Hollywood Pole Dancing
War Is Poopy!
The FCC is fighting with Ken Burns over two profanities in his WWII documentary. Most appropriately, the story in the London Times is by a guy named James Bone:
The War, by Ken Burns, which includes veterans using profanities to describe their experiences on the front line, has become a test case in the Government’s crackdown on indecency on the air. The 14-hour series, created by the documentarian known for his epic television histories Jazz, Baseball and The Civil War, is scheduled to be broadcast on public television stations in September next year.Despite the government clampdown, the defiant new head of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) is refusing to bleep out the offending words or to air it after 10pm, when the rules are less stringent.
“The American people need to know this is not about Janet Jackson,” Paula Kerger, the president and chief executive officer of PBS, said in Pasadena, California. “This is about film-makers that have powerful stories that now are not being allowed to tell those stories on public television or broadcast television.”
...Before the crackdown (post Janet Jackson) the FCC had ruled that Bono’s exclamation at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards — “This is f***ing brilliant” — was not indecent because it was not a sexual comment. But the commissioners reversed themselves after the Super Bowl incident.
The FCC regards material as indecent if it “depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium”. The regulatory agency says that even bleeped-out expletives can incur a fine if the words are comprehensible by lip-reading. The policy has forced broadcasters to pixellate, or obscure, speakers’ mouths when they utter bleeped words. Congress has increased indecency fines by a factor of ten, to a potentially crippling maximum penalty of $325,000 (£175,000) a station for each incident. PBS is already fighting a $15,000 fine levied on an affiliate station in San Mateo, California, for an episode of Martin Scorcese’s documentary The Blues.
Burns, who has spent six years working on his project, told The New York Times that he was not worried that The War would fall foul of the new decency standards because, although it contained graphic violence, there were only two profanities, and they were read off camera. He said he was flabbergasted that FCC policy was being applied to documentaries, particularly after President Bush was caught on camera using a vulgarity in a conversation with Tony Blair at the recent G8 summit in St Petersburg, Russia.
Sorry, but these words hurt whom...and how? Can anybody explain why we have these prohibitions? I mean, is there some good reason?
Follow Your Tax Dollars
They're in Baghdad, baby. No, Johnny can't read or think, but maybe Hassam will do better with all the money we're putting into Iraq. In The New York Times, James Glanz writes of massive cost overruns in Iraq rebuilding -- hidden from Congress. (What you don't know won't hurt...the Bush administration -- or Bechtel):
The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.
Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.
The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.
The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.
...The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in his report.
The rest was reclassified as overhead, or “indirect costs.” According to a contracting officer at the agency who was cited in the report, the agency “did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization.”
“We find the entire agreement unclear,” the inspector general wrote of the A.I.D. request approved by the embassy. “The document states that hospital project cost increases would be offset by reducing contractor overhead allocated to the project, but project reports for the period show no effort to reduce overhead.”
The report said it suspected that other unreported costs on the hospital could drive the tab even higher. In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.
One result is that the project’s overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.
Britney Goes To The Gynecologist's Office
And Bazaar is there to photograph it for their cover!
While I'm all for baby and boobie the way they did it on Babytalk's cover, this one I'll have to tape a white piece of paper over. Sorry, are we supposed to find this sexy? It's not outrageous, since Demi Moore broke the knocked-up cover girl barrier years ago.
And, FYI, Bazaar, if you're going to advertise "Fall's Best New Ideas Inside," it might be a little more believable if you didn't have this decade's worst example of bad taste on the cover.
P.S. And thank you in advance for the concern, but no, I don't live in the small metal canister at 171 Pier Ave. where I get my mail.
"Hey, Sugar Tits!"
How I'd like to be referred to from now on. If it works better for you, you can pretend you're Mel Gibson, drunk off your ass and slurring the Jews. Hmmm, since he claims to own all of Malibu...does that mean there's a little Jewish blood in there somewhere?
No, Your Colon Doesn't Need Mop 'n Glo
Or any other kind of "cleansing." And neither does your liver. Great post on the idiotic practice of liver cleansing (with link to the previous week's piece on the idiotic practice of colon cleansing) by Respectful Insolence.
In other words, the "stones" that liver cleansers are so proud of and go to such effort to strain their poo for after doing their flushes are not gallstones and were almost certainly the result of the actual flush itself! It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. These protocols usually involve fasting and then up to a half liter or more of olive oil at one time. That could easily provide the conditions for this sort of reaction to take place. Neat, isn't it? The very sign of "success" of the liver flush is something that has nothing to do with gallstones and everything to do with the results of the flush itself. Indeed, it's quite clear that, even if you don't have gallstones, if you do a liver flush and then look, you'll find things in your stool that very much look like gallstones due to saponified oil. (Now I know why pretty much every liver flush protocol includes large amounts of olive oil or similar oils plus epsom salts or orthophophoric acid and fruit juices).It's a beautiful scam. People do these flushes, they see things that look to them like gallstones being "flushed" out, and they believe it works. Consequently, they keep doing it. Because these flushes involve materials that don't have to be purchased from a "healer" (although certainly many "healers" sell various "supplements" to "aid" liver flushes), they can be viewed more as a means of healers to demonstrate their skill and keep the patient coming (and going). It also serves as a way of "demonstrating" the efficacy of "detoxification." After all, if this "flush" appears to cause "gallstones" to be "flushed out," then perhaps the other detoxification altie woo will similarly "flush out toxins," as claimed and might be worth a try. (Liver cleanses might indeed be a gateway altie therapy.) To me the ironic thing about liver flushes is that they are so strongly advocated by alties, and alties frequently castigate "conventional" medicine for "iatrogenic diseases or complications" (iatrogenic=caused by doctors). What, then, can we call these "stones" coming out of people using liver flushes, but a case of i-altie-ogenic disease?
Clearly, what they're really doing is flushing money out of gullible people's wallets and into the hands of "healers." Speaking of which, you don't believe in what Kevin Trudeau says, now do you?
A Little Reason In Your Reasoning?
Oh, how far we haven't come. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes in The New York Times of 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam:
The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the “New Christians,” as they were called even after generations of Christian practice, of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe’s first experiment in racialist ideology.
Spinoza’s reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.
Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us — whether Jew or Christian or Muslim — a privileged position in the narrative of the world’s unfolding.
Spinoza’s system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.
Spinoza’s faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.
...Statecraft infused with religion not only dissolves the justification for the state but is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others.
If There Is A Hell...
...And I get sent there, this is how it will be decorated.
Lena. Will. Just. Die. Of. Horror.
RateMyCameltoe.com. NSFWOMH (Not Safe For Work Or Male Homosexuals).
Why Jews Have Horns And Whether Terrorists Get Virgins Or Raisins
It was my first day at the University of Michigan. I'd been unpacking all day when my roommate arrived, accompanied by her mother.
My roommate was a girl from Jackson, Michigan whose father worked as a prison guard. I think she was of Mexican origin -- because she had a Mexican-sounding name and because the one thing she put up on the wall was a typing paper-sized poster of Emilio Zapata.
Well, we talked a bit about this or that, and I'm not sure how religious origins came up, but when I said something about being Jewish, her mother said, "Oh, my daughter's never met a Jewish girl before." She later said she'd heard (and no, I'm not kidding or making this up) that Jews have horns. Yeah, well, I had mine removed when they took off my braces.
My mother, who is a part-time biblical scholar, later explained why people might think this: Apparently, the Hebrew word "or" for light, as in "Moses had rays of light around his head," (or something close to that), was mistranslated as the word for "horn" or "horns." So, some lazy-ass translator was responsible for years of Christian-on-Heeb persecution...thanks a bunch...not to mention an unfortunate accident in Michaelangelo's portrayal of Moses above.
Well, the other day, in comments on my 72 virgins post, Kitt posted a link to a blog suggesting there may be a mistranslation of the word "virgin" in the Koran. Apparently, all those sick fuckers could be dying for 72...raisins?
The buzz, in brief, is that (following a period of strictly oral retransmission) early written transcriptions of the Koran recorded consonants but not vowels. Thus the martyr's reward might be the prized hur -- "white" (raisins) -- not Houri -- virgins. [A waggish compromise faction suggests Vegans ... of the dietetic or galactic variety?]From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor Houri (unless more experienced Vegans are an option) with honorable mention to hur. Is it possible these pure, unblemished "raisins" of which the Angel whispered to the Prophet are, in the idiomatic wordplay of the day, the metaphorical equivalent of today's "cherries"?
...For a faith pegged to strict authenticity of sacred text, any such gnat becomes a hard camel to swallow ... a single instance opens the entire text to the horrors of interpretation. Thus these scholarly speculations are, quite literally, fighting words.
Losing Loop
Between books, in the heat of the Valley, David "Tell Me Everything" Rensin is out of the loop, looking for the loop, and looping into blogdom as one of the group bloggers for LA Observed's new blog, Native Intelligence. Let's be with him as he loses his blogging virginity with an excerpt from his very first blog item:
I woke up a few mornings ago feeling out of the loop. Way out. Again. I don’t want to make a big deal here; feeling out of the loop is part and parcel of living in Los Angeles and working in the media-industrial complex. Or even just visiting friends in the Malibu Colony for a day at the beach. (You might say that living for forty years in the San Fernando Valley is like getting a Lifetime Achievement Award for being out of the loop.) Still, compared to writing for television, the movies, hip magazines, and now the blogosphere, authoring books can seem like living in what the late Douglas ("Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) Adams called the “unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.” (A book signing/reading attended by more than five people is a crowd. The average is two.) But still no reason for alarm. Just as being slightly overweight, losing brain cells every day, and a couple other chronic conditions I know I have but can’t put my finger on at the moment, I’ve learned to live with it.This time I lay in bed next to my wife, in that twilight haze between being grateful to see another dawn – I’ve sworn to live to 110, but no reason to be arrogant – and wanting to shut my eyes, put the pillow on my head, and sleep until well past noon. Suddenly, a vertiginous sensation of disconnect, discontent, and the certainty that wherever it is at, I’m not there, clutched my guts in its ham fists and refused to let go. I flashed back immediately to the previous night’s dinner conversation with a thirty-something couple, both hot, hot, hot with entertainment industry potential, who were so sure they were in the loop to stay that they believed their children would be born with silver loops in their mouths.
...I just know I’m missing something. There’s a brass ring out there waiting to be grabbed and taken home. My needs for loopdom are simple: I just want to be able to shop at Whole Foods without feeling like I really belong at Ralphs. Oh, and I want all those health freaks in their muscle shirts and leotards, who smell like barley and patchouli, to melt on the spot like a warm Cinnabun. There’s a place I dream of where there are twenty words for “brilliant”, but none for “anxiety.”
I want to be in the loop even though as my friend Carrie says, it leads to “a constant state of lack and need. A gross existential solipsism. A hunger that when satisfied only makes you more hungry because the loop, the information and inclusion that supposedly makes you happy, is, like a wave, ephemeral. Tomorrow’s birdcage liner.”
More about David Rensin?
David Rensin has written or co-written twelve books, including Tim Allen's mega-best-seller, "Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man," Chris Rock's "Rock This!," super-manager Bernie Brillstein's memoir "Where Did I Go Right?," WWII hero Louis Zamperini's incredible survival saga "Devil at My Heels," and his own 2003 bestseller, "The Mailroom" — an oral history covering sixty five years of what's it's like to start at the bottom dreaming of the top (like Geffen, Diller, Ovitz, etc.) in a talent agency mailroom. His new book, "All For a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki 'Da Cat' Dora" — an oral biography of the once and forever (and late) enigmatic king of Malibu and world wanderer — based on more than 300 interviews worldwide — will be published by Wm. Morrow in Spring 2007. You can also wander around Rensin's website, where there are no opinions all of the time, at www.tellmeeverything.com. Rensin has proudly lived in or near the San Fernando Valley since 1964.
The World's Itty-Bittiest Porn Star
Are we all hard yet? Because people are in an uproar over this magazine cover...baby getting some boobie. I found it very sweet. Then again, I don't think nudity is eeeee-vil. Here's what the Puritans had to say about it:
"I shredded it," said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. "A breast is a breast — it's a sexual thing. He didn't need to see that."
She...shredded it? Hmm, just a guess, but I guess now that that horrible magazine has been shredded, Johnny will be free to play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
"Player is a young man working with gangs to gain respect. His mission includes murder, theft, and destruction on every imaginable level. Player recovers his health by visiting prostitutes then recovers funds by beating them to death and taking their money. Player can wreak as much havoc as he likes without progressing through the game's storyline."
The boobie's tale contines:
It's the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public — a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: "lactivists," meaning those who advocate for a woman's right to nurse wherever she needs to."I'm totally supportive of it — I just don't like the flashing," she says. "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see."
Oh, please. Is this like an alien death ray that will blind them the moment flashes into their corneas?
Another mother, Kelly Wheatley, wrote Babytalk to applaud the cover, precisely because, she says, it helps educate people that breasts are more than sex objects. And yet Wheatley, 40, who's still nursing her 3-year-old daughter, rarely breast-feeds in public, partly because it's more comfortable in the car, and partly because her husband is uncomfortable with other men seeing her breast."Men are very visual," says Wheatley, 40, of Amarillo, Texas. "When they see a woman's breast, they see a breast — regardless of what it's being used for."
Yeah, them nursing mommies, mmmhmmm, hot! (Well, sure, there are fetishists out there, but still...)
Babytalk editor Susan Kane says the mixed response to the cover clearly echoes the larger debate over breast-feeding in public. "There's a huge Puritanical streak in Americans," she says, "and there's a squeamishness about seeing a body part — even part of a body part.""It's not like women are whipping them out with tassels on them!" she adds. "Mostly, they are trying to be discreet."
Will our society really fall apart if Johnny catches a glimpse of titty? In France, where they seem to have a much healthier sexuality, there are exposed breasts everywhere. And isn't that a lovely thing?
The Battle Of The Pants Bulge
Oops, it seems that's one battle Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman's war hero father lost. I read on Sploid that the 81-year-old father of Senator Coleman was caught, mid-fuck, in a car with a 38-year-old woman, outside a pizzeria. Senator Coleman responded with the expected hung head (the one on top of his shoulders, that is):
"I love my father dearly. I do not condone his actions or behavior, and I am deeply disturbed by what I have learned. He clearly has some issues that need to be dealt with, and I will encourage him to seek the necessary help," read the senator's statement.
I'm still waiting for a senator to prove to be a human being. If that were my 81-year-old dad, I'd be bragging about it still. Here, Norm, I'll help you, with a little lesson from Sydell, one of the little old ladies who come for cheesecake on Saturday at the café where I write:
"Every day I'm still alive is a pleashuh!"
Live hard, get naked. And if you can get naked and hard at 81, well, keep doing what you're doing. We need all the good examples we can get.
It's A Good Thing If AOL Is Going Free
Because today, their service isn't worth a shit.
I went to e-mail the lawyer at Cingular about their illegally expiring gift cards. (Most handily, I found his name on Consumerist, complaining about one of their posts -- and figured out his e-mail address rather easily). I wrote the e-mail, then, oddly, I couldn't get on AOL.
First it said the login process wasn't valid. I tried another computer. Same. I tried Web mail. Same. My password wasn't valid. This is pretty weird, since I've been on AOL since the early 90s and my password isn't one of the easily hackable ones, as far as I know.
Well, I called AOL (through the "find hard-to-find numbers" site) and they said "due to unusually high call volume..." they couldn't take my call, and I should call back later. Click!
I just called back and the recording said there's a 30 minute wait time to talk to one of their "consultants." I suspect something is majorly fucked up with their system. Just my suspicion!
And P.S. Cingular's rep told me somebody would get back to me within 24 hours. I guess they model their concept of time on their concept of customer service, because it's been about 40 hours now, and no callie-wallie!
UPDATE: I just got on AOL -- and I've been on the phone for 15 minutes. Still no rep on the line. I called back on another phone -- wait time is supposed to be six minutes. Hmmm, we'll see.
FURTHER UPDATE: They had an "unplanned system upgrade" and the lady I talked to said they won't be able to get into anybody's account to help them for an estimated two hours. She says they aren't going to go free. My account is back up now.
Looking A Gift Horse In The Ass
So, I'm reading one of my favorite sites, Consumerist.com ("Shoppers Bite Back"), when I see a posting about Cingular Wireless, my cell provider, giving people debit cards instead of checks for rebates. Down below the post, somebody named Hasan comments:
In CA, at least, gift cards with cash value never expire.
Hmmm, I have a Cingular gift card -- which expired in 2005. I do a little digging, and it turns out, Hasan's right. Here's what ensued yesterday afternoon:
I'm on hold with Cingular now...I've been talking to a rep named Chris Slagh. She told me I'm her first call of the day mentioning this (that it's illegal for them to have expiring gift cards in California), but they do get calls about this.Oh goody...this means they have some policy in place to rectify things, right? I ask Chris to get right on it.
Chris tells me "I'm sorry, but I can't do that for you today."
"Oh," I ask. "Does that mean you can do that for me tomorrow?"
She says no...of course. (Silly customer, don't you know that's just go-blow-speak, intended to make you say "okey-dokey" and hang up the phone?)
Chris says she doesn't know anything about the California law against giftcard expiration dates. I suggest she simply google "against the law for gift cards to expire in California." I ask if they have access to Google. Apparently, they don't.
I tell her I wasn't going to go away. I asked to speak to somebody else. I also explain that it became against the law for gift cards to expire in California in 1997.
She puts me on hold.
She says her supervisor is busy. I say he can call me when he's done being busy. She says, get this, they're only able to take incoming calls. Well, isn't that convenient! Was I just supposed to play supervisor availability like lotto? What if I called the next time and her supervisor was busy?She keeps telling me the card had expired and there is nothing she could do about it. I explain again that it was AGAINST THE LAW IN CALIFORNIA for gift cards to expire, and because they broke the law, they needed to rectify this, and without me calling and hanging on the phone for a long period of time. She puts me on hold to go do something or find somebody. I suspect she thought it would be wise to find somebody to intervene.
Okay, now this "floor manager" comes on. His name is Tom Matthews. I must be lapsing into Swahili again, because after I explain the law to Tom, he says, "If there's an expiration date, it doesn't matter whether it's a gift card, a bank card or a debit card, it does expire."
I explain the law again. Tom has never heard of this law, and he "grew up in California." I thought that was kind of quaint. Hmm, I guess that makes me something of a transplanted savant! Here I am, a girl who suffered through childhood in unsunny, unsurf-y suburban Detroit, and look at how well-versed I am (well, thanks to Consumerist) in California gift card law!
I tell him I wanted to talk to a supervisor. He tells me the only way to resolve this was by mail. No e-mail, just mail. "It has to be in writing to be legal." I ask him what law says this. Tom just repeats that I have to mail in my complaint.
The address Tom gives me:
Cingular Corporate Headquarters PO Box 755 Atwater CA 95301
So, wait...Cingular broke the law, and they're jacking me out of $50 because of it, and *I* have to do all this work to rectify it? Nuh-uh.
I tell him I want to talk to his supervisor. He tells me he's the floor manager. Nobody else for me to talk to. Unfortunately for Tom, this does not make me go away like it would most people. I press on. Finally, he says he will have a supervisor call me back at home. "Within 24 hours."
Why is it that so often, the people in "customer service" have so little knowledge that would actually...serve the customer?
The California law is here. (P.S. Cingular's expiration date is on the back, not the front! And it's in miniscule type. I'd guess three-point.) Excerpt of California law follows:
Q.2. Can a gift certificate or gift card contain an expiration date?A. No. However, this general rule is subject to the following exceptions:
* A gift card that can be used with multiple sellers of goods or services that are not affiliated may contain an expiration date. If so, the expiration date must be printed on the card.
* A gift certificate or gift card that is sold to the purchaser as a gift for another person (the “recipient”) may state a date by which the recipient must redeem the certificate or card. Since this is an exception to the “no expiration date” rule, a seller that chooses to state a redemption date on a gift card or gift certificate must give the purchaser a full refund of the amount paid for the certificate or card if the recipient does not redeem it by the redemption date6.
