling to neuter as a semi-objective voice on foreign affairs, recently declared the Iraq occupation to be a boon to terrorists.
Yet the president stumbles on, demanding that we support his Iraq adventure lest we sully the memory of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001. "We fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand," said Bush last week. Actually, no. We fight in Iraq today because Bush listened to a band of right-wing intellectual poseurs who argued America could create a reverse domino effect, turning the Middle East into a land of pliable free-market, pro-Western "democracies" through a crude use of military force. This is rather like claiming a well-placed stick of dynamite can turn a redwood forest into a neighborhood of charming Victorians.
...From the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush has systematically sought to parlay the public's shock over a singular, if devastating, terrorist assault by a small coterie of extremists into what amounted to a call for World War III against a supposed "axis of evil." But these countries — Iran, Iraq and North Korea — shared only a clear hostility to the United States, rather than any real alliance or ties to 9/11 itself.
In the process, Bush has justified an enormous military buildup, spent tens of billions of dollars in Iraq, reorganized the federal government, driven the nation's budget far into the red and assaulted the civil liberties of Americans and people around the world, all without bothering to seriously examine the origins of the 9/11 attacks or compose a coherent strategy to prevent similar ones in the future. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden remains at large, as do his financial and political backers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
But why has the White House pursued this nonsensical approach over the loud objections of the country's most experienced counterterrorism and Islamic experts? Because it allows the administration all the political benefits the Cold War afforded its predecessors: political capital, pork-barrel defense contracts and a grandiose sense of purpose.
And because the war on terror has no standard of victory, it can never end — thus neatly replacing the Cold War as a black-and-white, us-against-them worldview that generations of American (and Soviet) politicians found so useful for keeping the plebes in line. It's a one-size-fits-all bludgeon.
Steal This Vote
France's independence day seems a perfect opportunity, not to whine, à la Spano, while illegally smoking out the neighbors, but to mention this terrific advance review from Publishers Weekly, of Andrew Gumbel's book, Steal This Vote:
In a riveting and frightening account, Gumbel, U.S. correspondent for Britain's Independent, traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present, spotlighting the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, vote buying in the Gilded Age and the history of black disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction South. The last 100 pages are devoted to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Gumbel rehearses the Florida mess and argues that those who care about voting rights should be terrified by Justice Scalia's argument in Bush v. Gore that the Constitution doesn't per se guarantee a right of suffrage. Gumbel shows that the confusion (at best) and cheating (at worst) that went on in Florida are not unusual, describing numerous county and state elections plagued with problems: registered voters purged from the rolls; queues at polling places so long that would-be voters gave up; and confusing ballots. Who are the villains? Not just the Republicans; he shows Democrats equally willing to play dirty. This book is sure to be controversial, and if it garners media attention, that's all for the good, for the issues Gumbel so winningly addresses are crucial to the future of democracy.
Religion Isn't What Causes Suicide Attacks?
That's what this suicide attack expert, Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, says in an interview with The American Conservative:
RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.
RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.
...TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?
RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.
Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.
TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?
RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.
via Metafilter
Hungry? Eat Protein!
Arne Arstrup writes in the American Journal Of Clinical Nutrition that telling fat people to eat less and exercise more doesn't do the job:
This simplistic strategy assumes that humans have conscious control over appetite and body weight regulation, which is certainly not the case for most people; if it were true, there would be no overweight or obese people. I have never met an obese patient who has worked hard to become obese and to maintain an excessive body size. We need to acknowledge that our regulatory systems are geared to prevent depletion of body energy stores and undernutrition effectively, whereas the systems that reduce appetite and increase energy expenditure during periods of excess availability of foods are easily suppressed by palatability and by the social, psychological, and rewarding aspects of foods.In the past, when people expended plenty of calories just by going about their daily business, it was possible to remain slim while eating a diet with nearly any nutritional profile. The problem nowadays is that many people are extremely sedentary, which makes it possible to overeat even when dietary intakes are relatively small. For example, it is easy to prepare tasty, filling meals with drinks for an active person who needs {approx}2500 kcal/d, but it is difficult to do the same for a sedentary person who needs only {approx}1800 kcal/d. This is why the current focus of science is to increase the satiating power of the diet, so that people feel full with fewer calories.
He points to Atkins and other protein-heavy diets as a likely solution:
In this issue of the Journal, Weigle et al (3) showed that an increase in dietary protein from 15% to 30% of energy and a reduction in fat from 35% to 20%, at a constant carbohydrate intake, produces a sustained decrease in ad libitum calorie intake and results in significant weight loss....Weigle et al's results clearly showed that protein is more satiating than is fat, and previous studies have shown that protein is more satiating than is carbohydrate (4). Moreover, diets with a fat content fixed at 30% of calories produce more weight loss when high in protein (25% of energy) than when normal in protein (12% of energy): 9.4 compared with 5.9 kg after 6 mo; after 1 y, evidence was found to suggest that the high-protein diet, independent of the loss of total body fat, resulted in a significant loss of visceral fat (5).
Should we advise overweight and obese patients to increase their protein intakes from 10–20% to 20–30% of calories and reduce their intake of fat and carbohydrates correspondingly? If fat intake is fixed at {approx}30% of calories, there is still plenty of room for carbohydrates to make up 40–50% of the calories. It is preferable to replace sugars from soft drinks with protein from low-fat milk, high-fat meat and dairy products with the lean versions, and possibly white bread and pasta with lean meat, without reducing the intakes of fruit, vegetables, and whole-grain products. Should we advise the public to increase their intakes of meat and dairy products? The answer depends on the potential adverse effects of a high-protein diet.
The guidelines from the Institute of Medicine allow for the inclusion of higher amounts of protein than previously recommended in a healthy diet (6). This institute concluded that there is no clear evidence that a high protein intake increases the risk of renal stones, osteoporosis, cancer, or cardiovascular disease.
Well, here are investigative science journalist Gary Taubes' comments -- exclusive to this blog! -- on the Arstrup piece:
On the other hand, he's simply wrong about the mechanisms. It's got nothing to do with satiating power. Carbohydrates promote fat accumulation, via insulin. That's one of the primary things insulin does. So it's not that protein or fat prevent obesity, it's that refined carbohydrates, starches and, particularly, sugar cause it. The weird thing is that the science was well worked out 50-years-old, and these people are simply unaware of it. (On the other hand, if they actually paid attention to their history, I wouldn't have a book.)
FYI, Taubes is one of the top investigative science journalists out there. He wrote the NY Times Mag piece that relaunched the Atkins Diet craze: What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie, and The Soft Science Of Dietary Fat for the journal Science. He's working himself to the bone on his book -- which should revolutionize the way Americans eat -- and that's not hyperbole, either.
Vichy Soirs
This one's for my parents, who respond to the news of any trip to Paris I take, not with "bon voyage, have a great time," but with emails and leaflets about anti-Semitism in France.
Well, as expected, in the thick of my deadline and packing craziness, I got an email from my mother, raining on my Paris parade -- a much-forwarded, non-bylined piece, which turned out to be a copy of this Jeff Jacoby column from 2002. (My mother thinks Google is something kids mumble when they're teething.)
Little snot that I am, I emailed my mother back to ask her if she responded to the guy who emailed her with tales of my blissful, anti-Semitism-free childhood in America (kids egged our house, called me "dirty Jew," and a group of girls were disciplined for chasing me around junior high, yelling anti-Semitic remarks, and throwing a chair at me). Of course, anti-Semitism in America isn't exactly over at the moment, either.
Then again, maybe I'm just too immature to admit that my parents might be right. What do you think?
How Big An Idiot Is Dennis Prager?
In the LATimes' new Currents section, one of my least favorite blowhard primitives trots out, with much pretense at apology, an essay explaining why the Jews are "the chosen people." Here's an excerpt from Dennis Prager's self-serving stupidity:
But the greatest evidence for chosenness is the evil that has targeted Jews since the mid-20th century:• Nazi Germany was more concerned with exterminating the Jews than with winning World War II. Whenever there was competition for resources between the war and the "final solution," Hitler chose the murder of Europe's Jews.
• Throughout its 70-year history, the Soviet Union persecuted its Jews and tried to extinguish Judaism. At the time of Stalin's death, he was planning a massive killing of Soviet Jews.
• The United Nations has spent more time discussing and condemning the Jewish state than any other country. That is why the U.N. General Assembly has passed an unparalleled 322 resolutions against Israel. Yet this state is smaller than every Central American country. Imagine if the amount of attention paid to Israel were paid to Belize — who would not think there was something extraordinary about that country?
• The Muslim world is obsessed with the Jews and with annihilating the one Jewish state, an obsession analogous to that of the Nazis.
In the words of Catholic scholar Father Edward Flannery, "the Jews carry the burden of God in history." Most Jews do not believe this (or almost any Jewish religious doctrine, for that matter). And many Jews dislike talk of chosenness because they fear it will increase anti-Semitism. They may be right.
But it doesn't alter the fact that the worldwide obsession with one of the smallest countries and smallest peoples on Earth, and the unique hatred of the Jews and the Jewish state by the world's most vicious ideologies, can be best explained only in transcendent terms. God, for whatever reason, chose the Jews.
Oh. Please.
I grew up Jewish (I'm now a godless, as any rational person would be), but how queer is "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah...we're chosen!"? Why not just put it in fourth grade terms: "We're really cool, and you suck!" and call it what it is -- religiously sanctioned immaturity?
Attention, Dennis Prager: It's 2005. Isn't it time we stopped using such irrational divisiveness as belief, without proof, in one particular god or another, to remain clannishly separate, and instead focus onn how related we all are as human beings and get global?
For starters, let's look to reason, rather than religious mumbo jumbo, for possible reasons for the Jews' persecution throughout the centuries: The Jews have, for thousands of years, been a dispersed people, consistently "strangers in a strange land"; ie, a convenient "out group" for scapegoating.
Hence, persecution of the Jews is actually right in line with how humans evolved to behave -- to favor the "in group" (the members of our band) and disfavor the "out group" -- to attack them and take the resources for the "in group," or, at the very least, disfavor them for mating and special treatment. (In the post-Pleistocene era, this might mean not being allowed to join certain "in group" country clubs.)
It's really basic stuff. Except for voluntarily brainwashed, irrational religious fanatics like Prager.
Right Wing Pundits Take A Long Walk Off A Short Ark
Excellent Reason Mag piece by Ron Bailey on why it might be that some of the right's Big Thinkers are coming out against evolution:
...(T)he neocon assault on Darwinism may not be based on either science or spirituality so much as on politics and political philosophy. That is the view of Paul Gross, a biologist and self-described conservative. Gross is much concerned with the interplay of science and politics--he is the co-author of the 1994 book, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science--and is puzzled by the attacks on evolutionary biology by people whose political views he largely shares. Regarding Commentary's anti-Darwin article, he says he is mystified that the magazine "would publish the damned thing without at least passing it by a few scientists first."Gross believes that the conservative attack on Darwin may be a case of tactical politics. Some conservative intellectuals think religious fundamentalists are "essential to the political program of the right," says Gross. As a gesture of solidarity, he says, these intellectuals are publicly embracing arguments that appear to "keep God in the picture."
The end of the Cold War may also be a factor. Marx fell with the Soviet Union; Freud has been discredited by modern psychology and neuroscience. The last standing member of the 19th century's unholy materialist trinity is Darwin. Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial, makes the connection clear: "Darwinism is the most important of the materialist ideologies--Marxism, Freudianism, and behaviorism are others--which have done so much damage to science and society in the 20th century." Kristol agrees. "All I want to do," he told his AEI audience, "is break the bonds of Darwinian materialism which at the moment restrict our imagination. For the moment that's enough."
But something deeper seems to be going on, and the key to it can be found in Bork's assertion in his book that religious "belief is probably essential to a civilized future." These otherwise largely secular intellectuals may well have turned on Darwin because they have concluded that his theory of evolution undermines religious faith in society at large. Of course, this is not a novel thought. Many others have arrived at the same conclusion. Conservative activist Beverly LaHaye, a biblical literalist who is president of Concerned Women for America, puts the matter directly: "If the biblical account of creation in Genesis isn't true, how can we trust the rest of the Bible?"
Kristol and his colleagues may worry that once this one thread is pulled from the fabric of religious belief, perhaps the whole will become unraveled, with grave social consequences. Without the strictures and traditions imposed by a religion that promises to punish sinners, the moral controls that moderate our base desires will lose their validity, leading ultimately to moral chaos. Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is "the opium of the people"; they add a heartfelt, "Thank God!"
Bailey's simplified readout of who is and isn't who in moronic thought is below:
Pro-evolution: David Frum, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, William Buckley, James Taranto, John Tierney, Richard Brookhiser, Ramesh Ponnuru, and David Brooks basically accept that it is a genuine scientific explanation for how the diversity of life arose on earth.Skeptical: William Kristol, Stephen Moore, and Tucker Carlson express some skepticism about the details of evolutionary theory.