* Certain gift certificates or gift cards sold after January 1, 1998 are not subject to any of the rules discussed under “Frequently Asked Questions.” To be exempt, these gift certificates or gift cards must contain an expiration date in at least 10-point type on the front and must be either:
o Distributed by the issuer to a consumer without charge under an awards, loyalty or promotional program7; or
o Sold below face value at a volume discount to employers or to nonprofit and charitable organizations for fundraising purposes, if the expiration date is 30 days or less after the date of sale8; or
o Issued for a food product, such as a grocery item9.
The passage above is applicable for gift cards (in California) from 2004 on. Here's more about gift certificates from 1997 on:
Is It Timeless? Most gift certificates cannot contain an expiration date, and are valid until redeemed or replaced. (The only exceptions are certificates issued prior to January 1, 1997; distributed under various awards programs; sold to employers or to nonprofit and charitable organization for fundraising purposes; and for food products.)
Further links to the law in California are here.
Well, well, Hasan...look what you started!
I'm just tired of companies taking advantage of people because they can. Surely, they have lawyers who know about this law. Do they just count on the public not knowing about it? That would be my guess.
I hope a lot of people will hit up Cingular to make good on their cards. Do post comments here if and when you do, and about the process. And if you know California Cingular customers (and those in any other states with similar laws) please pass them the word and/or this link.
Dirty Pictures In God's Attic
About those 72 virgins the Islamonutters supposedly get in heaven...you know how all Christians and Jews always sneer at that?
Well, how do all these Christian and Jews know the Islamonutters don't get 72 virgins? For all they know, all those terrorists are up there now, fucking like monkeys. Hmmm...or, maybe fucking monkeys. Come to think of it, they're never very species-specific about those virgins, now are they?
The point is, since nobody's ever been to heaven and brought back any candelabras or anything, and nobody has any evidence it exists -- how does anybody have any authority to say who and what is or isn't up there?
Weenie Buys Up All The Amy Alkon Domain Names
His name's Forrest MacGregor (photo at the link), and he's the uncle of the kid who thought he'd have success using vitamin paste for treatment for cancer. Unca Forrest didn't like the way meanie Amy wrote about this ("Stupidity Can Be Fatal") so he retaliated like so:
That's why I now own AmyAlkon.net, .biz, .info, .org, nd .us.
The above was from a comment on the original Abraham Cherrix entry. This is from an e-mail he sent me:
In a message dated 7/27/06 5:23:38 AM, macgregor@chestnuttech.com writes:And be sure to visit AmyAlkon.net once it's up and running.
I'm not surprised that he'd be so lacking integrity (and brains) that he'd try to steal my name and use it.
I sent him this in an e-mail:
The Emerging Law of Personality Rights145. The personality right, also known as the "right of publicity" in certain jurisdictions, has been defined as "the inherent right of every human being to control the commercial use of his or her identity." 93 According to the modern view, the legal right is said to be infringed by an unauthorized use of a person’s identity which is likely to damage the commercial value of the identity and which is not immunized by principles of free speech or free press. 94 The legal right reflects a view that human identity, in certain instances, constitutes an intellectual property right with measurable commercial value. One needs only to consider, for example, a certain young golfer who has emerged to dominate the professional golf tour in recent years to understand the potential value that can be assigned to one’s personal identity by the forces of supply and demand in the marketplace.
He might read the story about my stolen car. Do I really seem like a good person to fuck with? Hmmm, real genius there, Forrest. Forrest, so I'm a big meanie. Don't you have a life or anything? Don't you have anything better to do?
UPDATE: **Here's a very intelligent recap of the case by Respectful Insolence.
It Should Be Boring To Be Gay
It's a sign of the disgusting hold of irrational thought in the form of religion that it's still a big deal to be gay. How sad that so many gay people have to go through so much to hide their sexuality, or are endangered physically or socially when they let the most basic thing about themselves -- their sexuality -- be known. Here's a story about Lance Bass of the band 'N Sync being in hiding for years:
Lance Bass, the former 'N Sync heartthrob, reveals that he is gay, in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE."I knew that I was in this popular band and I had four other guys' careers in my hand, and I knew that if I ever acted on it or even said (that I was gay), it would overpower everything," says Bass, referring to bandmates Joey Fatone, Chris Kirkpatrick, JC Chasez and Justin Timberlake.
"I didn’t know: Could that be the end of ’N Sync? So I had that weight on me of like, ‘Wow, if I ever let anyone know, it's bad.' So I just never did," he says speaking about his sexual orientation for the first time with PEOPLE.
Now, after years of keeping his personal life private, the Mississippi-bred, Southern Baptist-reared Bass, 27, is publicly revealing what he first shared with his friends, then his shocked family.
"He took years to really think about how he was going to tell everyone," says his close buddy Fatone, 29, who was the first 'N Sync bandmate to find out Bass is gay. "I back him up 100 percent." Adds Bass’s longtime pal, actress Christina Applegate: "I've always accepted him as who he is. It's about his own serenity at this point."
Having pursued acting, producing and – most memorably – space flight after ’N Sync went on hiatus in 2002, Bass now is looking ahead to new beginnings. He is in a "very stable" relationship with model-actor-Amazing Race winner Reichen Lehmkuhl, 32, and is developing an Odd Couple-inspired sitcom pilot with Fatone in which his character will be gay.
Mostly, though, he’s just enjoying the relief that comes with the culmination of a long, at times emotionally fraught journey.
"The thing is, I’m not ashamed – that’s the one thing I want to say," he explains of his decision to come out. "I don't think it's wrong, I'm not devastated going through this. I'm more liberated and happy than I’ve been my whole life. I'm just happy."
If you're straight, think about what it would be like if most of the people in the world were gay and you were one of the few straight people: to have to have to have some uncomfortable conversation with your parents at 15, and come out as heterosexual. To worry about losing your job or being looked at funny or maybe even being beaten up for being "openly heterosexual." And all the rest.
The Bust Of All Possible Worlds
In my Advice Goddess column I just posted, a female reader asks, "Where will it all end?":
I agree with your view that women should maintain their looks and take care of themselves, but I take exception to the "do what is necessary to keep your man" mode of thinking. Men like large breasts, so we have women rushing out to surgically inflate themselves....How much money should women spend on keeping flawless skin, perfect teeth and thin thighs? Most women aren’t attracted to fat, balding men, but men are not under the same pressure to keep up appearances (especially after marriage). I am a “barely B” woman involved with a man who thinks women walking around with basketballs on their chests are sexy. Am I supposed to go under the knife? Shouldn't we all be better than this?
My answer:
In other words, does what separates the men from the baboons involve anything more than $10,000 in laser hair removal?You could say men who go for women with tube-top tankers are no better than the boy baboons chasing after the girl baboons with the biggest, reddest rumps. Maybe it’s up to women to be a civilizing force, to teach men what really matters. And maybe women will -- just as soon as they’re done posing as bank inspectors to dig up some date’s net worth, and sending over private detectives to see whether his “classic car collection” includes more than a Yugo and a Pinto up on blocks on his granny’s lawn.
Oops, it seems we’re all evolutionarily ugly in our own special way. Men evolved to go for reproductively hot bodies -- fertility indicators like youth, clear skin and dangerous curves. Women evolved to go for “providers” -- guys who’ll hang around after sex to feed and care for any little knuckle-draggers that result. Times have changed, sure, but our genes have yet to get the message. That’s why a study by Michael Wiederman of over 1,000 personals ads found that women are 11 times more likely to seek a partner with “resources.” And just a guess, but when your mother was telling you the ways of the world, she probably didn’t say, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a drunk, unemployed one!”
If beauty sells, what’s wrong with buying it? Well, awfulplasticsurgery.com is a pretty good argument against it, with all its pictures of bad boob jobs and “trout pouts” -- collagenized lips the size of car bumpers that make women look like they’ve been body snatched by giant dead fish. Also, for a lot of men, big fake knockers are more scary than sexy. But, if you’d truly be happier with a different nose, or twin Winnebagos where your breasts used to be, why not? The big lie is looks don’t matter. The truth is, love may be blind, but lust has very good eyesight.
Here you are, a girl whose breasts are, at best, a B-minus. Here’s your boyfriend, who’s into women walking around with basketballs on their chests. Just a thought, but if this is a priority, not just a preference, maybe he should be with…a woman walking around with basketballs on her chest? There are guys out there who go for more “athletic” bodies -- guys who’d be all over those bee stings of yours. You won’t need breast augmentation to be with them. You will, however, have to remove that big, ugly growth that’s dragging you down; you know, the boyfriend you suspect lives to hear the announcement, “In case of a water landing, the girlfriend of the man in seat 5D may be used as a flotation device.”
Anybody Can Get A Restraining Order!
John Cusack takes out a restraining order against a woman, and it sounds like he has very good reason:
The Serendipity star filed for a temporary restraining order Friday against a Los Angeles woman whom he claims has been showing "unusual interest" in him, according to court documents obtained Monday by E! Online.Per the complaint, Emily Leatherman, a 32-year-old transient with no known address, is accused of "stalking, throwing long letters of interest over [his] fence in bags with rocks and screwdrivers inside, making unannounced visits to offices of people [he works] with in an attempt to meet with [him] and listing [his] address as her own during a recent address."
"Mail addressed to her has been arriving at my residence without my permission," Cusack stated. "I have never met this person." While the 39-year-old actor (who turns 40 on Wednesday) wrote that Leatherman has not committed or threatened any violence against him, she has, he said, caused emotional distress to him and vowed to hurt herself if he did not agree to meet with her.
Cusack requested that she be forced to stay at least 500 feet away from his home, workplace and car.
What were the reasons she gave for taking out a restraining order in return against Cusack? And what numbskull of a judge gave it to her? (Check out this video of her and see if you think she looks balanced and reasonable.)
This reminds me of the time a judge allowed some nutcase to take a restraining order out against David Letterman. This practice is frequently used to demonize men in custody cases. Enough is enough. Let's have some probable cause, shall we?
Hmmm, I have an idea. Let's sic her on the Scientologists!
In-Vitro Murderization
I missed this piece by Michael Kinsley when it came out, but I've had the same thought -- if Bush believes the anti-science bullshit he's spouting, he'd be stumping to have all the fertility clinics closed and all the fertility doctors jailed for murder:
In short, if embryos are human beings with full human rights, fertility clinics are death camps -- with a side order of cold-blooded eugenics. No one who truly believes in the humanity of embryos could possibly think otherwise.And, by the way, when it comes to respecting the human dignity of microscopic embryos, nature -- or God -- is as cavalier as the most godless fertility clinic. The casual creation and destruction of embryos in normal human reproduction is one reason some people, including me, find it hard to make the necessary leap of faith to believe that an embryo and, say, Nelson Mandela are equal in the eyes of God.
Proponents of stem cell research like to emphasize that it doesn't cost the life of a single embryo. The embryos killed to extract their stem cells were doomed already. But this argument gives too much ground, and misses the point. If embryos are human beings, it's not okay to kill them for their stem cells just because you were going to kill them, or knowingly let them die, anyway. The better point -- the killer point, if you'll pardon the expression -- is that if embryos are human beings, the routine practices of fertility clinics are far worse -- both in numbers and in criminal intent -- than stem cell research. And yet, no one objects, or objects very loudly. President Bush actually praised the work of fertility clinics in his first speech announcing restrictions on stem cells.
Even strong believers in abortion rights (I'm one) ought to acknowledge and respect the moral sincerity of many right-to-lifers. I cannot share, or even fathom, their conviction that a microscopic dot -- as oblivious as a rock, more primitive than a worm -- has the same human rights as anyone reading this article. I don't have their problem with the question of when human life begins. (When did "human" life begin during evolution? Obviously, there is no magic point. But that doesn't prevent us from claiming humanity for ourselves and denying it to the embryo-like entities we evolved from.) Nevertheless, abortion opponents deserve respect for more than just their right to hold and express an opinion we disagree with. Excluding, of course, the small minority who believe that their righteousness puts them above the law, sincere right-to-lifers deserve respect as that rarity in modern American politics: a strong interest group defending the interest of someone other than themselves.
Or so I always thought -- until the arrival of stem cells. Moral sincerity is not impressive if it depends on willful ignorance and indifference to logic. Not every opponent of stem cell research deserves to have his or her debater's license taken away. There are a few, no doubt, who are as horrified by fertility clinics as they are by stem cell research, and a subset of this subset may even be doing something about it. But these people, if they exist, are not a political force strong enough to stop a juggernaut of medical progress that so many other people are desperate to encourage. The vast majority of people who oppose stem cell research either haven't thought it through, or have thought it through and don't care.
Is it all just politics? Is George Bush just glad the fundies got him off the drink and got him and the rest of the fundanutter-values-professing Repubicans reeelected? Are they all dumb or just terribly crafty?
Dumb And Hummer
I was meeting these very cool people (friends of an editor who runs my column) at Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica. I saw a fire engine, stopped, lights flashing, up ahead at Pico and Ocean, so I thought I'd be really clever and turn off onto the back streets. Problem was, some bunwad in one of those tarted up Greyhounds for assholes had the same idea. He backed up traffic behind me (and made me late) while he tried to bend the laws of physics. Finally, he just drove over the grass.
What It’s Like To Be An Israeli
You’re dead because you went to the wrong Starbucks. You were tired of the one closest to your house, so you went to the one closer to work instead, but that was the one some terrorist planted a bomb in. Or, maybe the terrorist didn’t plant one – maybe instead of worrying about whether somebody is about to shout into their cell phone, you were more worried about whether they were going to pull the ripcord on their body explosives...and then you and your latte blew up.
Now, let’s pretend California is Israel and Mexico is Lebanon. Osama Bin Laden has moved just over the border, and he’s paid citizens there to keep katyusha rockets in their living room, like the Hezbollah has done in Lebanon. They’ve moved into the first floors of many apartment buildings –- making sure to be mixed in with civilians. To fight back against Osama then means killing civilians. Not innocent civilians but culpable civilians –- culpable for storing bombs and putting their families and their neighbors’ at risk.
But, what about the government of the state where Hezbollah is allowed to store missiles in residential areas? Can you imagine if people in the hood were allowed to keep scuds in their backyards, and rocket launchers on their SUVs? Lebanon bears culpability for letting Hezbollah infest their society.
Here's an excerpt from a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg about their intentional placement of their offices in residential buildings:
The chief spokesman for Hezbollah is a narrow-shouldered, self-contained man of about forty named Hassan Ezzeddin, who dresses in the style of an Iranian diplomat: trim beard, dark jacket, white shirt, no tie. His office is on a low floor of an apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which are called the Dahiya. Hezbollah has five main offices there, and all are in apartment buildings, which helps to create a shield between the bureaucracy and Israeli fighter jets and bombers that periodically fly overhead. The shabby offices are sparsely furnished; apparently, the idea is to be able to dismantle them in half an hour or less, in case of an Israeli attack.
Sure, there’s a problem with the bombing Israel’s doing, in that it’s taking out innocents with the hostiles, and surely creating hatred and resentment. But, the difference is, every time I hear an Israeli talk about that, in TV, radio or print, they lament the loss of innocent lives. Kind of different from when all the Muslims cheered about 9/11, huh?
Don't think Israel isn't showing restraint. They surely have the capacity to flatten all of Lebanon. They don't. But, what would we do if we were facing the same situation from Mexico -- if Mexicans wanted not just land, but to run all Americans into the sea? How can there ever be peace with a people who want that?
Benjamin Netanyahu explains in The Wall Street Journal:
Since Israel's unilateral withdrawal in 2000 to an internationally recognized border, Hezbollah has established in Lebanon a terror state-within-a-state, and, working on behalf of Iran and Syria, it has sought to undermine the emergence of a free and democratic Lebanon. In crossing an international border, murdering and kidnapping Israeli soldiers and firing rockets at Israeli cities, Hezbollah has also committed blatant acts of war. Like any nation exercising its right of self-defense, Israel is responding not only to the specific incidents that occurred but is also working to eliminate the threat posed by this clear and present danger.In direct violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559--which specifically calls for the disarming of all militias in Lebanon--Hezbollah has used its de facto territorial control over southern Lebanon to amass a deadly arsenal of over 12,000 rockets. Some of these missiles are Iranian-made and bring over one-half of Israel's population within range of the terrorist proxies of a fanatic Iranian regime that denies the Holocaust and is planning a new one with its promise to "wipe Israel off the map."
Imagine what the U.S. would do if, on its northern border, a terror state-within-a-state pledged to its destruction was established from which flurries of missiles were fired at Chicago, its third-largest city. With that in mind, to suggest, as some have, that Israel is not acting with restraint is preposterous. Unlike Hezbollah, which is indiscriminately launching hundreds of missiles at Israeli cities and towns to kill as many civilians as possible, Israel is using only a fraction of its firepower and is in fact acting with great care to minimize harm to civilians. But because Hezbollah not only targets civilians but also uses them as human shields by hiding its missile launchers in population centers, Hezbollah has deliberately placed innocent Lebanese civilians in harm's way.
At stake in the current operation is not only Israel's security, Lebanon's democratic future, and stability in the region, but a central principle in the war on terror. Soon after Sept. 11, President Bush made clear that America would no longer make a distinction between the terrorists and the regimes that harbor them. This policy is essential because international terrorism cannot survive without the support of sovereign states.
In order for the global terror network to be dismantled, its support by sovereign states must end--whether that supports comes in the form of actively perpetrating terror attacks (as in the case of Iran and the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority), providing safe havens for terror groups (as in the case of Syria) or not acting against terror groups within their borders (as is the case in Lebanon). A world in which the international community does not hold states accountable for the terrorism that emanates from within their borders is a world in which the war on terror cannot be won.
That is why any cease-fire or diplomatic effort that does not have as its objective the disarming of Hezbollah will only strengthen the forces of terror. And that is also why the world should fully support Israel in disarming Hezbollah--for Israel's sake, for Lebanon's sake and for the sake of our common future.
Who Killed Pat Tillman?
Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich suggested to ESPN.com's Mike Fish that his parents only care because they don't believe in the Imaginary Friend -- and it seems, neither did Tillman. An excerpt from the excellent series by Fish is below. Kauzlarich is talking about Tillman's parents:
"...I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."In a transcript of his interview with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones during a November 2004 investigation, Kauzlarich said he'd learned Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother and fellow Army Ranger who was a part of the battle the night Pat Tillman died, objected to the presence of a chaplain and the saying of prayers during a repatriation ceremony in Germany before his brother's body was returned to the United States.
Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.
In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."
Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know."
Asked what might finally placate the family, Kauzlarich said, "You know what? I don't think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don't know. Maybe they want to see somebody's head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can't bring their son back."
Kauzlarich, now 40, was the Ranger regiment executive officer in Afghanistan, who played a role in writing the recommendation for Tillman's posthumous Silver Star. And finally, with his fingerprints already all over many of the hot-button issues, including the question of who ordered the platoon to be split as it dragged a disabled Humvee through the mountains, Kauzlarich conducted the first official Army investigation into Tillman's death.
That investigation is among the inquiries that didn't satisfy the Tillman family.
"Well, this guy makes disparaging remarks about the fact that we're not Christians, and the reason that we can't put Pat to rest is because we're not Christians," Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, said in an interview with ESPN.com. Mary Tillman casts the family as spiritual, though she said it does not believe in many of the fundamental aspects of organized religion.
"Oh, it has nothing to do with the fact that this whole thing is shady," she said sarcastically, "But it is because we are not Christians."
After a pause, her voice full with emotion, she added, "Pat may not have been what you call a Christian. He was about the best person I ever knew. I mean, he was just a good guy. He didn't lie. He was very honest. He was very generous. He was very humble. I mean, he had an ego, but it was a healthy ego. It is like, everything those [people] are, he wasn't."
Your life has meaning because you make it have meaning -- on earth -- which, it sure sounds like Tillman did. Since the only evidence we have points to all of us being worm food when we die, and since Tillman was rational instead of being into religious witchcraft, maybe that made him more cognizant of living to the fullest on earth. As Tillman's brother said in a later version of the series:
When the time came for Richard to speak from the podium on that sunny California day, May 3, 2004, in the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, he tried to set the record straight about his brother and the afterlife for anyone who might try to co-opt Pat Tillman's story."Pat isn't with God. He's f------ dead," he told the 2,000 or so people in attendance and the television audience watching on ESPN. "He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f------ dead."
The people who were close to Pat Tillman, both as a civilian and as a soldier, paint a picture of a complicated man who questioned authority to understand it, who challenged his friends to defend their beliefs and who sought as many points of view as possible to make sense of an issue. They describe a person with no tolerance for dishonesty or incompetence, who would have countenanced neither the manner in which he was killed nor the way his death was handled.
More than two years after Pat Tillman died, Richard — like the rest of the Tillman family and many of Pat's close friends — is still trying to keep at bay the people and institutions who might want to use his brother's name for their own interests. The family is still suspicious of the media, still angry at the government, still convinced the Army tried to glorify Pat as a war hero when it knew he'd been gunned down by his fellow soldiers.
And, they're still looking for answers to the questions that have kept the story about Pat Tillman's uncertain death alive through three Army investigations and now an ongoing review by the Department of Defense Inspector General's Office...
Part two of Mike Fish's Tillman series is here. Part three is here.
Reach Out And Milk Someone
You know that "Universal Service Fund" you're paying into on your phone bill? It's supposed to subsidize phone service to people in rural areas. Well, it turns out it's more of a Universal Corporate Handout Fund.
We're paying up to $13,345 per phone line per year, but a study shows it would be cheaper to simply give away free cell phone service to all those people. (On a side note, I wonder if they can get reception in all those rural areas.) But, free satellite phone service is another more cost-effective option the study suggests.
The people we're really subsidizing are the shareholders of the small rural telephone companies, who are really making out. The George Mason University study for "The Seniors Coalition" identified 20 companies in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming that are the worst for milking consumers:
The Hazlett study notes that, rather than providing phone-service to low-income consumers in need, the bulk of USF taxpayer dollars are now part of a $3.7 billon wealth-transfer subsidy known as the "High-Cost Fund" that goes from unwary U.S. taxpayers to small, uneconomical private rural telephone companies that often have only a few hundred customers and are so engorged with tax dollars that they can afford to pay out more in dividends to shareholders than they actually charge for phone service.... the incentives created by these subsidies encourage widespread inefficiency and block adoption of advanced technologies - such as wireless, satellite, and Internet-based services - that could provide superior voice and data links at a fraction of the cost of traditional fixed-line networks. Ironically, subsidy payments are rising even as fixed-line phone subscribership falls, and as the emergence of competitive wireless and broadband networks make traditional universal service concepts obsolete. Unless policies are reformed to reflect current market realities, tax increases will continue to undermine the very goals 'universal service' is said to advance."
"Grandma" Flora Green, national spokesperson, The Seniors Coalition said: "America's seniors and other taxpayers are getting a real wake-up call today: The Universal Service Fund is such a costly mess that it makes those bills we all paid for Pentagon hammers and toilet seats look like a downright bargain! American taxpayers need to insist on reining in the runaway Universal Service Fund, which should only help out those who really need it. The Fund should be capped and then reviewed from top to bottom to squeeze out all the billions of dollars of waste and fraud going on today. We think FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is correct in calling for a reverse-auction system to make sure that those Americans who really need USF help get it with the best available technology and at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers."
The Universal Service Fund tax has surged to $7 billion, up from less than $4 billion in 1998. To pay for the Universal Service Fund, the tax rate applied to long distance revenues has skyrocketed five-fold from 2.1 percent to its current level of 10.5 percent. The primary cause of USF increases stem from rising payments to rural phone carriers, labeled "High-Cost Support," where annual payments mushroomed from $1.7 billion in 1998 to $3.7 billion in 2005. These rising expenditures are, in turn, driven by increasingly expensive per-line payments to high cost rural phone carriers and by new payments to wireless phone carriers now qualifying as recipients of such funds.
A Story About Some Store
They can't even get the inane stuff right in the LA Times features section.
In yesterday's LA Times Calendar section, Booth Moore, most mystifyingly the Times' fashion correspondent, writes a 767 word story about a woman who owns a famous store in Los Angeles -- and never mentions the name of the store:
When it comes to fashion in Los Angeles, all roads lead to Diane Merrick.She opened her boutique on Melrose Avenue in 1972, when the street was still sleepy, with bungalows nestled among the emerging decorator shops. Back then, Merrick sold antiques — jewelry and garage sale finds — and would gladly drive her Ford Courier pickup out to Malibu to deliver items to Barbra Streisand and other clients.
Slowly, clothing came into the mix — first T-shirts, then jeans with a big "?" on the back pocket. (These prototypes, which the Marciano brothers sold door to door, were the foundation of the Guess? empire.) She remembers "Maxi" — Max Azria — peddling $18 rayon print dresses by the fistful out of his downtown studio (the beginnings of the multimillion-dollar BCBG business). And then there was James Perse selling $8 Fleur de Lis T-shirts near his father's Maxfield store (now he has his own clothing line and boutiques).
Retailer to the stars Tracey Ross worked for Merrick for four years before opening her Sunset Boulevard boutique. So did Claire Stansfield, co-founder of the C&C California T-shirt label, which was sold to Liz Claiborne last year for $28 million. Gela Nash-Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy, the duo behind Juicy Couture, met when they were both working at the shop part time. L.A. designer Jenni Kayne even worked there for a summer.
But a few weeks ago, after 34 years, Merrick learned that the building her store occupied on Melrose was being torn down. She thought it might be time to retire. "But I realized I wasn't ready," she said. "And here I am."
She's opened a new shop in what she has dubbed the "Beverly Heights shopping district," a place as inviting as your grandmother's house, with an overstuffed couch, a big-screen TV tuned to E! and cookies and lemonade on offer.
"I've had customers for four generations," said Merrick, 69, dressed in black pants, a T-shirt in her favorite shocking pink, and diamond and platinum chain necklaces, her hand resting on the coiffed head of her Maltipoo dog, Doll Face. "It's been fun watching the evolution of all these people, of their stories," she said. "And it's amazing how many little kids have had their own MasterCards and their own cars."
Charming, isn't it? Don't let any critical thoughts escape into that story, Booth! Booth goes on and on, but still no store name:
The store, on Beverly Boulevard near Martel Avenue, is 2 1/2 times the size of the original. Bright and airy, it has hardwood floors, custom moldings, chandeliers and lots of alcoves for jeans, T-shirts, gauzy beach dresses, handbags and sandals from Ella Moss, James Perse, Splendid, Juicy Couture, Tarte, Sweetees, Botkier, Kooba, Seychelles, J Brand, True Religion, Paige and more. There are also mirrored glass cases for her beloved jewels, and shelves full of her luscious private-label cashmere ponchos and wraps ($198 to $275) in a rainbow of colors.
WHAT'S THE STORE CALLED, BOOTH?!
I read the story in a hard copy of yesterday's paper at a no-Internet cafe, and I was mystified. I looked it up when I got online.
It turns out the woman's name -- Diana Merrick -- is the name of the store; specifically, Diana Merrick Clothing Salon. Booth might have written "whose eponymous store." Then again, I recognize that many readers don't have the capacity for words beyond two syllables, so maybe simply throwing in a mention of the name of the place would have been a wise idea?
Hmmm...maybe they won't run my column because I'm just too meticulous for them?
FYI to Booth, perhaps you hadn't noticed, but LA is an extremely transient city, meaning not everybody has been here 25 years and knows all the stores.
Speaking of The LA Times, Cathy Seipp writes in an "Outside The Tent" piece in today's Times -- one of the pieces criticizing the paper -- of how they marginalize writers on the internets. Perhaps it's just me, but if they're going to marginalize anyone, it seems it should be a few of their own writers. Here's an excerpt from Cathy's piece:
According to a front-page California section story, the governor, signaled his "support for long-stalled legislation banning drivers' use of hand-held cellphones" — but where, exactly, he signaled that support was kept vague. Did Schwarzenegger tell this to a Times reporter during a one-on-one interview? Did someone from the paper attend a news conference?Nothing of the sort. The entire piece was based on what The Times described as "an online interview with a reporter broadcast over the Internet." And that, dear readers, is all the information your daily paper thinks you need to know.
The Times correctly considered Schwarzenegger's position on cellphones important enough that the follow-up story the next day made the front page. And still I wondered: What reporter? Broadcast where, exactly, over the Internet?
If these stories had been based on a Schwarzenegger interview in a traditional newspaper — whether the Washington Post or a small-town weekly — The Times almost certainly would have credited the source, and rightly so.
A little Googling revealed that Schwarzenegger took questions from the public directly during a webcam chat moderated by Kate Folmar of the San Jose Mercury News.
And it was a few years back, but the best was when the late David Shaw, who bragged about the paper's fact-checking, referred to David Poland as "writing on the Internet." Cathy writes:
"Writing on the Internet"? Where? In a chat room or message board or something? From Shaw's dismissive tone, that's what you might have thought.Actually, Poland — who now makes a living covering Hollywood through paid advertising on his Movie City News website — was working at the time for TNT's (now-defunct) Roughcut.com, then a popular source for Hollywood news.
That The Times saw no need to identify this online publication was more than a lapse of professional courtesy; "writing on the Internet" is mainstream media code for "unreliable." Readers might have appreciated the chance to check out Poland's column for themselves, and a newspaper that withholds such basic information isn't serving the public.
Beyond that, how are newspapers going to compete with online news if they can't even acknowledge that it exists?
The truth is, papers say they want younger readers, but few are willing or quick to get off their asses and get them. Ask yourselves why my column, which is extraordinarily popular in the OC Register and many other dailies and alt weeklies, doesn't run in my local paper, the Los Angeles Times. Ask yourself why you read so few other local writers in the paper, or, rather, good local writers, except in the Op-Ed section, which they've reformed. (Ever read any of those mostly dreadful and unfunny Thursday Calendar pieces on dating?) If you'd like to ask them why they do all the mystifying things they do in the features sections of the Los Angeles Times, John Montorio is the features editor.
P.S. On a positive note, Carina Chocano, their new film and TV critic, is very good. So is Tim Rutten. There are others there who are good or not bad, too. In other words, I don't hate the LA Times, I just hate bad or mediocre writing, and the way their features section is mostly just a phone-book sized collection of reviews, probably so they don't have to cover much that's newsworthy in culture -- and likely get caught with their collective pants down.
All The President's Embryos
What will it take for the lazy voting public to learn? We have the numbnuts Democrats in the wings and the rapture-obsessed Republicans in office because we don't demand any better. How many of you lazily voted for George Bush, the poster boy of anti-science, pre-enlightenment thinking? Better hope you don't come down with M.S. Frank Rich lays out the presidential priorities in The New York Time$:
HOW time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.
Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he’s consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action — on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president’s base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq’s marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.
The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush’s Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran’s ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America’s own religious wars. The president’s politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right’s former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can’t beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we’re at least starting to rout them here.
That the administration’s stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party’s far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo’s condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program’s canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he’s read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush’s side.
The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell “compromise” could make “more than 60” cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board’s audit committee.
This time around, with the administration’s credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn’t fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren’t required because there was “far more promise from adult stem cells,” The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn’t produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells “cruelly deceive patients.”
By the way, if Mr. Bush thinks federally funded stem cell research is murder, don't you think the same goes for unfederally funded stem cell research? As the old joke about hookers goes, "We've already established what you are; we're just haggling over the price."
All The News That's Unfit To Report
Every newspaper out there prints a horoscope. Why? Because people are dumb enough to believe in them. Here's an excerpt from a piece from Skeptically Thinking:
Astrology is as old as human history and is based on the mistaken belief that someone or something in the universe is concerned about our lives. It has been consistently debunked and shown to have no scientific validity. (Dean, 2001) Still, 41 percent of those surveyed in 2001 by the National Science Foundation believe that astrology is at least somewhat scientific. I believe that the presence of horoscopes in newspapers contributes to the widespread belief in astrology among Americans. At the very least, it gives credibility to something that has no credibility.Why do people believe in horoscopes despite the lack of scientific evidence? The answer is the vagueness of the typical horoscope . Many horoscopes hedge their bets with the words like "could" and "may". It is hard to invalidate a horoscope when it never predicts anything with a sufficient degree of certainty.
Other horoscopes predict improved finances or new love without providing any specifics on how these things will take place. Improved finances could include anything from winning the lottery to finding a dollar on the street. New love could be a new girlfriend/boyfriend or a recently bought pet. Again, it is hard to invalidate a horoscope that it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.
Horoscopes typically speak in generalities. They provide us with a broad outline and let us fill in the blanks. We do most of work of applying vague statements to the specific events in our lives and the astrologer takes the credit for knowing things about us that only we could know.
...Typical horoscopes includes tidbits of wisdom such as:
Communication is the key.
Meditate and reflect before acting.
Don't succumb to moods, but enjoy the evening with an old friend.Good advice, yes. Is the advice so precisely applicable to my life that it could only come from a paranormal source, not even close. These profundities would be good advice to anyone no matter what his or her astrological sign is.
Granted, advice going out to broad categories of people grouped together based on their birth date cannot be very specific. I can't expect a horoscope for Capricorn (which is my astrological sign) to say "Brenda, this is my individualized advice for you... John, this is my individualized advice for you…" . However, I would argue that this is precisely what the problem is. Do astrologers believe that the lives of every Capricorn are so similar that all of them need the same advice from their horoscopes? Even if every Capricorn has the same personality type, it is unlikely that they have the same life circumstances. A Capricorn with a happy marriage and good job is going to need different advice than another Capricorn living in poverty and married to an abusive spouse.
I have asked Jeraldine Saunders who composes the horoscopes that appear in the Florida Times Union as well as other newspapers to answer these criticisms and explain the process she uses to create these horoscopes. So far, she has not responded favorably to this request. This should not be a surprise to any skeptic since pseudoscience often seeks only the forums friendly to its claims.
And oops! Practitioners of the primitive discipline of astrology forgot to include Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, planets not visible to the naked eye, imagine that.
Astronomers discovered these planets partially through the use of telescopes, but also through the predictive power of mathematics. Astronomers noticed that the known planets did not move quite right and realized that the changes were likely the result of other, unknown planets exerting their own gravitational forces. The observations made by astronomers led to predictions which could be tested; if astrologers noticed anything, they were led to neither predictions nor tests.Curiously, many astrologers refused to even include Uranus in their charts for a while after it was discovered.
Of course, these planets have since been incorporated into astrological charts, but their notable absence for several thousand years raises serious doubts as to the efficacy of a system which makes such grandiose claims for itself. If these planets exerted any influence before, then someone should have noticed it - their failure suggests that they didn't know what they were doing. If these planets did not exert any influence to notice, then they must not be exerting any now, and their current inclusion in astrology means that contemporary astrologers also don't know what they are doing.
Here's an excerpt from an even more comprehensive piece debunking astrology, from See Sharp Press:
Fifth, many astrologers ignore precession. The Earth’s ro-tational axis is not stable, and the Earth wobbles like a top—but much more slowly. So slowly, in fact, that it takes approximately 26,000 years for the Earth’s axis to complete one rotation around the 47-degree-diameter circle it describes. This slow wobbling is called precession. It means, among other things, that the stars we now see in summer will be seen in winter (and vice versa) 13,000 years from now. It also means that the sun has receded almost a full sign along the zodiac since the Tetrabiblos was written nearly two millennia ago. So, the calculations of astrologers who rely on that hoary source are now off almost a full sign.Sixth, the most popular type of astrology is natal astrology, in which astrological forces supposedly leap into action at the moment of an individual’s birth, imprinting her or him with certain characteristics. But the choice of the time of birth as the moment of supposed astrological imprinting makes no sense at all. Astrologers choose the time of birth purely because it’s convenient. They might object that a mother’s body shields her baby from astrological "radiation" until birth, but that argument ignores the fact that almost all babies are born indoors, and it would be illogical to think that this "radiation" could penetrate wood, concrete and steel, but not a few centimeters of human flesh.
Some astrologers, especially the "humanistic" variety, attempt to discount criticisms such as these by claiming that the planets and stars do not produce astrological effects, but, rather, that the positions of astronomical bodies only serve as "indications" of astrological forces. This is a transparent attempt to evade questioning of astrology’s supposed causal mechanism by retreating into a fog of ever-vaguer claims. By taking such a position, astrologers are saying in effect that for unknown reasons the positions of some of the stars and planets are indications of the undetectable effects of unknown types of undetectable forces emanating from unknown, undetectable sources. Such a proposition is even more ludicrous than the traditional astrological view that the stars and planets—never mind how—influence our daily lives.
Finally, there is absolutely no empirical evidence, absolutely none, that astrology has any value whatsoever as a means of prediction. What scientific testing has been done indicates that there are no astrological "effects." For instance, former Michigan State University psychologist Bernie Silberman asked astrologers to list compatible and incompatible signs. Silberman then inspected the records of 478 couples who divorced and 2978 who married in 1967 and 1968 in Michigan. He found no correspondence beyond that of random chance between the astrological signs predicted to be compatible or incompatible by astrologers and the signs of those getting married or divorced. French statistician Michel Gauquelin has conducted far more detailed tests which also have discovered no astrological effects. (Gauquelin’s early, highly publicized report of a "Mars effect" on professional athletes was the result of an error in his calculations, and similar studies conducted by others showed no such effect.) In one test he examined the signs (moon, zodiacal, planetary, ascendant, and mid-heaven) for 15,560 professionals from five European nations in 10 different occupations. He found no evidence of any astrological effects. His calculations showed that the correlation between astrological signs and occupations to be that of random chance.
What's your sign? Whenever anyone asks me that, I first tell them I don't have one. If they press me, I tell them it's "Street Cleaning Wednesday, 10am-Noon."
How To Create A Gun Nut
After a fellow grocery store employee who's already slashed eight co-workers chases you with a knife "like something in a serial killer movie," and you're saved by a guy down the strip mall with a 9mm, suddenly, I think you become one of the Second Amendment's biggest fans.
The Dumbshit-In-Chief
Jonathan Chait reminds us that our country's being run on "horse sense," and the effects have been devastating:
...It is now increasingly clear that Bush's status as non-rocket scientist is a serious problem. The problem is not his habit — savored by late-night comedians — of stumbling over multisyllabic words. It is his shocking lack of intellectual curiosity.Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, paints a harrowing picture of Bush's intellectual limits. Bush, writes Suskind, "is not much of a reader." He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he's saying. In August 2001, the CIA was in a panic about an upcoming terrorist attack and drafted a report with the title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." When a CIA staffer summed up the memo's contents in a face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president found the briefer insufficiently confident and dismissed him by saying, "All right, you've covered your ass, now," according to Suskind. That turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment.
Bush loyalists like to dismiss Suskind's reporting, but it jibes with the picture that has emerged from other sources. L. Paul Bremer III's account of his tenure as head of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority depicts Bush as uninterested in the central questions of rebuilding and occupying the country.
Video of a presidential meeting that came to light this year showed Bush being briefed on the incipient Hurricane Katrina. His subordinates come off as deeply concerned about a potential catastrophe, but Bush appears blase, declining to ask a single question. And of course there was the famous 2001 incident in which Russian President Vladimir Putin conveyed to Bush a story of being given a cross by his mother. Bush invested deep significance in the story. "I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy," he told reporters. "I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Bush's supporters have insisted for the last six years that liberal derision of the president's intelligence amounts to nothing more than cultural snobbery. We don't like his pickup truck and his accent, the accusation goes, so we hide our blue-state prejudices behind a mask of intellectual condescension.