Anti-evolution: Grover Norquist and Pat Buchanan are pretty sure that it's wrong and pernicious.
Norman Podhoretz abstained.
Pernicious? Pernicious? I would say "pernicious" is how you describe the thinking of somebody who believes that the earth was created in five days, ten thousand years ago, and all sorts of other wacky shit not supported by the fossile record -- or any record that didn't come from a big book of fairy tales. Tell me something: Why is The Bible any more valid than any of those nutty L. Ron Hubbard tales about how aliens came to earth, etc., etc.?
Back Off, Bush!
Terminally ill people should have a right to choose to end their lives, and George Bush and the rest of his funda-nutter band should keep the hell out of it. Nicholas Kristof writes of 59-year-old Jack Newbold, dying of a painful cancer, who's lucky he's an Oregon resident:
...Mr. Newbold faces a wrenching choice in the coming weeks: should he fight the cancer until his last breath, or should he take a glass of a barbiturate solution prescribed by a doctor and put himself to sleep forever? He's leaning toward the latter."I've got less than six months to live," he said. "I don't want to linger and put my wife and family through this."
I don't know what I would do if I were Mr. Newbold, nor if I were his wife or daughter (they're both supporting him in any decision he makes). But I do believe that it should be their decision - not President Bush's.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bush is fighting to overturn the Oregon Death With Dignity law, which gives Mr. Newbold the option of hastening his death. Oregon voters twice passed referendums approving the law, which has been used since 1998, and it has wide support in the state.
The Bush administration issued an order that any doctor who issued a prescription under the state law would be prosecuted under federal law. Oregon won an injunction against the order, John Ashcroft lost an appeal, and now the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the fall.
"I'm just grateful I live in the state of Oregon, where we have this option," Mr. Newbold said. "I'm just sorry the John Ashcrofts of the world want to dictate not only how you live, but also how you die. There's nothing more personal, other than childbirth, than passing on."
..."By God, I want to go out on my own terms," Mr. Newbold said. "I don't want someone dictating to me that I've got to lie down in some hospital bed and die in pain."
Mr. Newbold has started the process of obtaining the barbiturates; two doctors must confirm that the patient has less than six months to live, and the patient must make three requests over at least 15 days. Typically, the drug is secobarbital - the powder is removed from the capsules and mixed into water or applesauce - or pentobarbital, which comes as a liquid. Patients typically slip into a coma five minutes after taking the medication and die within two hours.
Like many patients, Mr. Newbold says that his biggest concern isn't pain so much as the loss of autonomy and dignity. That's partly why he wants the medication on hand - if he feels himself losing the self-control he has prized all his life, he can hasten the process.
"I may never use the medication," he said, "but the knowledge that you have the ability to end it gives you so much relief."
It seems there's nobody quite so meddling as those who bill themselves as the party of hands-off, small government -- at least, when others' autonomy conflicts with the nutters' primitive religious beliefs.
Why Dogs Should Be Allowed In Restaurants And Children Should Be Tied To Parking Meters Outside
My little Yorkshire terrier, Lucy, who most politely waits to be taken to the curb when nature calls, was lying quietly in my lap at the chi-chi patisserie, Ladurée, on rue Jacob, in Paris' 6th arrondisement.
I was having pastry and coffee with Gregg and our friends Mark and Chantal when we saw the most disgusting piece of toilet theater, dead center in the restaurant. A woman at the big, round center table -- center stage, really -- laid her baby girl out on the table, undid the kid's poopy diaper, and began wiping the kid's butt!
I'll say this in as colorfree a way as I can: the contents of the diaper were completely visible to me and probably to most of the patrons. The woman took her sweet time, too, placidly going through the whole diaper-changing process right then and there on the table -- despite the fact that she was a mere 10 feet from a very nice restroom with a rather ample marble sink/vanity area. I'm getting sick all over again just writing about it.
Hey, Paris bloggers: Do you know this woman (or is it possible that the other flashbulb going off belonged to one of you)? Okay, to describe her: straight, dark brown hair, French, navy and white silk scarf tied around her neck, well-to-do (her baby's little peach cashmere dress certainly cost more than any of our outfits), attractive, probably mid-to-late thirties -- the French equivalent of a Madison Avenue mommy. Her husband had sandy brown straight hair. Both looked to be of that social class that used to be (and may still be) called BCBG in Paris, defined below:
The BCBG (Bon Chic Bon Genre) is the French equivalent of the American Preppie. In the UK cynically called a Sloane Ranger (mid 70's). One can see them in their natural habitat at Neuilly, Auteuil and Passy (NAP), which are the rich suburbs of the 16th and 17th arrondissements in Paris. They look the same as the preppy, but with a more European touch of refinement to it.
Oh, is that what they call it? At least, when somebody changed their baby at my local hippie haus of coffee in southern California, they had the baby on the bench, not center stage. Here, the woman appeared utterly disinterested in all the patrons (at least in our corner, after we started gasping) staring on in horror. The staff said nothing to her, but after she and her husband left, the busboy came over and changed all the service articles on the table, and wiped the table and chairs with disinfectant. Again, there was, however, at least one other flashbulb going off besides Gregg's.
Hmm, what should her fate be? Perhaps something similar to that of the Korean dog poop girl; ie, a bigtime "blogslapping" -- the new word I came up with to describe the heavily-linked blog shame brought on those who are under the mistaken impression that they can get away with crude and horrible behavior in (camera phone-toting) public. Hello, Paris bloggers...shall we prove the lady wrong?
photo by Gregg Sutter
The Morel Of The Story?
You'll have to read Nancy Rommelmann's excellent LA Times Mag cover story, about cash, guns, politics and turf wars in eastern Alaska, all inspired by a tiny mushroom.
Morons On The "Morning-After" Pill
Tenderheaded fundamentalists contend that the "morning after" pill will cause an upsurge in unprotected sex and (gasp!) promiscuity! Once again, sigh (remember the Schiavo case?), science has the last word. British data shows making the pills available OTC didn't change women's contraceptive usage:
For example, the proportion using emergency contraception once per year was 6.5 percent, 6.3 percent and 5.6 percent during each period. The proportion using emergency contraception more than once was 2.0 percent, 1.5 percent and 1.7 percent.The only apparent change over time was in the places where women procured emergency contraception. The proportions obtaining the morning-after pill from a pharmacy increased from zero in 2000 to 19.7 percent in 2001 and 32.6 percent in 2002. During the same periods, fewer women obtained emergency contraception from a general practitioner or a family planning clinic.
"The sharp rise in the proportion of women buying emergency hormonal contraception over the counter indicates that many women prefer this way of obtaining it," Marston and her colleagues maintain. Easier access is likely to have prevented more pregnancies, they add.
"Given the apparent absences of negative consequences, and the fact that many women clearly prefer to buy emergency hormonal contraception over the counter," the team concludes, "our study supports the case for lifting the ban on over-the-counter sales of emergency hormonal contraception in the United States and other countries."
Sorry, you might first need to lift a few of the religious nutters out of office. It turns out, though, that some states are defying the primitive-thinking, moron feds. PS I have about five packs of "morning-after" pills, all bought OTC in France, and I haven't used one of them since I've bought them. But better safe than extremely inconvenienced in America, where you're treated, not like an adult woman, in charge of your own body, but a blithering idiot who must go to the doctor's office (kind of counterproductive if it takes you weeks or months to get an appointment -- or, at the very least, a multi-hour wait in urgent-care for a pregnancy test)...instead of going to the pharmacy and saying, "Hey there, I'll take some of those." PS I believe they were about 11 euros in France -- far less than the price in the US of involving the doctor needlessly!
PS The pharmacist in France did come to the counter when the clerk told him I was buying more than one: "Madame, these are not to be used as regular birth control!" I told him I knew -- but I live in a Puritan country, so I was buying them for myself and my friends -- just in case.
Fuck Off, Terrorists!
Stu posted a link to this piece -- "A Letter To The Terrorists, From London" -- within Comments on a post, but I thought it deserved a posting of its own:
What the fuck do you think you're doing?This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.
Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.
All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.
And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.
Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.
And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.
So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.
Reminds me of the story of the hostage who hired bounty hunters to go after his captors. Likewise, I've got a fantasy of some ordinary people going after Bin Laden and the rest of his murderous clan, à la the hair-curlered, housedress-wearing "The Landlady"/superhero in Kung Fu Hustle.
Bombing Us Back To The Middle Ages
Roger Cohen speculates in the IHT that that's what the terrorists want:
Fanaticism often has roots in rapid change, for its absolute certainties are consoling when all else shifts.
Terrorism remains a mystery. Nobody knows exactly what leads a young Muslim to blow himself up in the name of a holy war against the West. As Walter Laqueur, a historian, has observed, "There can be no final victory in the fight against terrorism, for terrorism (rather than full-scale war) is the contemporary manifestation of conflict, and conflict will not disappear from earth."
But what is clear is that even as jihadist terrorists employ the tools of modernity - posting scenes of beheadings on the Internet, adopting cellphone-operated detonation devices - their struggle is against modernity itself, which is to say against open societies as manifested in cosmopolitan cities like London or Madrid or New York.
Why Not Just Call A Witch Doctor In For A Consultation?
A guy in Sweden -- John Knecht -- writes in to the IHT in support of Brooke Shields' medical approach to getting her postpartum depression treated:
After birth Brooke Shields's commentary ("What Tom Cruise doesn't know about estrogen," Meanwhile, July 2) was great. My wife was fine after each of our first three children were born but suffered postpartum depression after the birth of the fourth. We fought through it without medication for six months and relied on faith and prayers. However, that doesn't always fix medical needs. After 18 months and slowly weening herself off the daily dosage, she is doing well. John Knecht, Karlskrona, Sweden
If he did say, "Well, we tried the witch doctor, and sprinkled Kabbalah water on her, then bought red shoes and had her put them on and click them together three times while facing north..." you'd think he was nuts, right? Well, in effect -- he did.
Luke Thompson's Guts
Some of them had to come out. In LA Weekly's Considerable Town, Luke writes:
I checked in around 11 a.m. It was maybe 5 p.m. by the time I got a shot that reduced the agony in my abdomen to that of a typical stomachache. One of the questions they ask is if you’ve had any previous surgery. I had testicular surgery 16 years ago. Unfortunately, saying this meant that my first test was a scrotal ultrasound. An old German woman fondled my nuts with Vaseline. As a test, it revealed nothing. As a way to lower my shame threshold so that nothing subsequent could possibly embarrass, it succeeded.As part of a CAT scan, you have to drink a radioactive milkshake (which ought to turn you into a superhero, but doesn’t). Most people hate that part, but I was dehydrated, and had been denied any liquids in case I needed surgery, so it actually tasted good, too. For the CAT, you have to hold your breath 20 seconds. I couldn’t. Hurt too much. For the regular X-ray, I had to stand up straight, which was getting tough too. I was starting to need more painkillers.
A guy with a shaved head was wheeled in next to me — his face was split open and bloodied. He made the sign of the beast with his fingers and banged his head when he saw me. He’d been in a nightclub brawl (“with niggers,” he whispered in my ear), though he proclaimed his innocence in starting it.
“That girl, I heard her say she has a big welt mark on her chest from me punching her,” he told the cops. “Can you have your CSI guys do a DNA test on that or something?”
“No, sir. They don’t really do that.”
I overheard some talk of kidney stones, but pretty soon it was unanimous: My appendix had to come out. Surgery took all of 10 minutes, and when I came to, the pain was instantly cut in half.
Following the surgery, I’d puke up green stuff, but not violently — it was like my vocal cords and mouth would suddenly just say “Bleeahhh!” and green tea would fly out. After each performance, I’d get a shot of anti-nausea medication, which never worked.
I plied my doctors for info on how close I was to dying but got nowhere. Though when I brought up gangrene, they said yes, I had had that. My necrotic appendix shut down my digestive system. It had to learn how to work all over again. I wore a diaper out of the hospital and crapped myself three times on the way home. If you think the smell of bodily emissions is bad, try to imagine what it would be like if all your secretions smelled like household chemicals. Minus lemon-freshness, of course.
And now the bills are coming in. But that’s a whole different kind of pain.
The whole gory story can be found on LYTRules.com. See directions in comments below. Luke, you might post a link or two in the comments. (It is always worth seeing the wild photo of Luke on the front of his site -- and this time is no exception!)
link spotted at LAObserved
The Word From London
Jackie Danicki, an American friend of mine living in London, emailed:
This is very strange. I've been wondering for years why something like this hadn't happened yet, and had almost tricked myself into thinking that nothing I pondered that much, in so much detail, could possibly happen.And this morning at the BBC, someone told me that he thought the terrorists show "impressive committment to their beliefs". I told him I wasn't impressed by the mass murder of Londoners or stoning of gays and rape victims, but that he was free to be bowled over.