But the more we learn about how Bush operates, the more we can see we were right from the beginning. It matters that the president values his gut reaction and disdains book learnin'. It's not just a question of cultural style. The president's narrow intellectual horizons have real consequences, sometimes cataclysmic ones.
It's true that presidents can succeed without being intellectuals themselves. The trouble is that Bush isn't just a nonintellectual, he viscerally disdains intellectuals. "What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous," he told a Texas Monthly reporter in 1994.
When I went to college at Michigan, I occasionally played pickup basketball with varsity football players. They obviously felt athletically superior to me. I didn't resent them for it — because they were.
Gambling That The 80s Will Eventually Be In Again
Drugstore Photo Cowboy
Go camping with your 3- and 8-year-old kid. Fail to show proper Puritan fear of nudity, and document lack of said fear with disposable camera. Find yourself and your family relocated to hell.
Amazing (amazingly horrifying, that is) story of a family turned in by an Eckerd drugstore photo developer thanks to a few bare-ass, non-sensual photos of the kids. Jodi Jenkins tells the tale on $alon:
As usual during the trip, we took several photos. Because I forgot my digital camera, I bought a disposable camera at a gas station on the way to the campground. I took pictures of the kids using sticks to beat on old bottles and cans and logs as musical instruments. I took a few of my youngest daughter, Eliza, then age 3, skinny dipping in the lake, and my son, Noah, then age 8, swimming in the lake in his underwear, and another of Noah naked, hamming it up while using a long stick to hold his underwear over the fire to dry. Finally, I took a photo of everyone, as was our camping tradition, peeing on the ashes of the fire to put it out for the last time. We also let the kids take photos of their own.When we returned on Sunday, I forgot the throwaway camera and Rusty found it in his car. He gave it to his wife, who I'll call Janet, to get developed, and she dropped it off the next day with two other rolls of film at a local Eckerd drug store. On Tuesday, when she returned to pick up the film, she was approached by two officers from the Savannah Police Department. They told her they had been called by Eckerd due to "questionable photos."
One officer told Janet "there were pictures of little kids running around with no clothes on, pictures of minors drinking alcohol," she recounted for me in an email. "I asked to see the pictures and was told I couldn't. I explained there must be a mistake. I was kind of laughing, you know, 'Come on guys. There must be an explanation. This is crazy. Let me see the pictures.' The officer told me that he personally did not find [the photos] offensive and that he had camped himself as a kid and knows what goes on." But the officer also told Janet that "because Eckerd's had called them and that because there were pictures of children naked, genitalia and alcohol, they would have to investigate."
Janet asked the photo lab clerk what was on the photos and the clerk "replied very seriously that they were bad, that there was one that looked like a child's head had been cut off, one with children drinking beer and pictures of naked kids." As she drove to her house, Janet said, "I was in shock and felt sick to the pit of my stomach and was trying to process all of it." She called my wife, who was driving home, and explained what had happened. Sensing how bad this might become, my wife pulled her car to the side of the road and fought the urge to throw up.
Neither my wife nor I, Rusty nor Janet has a criminal record of any sort. Yet over the next several weeks, the Savannah Police Department and the Department of Family and Child Services (DFCS) investigated us for "child pornography" and then "sexual exploitation of a minor." We suffered the embarrassment of having DFCS interview our family, friends, employers and our children's teachers, asking them whether we were suitable parents and what kind of relationship we had with our kids.
I think about the Christmas and New Year's I spent in Rome in the late 90s, with my friends Thomas and Roberta. Thomas is German, Roberta's Italian, and we went to her parents' house every night for dinner -- as did much of her extended family. I was amazed by how, when some relative came in with a baby, they immediately passed the baby around, with everybody cootchie-cooing it. Nobody was at all worried that Grandpa was a funny uncle like they are here. For more on the dumb things people are terrified of vis a vis the stuff they should be afraid of, read Barry Glassner's book, The Culture Of Fear.
Maybe a less fearful and less precious approach to child-rearing and child socialization is why kids in Latin countries -- France, Italy, Spain, South American countries -- don't seem so terrified and upset by non-family members as American children are.
"Re: Abraham Cherrix and your coverage of it - and 2 reasons why your an idiot..."
The movies have been a disappointment lately, except for the entertaining new Amy Sedaris pic, Strangers With Candy, which was a silly but hiliarous trip in time to high school.
Luckily, I always have my e-mail to amuse me. For example, this e-mail from Tuesday (see subject line above) about the Abraham Cherrix case. The first line is from my nimrod pen-pal:
NIMROD PEN PAL: 1. Smoking cigarettes which is PROVEN to cause cancer and to kill you, is legal and acceptable and government sanctioned...ME: Not for minors.
NIMROD PEN PAL: 2. 13 year old girls, without parental knowledge or consent, can get a goddamn abortion...
ME: Abortion is proven to work. You can't say the same for Hoxsey.
No responsible clinician who looks at evidence rather than wishful thinking-based treatments would ever prescribe Hoxsey. I love that the "doctor" referred to on the TV station link (posted in my comments section), who said Hoxsey was valid, was actually a doctor of...hypnotherapy!
NIMROD PEN PAL: P.S. Chemotherapy is 2.4% effective, as determined by the industry itself... sounds like a winner to you, huh?
ME: wouldn't trust stats coming from a person with so little grasp of rational thought or evidence-based medicine, first of all. Second, I neither have the time nor the interest to get the correct stats at this moment. Third, "cancer" is actually a name applied to many forms of overgrowth of cells, all of which have different survival rates. Fourth, many cancers are found when they're past the point where they can be eradicated by chemo. I have a number of friends who are living because chemo eradicated their cancers. This isn't supposition on my part - the x-rays showed the shrinkage after chemo.
PS "Your an idiot" is correctly written like so: "You're an idiot."
In the future, please refrain from e-mailing me and post your contentions on my blog, as I don't have time to respond personally to every letter, and there are plenty of bright, rational regular commenters there who will make quick work of your lightweight thinking.
She (I think it's a she, anyway) kept writing to me, and claimed in her next e-mail that Otto Warburg's work was valid, so I simply sent her this article from Quackwatch by Dr. Saul Green, a retired Sloan-Kettering cancer researcher, and deleted the rest of her e-mails without reading them, which always gives me this squishy little rush when the person's an utter nitwit.
Psychic Detectives
If you believe in them, I can help you locate a valuable lost object: your head, which you'll find if you bend over in front of a mirror and look up your ass. Benjamin Radford points out in the Skeptical Inquirer:
Psychic detectives have a long and glaring track record of utter failure in criminal cases; from Elizabeth Smart to Laci Peterson to Chandra Levy, Jimmy Hoffa, and countless others, psychic information has been worthless in leading police to missing persons....Following the success of Court TV’s series Psychic Detectives, the network launched a new “reality TV” program titled Haunting Evidence. California “psychic profiler” Carla Baron and two other investigators spend 24 hours revisiting real-life cold case murders in the expectation that their powers will succeed where police have failed.
Oddly, the team doesn’t tackle obvious missing persons cases known to many Americans, such as the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, or Natalee Holloway’s 2005 disappearance. Perhaps those cases are too high-profile, and might cause the public to wonder why America’s top psychic detectives hadn’t solved those long ago.
In a recent episode, the group went to Athens, Georgia, to look into the unsolved 2001 murder of college student Tara Baker.
The investigators visited the Baker family, camera crew in tow, and asked them to relive their daughter’s life and death. The psychics then launched into very graphic, detailed descriptions of how they imagine Baker was murdered (based entirely on “feelings,” guesses, and conjecture). They later headed to Baker’s grave, though it’s unclear why, other than for dramatic effect. Ghost hunters usually claim that people’s ghosts remain not at the spot they were buried, but where they died (hence haunted houses, not haunted cemeteries). Apparently the group was unaware of this, but in the end it didn’t matter, since no information came of it.
Ghost informant
One psychic stated confidently that the police already have the DNA evidence they need to find Baker’s murderer (which makes one wonder why the group was needed in the first place). The investigators also claimed that Baker knew her killer well, and that they had communicated with Baker’s ghost. If Baker knew her killer well, she would presumably know his name, address, and telephone number—exactly the sort of information that would be useful to police.
If Baker’s ghost confirmed to the psychics that she knew her killer, why would it refuse to just tell them who it was? Predictably, both psychics’ powers dimmed on that subject, and instead they provided only the usual ambiguous information that may (or may not) turn out to be true if and when the killer is found.
The program concluded with the team giving their information to police and suggesting that they had helped solve the crime, when nothing of the sort happened. The murderer has not been caught and the crime remains unsolved.
Shocking, simply shocking.
But, on a related note, who here reads their horoscope? Hmmm, you don't believe in that crap, do you? Maybe, if you have been believing in it, now's a great time to stop.
Fuck The Constitution...
They're running the country according to the "Holy Scriptures," and they don't even try to hide it. Check out this incredible bit from a Washington Post piece on gay marriage by Dana Milbank:
The Senate last month rejected -- emphatically -- a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to ban same-sex marriage, so there was zero chance the amendment could be approved this year. But members of the House were answering to a Higher Authority."It's part of God's plan for the future of mankind," explained Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.).
Rep. Bob Beauprez (R- Colo.) also found "the very hand of God" at work. "We best not be messing with His plan."
Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) agreed that "it wasn't our idea, it was God's."
"I think God has spoken very clearly on this issue," said Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), a mustachioed gynecologist who served as one of the floor leaders yesterday. When somebody quarreled with this notion, Gingrey replied: "I refer the gentleman to the Holy Scriptures."
A pity the gentleman's constituents don't refer the gentleman to a job that would better suit his unique intellectual ability -- such as sweeping the steps of the local church.
P.S. I'm still retching over the notion of the "mustachioed gynecologist." Would you let this man look up your cooter? (Hmm, maybe that's how he ended up in government to begin with...where incompetence and lack of critical thinking can take a man all the way to the top!)
For those who like their Holy Scriptures hilarious, check out The X-Rated Bible by Ben Akerley.
In other religious nitwittery, George Bush, discovered that "V" is not just for that big Victory we're seeing in Iraq, but also for Veto. Here it is, short and sweet from the Ayn Rand Institute:
Bush Vetoes Medical Progress
IRVINE, CA--"President Bush's veto of a bill to remove restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is immoral," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
"It is revealing that Bush has used his first veto to oppose potentially life-saving research in the name of the dogma that microscopic embryos are sacred. Clearly, Bush and other 'compassionate conservatives' are not concerned with the well-being of humans, but with sacrificing them to clumps of cells in the name of religion. Such opposition is rooted in the perverse worship of human suffering.
"Anyone who truly cares about human life must condemn this religious assault on medical progress."
Okay, what's your guess? Will there be a backlash against all this idiocy...or will America continue receding into religiousness?
Electrocute Your Pet!
It's the Stay! Mat. For those of you who aren't stern disciplinarians/frilly fascists like me, or who just can't be bothered to train a dog to behave with bribes, stern words, and repetition, there's an alternative to "crating" -- the electro-shock doggie mattress!...with four increasingly painful levels of zap.
Glenn Derene writes on the Popular Mechanics blog:
The company says that two weeks of training are required to teach your dog the rules of the Stay! Mat. (Those rules, of course, are “don’t move” and “life is sometimes cruel and painful.”) Pet owners are advised to pay close attention to their dog’s reactions during training to find the static correction level best suited for your dog. “If your dog looks puzzled or confused,” owners are advised, “these are signs that your dog is feeling the correction and that everything is working properly.” Likewise, “if your dog whimpers, appears anxious and tries to run away,” owners are reminded that the system is working just fine. If, on the other hand, your dog falls to his mat and whines in despair at the Hobbesian cruelty of his existence, well, then, apparently the mat is still working
I'm all for doggie discipline lessons. I think you do your pet a favor by teaching it to behave (I can take my dog anywhere, because she'll never act out -- in fact, she'll stay hidden so nobody knows she's there if I just whisper "lie down, no noise!"). Still, I think having the ability to zap your pet for your convenience should disqualify you having a pet at all.
via ShinyShiny
Home Is Where The Tart Is
I just posted another Advice Goddess column. A woman's "not as svelte as (she) used to be," but her husband doesn't mind. They have "date night" every Saturday night, after the kiddies are in bed, and he's bought her "many provocative outfits" she's never worn (miniskirts, leather pants, a tartan schoolgirl skirt, thigh-high stiletto boots, etc). She wants to make him see "flabby thighs in miniskirts and a tiny cropped top plus a tummy bulge are not sexy," but he just tells her she's hot. Here's my reply:
He’s thinking “Woo-hoo!” You’re thinking “Mooo, mooo!” Even if you are a bit of a heifer, is it really in your best interest to correct him?Like a lot of married people, when you pledged “’til death do us part,” you probably didn’t give much thought to how, exactly, you’d make that happen. It starts out promisingly. On the first date, everybody dresses like they want somebody to want to have sex with them. And it often works. Then they land the person, and they dress like they want somebody to want them to fix their toilet. And it often works.
It doesn’t help that women waste weeks, months, or years of their lives staring into the mirror and bemoaning their ugly elbows or freakishly-enlarged pores. If your husband is even aware that you have pores, I’ll give you $5. While there are “leg men,” “butt men,” and “boob men,” most men don’t disassemble the women they care about into their individual figure flaws. Most men don’t want stick figures, either. In studies by psychologist Paul Rozin and others, men consistently preferred women with a bit of meat on them -- just not so much that they need to be hoisted out of bed by three orderlies with a Hoyer lift.
If you want your husband to be there through thick and thin (or thick and thicker, as the case may be), you’d better work on seeing yourself through his eyes. Chances are, when he’s begging you to put on that Catholic schoolgirl uniform, what’s on his mind isn’t how little time you’ve spent in Pilates. What should be on your mind is slipping into a sexy little French thing called “bien dans sa peau” -- being comfortable in your skin, much like all the hot black and Latina secretaries I used to see when I lived in downtown New York City. A lot of them were fat, but they wore bright, tight, sexy clothes, and strutted around like they were fat and proud.
Of course, with all the bulges and folds you purportedly have in your skin, getting truly comfortable in it might take some doing. Fake it until you make it. Pick some hussy from the movies and play her on date night…and beyond. No, you don’t have to dress like you’ll be the featured stripper at the PTA meeting, but would it kill you to throw on a low-cut top, a skirt, and cute shoes before the hubster comes home? The guy’s been patient with sexual vanilla for quite some time, probably because he loves you. He does have his faults. Like, maybe he’s blind. Maybe he’s dangerously nearsighted. And maybe you should count and recount your lucky stars. Whatever you’ve got, he happens to want. Can’t you run with that? I mean, as fast as you can go while being chased around the bed in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform and thigh-high stiletto boots.
The whole thing is here. Oh yeah, and best of all, as expected, I got an e-mail criticizing me for calling the black and Latina secretaries "black" and "Latina":
Dear Ms. Alkon,Your column is one of the highlights of my weekend. That said, I was totally shocked to read this in your response to "Home is Where the Tart Is" (July12-18): "... -- or being comfortable in your skin, much like all the hot black and Latina secretaries I used to see when I lived in downtown New York City."
Come on, now. Why stoop to objectifying and then labeling a group of people by race? Are you not perpetuating a stereotype?
You might stop to consider all of the current scientific theories that are questioning the notion of race classifications like "black" in the first place. You might stop to think that some "Latina" women might prefer to be called American.
You might also consider that your writer who approached you with the problem of not feeling comfortable in her own skin might, in fact, identify herself as "non-white".
Even if you meant to be complementary, your identification of body confidence with a particular race or culture is still insulting in that it plays into classic stereotypes our society has used in an attempt to place limits on others' experiences.
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts regarding this e-mail since I am a writer, and an adjunct professor of English. I hope you will consider my comments relevant and that you will accept my criticism in the spirit of inquiry.
My reply:
Why not identify them by race? They WERE black and Latina. I'm not racist, just observant. The notion that we have to be prissy about identifying people as black or Latina is not one I share.If an individual wishes to be called a black American or a Spaghetti American or a Petunia American, I'll oblige them. As far as groups go, I identify them in a way that isn't PC, but...understandable without a lot of hemming and hawing. I'm white, but my family is Jewish, but I'm an atheist (post-Jewish). People sometimes refer to me as Jewish because it's my cultural ancestry. Not a really big deal.
I find that people who are very focused on renaming race at every turn are often very focused on being victimized as well rather than actually building things. Black and Latina women DO tend to be more comfortable with their bodies, and I have data somewhere around here about how black men are more accepting of fuller figured women. Because it isn't PC to say so doesn't mean I won't say it.
Thanks for writing, but I disagree with you. Best, -Amy
Come On, You Don't Really Believe In Hell, Now Do You?
Do you really believe people go to some fiery place nobody's ever seen, that there's zero evidence of? These ideas of heaven and hell are really damaging. Maybe if Christianity didn't promote these ridiculous notions, Andrea Yates' kids would still be alive today. From an e-mail from blog regular Gary S.:
News item on the Andrea Yates trial describes her Christianity-based motivation for murdering her five children. Apparently she thought killing them was in their best interest, since she was sure they would become serial killers and prostitutes, and then spend eternity in hell. Even though the children were no older than 7."At least they'll go to heaven" is an awfully convenient rationalization to have available when you're an unstable person who's pondering slaughtering your own family. I wonder how much of a factor this belief in heaven was in this woman's twisted thought process.
I think this story dovetails nicely with some of the recent discussions on your blog about what a silly concept heaven is.
If everyone really spends eternity in heaven or hell, and children get a free pass to heaven, then Andrea Yates is the best mother who ever lived. And millions of Christians believe the first two-thirds of that sentence.
Here's the link to the CNN story.
How Martin Luther Laid The Foundations For The Holocaust
For those who'd rather believe religion isn't harmful, check out the the Godless Zone for the comprehensive posting about the evils of Luther's teachings about the Jews:
Is it a coincidence that Germany, the home of Martin Luther and his doctrines, was also the home of Adolph Hitler and his doctrines? I think not. Many, many historians think not as well. British conservative historian Paul Johnson says that Luther’s notorious anti-Jewish tract On the Jews and their Lies the “first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.” William Shirer, in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich writes: “It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther. The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believe in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews. Luther’s advice was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler.”And the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada confessed that Lutherans “carry a special burden in this matter because of the anti-Semitic statements made by Martin Luther and because of the suffering inflicted on Jews during the Holocaust in countries and places where the Lutheran Church is strongly represented.” The Austrian Evangelical Church wrote “our churches shares the guilt of the Holocaust” because they are “burdened by the late writings of Luther and their demand for expulsion and persecution of the Jews.” And the Lutheran Church of Bavaria said that followers of Luther ought to take seriously Luther’s anti-Semitism and “acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences” and said that the Lutheran Church “knows itself to co-responsible for anti-Jewish thoughts and actions that made possible or at least tolerated the crime of the ‘Third Reich’ against children, women, and men of Jewish origin.”
There's great detail at the link above. Worth reading -- especially for any Lutherans out there.
Why I Voted For Arnold
I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican; I'm for common-sense in government. Like this:
"I urge you not to make the first veto of your presidency one that turns America backwards on the path of scientific progress and limits the promise of medical miracles for generations to come."--California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a letter to President Bush
Why I would never vote for a George Bush. From the LA Times Op-Ed page:
IF, AS EXPECTED, the U.S. Senate votes to expand federal support of embryonic stem cell research today, the Republican Party will begin making amends for allowing religious conservatives to stall medical progress for nearly five years. If, as threatened, President Bush uses his very first veto to block the bill, the rap on the GOP as the party hostile to science will continue to be deserved.The government's current split-the-baby approach to embryonic stem cell research makes no sense. In 2001, Bush banned any federal funding for such science other than on the few dozen stem cell lines that had already been harvested, because he didn't want to authorize what he called the deliberate destruction of life. It made no difference to him that the research uses only embryos that would have been destroyed anyway, having been left over from fertility treatments.