And on a monkey-see, monkey-do/honesty in blogging note -- I saw that Cathy, who introduced me to Jackie, put this up first, and I followed suit.
Oh, but there's more from Jackie:
Whether I get the Tube or bus to work is less the question than, "Can I walk to work in under three hours?" Do the terrorists win if I'm conscious of the fact that London's security services SUCK?
And here's my response:
Everybody's security services suck. There's no airport, bus, or train that's impenetrable to a terrorist. For citizens going about their lives, it's just a case of wrong place, wrong time, and I refuse to live in fear.The best thing is to just live every day as if you could be dead the next day, but with the probability that you'll live out the week; probably, the month or the year. That way you won't spend every dollar on diamonds and hookers (not that I'd spend money on either, but you get my drift!)
Ladies: How Long Is Too Long?
We're not talking penis size, but the ideal length of time for sex -- the actual act itself -- not including foreplay, etc. In other words, at what point in time -- if ever -- do you start saying to your self, "Hello? Are we there yet?" Some time examples: An hour and a half, an hour, and down from there. And why.
Feel free to comment under a fake name or anonymously. No details will be detective-ized or revealed! You have my word on that!
The Dog Poop Seen Around The World
A Korean woman's dog pooped on the train, and she refused to clean it up -- and even got belligerent. And then blog hell broke loose. Here are the photos.
Don Park has the skinny on the poop, but his take on it being an injustice by the bloggers is all wrong.
Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture. All mentions of privacy invasion were shouted down with accusations of being related to the girl. The common excuse for their behavior was that the girl doesn't deserve privacy.While the girl clearly behaved badly, those Korean netizens' behavior is even worse and inexcusably so. Abuse by the mob is indistinguishable from abuse by dictators yet they just don't see it in the heat of righteousness. Are they wary of ruining her life or hounding her into suicide? I doubt it. To quote some of them: her life deserves to be ruined and she won't kill herself because she is a thick-skinned bitch.
Well, no, but just like my hit-and-run driver (who was just prosecuted, and whose butt I'm now either going to drag to small claims court or Judge Judy), just because you think you can get away with behaving like an uncivilized asshole -- doesn't mean you should!
I think, in the age of cell phone cameras and loads of other listening and watching devices everywhere, you should probably listen to what your mother surely told you: When you put something in writing, assume it's going to end up on the front page of The New York Times. (You should also extrapolate that to audio and videotape.)
Now, don't get me wrong: I do think people -- even movie stars -- have a right to privacy. That is, for example, why I did not photograph anyone (even though I had the opportunity several times) for my recent blog entry on all the couples making out on the streets of Paris.
But, just do something wrong, and you stop being a private citizen and become news -- thus forfeiting your right to privacy. That's why I think this citizen's blog-arrest humiliation is a very good thing -- especially in light of my own experience of how little "the proper authorities" do, even when you hand them all the evidence (including, say, videotape of a hit-and-run!) they need to bring in some ethically bankrupt old coot -- or some car-boosting creep. In the case of the hit-and-run guy, Judge Kamins, in Santa Monica Criminal Court, said the guy never would have been brought to justice but for me.
And then there are "lesser" offenses -- rather mundane day-to-day crimes against humanity, like buttwads shouting into cell phones everywhere from restaurants to lingerie department dressing rooms. Maybe if you feel free to be an inconsiderate jerk for all to see and hear...all should really see and hear it.
In evolutionary psychology, it's thought that the disapproval of the group led to our social controls; ie, don't steal, be civil, etc. Group disapproval was a serious thing, back in the Pleistocene, because it could mean being outcast -- which, in a world without refrigerators and heating pads, was likely to mean death.
In a society where people, upon reaching adulthood, often leave their small towns and their families, and are, essentially, strangers to many people they encounter during their day, these group disapproval constraints have been removed. Or, they were removed until recently -- until bloggers shrank the Global Village down to size. Shout into a cell phone? Change your baby in public? Endanger my life by driving like an asshole (whose cell phone call is more important than anyone or anything on the planet)? Well, then I'm going to blogslap you.
And again, despite the contention of self-interested prissies like David Shaw (wonderfully bitchslapped here by Matt Welch), who think, to be considered a journalist, you need some official gold star and official suede elbow patches from Columbia's J-school -- the constitutional freedom of the press extends even to the pajama-clad whose blogs reach an audience of one or two -- one of whom might be their cat.
Thanks to Cathy Seipp for the poop on the poop.
To England
Condolences and solidarity-- against fundamentalist murderers.
One Thing America And France Have In Common
Boobs everywhere!
Unfortunately, in America, the boobs are primitive religious nutters like Ashcroft, who have to spend thousands in taxpayer dollars to cover up the exposed breasts on classical art.
The boobs above are on one of two statues guarding some steps at Hotel Sully, which is not a hotel at all, but a museum of history, sculpture, and tapistries right off the beautiful square, Place Des Vosges.
Lovers Handshaking Goodnight
That's not exactly how it goes in the United States, but one big diffference between France and the US is in the public display of affection department. In the USA, growing up, I heard "No PDA!" Here, there are couples everywhere kissing on the street. (No, not ass-grabbing and doing it doggie-style in doorways -- although, if you're out at the right hour, I'm sure you can catch that, too.) What I'm talking about are those sweet, romantic Robert Doisneau kind of kisses.
I probably saw eight couples kissing today while running around Paris with Lucy -- from near the Louvre down to Place Des Vosges and Hotel Sully in the Marais, then on to Montparnasse for drinks with Gaito. And then there are all the people everywhere -- men, women, children, friends, lovers -- holding hands, hugging, and generally showing physical affection for each other. Yes, I know, this is the country where men kiss each other as a greeting. Twice. (And what's wrong with that? Beats a sock in the arm.)
Contrast the kissing culture here with the way so many people in the United States seem to feel uncomfortable about -- again, not ass-grabbing in public or anything -- but simply hugging or even touching their significant whatever in front of others. Is it cultural Puritanism handed down from somebody's uptight ancestors? Why are we so anti-touchy-feely in the USA?
A French Revolution, Perhaps?