The existing restrictions have created some absurdities. Because many laboratories receive private research funding not subject to the same regulations, some of them are forced to use color-coded tabs to separate identical but separately funded equipment. Others reportedly use police tape to divide the parts of their labs funded by public versus private dollars.
...Should Bush follow through on his veto threat, it's unlikely that Congress would be able to override it. The House of Representatives passed the measure 238 to 194 last year, far short of the two-thirds support necessary for an override. The Senate would require a veto-proof 67 votes, which don't appear to exist.
Embryonic stem cells can develop into any kind of cell in the body; researchers believe studying them could eventually lead to treatments for such debilitating diseases as Parkinson's and diabetes. Even if this worthy bill fails to become law, the debate about it may succeed in showing Americans that the advancement of science is more important than the advancement of politics.
"Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s"
That was the headline in a Florida newspaper after the seven police officers of Jasper, Florida (population, 2000, and not a single murder in 14 years) were each given a military-grade M-16.
That's just one of many stories in a fantastic Radley Balko/Cato study (pdf) of the misuse of SWAT teams, OVERKILL, The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America.
A summary of Balko's paper is below (a Cato press release about it is here):
Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.
This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.
Balko writes:
This study will not recommend the abolition of SWAT teams or unannounced police raids. Rather, it will critique the increasingly pervasive use of both, particularly when it comes to executing routine drug warrants, as well as the effect of an increasing presence of military equipment, training, and tactics on America’s police departments.
Later in the piece, he quotes Justice Brennan in the 1963 case, Ker v. California:
Similarly, rigid restrictions upon unannounced entries are essential if the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against invasion of the security and privacy of the home is to have any meaning. ...First, cases of mistaken identity are surely not novel in the investigation of crime. The possibility is very real that the police may be misinformed as to the name or address of a suspect, or as to other material information. That possibility is itself a good reason for holding a tight rein against judicial approval of unannounced police entries into private homes. Innocent citizens should not suffer the shock, fright or embarrassment attendant upon an unannounced police intrusion. Second...(w)e expressly recognized in Miller v. United States that compliance with the federal notice statute "is also a safeguard for the police themselves who might be mistaken for prowlers and be shot down by a fearful householder." Indeed, one of the principal objectives of the English requirement of announcement of authority and purpose was to protect the arresting officers from being shot as trespassers, ". . . for if no previous demand is made, how is it possible for a party to know what the object of the person breaking open the door may be? He has a right to consider it as an aggression on his private property, which he will be justified in resisting to the utmost."
Balko continues:
As previously explained, police typically serve these warrants just before dawn, or in the hours just before sunrise. They enter the residence unannounced or with very little notice. The subjects of these raids, then, are awoken from deep sleep, and their waking thoughts are confronted with the prospect that their homes are being invaded. Their first reaction is almost certainly alarm, fear, and a feeling of peril. Disorienting devices like flashbang grenades only compound the confusion.It isn’t difficult to see why a gun owner’s first instinct upon waking to a raid would be to disregard whatever the intruders may be screaming at him and reach for a weapon to defend himself. This is particularly true of someone with a history of violence or engaged in a criminal enterprise like drug dealing. But it’s also true of a law-abiding homeowner who legally owns guns for the purpose of defending his home and family.
The “apprehension of peril” exception fails, then, because no-knock raids make violent confrontation and, consequently, peril, more likely than apprehending suspects with less aggressive tactics. No-knock and short- notice raids invite violence and confrontation, they don’t mitigate them. And the tactics used in their deployment are by their very nature designed to catch victims at their most vulnerable, disoriented, and in a state of mind least capable of sound judgment.
Balko's piece lists dozens and dozens of innocent people -- even elderly grannies or people with small amounts of pot for medical use or their personal possession -- who were hurt or killed after SWAT raids; many times, after officers went to the wrong address through sloppy police work or on the word of a snitch.
Bowling With Kate Coe
Kate Coe, who is noteworthy for many things...not only for her dry wit, but most hilariously, for being fired from E! for...gossiping!" (about "E! staffer pay deals")...is guest-blogging at FishbowlLA. She only has a couple entries up, but I liked this bit:
What's more newsworthy than learning that James Woods just made a lot of cash--and not at the track?
Kate's accepting all forms of dirty laundry, except, I suppose, the kind with skid marks.
Petite Anglaise Sacked For Blogging
Colin Randall writes in the Daily Telegraph that British Paris blogger Petite Anglaise was the latest blogging/work casualty. She plans to sue:
Using the pseudonym La Petite Anglaise, she has attracted a sizeable international following for her musings on love, work and single motherhood in her internet diary.Her blog postings, which are read by up to 3,000 people a day, do not reveal her own name, nor that of her French former boyfriend who is the father of her three-year-old daughter, and have never identified her employers.
But partners at the leading British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson alleged that she made herself and therefore the firm identifiable by including her own photograph on the weblog. They also complained that she used office time to work on it.
The secretary - who asked to be identified only by her Christian name, Catherine, to protect her child's privacy - began the blog "as a bit of fun" two years ago.
She occasionally mentions sexual encounters but without explicit details. "I have sometimes played up the Bridget Jones thing, in that I am not afraid of making fun of myself, but I don't see myself as in the least scatterbrained," she said.
References to work have included descriptions of a quintessentially English office atmosphere with a framed portrait of the Queen on the wall and "Cadbury's chocolate, Tetley tea, beers after work".
There is one embellished account of accidentally showing her cleavage while helping to set up a video conference meeting. And she refers to an office Christmas party where someone breaks the "unwritten rule" of pulling his cracker before the senior partner and his wife have pulled theirs.
The senior partner is described as "very old school", a man who "wears braces and sock suspenders, stays in gentlemen's clubs when in London and calls secretaries typists. When I speak to him, I can't prevent myself from mirroring his plummy Oxbridge accent."
Catherine said: "They are intended as humorous anecdotes, nothing more."
...She admits that she sometimes worked on her blog in office time but only when she had no work to do. "Other employees would often read books at their desk if things were quiet."
..."It is really a matter of principle as far as I am concerned, in defining the boundaries between personal and professional activities, where the line should be drawn for bloggers who touch on the events of their working life in their writing," she said.
The Virtual Presidency
Frank Rich write$ in the Sunday New York Times about George Bush and "the vision thing." It seems there never was one:
Like his father, George W. Bush always disdained the vision thing. He rode into office on the heels of a boom, preaching minimalist ambitions reminiscent of the 1920s boom Republicanism of Harding and Coolidge. Bush's most fervent missions were to cut taxes, pass a placebo patients' bill of rights and institute the education program he sold as No Child Left Behind. His agenda was largely exhausted by the time of his fateful Crawford vacation in August 2001, so he talked vaguely of immigration reform and announced a stem-cell research "compromise." But he failed to seriously lead on either issue, both of which remain subjects of toxic debate today.To appear busy once he returned to Washington after Labor Day, he cooked up a typically alliterative "program" called Communities of Character, a grab bag of "values" initiatives inspired by polling data. That was forgotten after the Qaeda attacks. But the day that changed everything didn't change the fundamental character of the Bush presidency. The so-called doctrine of pre-emption, a repackaging of the long- held Cheney-Rumsfeld post-Cold-War mantra of unilateralism, was just another gaudy float in the propaganda parade ginned up to take America to war against a country that did not attack the United States on 9/11.
As the president's chief of staff then, Andrew Card, famously said of the Iraq war just after Labor Day 2002, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The Bush doctrine was rolled out officially two weeks later, just days after the administration's brass had fanned out en masse on the Sunday-morning talk shows to warn that Saddam's smoking gun would soon come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
The Bush doctrine was a doctrine in name only, a sales strategy contrived to dress up the single mission of regime change in Iraq with philosophical grandiosity worthy of FDR. There was never any serious intention of militarily pre- empting either Iran or North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions were as naked then as they are now, or of striking the countries that unlike Iraq were major enablers of Islamic terrorism. "Axis of Evil" was merely a clever brand name from the same sloganeering folks who gave us "compassionate conservatism" and "a uniter, not a divider" - so clever that the wife of a presidential speechwriter, David Frum, sent e-mails around Washington boasting that her husband was the "Axis of Evil" author. (Actually, only "axis" was his.)
Since then, the administration has fiddled in Iraq while Islamic radicalism has burned brighter and the rest of the Axis of Evil, not to mention Afghanistan and the Middle East, have grown into just the gathering threat that Saddam was not. And there's still no policy. As Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution writes on his foreign-affairs blog, Bush isn't pursuing diplomacy in his post- cowboy phase so much as "a foreign policy of empty gestures" consisting of "strong words here; a soothing telephone call and hasty meetings there." The ambition is not to control events but "to kick the proverbial can down the road - far enough so the next president can deal with it." There is no plan for victory in Iraq, only a wish and a prayer that the apocalypse won't arrive before Bush retires to his ranch.
Rich writes the epitaph for the Dubya years:
The Bush era has not been defined by big government or small government but by virtual government. Its enduring shrine will be a hollow Department of Homeland Security that finds more potential terrorist targets in Indiana than in New York.
As I always ask myself when somebody's looking up my butt in the airport, "Are we safer, or just more annoyed?"
Mooooo.
Bush Talks Shit To Tony
At the G-8 summit, Bush said to Tony Blair, as broadcast by CNN:
"We got to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."
Do you think the FCC will try to fine him and CNN thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for use of "profane" language? Information on filing a complaint is here.
"The Attack Dog With Pretty Hair"
My friend Jill Stewart interviews LA's mayor for The Wall Street Journal. I didn't vote for Villaraigosa because I didn't like his MEChA past, but I'm impressed with how hard he seems to be working.
Jill's site is here.
Sunday In The Farmer's Market With Gregg
The view from the counter seats at Monsieur Marcel last Sunday. It isn't Paris, but it is colorful -- and very tasty. Order the lamb with melted goat cheese on top, especially if it's your last meal. In hot weather, I order off-menu: a plate of duck rilletes. They bring a slice of it that looks like regular paté instead of a little bowl of it like I'm used to getting at my favorite café in Paris. Butter a small piece of baguette, then spread the rillettes. Eat, repeat.
Stupidity Won't Protect You Against Malaria
Fiona Macrae writes for the Daily Mail that a bunch of vacationing morons from Great Britain are eschewing modern medicine to take essence of tree bark and swamp water to prevent malaria:
The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous quackery' and 'dangerous nonsense'.Their warning follows an undercover investigation which found that alternative medicine clinics readily sell travellers homeopathic protection against malaria, despite clear Government advice that there is no evidence such treatments work.
It also comes after a study published in the Lancet suggested that the benefits of homeopathy are all in the imagination, with alternative remedies performing no better than dummy pills in clinical trials.
Homeopathy, which has won the backing of Prince Charles, claims to prevent diseases such as malaria by using dilute forms of herbs and minerals that in higher concentrations could produce the symptoms of the condition.
In the investigation, scientists and researchers who pretended to be about to embark an African holiday, contacted a variety of homeopaths around the country. These include one recommended by high street pharmacist Superdrug.
Worryingly, all of the homeopaths recommended they take alternative remedies over conventional anti-malaria pills.
Among the remedies, which ranged in price from £3.75 to £75, were Malaria officinalis (CORR) tablets. Also known as Malaria nosode, they are made from African swamp water, rotting plants and mosquito eggs and larvae.
The homeopaths also recommended China officinalis or China sulph, which is made from tree bark which contains quinine, and Natrum Mur - or salt tablets.
One practitioner said the homeopathic medicines fill a 'malaria-shaped hole' in the body that would usually be targeted by mosquitos.
They also gave little or no advice on how to prevent mosquito bites and several claimed the herbal treatments had stopped other travellers from coming down with the disease which can kill within two days of the first symptoms.
Last year, 1754 Britons caught the mosquito-borne parasitic infection and 11 died.
Many of the deaths were caused by the holidaymakers either not completing the course of tablets given by their GP, or relying on other medicines, which could include homeopathic treatments.
British doctors said they are appalled by the results of the investigation, which was carried out by the BBC's Newsnight and the charity Sense About Science.
More on homeopathy at Quackwatch.com and Homeowatch.com. Here's an excerpt from the mission statement over the top of Homeowatch:
Homeopathic "remedies" are usually harmless, but their associated misbeliefs are not. When people are healthy, it may not matter what they believe. But when serious illness strikes, false beliefs can lead to disaster.
Daily Mail link via Respectful Insolence
Another Bushie Against Science
Jeb Bush defends a nurse who breached patient confidentiality to lie about Terry Schiavo's condition on national TV. Lori Helfand writes in the St. Pete Times:
Gov. Jeb Bush on Thursday sided with a nurse who could lose her license because she discussed Terri Schiavo's medical condition on national TV."The governor feels the actions taken against (Carla) Sauer-Iyer are not justified and hopes that the complaint will be reconsidered and dismissed," Bush spokesman Russell Schweiss wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times. "She did not disclose any information which was not already public."
On Thursday, the Department of Health requested the Board of Nursing to dismiss the agency's complaint that Sauer-Iyer, 42, improperly disclosed patient information on CNN last year.
Sauer-Iyer rejected a proposed settlement that would have forced her to give up her nursing license, pay up to $1,683 in administrative costs and not to apply for a license in the future.
Sauer-Iyer, a registered nurse, rejected a proposed settlement and requested an administrative hearing. No date has been set for the hearing.
She provided an affidavit for the governor's legal team in its defense of Terri's Law, which was ruled unconstitutional.
In her affidavit, Sauer-Iyer, who worked for Palm Garden of Largo as a licensed practical nurse while Schiavo was there, claimed Schiavo said "Mommy" and "Help me," told nurses she was in pain and chuckled when Sauer-Iyer told her humorous stories.
And then my dog got up on two legs and did the tango while reciting Proust.
Please, no more fundamentalist, anti-science nitwits for president.
I Believe His Hair Nukes Your Hair's Ass
Happy birthday to Luke Y. Thompson, whose hair makes a Slurpee look like a brown sparrow in a cup.
Why Your Brat Is Fat
Children in France eat what they've given at the table -- or they go hungry. Children in America are often little tyrants, ruling their parents with their food longings.
Via aldaily, Theodore Dalrymple puts the blame for obesity on the right culprits -- not the soda companies, or the junk food packagers, or the ad agencies, or sly dealers peddling sugar on playgrounds instead of crack -- but on Mommy and Daddy. He was inspired to write the piece by articles in the New England Journal Of Medicine:
The articles in the NEJM discussed the responsibility of the government to forbid food companies from advertising, especially on television, directly to small children. Personally, I see nothing wrong with a proposal to censor such advertising. By definition, small children are not fully capable of making up their own minds about things, and it seems to me that advertisements directed at them to get them to do things which are likely to be permanently damaging to them, for the sake of making a profit, or rather an extra profit, are immoral.
He's wrong on censorship (again, it's the parents' job to censor the kids from TV-watching), but he asks the right question:
Of course, the question as to why so many parents have transferred authority from themselves to their children as young as three years old is a very interesting and important one, to which more than answer can be given, and at more than one level of analysis. This transfer of authority is a mass phenomenon, otherwise the epidemic would not have taken place. Parents no longer seem in control of how much television their children watch, what their children buy with their money or even what they eat at home.
The problem might be, for example, that people have come to believe that the satisfaction of choice, no matter how ill-informed, whimsical or deleterious, however childish or child-like, is the whole meaning of existence, at all the ages of man, from the very moment of birth onwards. Clearly, this has a connection with the notion of consumer choice: it is the wrongful extension of a principle that, in the right context, is obviously an excellent one. The epidemic of childhood obesity is a precise illustration of Edmund Burke’s famous dictum that men are qualified for liberty in exact proportion as they are (or have been in the past) prepared to place a limit on their own appetites.
We might ask what kind of society we have created in which so many parents do not control the diet of their own children, and what such a lack of control - surely not confined to diet - bodes for the future. Perhaps parents are just too busy nowadays to make the effort; or perhaps they subscribe to the sentimental (and lazy) idea that to give children what they want exactly when and how they want it is an expression of deep love.
But whatever the reason, the fact that two articles about the problem of childhood obesity in the NEJM could fail even to mention individual parental responsibility is indicative of what one can only call a totalitarian mindset. According to this mindset, it is for the government to solve every problem, either by prescribing behaviour, or forbidding it, or of course both. It is not that I think that the proposal that the government should ban the advertising of noxious products to small children is wrong; what bothers me is the failure to recognise that there is any other dimension to the problem, a dimension that is in fact much more serious.
No doubt the NEJM does not want to court unpopularity, or even notoriety, by suggesting that millions of American parents are, at least in this respect, failing their own children (I suspect that they are failing them in other respects too). It is always safer, from the point of view of gaining the esteem of the intelligentsia and of avoiding their censure, to blame those in authority or large corporations rather than ‘ordinary’ people, who are by definition blameless victims. But to absolve ordinary people of all blame for the obesity of their own children, by simply omitting to mention it altogether, is to deny them agency as full human beings. Far from being generous towards, or respectful of, ordinary people, it is extremely condescending towards them. Poor things, they are but putty in the hands of television companies and the food industry.
If the only publicly admissible or mentionable locus of responsibility for the diet of children is the government, we have accepted the premise of totalitarianism. The authors of the articles in the NEJM might answer in their own defence that their articles considered only those measures the government could take to affect the situation; nevertheless, the fact that they did not mention even in passing that parents had some active role to play in their children’s diet suggests to me that the thought did not even occur them. Here truly is the dog that did not bark in the night-time.
Topping Saddam
How, exactly, are we going to stop the civil war we've obviously unleashed in Iraq? On July 12, Kirk Semple wrote in The New York Times of a three-day death toll of over 100 people in Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, some in the most horrible ways:
More than 50 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in violence that included a double suicide bombing near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, scattered shootings, mortar attacks, a series of car bombs and the ambush of a bus with Shiite mourners returning from a burial.Tuesday’s killings, many of them apparently carried out with sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100, magnified the daunting challenges facing the new government and deepened a sense of dread among Iraqis.
Many of the attacks, particularly those in neighborhoods primarily populated by one religious group or another, bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite. Militias now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq, and have left the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his American counterparts scrambling to come up with a military and political strategy to combat them.
...a family of five — a father, mother, grown daughter and two teenage sons — were found beheaded in a predominantly Sunni sector of Dawra, according to an official at Yarmouk Hospital, the main medical facility in western Baghdad.
The police and hospital officials also reported that four car bombs around Baghdad killed at least 7 people and wounded at least 18.
Gunmen raided a company’s offices in the upper-middle-class Mansour neighborhood, killing three employees and wounding three, officials said.
According to the official at Yarmouk Hospital, five bodies were discovered early Tuesday in Jihad, the neighborhood where dozens of people were reportedly executed by marauding gunmen on Sunday. It was unclear when the victims had been killed.
In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, a time bomb exploded in the clinic of Ameera al-Rubaie, the wife of the governor of Salahuddin Province, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted the local police. Dr. Rubaie, a gynecologist, was killed and four of her patients were wounded, the police said, according to the wire service.
In Baquba, north of Baghdad, the mayor of the Um Al Nawa district was assassinated by gunmen, the ministry official said. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a drive-by shooting killed two workers in the central market, according to the Interior Ministry official.
An engineer and his bodyguard were assassinated on their way to work in Kirkuk on Tuesday morning, according to Col. Adel Zain Alabdin of the Iraqi police. A car bomb in Mosul killed two people and wounded four, the police said.
Wijdan Mikhail Salim, Iraq’s minister of human rights, said in a telephone interview that a government commission had been formed to study the possibility of scrapping a law that granted American troops immunity from Iraqi prosecution.
Remember the days when all the right-wing bloggers and commentators complained that the "MSM" weren't reporting all the happy news about the war? Haven't heard any of those complaints for a while.