It's easy to love France when you don't have to do business here. But, maybe that will change -- or change a little. Katrin Bennhold writes in the IHT that Laurence Parisot, 45, a woman from outside France's big business establishment, was elected this week to lead Medef, a group representing more than 750,000 companies:
Her election is a small revolution in a country where women occupy only 5 percent of board seats for companies listed on the CAC40 stock index.
An expert on public opinion, she takes over at a time of rising anticapitalist sentiment in Europe's third-largest economy, which has been battling high unemployment and sluggish economic growth.
Parisot, who has been on Medef's executive board for two years, faces the challenge of selling economic change to a country whose deep skepticism about globalization came through loudly in the recent referendum on the European constitution. The strong French no vote emboldened the country's militant labor unions and has weakened the government - two years before elections, and just as it pushes ahead with unpopular privatizations of giant state-owned utilities.
But Parisot, who easily beat two other candidates, seemed undaunted. Speaking before a largely male crowd, she pledged to bring business closer to a public that often sees it as the enemy - one out to roll back their generous social and job protections.
"We have to talk about the economy, explain the economy, make people love the economy - the market economy, that is," she told fellow executives to storms of applause. "To have an economic policy that is favorable to companies is not to worsen unemployment.
"On the contrary, it would finally allow a return to full employment."
She blamed the French dislike of big business on the country's long farming tradition and an education system that has failed to rouse passions for economics in the way it has for politics and sociology. "We need to find better ways of teaching it," she said.
What Would Jesus Do?
Well, maybe something like this -- from a story by Shaila Dewan in the IHT:
The United Church of Christ became the first mainline Christian denomination to officially support same-sex marriages when its general synod passed a resolution affirming "equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender."
The resolution was adopted Monday in the face of efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage. It was both a theological statement and a protest against discrimination, said the Reverend John Thomas, president and general minister of the denomination, which has 6,000 congregations and 1.3 million members.
"On this July 4, the United Church of Christ has courageously acted to declare freedom, affirming marriage equality, affirming the civil rights of gay - of same-gender - couples to have their relationships recognized as marriages by the state, and encouraging our local churches to celebrate those marriages," Thomas said at a news conference after the vote by the General Synod.
The synod's decisions are not binding and the vote will not require pastors to provide marriage ceremonies for gay couples. Some United Church of Christ ministers already perform such ceremonies.
While the United Church of Christ has not had the widespread divisions other major denominations have experienced over homosexuality, some member churches had said that such a vote could prompt them to leave the denomination, and one group called for Thomas's resignation when he came out in support of the resolution. One amendment offered on the synod floor, and accepted, added a phrase acknowledging the "pain and struggle" passage of the resolution would engender.
Oh, please. I get letters about "pain and struggle" from hundreds of heterosexual married people every month. Since we don't have gay people marrying in this country (and I just looove that lame "Oh, it will ruin the institution of marriage" excuse!) -- who is there for all the pained, struggling heteros to blame?
All Roads Lead To Rove
Former journalist and current journalism prof Bill Israel, writing in Editor & Publisher, connects Karl Rove to the Plame affair:
In teaching with him, I learned Rove assumes command over any political enterprise he engages. He insists on absolute discipline from staff: nothing escapes him; no one who works with him moves without his direction. In Texas, though he was called "the prime minister" to Gov. George W. Bush, it might have been "Lord," as in the divine, for when it came to politics and policy, it was Rove who gave, and Rove who took away.Little has changed since the Bush presidency; all roads still lead to Rove.
Consequently, when former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson challenged President Bush’s embrace of the British notion that Saddam Hussein imported uranium from Niger to produce nuclear weapons, retaliation by Rove was never in doubt. While it is reporters Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times who now face jail time, the retaliation came through Rove-uber-outlet Robert Novak, who blew the cover of Wilson’s wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The problem, as always, in dealing with Rove, is establishing a clear chain of culpability. Rove once described himself as a die-hard Nixonite; he is, like the former president, both student and master of plausible deniability. (This past weekend, in confirming that Rove was indeed a source for Matthew Cooper, Rove's lawyer said his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information.") That is precisely why prosecutor Fitzgerald in this case must document the pattern of Rove’s behavior, whether journalists published, or not.
For in this case, Rove, improving on Macchiavelli, has bet that reporters won’t rat their relationship with the administration’s most important political source. How better for him to operate without constraint, or to camouflage breaking the law, than under the cover of journalists and journalism, protected by the First Amendment?
Karl Rove is in my experience with him the brightest and most affable of companions; perhaps I have been coopted, for I genuinely treasure his friendship. But neither charm nor political power should be permitted to subvert the First Amendment, which is intended to insure that reporters and citizens burrow fully and publicly into government, not insulate its players from felony, or reality.
Katherine Harris Discovers Cure For Canker!
Well, not really. But she did get the state of Florida to spend six months trying the method she suggested for curing citrus canker destroying trees. Naturally, it was a wacky one. Jim Stratton writes in the Orlando Sentinel::
Researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test "Celestial Drops," promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its "improved fractal design," "infinite levels of order" and "high energy and low entropy."But the cure proved useless against canker. That's because it was water -- possibly, mystically blessed water.
The "product is a hoax and not based on any credible known science," the state's chief of entomology, nematology and plant pathology wrote to agriculture officials and fellow scientists after testing Celestial Drops in October 2001.
In the same letter, Wayne Dixon recommended that the state break off its relationship with the promoters of Celestial Drops.
"We have expended considerable effort in trying to responsibly deal with this group and their products," he stated. "I wish to maintain our standing in the scientific community and not allow these individuals to use our hard-earned credibility for further name-dropping."
Dixon's sentiments were not a surprise to other scientists.
"The presentation of Celestial Drops as a citrus canker treatment was . . . largely unintelligible," according to a memo written more than a year earlier by one of the state's chief plant pathologists. "In general, the proposal comes across as unscientific and not worth pursuing."
So why did Florida spend months discussing and developing test protocols for Celestial Drops?
The initial push came from Harris, now a U.S. House representative and candidate for U.S. Senate. Harris, the granddaughter of legendary citrus baron Ben Hill Griffin Jr., said she was introduced to one of the product's promoters, New York Rabbi Abe Hardoon, in 2000.
Hardoon did not want to discuss Celestial Drops when contacted by the Orlando Sentinel.
Jared Diamond Bitchslaps Tom Cruise
...And many other lesser-known morons, over "the naturalistic fallacy" -- the notion that what's natural is good, and then smashes the Tabula Rasa. Cathy Seipp profiles him in NRO online:
“Genocide is natural! Rape is natural!” he exclaims in response. “No, what’s natural is not necessarily good — often it’s repulsive. One of the most important functions of human society, and the driving force behind most political institutions, is to prevent humans from doing what comes naturally.”But a point he emphasizes in Guns, Germs and Steel is that, “contrary to what white racists believe,” advanced societies didn’t develop because of innate genetic ability but because of their luck of the draw in biogeography. On the other hand, he undermines the tender-hearted conventional wisdom that aboriginal peoples are ecological saints.
“Every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans has been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals,” Diamond writes in Collapse, a point he’s made in his other books. The problem isn’t that American Indians or New Zealand Maoris were particularly bad managers, but that, like us, they were human — and thus prone to wiping out strange species before settling into a new environment.
Humans have also had a habit of exterminating other humans ever since Cain and Abel. It’s impossible to take the currently fashionable notion of a “people of color” brotherhood seriously after reading Diamond; his chapters on the globally genocidal history of the human race in The Third Chimpanzee, his first and in some ways most accessible book, are devastating.
The Norse were unable to sustain their Greenland settlement partly because they refused to hunt seals like the local Inuit, whom they dismissed as “skraelings,” or wretches. “If you regard people as wretches,” Diamond noted dryly, “you are not likely to learn from them.”
“Having been born in 1937, I grew up with the view that the Nazis were unique,” he told me. “And yes, the efficiency of [the Holocaust] was unique, but the effort was totally mundane. All the groups I work with in New Guinea, they’ve got their own stories of what they did to someone else.” Diamond has found the remote island so dangerous that he won’t let his twin teenage sons accompany him on expeditions. His stock response to their requests to go? “Once you learn to be really careful. Maybe when you’re 42 years old.”
Nitwit Sues NASA
Please commend me on my restraint for avoiding Uranus while titling -- not because I'm above being vulgar, but because it's far too common. And now, on to our tale of astrological woe. While I neither have an astrological sign nor believe in astrology, an idiot who makes her living in the field thinks she's predicted a way to cash in:
NASA's mission that sent a space probe smashing into a comet raised more than cosmic dust — it also brought a lawsuit from a Russian astrologer.Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe," the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday. A Moscow court has postponed hearings on the case until late July, the paper said.
Scientists say the crash did not significantly alter the comet's orbit around the sun and said the experiment does not pose any danger to Earth.
The probe's comet crash sent up a cloud of debris that scientists hope to examine to learn how the solar system was formed.
Bai is seeking damages totaling $300 million — the approximate equivalent of the mission's cost — for her "moral sufferings," Izvestia said, citing her lawyer Alexander Molokhov. She earlier told the paper that the experiment would "deform her horoscope."
Lucy Goes In Style
Lucy is ready to leave her mark on the streets of Paris.
Temporarily, anyway, thanks to a little gift set from our friend Emily.
Cancel That Hummer, Boys!
(I mean the wheeled kind, of course.) It seems objects in your pants may be larger than they actually appear.
July In Paris
Arrived this morning for a month in my favorite city with the miniature dog in tow. Well, actually, she was in my lap under a blanket during most of our flight. She's very well behaved -- probably because I'm a bit of a fascist, and trained her accordingly -- and she'll be perfectly quiet and still if I say "lie down" and "no noise." I could have smuggled her; I think the charge to bring her ($127 each way) is outrageous, considering my 2.5 lb. dog is no more trouble for anyone than my wallet (unlike some Labrador they have to put under the plane). Still, sneaking her on seemed a bit of a risk, considering I was flying on a free ticket. To be fair, I did get a bit of non-standard special service for her. We flew from LA through SFO, where there was a three-hour layover, and no doggie ladies' room facilities, so one of the pilots actually volunteered to take her for a walk on the tarmac-- in SFO and in Paris, when we arrived. Very sweet!
A Man Who Should Not Be Teaching Science
Any man who believes in the "young earth" theory:
The defining characteristic of Young Earth creationism is the belief that the Earth is "young", on the order of 6,000 to 10,000 years old, rather than the age of 4.5 billion years as estimated by a variety of scientific methods including radiometric dating. The Young Earth Creationist range of figures is arrived at using the ages given in the genealogies and other dates in the Bible, similar to the process used by Archbishop James Ussher when he dated creation at 4004 BC. YECs believe that all living kinds were specially created by God within a literal 6-day period during the beginning of the universe. Additionally, YECs believe that the Biblical account of Noah's flood is literally true, maintaining that there was a wordwide flood around 2350 BC that destroyed all terrestrial life except that which was saved on Noah's Ark.
For example, take this man, Larry Booher, currently employed as a high school science misleader, uh, teacher, in Roanoke, VA:
Booher's source book, which he distributed at his own expense to classes ranging from 25 to 40 students, included nine chapters with titles such as "In the beginning" and "Evidence for a young Earth."
Luckily, his primitive thinking shouldn't disqualify him outright from working as a dishwasher.
The Mystery Of Marmalade
Why does orange marmalade exist, and why does anyone ever serve it? It tastes like burnt plastic with orange sauce.
Religious Nutters And Their Selective Reading Of The Bible
Oops, forgot the part about polygamy! The National Gay And Lesbian Task Force recently put out a statement written by Reverend Jay Emerson Johnson, Ph.D. called Articles Of Faith: Biblical Values For American Families, that goes into a few points the fundamentalists would rather forget when they're railing against gay marriage:
Religious opponents of equal marriage frequently use the Bible for justification of their stance. In March the Southern Baptist Convention released the “Nashville Declaration on Same-Sex Marriage,” in which it based its opposition to equality on “the biblical teaching that God designed marriage as a lifetime union of one man and one woman.” For biblical literalists they don’t know much about the Bible. Biblical families and American families share the word family in common but not much more. But if we look beyond the radically different structure of biblical marriage, modern families can still find timeless values in the Scriptures to guide them.First, it’s important to recognize that the most common marriage pattern in the Bible is polygamy: not a union of one man and one woman but a union of one man and as many women as he could afford to keep (see Solomon and his 700 wives and 300 concubines). In the Christian Scriptures the two primary figures, Jesus and the Apostle Paul, are both unmarried and childless. Based on the model of Jesus and his disciples, the early church developed a radical model of family that broke with ancient kinship patterns in favor of a religious—and nonbiological—church family.
“Biblical family values” present just as many problems as “biblical families.”