A Little Birdie Told Me
Bad news for the fundanutters. Not only have they had to come to terms with the news that the world isn't flat, and there are no such things as witches (oops, seems they burned a few women at the stake unnecessarily!), Darwin's Galapagos finches are evolving before their eyes. From a story by AP science writer Randolph Schmid:
A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
...It's rare for scientists to be able to document changes in the appearance of an animal in response to competition. More often it is seen when something moves into a new habitat or the climate changes and it has to find new food or resources, explained Robert C. Fleischer, a geneticist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and National Zoo.
This was certainly a documented case of microevolution, added Fleischer, who was not part of Grant's research.
Grant studied the finches on the Galapagos island Daphne, where the medium ground finch, Geospiza fortis, faced no competition for food, eating both small and large seeds.
In 1982 a breeding population of large ground finches, Geospiza magnirostris, arrived on the island and began competing for the large seeds of the Tribulus plants. G. magnirostris was able to break open and eat these seeds three times faster than G. fortis, depleting the supply of these seeds.
In 2003 and 2004 little rain fell, further reducing the food supply. The result was high mortality among G. fortis with larger beaks, leaving a breeding population of small-beaked G. fortis that could eat the seeds from smaller plants and didn't have to compete with the larger G. magnirostris for large seeds.
That's a form of evolution known as character displacement, where natural selection produces an evolutionary change in the next generation, Grant explained in a recorded statement made available by Science.
"The Gay Species"
That's the name of a wise commenter on a post at one of the sites I visit often, Overlawyered.com. He's responding to a post on the gay marriage ban -- or, rather, legislated discrimination via the Federal marriage amendment:
Some of these comments illustrate the absurdities of the Amendment and its advocates. But this claim: "force gay marriage on everyone" is total folly.First, marriage is not orientation-specific, except by law that makes it privileged. Marriage, qua marriage, is simply marriage, neither gay nor straight, green or blue, black or white, religious or secular, but is itself its own genus of a legal institution.
In a pluralistic liberal democracy, "inclusion" would replace "exclusion," otherwise nothing changes. Rather than "closing" the privilege to straights only, inclusive-marriage would "open" marriage to include gays and lesbians. That would materially affect gays and lesbians currently excluded, but would have no impact on straights already included.
Only special-interest laws through tyrany of the majority give marriage its character of "exclusion" for "straight only." This situation is entirely analogous to "white only" facilities during segregation, or "paying members only" with respect to country clubs.
"Opening membership" to include others previously excluded does nothing to existent members. Certainly, the existent members are not "forced" into anything, save perhaps fairness, equality, and justice.
So, the preposterous notion that "gay marriage" is being "forced on the rest of us" is entirely incoherent nonsense. Rather, marriage, presently restricted, like segregation and many country club memberships, would be "opened" to include, rather than "closed" to exclude, without "forcing" anyone into anything, and certainly not altering existent privileges. The only change is embracing a wider constituency to share in America's promise.
Two guys or gals marrying would have no impact on the guy-gal model already in play, and the notion of anyone being "forced into gay marriage," a totally incoherent and vacuous phrase, is as ludicrous as it is absurd. Sadly, this kind of incoherent, irrational, and privileged thinking remains stubbornly persistent as it is thoroughly impoverished.
Even worse, arrogantly preferring exclusion over inclusion is the antithesis of equal application and due process, by privileging the dominant class over the dominated class, repudiates basic American principles and thereby undermines all Americans' access to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Blacks, poor, atheists, and queers know this perversion of thought only too well. We are no longer content to tolerate it.
The Gay Species' blog can be found here. The blogger is D. Stephen Heersink, who describes himself as a "Gay, Classical Liberal, Humanist, Philosopher, Evolutionist, Graduate U.C. Berkeley and Mills College, and Retired Capitalist."
SF mayor Gavin Newsom on the Federal marriage amendment here. I suspect Newsom's somewhat responsible for getting George Bush elected. Not that he was wrong to push for gay marriage, just that he should have done it the right way, by going through the courts.
In America, Anybody Can Be Senator
Jon Stewart has the audio (as video) on Senator Stevens on them tubes that make up the Internets.
How drunk did the Alaska constituents have to be to vote for this guy? Hmmm...then again...how drunk did we all have to be to vote for the morons and sell-outs representing most of the rest of us?
A Hole In The Security Blanket
Okay, all you brats, complaining about my gay marriage post, here's a little something for you to chew on. I just got this short question via e-mail:
What is more important in a relationship at age 54, chemistry or security?
The reply I dashed off:
It depends on your values and situation. Some people have to settle for a relationship as a form of either financial or emotional prostitution -- you scratch my back, maybe with the rent money, and I'll stick around, or I don't have enough of a self to be alone, so I'll be with you. I'm a whore for love, personally. I'd never get married because if the relationship gets boring or awful, it should end. Then again, I support myself, and have always counted on needing to do so so I would always be independent. Too many women depend on men for their survival, making them prisoners to a guy's salary. Ick.
Stupidity Can Be Fatal
A kid with cancer is fighting in court for the right to refuse chemotherapy and take a mixture of herbs. His idiot parents are behind him in this. Rachael Myers Lowe writes for CancerPage:
Abraham Cherrix was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma last year after a lump was discovered in his throat. He’s been through one series of chemotherapy, which he says left him sick and weak. In February, his oncologist told him that the cancer is back and a new higher-dose series of treatments should be started.Abraham said “No.” He and his family are now in court to stop the commonwealth of Virginia from forcing him into treatments.
He told a family court judge during two days of hearings this week that the decision should be his to make.
Accomack County child welfare officials have urged the court to turn custody of the boy over to the state and order that he continue conventional treatments for his cancer.
The judge is expected to issue a written ruling on July 18th.
In May, the judge declared Abraham’s parents neglectful and ordered them to share custody of their son with the Accomack County Department of Social Services.
Abraham Cherrix and his family have put their hopes in an alternative treatment of herbs, salves, laxatives, anti-septic washes, and food restrictions called the Hoxsey Method. After examining the records of 400 patients given the Hoxsey treatment, the National Cancer Institute concluded there’s no scientifically validated evidence that the Hoxsey Method is any better than no treatment at all. Because the treatment is illegal in the U.S., Abraham and his family traveled to a clinic in Mexico to get it.
Here's the American Cancer Society on Hoxsey:
There is no evidence that the Hoxsey herbal treatment has any value in the treatment of cancer in humans. In 1946, the National Cancer Institute reviewed 77 case reports of Hoxsey’s patients and concluded that none of them met the criteria for scientific evaluation.Only 2 human studies of the Hoxsey herbal treatment have been published. One was published in a pamphlet provided by the Tijuana clinic and simply contains a description of 9 patients who received the treatment. It concluded that the treatment is effective, even though most of the Hoxsey-treated patients received standard cancer treatment in addition to the Hoxsey treatment. The other study published in the Journal of Naturopathic Medicine involved 39 people with various types of cancer who took the Hoxsey herbal treatment. Ten patients died after an average of 15 months and 23 never completed the study. Only 6 patients were disease-free after 48 months.
The National Advisory Cancer Council studied many of Hoxsey’s patient records and learned that most of the patients had never had biopsies, so that there was no confirmation that they actually had cancer. The National Cancer Institute investigated 400 patients who were reported as cured by Hoxsey. Patients or their families were interviewed, and all records were carefully reviewed. These patients fell into 3 groups: those who had been treated, but didn’t actually have cancer; those who had received successful conventional cancer treatment before seeing Hoxsey; and those who had cancer and had died of it, or were still alive with evidence of cancer. Out of the 400 cases, not one case of a Hoxsey cure could be documented.
How far should self-determination go for a teen? Should you be sentenced to death because you're stupid, or just not rigorous enough a thinker (how many kids are at 16?) to understand that you're probably going to die if you drink some herbal tonic instead of doing chemo for your cancer?
Remember Fergie?
I hope so, because you're not going to recognize her if you bump into her on the street.
Sarah Ferguson never was beautiful, but she used to be kind of adorable, and have a little twinkle in her eye. Now they've stretched even that out of her.
Big Brother Wants You To Shut The Fuck Up
From a Hollywood Reporter story on MSNBC, the FCC is checking live sports tapes for dirty words:
“I don’t know how they are going to rule, but they asked us for tapes with a specific emphasis on crowd noise,” said another TV executive, who also requested anonymity. “If some bozo in the crowd calls the ref an a--hole, the commission is asking for a copy of the tape.”A live, on-field event — albeit when no athletes were on the field — during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, when Janet Jackson’s breast was accidentally bared, helped reignite Washington’s interest in the indecency issue. Since then there has been a highly charged fight at the commission about just how far the commission can go in restricting broadcasts.
Court fight continues
Broadcasters last week split over whether the commission should be allowed to get one of the premier indecency cases back from the federal court in New York.In a series of motions filed Friday in federal court in New York, Fox and its affiliate group, CBS and NBC opposed an attempt this week by the FCC to get a key indecency case back from the court.
The commission this month asked the same federal court for more time to consider affiliates’ arguments that the agency erred in March when it decided variations of the words “f---” and “s---” likely are to be indecent whenever broadcast, even if the words are uttered accidentally.
A delay would let affiliates contest the decisions before the commission. The FCC contends that this is a necessary step before arguing in court. The agency said ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates backed its request.
Under federal court rulings and commission rules, material is indecent if it “in context, depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.” Indecent speech can be aired safely between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Under a new law approved by Congress and signed by President Bush, broadcasters face fines of as much as $325,000 per violation, up from a previous maximum of $32,500.
More and more, our government is acting like our mommy. While they're busy checking to see if we said naughty words, they're also busy declaring Indiana the state with the most targets for terrorists, and picked a few other choice targets, too:
In addition to the petting zoo, in Woodville, Ala., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., the auditors questioned many entries, including “Nix’s Check Cashing,” “Mall at Sears,” “Ice Cream Parlor,” “Tackle Shop,” “Donut Shop,” “Anti-Cruelty Society” and “Bean Fest.”
For the record, I recently said "blow job" on the radio (thinking it was Internet radio only, which, it turns out, it wasn't). I won't name the show, lest the Govern-Mommy is peeking in on my site, but luckily, not allowing dirty free speech is a big concern for them, and they bleeped me, saving $325,000 in one push of a button!
A Sappy Medium
From the Advice Goddess column I just posted, a guy's girlfriend writes her daily doings to an ex-boyfriend and signs off with "love" or a (gag me!) emoticon kiss. The guy, "Plagued By Her xox-Boyfriend," continues:
She calls it “normal communication between friends.” My approach is adapt or adopt. I’m trying to adapt to the guy having such a presence in her life, but if we marry, I can’t have him sending her cards and e-mails with love and kisses. Adopting means doing what she’s doing -- writing to single women I know in love talk. I can’t do that -- it’s not my way.
Here's my answer below:
Internet cute-icisms like emoticons are a problem. In case Ted Kaczynski or any other computer-opposed types are reading this, emoticons are punctuation marks combined to make gaggingly cute little sideways faces (:-o) intended to convey emotion in chat rooms, instant messages, and e-mail. The way I see it, they’re acceptable when used by anybody under 12, and excusable when used by 35-year-olds who have yet to master written English.Emoticon users are also prone to use the likes of “LOL” (Laughing Out Loud), and “ROFL” (Rolling On Floor Laughing); acronyms sometimes included in e-mail to indicate that something the person’s written should have us wetting ourselves laughing. Guess what: If it's funny, we'll laugh. If it's not, and you use that acronym, it may leave us “WTTYS”: Wanting To Throttle You Senseless.
But, enough about my menagerie of pet peeves, let’s get to why you’re being so nutso unreasonable. Here’s a girl who’s pretty much typing out her daily to-do list, junking it up with punctuation-mark faces, and e-mailing it to some guy she was done with long ago. You don’t mention feeling attention-deprived, and it doesn’t sound like there’s more than questionable taste being exchanged. Can’t you just let her play nicely with her little friend since it doesn’t seem like she has any intention of playing doctor?
So, her style isn’t your style. What’s important is whether you match up on the stuff that matters most to you. Of course, if this matters most to you, you’re with the wrong girl. Sure, it’s a bit unsettling to have a girlfriend with an ex-boyfriend best friend. But, come on, are you seriously threatened by this guy’s presence, or more by your apparent inability to dictate to your future Stepford wife what she can and cannot do?
The real danger to your relationship is probably your “I’ll show her!” model of conflict resolution: “My name is Conan. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Satisfying as it might be to get revenge by writing loveyisms to single women, if you’d like to learn about the civility, deep friendship, and compromise necessary to make a relationship work, you might watch a little less old Arnold and a little more recent Oprah.
There’s a good chance these punctuation skin tags aren’t so much your girlfriend’s way of conveying she has feelings for the guy as they are a way of glossing over the fact she doesn’t. Stop stewing over “adapt or adopt,” and consider the possibility that she signs off with all that goop because she’s always signed off with all that goop. Maybe, to her, it seems cruel to suddenly yank the kissyface and replace it with (:-|) or with what you’d probably prefer t(-_-t) -- the emoticon (read upright) for flipping somebody the double bird.
The whole Q&A is here.
Republican Family Values
Adultery, adultery, adultery. Does it only matter to the right wing when it's the Clintons? Steve Benen writes for Washington Monthly:
Lurking just over the horizon are liabilities for three Republicans who have topped several national, independent polls for the GOP's favorite 2008 nominee: Sen. John McCain (affair, divorce), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (affair, divorce, affair, divorce), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (divorce, affair, nasty divorce). Together, they form the most maritally challenged crop of presidential hopefuls in American political history.Until relatively recently, a self-confessed adulterer had never sought the presidency. Certainly, other candidates have been dogged by sex scandals. In the 1828 presidential election, John Quincy Adams questioned whether Andrew Jackson's wife was legitimately divorced from her first husband before she married Old Hickory. Grover Cleveland, who was single, fathered a child out of wedlock, a fact that sparked national headlines during the 1884 election (though he managed to win anyway). There have been presidential candidates who had affairs that the press decided not to write about, like Wendell Wilkie, FDR, and John F. Kennedy. And there have been candidates whose infidelities have been uncovered during the course of a campaign: Gary Hart's indiscretions ultimately derailed his 1988 bid, and in 1992, during the course of his campaign, Bill Clinton was forced to make the euphemistic admission that he "caused pain" in his marriage.
But it wasn't until 2000 that McCain, possibly emboldened by Clinton's survival of his scandals, became the first confessed adulterer to have the nerve to run. Now, just a few years after infidelity was considered a dealbreaker for a presidential candidate, the party that presents itself as the arbiter of virtue may field an unprecedented two-timing trifecta.
McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure. It's possible that the age of the offense and McCain's charmed relationship with the press will pull him through again, but Giuliani and Gingrich may face a more difficult challenge. Both conducted well-documented affairs in the last decade--while still in public office.
Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with "groping in the window at Macy's." In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.
But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
Will right-wing voters look the other way for their boys?
Nicholas, Caged
A reader writes:
My wife’s previous lover, and before him a husband, cheated on her, so before we got married I bought a CB2000 male chastity device, mostly as a gag gift. Well they really work and a year and a half later we got the newer model that fits men with smaller equipment...better for me (CB3000) (link NSFW).My wife just read the book Venus On Top and since reading it she has caught me masturbating. She says it’s the same as cheating on her with another woman because it drains all my desire to please her. I tend to agree.
She has been demanding I stay locked up all the time now and has been lengthening my times between releases. She says I am not attentive enough for a week after she allows me a release. I am so used to wearing this thing all the time now I hardly know its there.
Are more husbands being kept locked up now?
I know there are a lot more hybrids on the road, but as far as chastity devices for men, I couldn't tell you. Whatever floats your boat, or keeps your weiner shrink-wrapped, as the case may be.
Amy Alkon, Shoe Whore
While some feel inclined to brag about how much their shoes and clothes cost, I prefer to brag about how much they didn't. The trick is, never shop in season: Buy your cashmere sweaters in January, just as they're bringing in cotton skirts for spring, and buy your suede boots in July and August, just as they're about to bring in the cashmere sweaters for fall. My latest find? $148.95 Richard Tyler boots for $39.95, including shipping, at Zappos.com. Woohoo!
Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful
Another reader writes (probably after reading one of my anti-religion entries):
You may be one of the most judgemental, bitter, cold-hearted, egotistical, godless, and abusive people on the internet today.I have to admit, it turns me on.
The Sound Of No Hands Clapping
This is actually the sound of Toby Young taking Emmanuelle Richard, Cathy Seipp and me to Chateau Marmont for lunch and fun at the pool. He was thanking us for throwing his book party at Barnsdall Art Park. (That's Emmanuelle in the back, Cathy in the front).
Just below, this is The Sound Of No Hands Clapping, Toby's memoir about his "marvelous successes at failing," in which he tells many funny tales of his career as an "unsuccessful journalist-slash-screenwriter." Many thanks to our sponsor, Pravda Vodka.
The War Crimes President
Can George Bush be tried for war crimes after he leaves office? Benjamin Ferenccz, the chief prosecutor of the Nuremburg Trials, says there's a case for trying Bush for the "supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation." Jan Frel writes for Alternet:
Writing for the United Kingdom's Guardian, shortly before the 2003 invasion, international law expert Mark Littman echoed Ferencz: "The threatened war against Iraq will be a breach of the United Nations Charter and hence of international law unless it is authorized by a new and unambiguous resolution of the Security Council. The Charter is clear. No such war is permitted unless it is in self-defense or authorized by the Security Council."Challenges to the legality of this war can also be found at the ground level. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse to serve in Iraq, cites the rules of the U.N. Charter as a principle reason for his dissent.
Ferencz isn't using the invasion of Iraq as a convenient prop to exercise his longstanding American hatred: he has a decades-old paper trail of calls for every suspect of war crimes to be brought to international justice. When the United States captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003, Ferencz wrote that Hussein's offenses included "the supreme international crime of aggression, to a wide variety of crimes against humanity, and a long list of atrocities condemned by both international and national laws."
Ferencz isn't the first to make the suggestion that the United States has committed state-sponsored war crimes against another nation -- not only have leading war critics made this argument, but so had legal experts in the British government before the 2003 invasion. In a short essay in 2005, Ferencz lays out the inner deliberations of British and American officials as the preparations for the war were made:
U.K. military leaders had been calling for clear assurances that the war was legal under international law. They were very mindful that the treaty creating a new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague had entered into force on July 1, 2002, with full support of the British government. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the defense staff, was quoted as saying "I spent a good deal of time recently in the Balkans making sure Milosevic was put behind bars. I have no intention of ending up in the next cell to him in The Hague."
Ferencz quotes the British deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry who, in the lead-up to the invasion, quit abruptly and wrote in her resignation letter: "I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution … [A]n unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances that are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law."
While the United Kingdom is a signatory of the ICC, and therefore under jurisdiction of that court, the United States is not, thanks to a Republican majority in Congress that has "attacks on America's sovereignty" and "manipulation by the United Nations" in its pantheon of knee-jerk neuroses. Ferencz concedes that even though Britain and its leadership could be prosecuted, the international legal climate isn't at a place where justice is blind enough to try it -- or as Ferencz put it, humanity isn't yet "civilized enough to prevent this type of illegal behavior." And Ferencz said that while he believes the United States is guilty of war crimes, "the international community is not sufficiently organized to prosecute such a case. … There is no court at the moment that is competent to try that crime."
As Ferencz said, the world is still a long way away from establishing norms that put all nations under the rule of law, but the battle to do so is a worthy one: "There's no such thing as a war without atrocities, but war-making is the biggest atrocity of all."
The suggestion that the Bush administration's conduct in the "war on terror" amounts to a string of war crimes and human rights abuses is gaining credence in even the most ossified establishment circles of Washington. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling by the Supreme Court suggests that Bush's attempt to ignore the Geneva Conventions in his approved treatment of terror suspects may leave him open to prosecution for war crimes. As Sidney Blumenthal points out, the court rejected Bush's attempt to ignore Common Article 3, which bans "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."
And since Congress enacted the Geneva Conventions, making them the law of the United States, any violations that Bush or any other American commits "are considered 'war crimes' punishable as federal offenses," as Justice Kennedy wrote.
Yoohoo? Evidence Of God?
Five children on a church outing were swept to their deaths. Where was god? Pick one:
a. working out on his treadmill in hopes of ridding himself of the Divine Spare Tire
b. watching porn on DVD
c. non-existent
If god not only exists, but is "all-seeing," and all that crap, what's your explanation for this, god-squadders? Did god watch the kids drowning, and just think, "Whatever!"?
How To Make Your Co-workers Fund Your 12-Week Vacation
You have a kid, how about you pay to raise it, down to saving up some cash to go on maternity or paternity leave? Yeah, that's right. Why should your employer (or the other employees) pay for your choices? Ron Lieber writes in The Wall Street Journal that paid paternity leave is the next frontier. How unfortunate. Here's an excerpt from his piece:
The continuing quest for a stigma-free paternity leave is showing a few signs of progress.While maternity leave is now a (mostly) established part of the culture of work, we dads have it tougher if we want an extended period of paid time-off. True, since 2004, California dads have been able to take as long as six weeks off and now get a maximum $840 weekly check funded by all employees who are in the state's disability-insurance program. So far, it's the only state that does this, though. Otherwise you have to cross the pond: In the U.K., the new "Work and Families Bill" extends the right to time-off (with a small government subsidy) for many fathers.
In the U.S., just 13% of employers that the nonprofit Families and Work Institute queried in a 2005 survey said they offer any paid paternity leave to U.S. workers (moms generally qualify for disability pay). That number shows little sign of increasing. Indeed, the sad reality is that the decision to take a parental leave often comes down to whether you can afford it. So here's how to think about the financial challenges:
Many new parents are eligible for unpaid leave. With a few exceptions, the federal Family and Medical Leave Act allows anyone who works in a company with more than 50 employees to take a 12-week break. You get to keep your health insurance and are guaranteed your old job or an equivalent one upon return.
Also, you can take your leave anytime within a year of the arrival of your child. So it's fine to take yours when your spouse's leave ends, to maximize the time that one parent is at home and put off child-care costs.
The lack of guaranteed pay makes an extended leave difficult for people whose spouses don't work and for the self-employed, brokers and others similarly employed. The rest of us, however, can treat paternity leave as a goal to save for like any other. Nine months probably isn't enough time to plan. Instead, set a goal years ahead of time and figure out what you need to save to avoid debt while still keeping the kid in diapers.
By the way, as I've said before, it's utterly idiotic that health insurance is funded by employers. Pay your own damn health insurance. Think about how unfair it is, if one employee is a single person, and they're subsidizing some other employee with a wife and five kids.
Even at my poorest, health insurance has been a required purchase for me. I have an HMO -- Kaiser Permanente. Before that, I had Oxford (in New York City). When I was sleeping on a door (on two milk crates, not hanging from it like a bat or anything) during my struggling writer years, I even had health insurance then. Be personally responsible, and don't expect the rest of us to sweep up after you -- or y our life choices.
And that, by the way, means (as I've also said before), that school should be paid for by parents -- any parents but the very poor. We can still have public school (whether that's even a good idea is another question -- but that's not really my area), but we'll just take the school fees out of your taxes...if you aren't paying for private school for your kids already.
It Runs On The Sun
Electric car powered by its own sonar panel! Owned by the Patricia Faure Gallery at Santa Monica's Bergamot Station. There's really no reason for us to keep guzzling gas -- I mean, if we don't want to guzzle gas. This isn't exactly cold fusion, coming up with cars that run on something other than Osama's oil.
Rays, Rays Go Away
A few cars out there might run on the sun. But, if you get too much of it, you're going to look like an Hermes handbag when you're 50. Here's the perfect thing -- the cheapest UV monitor on Amazon.
Bunks For Drunks
Even if you're a total grinch who hates the poor, you have to admit it makes sense to give people preventive health care. Dollars and cents, at the very least. The same goes for helping homeless addicts -- helping them into housing, for example.
A lot of people would rather leave the homeless addicts in the gutter as punishment for their thumbing their noses at the Puritan work ethic and all the rest. It turns out it costs more to do that than to warehouse them and let them drink. Seattle realized that, and built a drunk bunk. Jessica Koval writes for The New York Times:
Rodney Littlebear was a homeless drunk who for 15 years ran up the public tab with trips to jail, homeless shelters and emergency rooms.He now has a brand-new, government-financed apartment where he can drink as much as he wants. It is part of a first-in-the-nation experiment to ease the torment of drug and alcohol addiction while saving taxpayers' money.
Last year, King County created a list of 200 "chronic public inebriates" in the Seattle region who had cost the most to round up and care for. Seventy-five were offered permanent homes in a new apartment building known by its address, 1811 Eastlake.
Each had been a street drunk for several years and had failed at least six efforts at sobriety. In a controversial acknowledgment of their addiction, the residents — 70 men and 5 women — can drink in their rooms. They do not have to promise to drink less, attend Alcoholics Anonymous or go to church.
"They woke me up in detox and told me they were going to move me in," said Mr. Littlebear, 37, who has had a series of strokes and uses a walker. "When I got here, I said, 'Oh boy, this don't look like no treatment center.' "
These are the "unsympathetic homeless" who beg, drink, urinate and vomit in public — and they are probably the most difficult to get off the streets, said Bill Hobson, executive director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, the nonprofit group that owns 1811 Eastlake.
In 2003, the public spent $50,000, on average, for each of 40 homeless alcoholics found most often at the jail, the sobering center and the public Harborview Medical Center, said Amnon Shoenfeld, director of King County's division of mental health and chemical abuse.
Mr. Hobson's group expected the annual cost for each new resident of 1811 Eastlake to be $13,000, or a total of $950,000. It cost $11.2 million to build and is paid for entirely by the City of Seattle and county, state and federal governments.
Their Irrationality Is More Legit Than His Irrationality
A Wiccan guy dies in combat and the Department of Veterans Affairs won't let him have his pentacle writes Alan Cooperman for the Washington Post:
The department has approved the symbols of 38 other faiths; about half of are versions of the Christian cross. It also allows the Jewish Star of David, the Muslim crescent, the Buddhist wheel, the Mormon angel, the nine-pointed star of Bahai and something that looks like an atomic symbol for atheists.Stewart, 34, is believed to be the first Wiccan killed in combat. He was serving in the Nevada National Guard when the helicopter in which he was riding was shot down in Afghanistan last September. He previously had served in the Army in Korea and Operation Desert Storm. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
His widow, Roberta Stewart, scattered his ashes in the hills above Reno and would like him to have a permanent memorial.
She said the veterans cemetery in Fernley offered to install a plaque with his name and no religious symbol. She refused.
"Once they do that, they'll forget me. They don't like having a hole in the wall," she said. "I feel very strongly that my husband fought for the Constitution of the United States, he was proud of his spirituality and of being a Wiccan, and he was proud of being an American."
Wicca is one of the fastest-growing faiths in the country. Its adherents have increased almost 17-fold from 8,000 in 1990 to 134,000 in 2001, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. The Pentagon says that more than 1,800 Wiccans are on active duty in the armed forces.
Wiccans still suffer, however, from the misconception that they are devil worshipers. Some Wiccans call themselves witches, pagans or neopagans. Most of their rituals revolve around the cycles of nature, such as equinoxes and phases of the moon. Wiccans often pick and choose among religious traditions, blending belief in reincarnation and feminine gods with ritual dancing, chanting and herbal medicine.
Federal courts have recognized Wicca as a religion since 1986. Prisons across the country treat it as a legitimate faith, as do the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. military, which allows Wiccan ceremonies on its bases.
"My husband's dog tags said 'Wiccan' on them," Stewart noted.
But applications from Wiccan groups and individuals to VA for use of the pentacle on grave markers have been pending for nine years, during which time the symbols of 11 other faiths have been approved.
If you die for your country, I think you should get to have Bugs Bunny on your tomb if that's what you want. At least, unlike god, there's some evidence -- probably millions of pictures -- that Bugs exists.
I Have, Too. I'm Not Ashamed.
Like The Guardian's Zoe Williams, I've had an abortion.
I was in my early 30s at the time, and shuttling back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. I had Kaiser Permanente as my HMO, which was not in New York City, so this very sweet jewelry designer I knew named Annette went with me and drove me all the way to White Plains in her old pickup truck.
It was winter, and very cold and snowy. When we got up to White Plains and found the clinic, there were people in parkas holding up old framed paintings outside. "Look, there's a yard sale!" I said to Annette. Oops, no...they were shouting "Murderer, murderer!" They were religious nutters holding up pictures of Jesus. Assholes. "Hey, I'll give you 50 cents for that frame!"
I've always felt, as Zoe Williams does, that it was important to not follow the lead of the fundanutters, and act like my abortion was something shameful. Sure, I regret not having been more careful about birth control, just as I regret not having been more religious about wearing sunblock during the years I got around New York City on rollerskates.
But, knowing what I know about science (read Michael Gazzaniga's book The Ethical Brain for the specifics on the fetal development timeline) I realized what I was doing was having a small growth of cells removed from my body. It was a potential human, not a person.
I mention it freely, when pertinent -- which means that I don't hide it. For example, I made this comment on March 19, 2006, in response to Crid's remark about how there's this strained silence in the room among certain women when there's talk of abortion:
I've had an abortion -- as have probably many women 40 or over. I have no problem admitting to it or to anything else I've done. As the therapist tells my friend Sue Shapiro, in her book, Lighting Up, "Live the least secretive life you can."Joan Didion, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, calls it having "the courage of your mistakes":
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent.
Zoe Williams writes, "If we can get women to speak about it without embarrassment, we can break the abortion taboo." This doesn't mean we should be proud of having abortions, or vie for lots and lots of abortions; on the contrary, we should work to keep abortion, like other surgical procedures, "legal, safe, and rare."
But, part of keeping it all those things is not treating it like it's some shameful, horrible thing that has to be hidden. This means refusing to follow the lead of the religious nutters who really seek to take from us not just the right to abortion, but the right to birth control. Right now, they're setting the agenda of shame-based silence with their anti-science propaganda. And that's wrong.
Here's what Zoe Williams suggests we all do about it:
Tomorrow night there's a public meeting in the House of Lords in which women who've had abortions will talk about the experience. I've been to many pro-choice meetings, and my line is always the same, to the extent that now I have it written on a napkin: the only people who can break the taboo on abortion are people who have had abortions.In the normal run of things, I take the opposite view. I do not, for instance, share the view that parents are the only people who understand children; or that you need to be the victim of a crime to comprehend prison sentencing; or that unless you had a family member involved in 7/7, you won't grasp the threat of terrorism. Taboos, however, are different. Gay rights were not won by a load of straight people saying "I don't mind if people are gay"; and abortion rights will not be upheld by a load of people saying "I agree with this right in principle". They will be upheld by people saying, in the words of the Abortion Rights flyer: "I've had an abortion. I am not ashamed." I've had an abortion, and I'm not ashamed in the slightest.
With no one speaking directly for this right, it leaves a gaping silence that is duly filled by anti-abortionists: foetus fetishists, quasi-Christians who don't actually, like, believe in God, but still think termination is a bit icky, misogynists looking for a way to put the boot in, people of genuine faith who don't agree with it ... And the more airtime they get, the more mainstream their views seem. On the other hand, as society gets more permissive, the terms in which we discuss abortion seem to be regressing; even those who support the right talk with hushed embarrassment rather than vivid pride in the women's movement and its achievements.
I'm always preaching to the converted, and rarely expect anything but a friendly clap and some nodding - until Wendy Savage (obstetrician, gynaecologist, pioneer, academic, one of the most impressive people I've met) talked about an open letter to a newspaper, along the lines of "We, the undersigned, have had abortions, and are not embarrassed about it ...". Apparently something similar was done in Spain, where the pro-choice movement gets a lot of oomph from the influx of Italian women, whose doctors, even though legally obliged to perform abortions, widely disdain to.
French women did something similar, too, the "Manifesto of 343 Bitches."
Williams continues:
I would love nothing more than to put such a letter together: I would be particularly interested in getting MPs as signatories, for three reasons: first, they represent the summit of respectability, and I think one of the taboo's incremental effects is that people associate terminations with fecklessness - and once characterised as something required only by the irresponsible, abortion will not be taken seriously as a right. Second, many women MPs who cut their political teeth in the women's movement, and got an incredible amount of engine-power from it, have now distanced themselves because, as with a CND past, it would make them sound unfashionably ideological. Third, getting MPs down on paper as having had abortions is a tricky business; there is no political currency in it these days - you alienate voters without winning any. Is there a female MP prepared to sign as a point of principle? There sure as hell are some who've had abortions.
Yes, it's about time women talked about their abortions without shame. Ironically, it's probably the best way to cut down on abortions (as opposed to all the abstinence nonsense -- indoctrination which doesn't stop kids from having sex, it just causes them to take a little longer to get to it, and then be unprepared to protect themselves against pregnancy and disease).
So, who, besides me, is willing to come out? Girls? Guys (if you've gotten a girl pregnant who's gotten an abortion)? Don't let the religious nutters silence you. Come out below in my blog comments -- the Global Village version of the letter Zoe writes about in her piece.
Come on, there's nothing shameful about not bringing a kid into the world you're unprepared to care for, or simply don't want. Just try to be better about birth control in the future, 'kay?
Every Witch Way But Rational
"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry."
--Mark Twain, Bible Teaching and Religious Practice essay, "Europe and Elsewhere", 1923
via The War On Faith
Excerpt From The Upcoming Elmore Leonard Novel
Sneak peek here.
Lost In Fond
After six weeks of dating, the guy tells her he's fond of her and she's grown on him -- and it's a problem:
He’ll soon be moving across the country to his next three-month gig and wants me to come see him. Should I take the position that I’ll come when he sends me a plane ticket? I’m just trying to keep from investing myself in somebody who doesn’t value me. Am I expecting too much from a six-week relationship?
Here's my answer from the Advice Goddess column I just posted:
Ovaries suddenly shouting “last call”? Biological clock not just ticking but wired to plastic explosive?This is the real world, not a $3 paperback. Sure, if you were the girl in the corset who gets bent backward by the guy in the pirate suit, he’d already be carrying you over the threshold of your two-drawbridge starter castle. But, here you are feeling romantically ripped off because a guy who’s known you for six weeks announced he’s fond of you and you’ve grown on him -- and he probably doesn’t mean like back hair or a precancerous lesion.
Maybe fonder feelings will come, or maybe this will turn out to be a “time and place” thing -- like an airplane flight where you and your seatmate have some magical connection for five hours and 22 minutes, then collect your luggage, walk out of the airport, and never see each other again. Of course, even if this guy does feel more than “fond,” he might be wary of saying so, since many women see any declaration of feelings as a sort of promissory note, auto-translating a guy’s “I love you” into “You owe me.” (Not to worry, Dude, a bunch of carats will do.)
It also pays to remember that men aren’t exactly the gushy sex. Compared to women, their brain structure and hormonal makeup leave them less able to store and process emotion. They typically aren’t so hot at talking about it, either. Perhaps this is understandable, considering that brain scans generally reveal women using both halves of their brain while speaking and men only using one half. This doesn’t mean men are dumb. In emotional expressiveness, they’re like my “Historical Dictionary of American Slang,” which stops at the letter “O” because the publisher ran out of money. If I need something from “P” through “Z,” I’ll probably have to go to the library and root it out myself.
If you want more than “fond,” all you can do is wait for the guy to show it to you. That’s how men express their feelings; they don’t sit around chattering about them like schoolgirls. Avoid getting all pissy about plane tickets or coming on like he’s your one final chance not to be a spinster -- even if he is. He did tell you he was there on a temporary work contract, which meant he’d probably be moving on when it ended, not moving into a kneeling position with Barry Manilow in the background. Maybe the question you most need to ask is whether you really want him or you just want him to want you. After all, while he isn’t exactly cribbing sweet nothings from some bodice-ripper, you merely say you “like him” and “get along well” -- as a prelude to a litany of complaints about how he’s a messy, under-expressive right-winger who eats badly.
The entire thing is here.
Looking For Lap Dogs In All The Wrong Places
Who's the real national security risk? The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof clears up a few misconceptions:
Take Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator Roberts has criticized The Times, but he himself is responsible for an egregious disclosure of classified intelligence. As National Journal reported in April, it was Senator Roberts who stated as the Iraq war began that the U.S. had "human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein."That statement horrified some in our intelligence community by revealing that we had an agent close to Saddam.
No responsible newspaper would risk an agent's life so blithely. And The Times would never have been as cavalier about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as the White House was. The fact is, journalists regularly hold back information for national security reasons; I recently withheld information at the request of the intelligence community about secret terrorist communications.
More broadly, the one thing worse than a press that is "out of control" is one that is under control. Anybody who has lived in a Communist country knows that. Just consider what would happen if the news media as a whole were as docile to the administration as Fox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.
Historically, we in the press have done more damage to our nation by withholding secret information than by publishing it. One example was this newspaper's withholding details of the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy himself suggested that the U.S. would have been better served if The Times had published the full story and derailed the invasion.
Then there were the C.I.A. abuses that journalists kept mum about until they spilled over and prompted the Church Committee investigation in the 1970's. And there are secrets we should have found, but didn't: in the run-up to the Iraq war, the press — particularly this newspaper — was too credulous about claims that Iraq possessed large amounts of W.M.D.
In each of these cases, we were too compliant. We failed in our watchdog role, and we failed our country.
So be very wary of Mr. Bush's effort to tame the press. Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxious, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.
We Hate Smart People
Via Reason Express:
"You want to talk about some of the stupid things Bush has done? Why restrict the best and the brightest people from coming into your country?"-- Jim Goodnight, CEO of software giant SAS, on restrictions on the number of high-tech visa applicants the U.S. will accept. The alternative is for the industry to grow operations in India and China instead.
Will Ken Lay Go To Heaven?
The smirking scumbag just died.
On a related note, this religious nutter woman keeps writing me about belief in god, telling me all it takes to go to heaven is accepting Jesus as the savior:
It is not only belief in the Bible....it is faith from the heart. Each of us has a sense of God. Believing in him is easy. All he requires is that you believe that he died for your sins. yes even Adolf Hitler can be saved. Even the murderer or adultress.
Even Adolph Hitler can be saved? So, you can murder millions and millions of people, and go to heaven, or, in Ken Lay's case, cause thousands to lose their homes and retirement funds...and all you have to do is give a wee thumbs up to Jesus, and you're in?
Yet, if there's some person who spends their time on earth making it a better place for the rest of us, but doesn't believe without evidence, in this religious hoohah, they'll burn forever?
Who believes this shit?! Well, a whole lot of people, considering the church is pretty much the most successful multinational corporation ever. A lot of sheeple, that is. Come on, it's 2006, wake up and think.
How About Some Biological Independence?
I'm talking about the ridiculous war on drugs, and the notion that the government can tell us where we go in our heads. How can this be consitutional? Vicki Ross Havens writes:
". . . it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states." --William F. Buckley, Jr. Ed., National Review, 2/12/96The first shot fired in our now almost-Hundred Years War on drugs was the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914--the first national law to criminalize drugs. The Harrison Narcotics Act came about through the efforts of politicians, as well as of certain religious groups that viewed taking psychoactive drugs as sinful. These efforts eventually led to penal statutes under which the "sinners" become criminals and go to jail. Thus was laid the cornerstone of today's U.S. anti-drug laws, and thus began the demonization of "addicts," "pushers," "junkies," "marijuana," "heroin," etc.
President Richard M. Nixon declared an "all out global war on the drug menace" in 1972 after having proclaimed it a "national emergency." Bill Wylie Kellerman, a contributing editor for Sojourners magazine, characterizes the war as politically-motivated, parlayed by later administrations, particularly those of Reagan and Bush, into an effort to fill the "immediate need to find new 'enemies' to replace 'communists' in the ongoing manufacture of public consensus."