Abraham’s use of his slave, Hagar, to sire a child, and his subsequent banishment of her and the child to the wilderness (Genesis 21:14) would be considered unspeakably callous by today’s standards. Yet according to the family values of his day, Abraham was acting completely within his rights. When Jacob steals his brother Esau’s birthright, the Bible describes it not simply as an act of brotherly betrayal but as a necessary part of God’s will for God’s people (Genesis 27).
Even more severe is Jephthah’s sacrifice of his own daughter to fulfill the terms of a foolish vow (Judges 11:29-40) or Onan being put to death for refusing to impregnate his late brother’s wife (Genesis 38:9). Parents who cover their children’s eyes during Desperate Housewives, might be shocked to discover what lurid tales of betrayal, rape, incest, and adultery—all transpiring within traditional biblical families—lurk between the covers of their family Bible.
Not every biblical family relationship is as dysfunctional as these examples. But when biblical figures act virtuously, they often do so outside the bounds of “traditional family.” The story of Ruth and Naomi is an account of same-sex devotion often read, ironically, during heterosexual marriage ceremonies (Ruth 1:16). David and Jonathan’s relationship is presented with a tenderness lacking in most biblical marriages: David admits that his love for his friend “surpassed the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). In the Gospels, when Jesus is asked about his own family, he replies with an answer that was as radical for his day as it is now: “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:48-50).
The structures of biblical families are rooted in ancient cultural practices far removed from the sensibilities of Western society; the authors of the Bible would scarcely recognize the partnership of equals that marks a contemporary American marriage. But this doesn’t mean we should abandon the Bible as a guide to family values. As the mutable institution of marriage evolves with shifting cultural norms, the Bible continually calls us back to what truly matters in human relationships.
St. Paul wrote about these values, calling them the “fruit of the spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22). Surely these are biblical values every family would embrace. According to Paul, “love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.... It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Even when knowledge and human institutions fail, these values, Paul says, remain constant: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these three, Paul concludes, is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Seems the nutters are a bit forgetful about the "feed the poor, care for the sick bits, too." I guess that stuff comes next on their list after "buy new Hummer!!!"
Now, If Only They Could Make The Noisy Child Disappear!
In "Would Somebody Turn That Noisy Child Off!" Alexandra Frean reports on the latest in noise-cancelling technology:
A REMOTE control that allows you to switch off annoying noises could be available soon. The gadget – the size of a mobile phone – will allow you to zap the sounds of bickering children, thundering traffic, pounding road diggers, barking dogs or twittering colleagues.The sleek, high-tech silencer, called the Mute, uses technology created for use in hearing aids. It sends a signal via a wireless connection to two little “buds”, which users stick in their ears.
All they have to do is point the remote at anything and it will filter out the sound coming from it.The Mute, which is still in development, was created for the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) to help people with hearing difficulties to screen out background noise that can interfere with their understanding of the spoken word. But its creators soon recognised that its applications could be far wider.
Chris Vanstone, of Human Beans, the design consultancy behind the Mute, said: “We wanted to create a product that could help everyone to manage the noise around them. The world is getting noisier all the time. It is twice as loud now as 50 years ago.”
He said that the Mute would come into its own in, say, a noisy pub or an office with a digger outside.
Neil Thomas, of the RNID, said that the Mute works by “sampling”, or recording, the sound that the user wants to screen out so that it can identify the shape of the sound wave. “It then inverts the sampled signal and plays it upside down over the noise that is coming in and they cancel each other out.”
The Designer Was A Dipshit
David Barash wipes the floor with "intelligent design" in the LA Times:
Current believers in creationism, masquerading in its barely disguised incarnation, "intelligent design," argue similarly, claiming that only a designer could generate such complex, perfect wonders.But, in fact, the living world is shot through with imperfection. Unless one wants to attribute either incompetence or sheer malevolence to such a designer, this imperfection — the manifold design flaws of life — points incontrovertibly to a natural, rather than a divine, process, one in which living things were not created de novo, but evolved. Consider the human body. Ask yourself, if you were designing the optimum exit for a fetus, would you engineer a route that passes through the narrow confines of the pelvic bones? Add to this the tragic reality that childbirth is not only painful in our species but downright dangerous and sometimes lethal, owing to a baby's head being too large for the mother's birth canal.
This design flaw is all the more dramatic because anyone glancing at a skeleton can see immediately that there is plenty of room for even the most stubbornly large-brained, misoriented fetus to be easily delivered anywhere in that vast, non-bony region below the ribs. (In fact, this is precisely the route obstetricians follow when performing a caesarean section.)
Why would evolution neglect the simple, straightforward solution? Because human beings are four-legged mammals by history. Our ancestors carried their spines parallel to the ground; it was only with our evolved upright posture that the pelvic girdle had to be rotated (and thereby narrowed), making a tight fit out of what for other mammals is nearly always an easy passage.
An engineer who designed such a system from scratch would be summarily fired, but evolution didn't have the luxury of intelligent design.
Admittedly, it could be argued that the dangers and discomforts of childbirth were intelligently, albeit vengefully, planned, given Genesis' account of God's judgment upon Eve: As punishment for Eve's disobedience in Eden, "in pain you shall bring forth children." (Might this imply that if she'd only behaved, women's vaginas would have been where their bellybuttons currently reside?)
On to men. It is simply deplorable that the prostate gland is so close to the urinary system that (the common) enlargement of the former impinges awkwardly on the latter.
In addition, as human testicles descended — both in evolution and in embryology — the vas deferens (which carries sperm) became looped around the ureter (which carries urine from kidneys to bladder), resulting in an altogether illogical arrangement that would never have occurred if, like a minimally competent designer, natural selection could have anticipated the situation.
There's much more that the supposed designer botched: ill-constructed knee joints that wear out, a lower back that's prone to pain, an inverted exit of the optic nerve via the retina, resulting in a blind spot.
And what about the theological implications of all this? If God is the designer, and we are created in his image, does that mean he has back problems too?
In a letter to the editor, forwarded to me, Ben Akerley asks (what should be) the obvious:
David P. Barash's scathing indictment of oxymoronic ID (Intelligent Design) immediately brought to mind one of the favorite stories that America's great agnostic orator, Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) used to tell his audiences: A devout clergyman one day pointed out a crane to his young son explaining that God, in his infinite wisdom, had designed his short legs and long, slender bill to enable him to catch fish easily. Then the little boy protested quizzically, "I understand God's goodness as far as the crane is concerned, but father, don't you think the arrangement a little tough on the fish?"Of course ID also begs the unanswerable question that if creationism explains all origins, who designed the designer?