Like all wars, the drug war is extremely expensive, currently costing the federal government $14 billion per year. According to Craig Horowitz, this figure excludes war expenditures of state and local governments, which add another estimated $14 billion per year, and also excludes incarceration costs, which in 1994 were more than $315 million for the 10,000 people sentenced in that year alone for nonviolent drug offenses ("The No Win War," New Yorker, February 5, 1996). Horowitz estimates that "the direct budgetary costs of drug prohibition in America probably approaches $100 billion yearly." For comparison, note that the budget for the Department of Defense for the current fiscal year is approximately $267 billion (Institute for Better Education through Resource Technology).
It is also a war that holds hostage an increasing number of our Constitutionally-granted civil liberties in a virtual de facto repeal of our Bill of Rights.
Here's one example she gives:
The Ninth AmendmentAmendment 9. The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
According to a series of Supreme Court decisions, the right to privacy is one of the unexpressed rights of the people. Invasions of privacy by the government is considered one of the vilest characteristics of life in a dictatorship; they bring to mind scenes from Hitler's Germany. Nevertheless, the War on Drugs has encroached on this right in many ways, including the following:
·The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency maintains a computer bank (the Narcotics and Dangerous Drug Information System) containing the names of more than 1.5 million people. Posted in federal buildings are 1-800 numbers that one can use to report any person one suspects of illegal drug activity. The caller is not required to give his name or to present evidence or to appear in court--but the reported name goes into the computer system, even though more than 95% are not even under investigation.
·In several states, hospitals must submit for prosecution any drug-positive urine tests of pregnant women, even though urine tests have a reputation for unreliability. One positive urine test has ruined many budding careers, and now parents can purchase an over-the-counter urine test kit for determining drug activity of their children. Children may also be forced to be tested at school, and some private schools state proudly that they require repeated urine tests.
·Helicopters are permitted to fly low (100 feet) and to spy randomly into people's homes in efforts to catch possible drug use.
·Some critically and terminally ill patients are denied the use of many controlled substances, such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, that have valuable therapeutic applications.
·Entire families of drug defendants can be evicted from or denied public housing. Drug offenders are ineligible for some college loan programs.
·Finally, add to the list of concerns the right of self-determination and to ingest substances if one chooses to do so.
...The war on drugs is failing. More and more social scientists, judges, and law enforcement officers are indicting our current narcotic policies as ineffective, counterproductive, and harmful--a position directly contrary to the positions of Congress and of the President.
Eric Sevaried observed that "The chief cause of problems is solutions." More of our civil rights will be quietly sabotaged . . . until we are willing to attribute the suffering to the War on Drugs and the narcotics laws (and their consequences) themselves, rather than the actual drugs (and their use/abuse).
Check out the Drug War Clock to see how many of our taxpayer dollars have been spent on it this year.
Girls Gone Litigious
Via Overlawyered, a recent idiotic lawsuit:
In the latest development regarding suits by young women who come to regret being filmed in compromising states of undress during Spring Break, Mardi Gras, etc., a Denton County, Tex. jury has decided to award no damages to Brittany Lowry and Lezlie Fuller, who "accused Mantra Films of misappropriation and fraud after the two were videotaped in March 2002 flashing their breasts during a vacation at Panama City Beach, Fla."
This relates to a recent question of mine: whether it's legal to tape loud assholes shouting into their cell phones in coffee shops, stores, and in other public places. Whether it's safe to do so is another question. But, it seems, yes, it's legal, and regarding safety, it seems I don't have to let them know I'm doing it (like I would if I taped a phone call). I got this information from the "state-by-state guide" to taping, from the The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Here's California:
Cal. Penal Code §§ 631, 632: It is a crime in California to intercept or eavesdrop upon any confidential communication, including a telephone call or wire communication, without the consent of all parties.It is also a crime to disclose information obtained from such an interception. A first offense is punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 and imprisonment for no more than one year. Subsequent offenses carry a maximum fine of $10,000 and jail sentence of up to one year.
Eavesdropping upon or recording a conversation, whether by telephone (including cordless or cellular telephone) or in person, that a person would reasonably expect to be confined to the parties present, carries the same penalty as intercepting telephone or wire communications.
Here's the essential part, at least for me:
Conversations occurring at any public gathering that one should expect to be overheard, including any legislative, judicial or executive proceeding open to the public, are not covered by the law.
In other words, if you're shouting your private information into your phone at Starbucks, you may be shouting to the global village, if I have my way. The rest of the info from Reporters Committee for Freedom/California:
An appellate court has ruled that using a hidden video camera violates the statute. California v. Gibbons, 215 Cal. App. 3d 1204 (1989). However, a television network that used a hidden camera to videotape a conversation that took place at a business lunch meeting on a crowded outdoor patio of a public restaurant that did not include "secret" information did not violate the Penal Code's prohibition against eavesdropping because it was not a "confidential communication." Wilkins v. NBC, Inc., 71 Cal. App. 4th 1066 (1999).Anyone injured by a violation of the wiretapping laws can recover civil damages of $5,000 or three times actual damages, whichever is greater. Cal. Penal Code § 637.2(a). A civil action for invasion of privacy also may be brought against the person who committed the violation. Cal. Penal Code § 637.2.
Whether I can publish a taped conversation -- the audiotape itself, not just the transcript -- on my blog is another question...hee hee...one I plan to research soon!
Shiny Shiny
Tacky Tacky
Going to a party and bringing a bottle -- but not an unopened bottle of wine, but a half-filled water bottle with Jack Daniels in it.
I went to a fantastic party this weekend, with lots of really interesting people attending, and a full table of food, and I overheard one girl saying to a friend of mine, "I didn't want to bring the whole bottle of Jack, so I brought just enough" (to mix her own drinks, period).
Anybody else experience some ugly this weekend?
The Scopes Monkey Retrial
They're using the Constitution for toiletpaper down in Georgia, where they passed a law to allow the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Nancy Badertscher writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Starting today, governments can post the Ten Commandments as part of a courthouse or justice center display of nine historic documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact and an image of Lady Justice....Lawmakers took a stand on the Ten Commandments after the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the Barrow County Commission over a courthouse display in Winder. The ACLU argued that the display's placement on a wall plaque in a public building violated the separation of church and state. The county had to pay $150,000, plus $1 to the ACLU.
The new law allows the display but only if it is accompanied by eight other documents, including the preamble to the state Constitution and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
With the new law in place, several counties are rumored to be planning displays, but Barrow is in no rush.
"I think there's some sentiment that we might want to do that, but it has not been brought back up for discussion," Barrow County Commission Chairman Doug Garrison said.
Dr. Jody Hice, pastor of Barrow County's Bethlehem First Baptist Church and president of the nonprofit group Ten Commandments Georgia, said he'll be encouraging his commissioners to put up a display. "I think that any way the Ten Commandments are on display is a good thing."
Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn), who represents most of Barrow County and co-sponsored the new law, said he believes "everybody's just a little bit gun-shy because of the $150,000 they had to pay out."
"The consensus seems to be: Let somebody else do it. Let it pass the muster, and we'll follow up," England said.
Gerry Weber, the legal director for ACLU Georgia, said his group might sue if it considers any individual displays unlawful, but saw no need to try to block the new law.
"It's more a statement of the General Assembly's beliefs than it is an affirmative statute that obligates the posting of the Ten Commandments," Weber said.
Huh? Is there something in the water down there that makes everybody really stupid?
At least a dozen counties may be planning to post the collection of historic displays, according to the Rev. Mike Griffin, executive director of Ten Commandments Georgia."We're in the process of having our printers design a nine-piece set of documents that they'll be able to use and will meet the requirements," said Griffin, a GOP legislative candidate. "I know there's a good bit of interest in it."
The battle over Ten Commandment displays is part of a national debate regarding the U.S. Constitution and religion in American society. For years, Christian groups have been pressing to maintain the displays or put up new ones on government property, citing what they call the nation's Judeo-Christian heritage.
The commandments, which Jews and Christians believe were given by God to Moses, include prohibitions on killing, stealing, lying, swearing, adultery and praying to false gods, as well as orders to honor parents and keep the Sabbath.
Permitted "Commandments Companions" include the following:
The documents — called the "Foundations of American Law and Government" — that also must be displayed in public buildings in Georgia with the Ten Commandments:• Mayflower Compact
• Declaration of Independence
• Magna Carta
• "The Star-Spangled Banner"
• National motto: "In God We Trust"
• Preamble to the Georgia Constitution
• U.S. Bill of Rights
• An image of Lady Justice
Perhaps I've held a misconception all this time, but I don't think "Lady Justice" is wearing a nun suit.
Is Georgia an American state, or a North American outpost of The Vatican? Separation of Church and State, anyone? I'm just dumbfounded. Now, perhaps some dimwit Democrats voted for this, too, but anybody rational-living person who votes for Republicans has got to worry that they're just going to contribute to boneheaded, fundanutter, unconsitutional stuff like this.
And as far as longterm goals go, what do I do, practice my French so I can get out of Dodge when we become a Christian country and they start burning atheist witches like me at the stake...or whatever it is they'd like to do to us heretics if they could? Sounds like paranoia, perhaps. Well, who would have thought they'd be legislating religious iconography into public buildings in 2006. Where will we be in 2010, or 2020?
The Essential Quotes
Dean Baquet, editor of the LA Times, and Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, co-wrote a piece explaining why they went to press with the secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. There are a few essential quotes from the piece, which I'll italicize in the excerpt below, but read the whole thing:
Thirty-five years ago Friday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press' drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.
Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.
In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.
As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of the Washington Post, asked recently in that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"
Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003, the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters — from our papers, the Wall Street Journal and others — to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat.
...It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it.
Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries hosting secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.
Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.
We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.
Here's Frank Rich on the topic from an E&P link, which you can read without a membership to Times Overly-Select (the pay service that keeps the Times' most influential columnists from being read by very many people).
And to anybody who suggests the papers tipped off the terrorists, do you really think it's any secret to the terrorists that their activities -- financial, travel, meetings, and all other kinds -- are being monitored?
"Why Vegetarians Should Be Force-Fed...Lard"
Some good arguments against vegetarianism. Unfortunately, the piece is published in an exceptionaly annoying-to-read typeface, and all in caps. I don't know how it works on PCs, but on a Mac, you can make the typeface bigger by holding down COMMAND and hitting the plus key. Shrink it back down to size by holding COMMAND and hitting the minus key. You can also copy the whole piece to a Word document to make it readable in upper and lowercase Geneva. Here's an excerpt from the piece:
I don't want to eat anything that I wouldn't be prepared to kill myself.This one is an interesting argument, that at first glance might seem to be an effective attempt to grab the moral high ground. On closer inspection, however, it turns out to be rubbish. Is a rich advertising executive prepared to harvest a field of wheat? Probably not, but he’ll still be happy to eat the bread. Would he be too squeamish to kill a cow himself? Perhaps, but is squeamishness good?
Modern removal from the process of killing has left many people with a distaste for killing. The strongest association with killing in people's minds today is with killing other humans, and this is a thing done criminally or cruelly. People who like killing other people are a menace to society, but men who liked hunting deer were a boon to the society of our ancestors. There can be no innate distaste for hunting, or we would have died out. The ability humans have evolved to be squeamish is almost certainly one that was to do with self harm and the harming of allies or the provoking of human enemies. Squeamishness itself is not a virtue in all circumstances. If it were, we would all be trying to fake it all the time: “Oh no – a shoe! Yeargh! No I can’t bring myself to touch it! You put it on for me!”
What is the analogous example we can find that shows this argument to have logic? “I don’t want to watch any stunt that I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself”? “I don’t want to view any painting that I wouldn’t be prepared to paint myself”? “I don’t want to laugh at any joke that I wouldn’t be prepared to tell myself”? None of these makes sense, so why does the meat eating one make sense? Some people are better than others at telling jokes. Let them be the comedians. Today, no one has to kill all the meat he eats.
A man might argue that he doesn’t want to enjoy the products of a company that exploits its workers cruelly. This is fair enough, and it could act to make the world a happier place for others, and thus it would be morally good. Broadly, the argument would be “I don’t want to benefit selfishly from something that makes the world a sadder place overall, because it would make me feel guilty, and my feeling of guilt is a sign that I am a good person.” This is fine, and it could be applied well to, for example, buying wildly over-priced trainers made in a tiny sweatshop in the Third World. For it to work with the meat argument, however, it would have to be demonstrable that the effect of eating meat is to make the world a sadder place overall. For my answer to that one, see the rest of this essay.
In case you're wondering, I've never been so healthy since I started eating more meat, and in response to the cruelty issue, I try to buy grass-fed beef from New Zealand and free-range chicken. Moreover, I'm angered by the silliness that all our cheese (except a few hard cheeses that sneak through from France) has to be pasteurized. It's healthy to eat bacteria! And unhealthy not to!
The Assertive Boob
I have a problem with public wearing of flip-flops. Public breastfeeding, however, doesn't trouble me. Then again, children in public often does -- like the loud brats the mothers brought into Starbucks yesterday, screaming, yelling and running around. Note to the mothers: if I wanted to read the paper in a nursery, I'd go to one.
Regarding the breastfeeding in public, for all you offended types, look away if it bothers you. That's what I do when I see people eating piggishly. I don't run over and tell them I'm distraught and they must learn some table manners. Also, for all you Puritanical, horrified types, hello...it's not so sexy. And if you do find it sexy, good for you, you get a free thrill.
Still, there's just something wrong with this woman's attitude about breastfeeding at a Victoria's Secret store. First, she expects to take over the dressing room to do it. Apparently indignant when a dressing room is not instantly provided her for that purpose (the story suggests they were full of customers trying on bras, imagine that), she plops down on the floor and proceeds to feed her kid. So, maybe one of the highly-paid employees didn't know it's the law that a woman can breastfeed her kid anywhere she can legally take it. Big whoop. Yet, now there are mommies (with nothing better to do, apparently) gathering to go on the warpath against Victoria's Secret.
As one of the commenters at Consumerist put it, you wouldn't plop down on the floor there and eat your lunch. The woman could have gone out in the mall on a bench. She instead found it imperative to assert herself and make a scene. Here's the bit from Consumerist:
Nurse-In Planned at Victoria's SecretIn protest of Victoria's Secret employees acting like boobs, a national protest plans to whip out theirs.
Rebecca Cook of Wisconsin wanted to breast-feed her child in the store's dressing room but when one wasn't available, prepared to do so on the store floor. An employee asked her to leave.
"Cook said the store manager told her the employee probably thought the 'sight of her breasts might offend a customer,' " reported the Citizen-Times.
A similar incident occurred in Massachusetts.
In retaliation, the two mothers have planned national nurse-ins at Victoria's Secrets across the country. The goal, they say, is not to defame the lingerie seller but bring about public awareness of the right to breast-feed in public.
"I find it especially absurd that Victoria's Secret of all places is freaking out about exposed breasts, since it's pretty much what they sell," said Tali Branco, 21, of North Asheville, mother of a 6-month-old. "You see more in their magazines and store windows than you do when a mother nurses."
Corporate HQ said the incidents were unfortunate and against company policy.
This jaded reporter has but one thing to say:
Boobies!
Here's what another wise commenter from Consumerist had to say:
This sort of incident makes all breastfeeders look bad. And I say that as a mother of a breastfeeding infant. I'd never do this. It has nothing to do with my being ashamed of what I'm doing and everything to do with there being appropriate places to do things. This wasn't one. And frankly, I get pretty impatient with the analogies that breastfeeding militants are apt to drag out to justify what they're doing (a common one is that they won't do it in a bathroom because "you wouldn't eat in a bathroom, so why do you think my baby should"). It doesn't have to be illogical to be inappropriate. And it isn't that hard to schedule outings around feeding times, or to go and sit in the car for fifteen minutes, for heaven's sake. Or to pump and bring a bottle for public feedings. That's probably the easiest solution of all.
The Mickey Mouth Club
Just guess what it takes to win your pair of ears. Christopher Hitchens' gives deep background in -- The Oral History Of The Blow Job in Vanity Fair:
At some point, though, there must have been a crossover in which a largely forbidden act of slightly gay character was imported into the heterosexual mainstream. If I have been correct up until now, this is not too difficult to explain (and it fits with the dates, as well). The queer monopoly on blowjobs was the result of male anatomy, obviously, and also of the wish of many gays to have sex with heterosexual men. It was widely believed that only men really knew how to get the "job" done, since they were tormented hostages of the very same organ on a round-the-clock basis. (W. H. Auden's New York underground poem titled "The Platonic Blow"—even though there is absolutely nothing platonic about it, and it lovingly deploys the word "job"—is the classic example here.) This was therefore an inducement the gay man could offer to the straight, who could in turn accept it without feeling that he had done anything too faggoty. For many a straight man, life's long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.) Cursing god, the boy then falls to the hectic abuse of any viscous surface within reach. One day, he dreams, someone else will be on hand to help take care of this. When drafted into the army and sent overseas, according to numberless witnesses from Gore Vidal to Kingsley Amis, he may even find that oral sex is available in the next hammock. And then the word is out. There might come a day, he slowly but inexorably reasons, when even women might be induced to do this.Through the 1950s, then, the burgeoning secret of the blowjob was still contained, like a spark of Promethean fire, inside a secret reed. (In France and Greece, to my certain knowledge, the slang term used to involve "pipe smoking" or "cigar action." I don't mind the association with incandescence, but for Christ's sake, sweetie, don't be smoking it. I would even rather that you just blew.) If you got hold of Henry Miller's Sexus or Pauline Réage's Story of O (both published by Maurice Girodias, the same Parisian daredevil who printed Lolita), you could read about oral and other engagements, but that was France for you.
The comics of R. Crumb used to have fellatio in many graphic frames, but then, this was the counterculture. No, the big breakthrough occurs in the great year of nineteen soixante-neuf, when Mario Puzo publishes The Godfather and Philip Roth brings out Portnoy's Complaint. Puzo's book was a smash not just because of the horse's head and the Sicilian fish-wrap technique and the offer that couldn't be refused. It achieved a huge word-of-mouth success because of a famous scene about vagina-enhancing plastic surgery that became widely known as "the Godfather tuck" (sorry to stray from my subject) and because of passages like this, featuring the Mobbed-up crooner "Johnny Fontane":
And the other guys were always talking about blow jobs, this and other variations, and he really didn't enjoy that stuff so much. He never liked a girl that much after they tried it that way, it just didn't satisfy him right. He and his second wife had finally not got along, because she preferred the old sixty-nine too much to a point where she didn't want anything else and he had to fight to stick it in. She began making fun of him and calling him a square and the word got around that he made love like a kid.
Earthquake! Sensation! Telephones trilled all over the English-speaking world. Never mind if Johnny Fontane likes it or not, what is that? And why on earth is it called a "blow job"? (The words were for some reason separate in those days: I like the way in which they have since eased more cosily together.) Most of all, notice that it is regular sex that has become obvious and childish, while oral sex is suddenly for real men. And here's Puzo again, describing the scene where the lady in need of a newly refreshed and elastic interior isn't quite ready to sleep with her persuasive doctor, and isn't quite inclined to gratify him any other way, either:
"Oh that" she said.
"Oh that" he mimicked her. "Nice girls don't do that, manly men don't do that. Even in the year 1948. Well, baby, I can take you to the house of a little old lady right here in Las Vegas who was the youngest madam of the most popular whorehouse in the wild west days You know what she told me? That those gunslingers, those manly, virile, straight-shooting cowboys would always ask the girls for a 'French,' what we doctors call fellatio, what you call 'oh that.'"
Notice the date. Note also the cowboys, likewise deprived of female company for long stretches. Now that we know about Blowjob Mountain, or whatever the hell it's called, I think I can score one for my original theory.
special thanks to our sex expert, Lena Cuisina
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